Time for a new routine

There are a few new things going on at the Parker home. The first is that we bought our tickets to go to Chile for Christmas this year. I am really excited for Ryan to meet all of my family down there and for us to go visit a part of my old life. I am also excited that my family will get to meet Aubrey. We wanted to go before she turned 2 so she could fly for free, so this was the ideal time to do so. That being said, those airline tickets wiped us out with the savings account. We weren’t too worried about it, but with the current state of things in America, I have to say that it makes me nervous not to have any backup. So we are going back over the budget, hunkering down and building that puppy back up! Good thing I bought my iphone before all of these banks started failing! So its back to simplifying my life, which will be good for me. I started working to help our family get to a place where I could stay home with the kid without jeaopardizing our livelihood, and have instead gotten caught up in all of my material tendencies. This buckling down will be for the greater good of our family. I might be annoyed that I can’t buy a certain thing right away, but in the long run it will enable me to live my dream (SAHM) and create a more stable environment for our children (because when we do reach our goals, I am having another kid).

So that’s that. The other thing that I need your help with, Internet, is that Aubrey needs a new bedtime routine. I took her for her 15 month check-up yesterday and she checked out fine. Tiny, but fine. I can’t believe she only weighs 17 pounds. I promise, I feed her, and when I try and overfeed her, she reminds me that this is a bad idea by throwing up all over me. Her doctor said I could try giving her PediaSure and it might help her start gaining. She was getting so fat before she started crawling and now that she can walk, she won’t sit still. I am sure she burns a ton of calories all day long. But she is doing everything she should be, developmentally. Then I was told that it was time to take her off her bottle.

GREAT. The bottle, filled with whole milk, is the only way Aubrey will fall asleep at night. We have a routine. Bath, Teeth brushing, Bottle, Bed. Not that she ever stays asleep for the entire night but the sucking motion makes her sleepy and her eyes start drooping and at the end of that 8 ounces, I can lay her down with relatively low levels of whimpering before she decides to give me about 4 hours of uninterrupted chore/sleeptime. So when the doctor said that this bottle business, it needs to stop, I wanted to invite her over to try putting my kid to bed everynight by merely laying her in her crib. I would have even offered to throw in some ear plugs.

New routines. For someone who hates change as much as I do, I am really not looking forward to the next couple weeks/months. I know in the end our savings account will be a nice cushiony nest again, I might be able to entertain the idea of more children, and Aubrey will go to bed at night without a bottle and perhaps even sleep all night.

So I need help! What is your bedtime routine with your toddler and how do you get them to go to sleep on their own? Please please please, comment away!

To inoculate or not to inoculate, that is the question…

This article is a bit long, but worth the read if you have or ever want to have children. Personally, I am on the “better safe than sorry” side of the argument but I was always of the opinion that people should be free to make their own choices on this issue. The piece brings up a good point that I hadn’t thought of before, and that is a lesson that can and should be applied to everything in life- it’s never just “my life”, what I do affects everyone around me.

I have a few friends who have chosen not to vaccinate their babies right away with the idea that they might (probably will) change their minds later when their kids get older. For a family who is able to keep the child at home, I can see how this would be the best of both worlds. Not only are you not exposing your child to these diseases by them being around other kids (daycare or school), but you are allowing their immune systems to develop a little more before you inject these vaccines into them.

For most of us, though, our children go to daycare and we put them in the nursery at church where they are exposed to all sorts of germs and childhood antics. It was a requirement for her daycare that Aubrey be vaccinated and honestly, it never even crossed my mind to opt out of these shots (since she’s in a home daycare I don’t think I could have, actually). It was very hard to watch her fat little thighs get poked with those needles and I hated how much she cried. She had a bit of a fever afterwards and was fussy, but it was nothing near the fits she throws when she’s cutting a tooth, let me tell you what!

I don’t know a lot about all the things that these vaccines are being linked to, like autism and asthma. I do know this- my sister and I both got all of our shots and we turned out fine, Aubrey is up to date on hers and she has never been sick with anything worse than an ear infection. There isn’t any science linking these diseases to vaccinations that I can find, it’s all mostly opinion. One argument is that so many more cases have been reported- but hasn’t awareness and education about things like autism been heightened so much that people are catching it earlier? Couldn’t THAT be the reason these cases have spiked?

Also, I get my dog vaccinated because I’d like to keep her around as long as possible, and my sister can share the horror stories of poor animals who contract diseases that could have been easily avoided. My dog can’t tell me what’s wrong with her if she’s sick, kind of like my baby- so why not just ward off all that frustration and pain by blocking the sickness from ever getting to them?

I’m not trying to tell anyone what they should do or saying you are harming your child if you don’t choose to vaccinate them. What I do know is this- if I found out that there was a kid in her daycare who hadn’t been innoculated and had no plans to do so, I’d probably find Aubrey another daycare. Now, this is JUST MY OPINION, not a judgment, but I do see it as a little selfish on the parent’s part to not vaccinate their kids when they go to school and then throw them in with a bunch of other kids to spread the disease if they ever got it. I know that Aubrey probably wouldn’t catch it since she has been protected, but still. The risk is there. And I have researched a bit (not a ton, but enough to solidify my decision) on the toll it takes on their little bodies if they DO get these diseases, and the worst case scenarios are horrifying. Paralysis, deafness, seizures and other things could result from childhood diseases such as polio and measles that are routine when it comes to getting shots.

I mainly posted this article because it is great at showing both sides to the story. And I’d love to hear YOUR opinion on the matter. Not to change anyone’s mind, but to see where everyone is coming from. Dialogue is good- so start talking!

 

UPDATE: Check out this blog to get more info on the side of those who choose not to vaccinate their children. Thanks Melissa for the link!

Why is my head ringing?

So I have been sick since oh, last Tuesday. I haven’t been to work since Thursday so I am catching up on everything, feeling very productive until I just now looked at the clock and I have only been here an hour. I started feeling really really bad on Thursday so I went to the doctor, who told me I might have strep or allergies, then kind of looked at me as if to say, what do you think it is? So, I get antibiotics, the antibiotic of all antibiotics, the Z-pack. It didn’t really work, so I went back yesterday bc I was really dizzy and felt like my head was a tunnel. She then decided to look into my ears, and lo and behold, it was a “raging” ear infection.

2 pills of amoxicillan later (thank God Aubrey is the only freak in the family who is allergic to this miracle drug- just kidding! she’s not a freak, she’s just special) I feel much better. Only, why is the phone always ringing???