International Car Seats

 Family, General, Standards  3 Responses »
Oct 162006
 

We’re plan­ning on trav­el­ling to Aus­tralia for a vaca­tion, and since the baby will shortly need a new car seat any­way, I was hop­ing to get one that matches Cana­dian and Aus­trali­an stand­ards. Britax makes car seats in each coun­try but when I called them they said the Cana­dian car seats did not meet Aus­trali­an require­ments (hard to believe they can be all that dif­fer­ent, I assume she meant that the car seat isn’t cer­ti­fied in both countries).

Does any­one know of a car seat that can be used for a big infant under the age of 1 (in Canada, that means rear-facing) in both coun­tries? Or have sug­ges­tions? When we’re in Aus­tralia we’ll mostly be with friends rather than driv­ing rent­als, hence the desire to take our own car seat.

This is one place where true inter­na­tion­al stand­ards would be help­ful… I won­der why every coun­try needs its own?

Books on Raising Children

 Books, Family  6 Responses »
Oct 142006
 

There seem to be as many philo­sophies about how to bring up chil­dren suc­cess­fully as there are par­ents, which fact you tend not to dis­cov­er until you are a par­ent your­self. And then you have to hope that your philo­sophy is reas­on­ably con­gru­ent with that of the oth­er par­ent and/or care­givers in your child’s life. We’ve been lucky in this regard; there are always issues that need to be dis­cussed but Tim and I gen­er­ally have sim­il­ar views on child-rear­ing issues. Most of this we had to fig­ure out as we went along (for­tu­nately there are few things you do that are really crit­ic­al and can­’t be fixed later). I found a couple of books to be really use­ful in fig­ur­ing things out, so here’s a quick run-down on which and why.

There are a large num­ber of books on the sub­ject of rais­ing chil­dren, each with their own philo­sophy and assump­tions, so it’s inter­est­ing try­ing to fig­ure out the dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives they were writ­ten from. And the books all have to be writ­ten to allow for the old adage of “they’re all dif­fer­ent” (when you have two, you find out just how true that is). I’ve found with this second baby I’ve ten­ded not to read the books as avidly as I did with the first, prov­ing I guess the oth­er adage about first-time par­ents being tense and want­ing to do everything per­fectly, while more exper­i­enced par­ents relax more and settle for hav­ing things be done well enough. When you have two chil­dren, well enough really is good enough and that leaves you a little time to try to keep your own san­ity as well.

I found three books worth read­ing and hav­ing. First, Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child, which is divided into sec­tions accord­ing to the age of the child up until the age of five. The book’s philo­sophy is to be “be kind to and gentle with your baby”; there is lots of mater­i­al on the child’s point of view and how to inter­pret reac­tions and actions. As an added bonus, the pho­tos are great and our son loved look­ing at them when he was a toddler. 

Dr. Spock­’s Baby and Child Care is the clas­sic I turn to when I’m not sure about wheth­er the baby needs to go to the doc­tor for some­thing that looks minor but might not be, or for an issue affect­ing our sev­en-year-old who’s “out­grown” the oth­er book. The tone seems to me to be more mat­ter-of-fact although there’s also a lot of psy­cho­logy in the book; the dif­fer­ence is tone is prob­ably because of the issues deal­ing with older chil­dren and the emphas­is on bal­ance with­in the family.

And for boys from tod­dler age up, I recom­mend Steve Bid­dulph’s Rais­ing Boys. This is a quick read that has ideas on how to cope with the bio­lo­gic­al dif­fer­ences between boys and girls that affect how many boys behave once they’re past the tod­dler stage. I’ve recom­men­ded this to sev­er­al people and lots have told me they’ve found it use­ful with their sons. I’m going to get anoth­er one of his books out of the lib­rary to read to see wheth­er it has use­ful stuff to say about rais­ing a daughter.

There are lots of oth­er books I’ve read but would­n’t neces­sar­ily recom­mend for any­thing oth­er than get­ting out of the lib­rary, since I read them once and not again. Libby Purves’ How Not to Be a Per­fect Moth­er fits into this cat­egory; fun to read once but not a must-have for the par­ent­ing lib­rary. Edward Chris­toph­ersen’s Little People: Guidelines for Com­mon Sense Child Rear­ing was mostly good, though I dis­agreed with some parts of the book. I read it once, figured out the import­ant bits of the “catch them being good” mes­sage (which is use­ful) and haven’t read it again since. YMMV on any or all of these books of course (what was that about they’re all dif­fer­ent? So are the parents…)

Coping with Pregnancy

 Family  9 Responses »
Sep 062006
 

I found a couple of things very use­ful for my second preg­nancy that I did­n’t dis­cov­er for my first — and thought I should blog them in case they’re use­ful to any­body else. I’m sure any read­ers with oth­er ideas will add them — I’ll do anoth­er post in a bit about some early baby­hood stuff that I found useful.

The biggest prob­lems I had with the second preg­nancy were simply due to the size of the belly. I can highly recom­mend doing Pil­ates, or yoga, or find­ing some oth­er way of get­ting some­body to help you fig­ure out how to sit, stand, and walk as the belly grows. I stuck out in front which made the poten­tial for lower back pain (which I had for my first, when I did­n’t do Pil­ates) worse than for those women for whom the weight is more evenly dis­trib­uted. I was in a cof­fee shop in the last couple of weeks and chat­ted to the barista about this; she thought stick­ing out in front and not being notice­ably preg­nant from behind was good until I poin­ted out it makes doing up your shoes dif­fi­cult. You do get some­what adept at twist­ing your legs around so you can get at your feet side­ways — I found a long shoe­horn was very use­ful at this stage. 

A body pil­low was use­ful for sleep­ing as you are meant to sleep only on your side, and the lig­a­ments in your hips start to stretch and hurt, so you need all the sup­port you can get. You can get by with lots of pil­lows, but a body pil­low is easi­er to deal with. I did­n’t both­er with one of those fancy shaped body pil­lows, the basic straight ver­sion did just fine and was a lot less expens­ive. I also found reg­u­lar mas­sages from a registered mas­sage ther­ap­ist (make sure they have preg­nancy pil­lows for sup­port and have exper­i­ence in pren­at­al mas­sage) to be well worth the money — all those muscles that are being stretched and over­loaded in unfa­mil­i­ar ways really enjoyed being put back into place.

And of course you want to get as much done as pos­sible before the baby arrives, while get­ting as much sleep as pos­sible. No mat­ter how tired you are before the baby arrives, and how little energy you have, you will be more tired and have less energy after­wards! Mind you, if you live any­where like Van­couver and need any renov­a­tions done, you won’t have much choice in when things get done. They will get done when the con­tract­or can fit them in, if you can find a con­tract­or to do any­thing. And the rest will get done when you have some energy. Hav­ing a baby is a good les­son in what does­n’t need to be done.

Bootees

 Crafts, Family  1 Response »
Aug 292006
 

I was a few months preg­nant when Tim asked when I was going to knit some bootees (aka booties) for the baby. I wondered why he had­n’t asked for the first child, he answered that he had­n’t known I could knit back then. Fair enough.

So I got some yarn in time for the trip to Hawaii, think­ing it would be a good chance to get some knit­ting in. I tried two pat­terns, one from a book of my great-aunt’s, and one on the web; I pre­ferred the web pat­tern (they’re the bootees on the right). Once the baby arrived of course, we redis­covered why we had­n’t used the bootees we had with our first child; they don’t stay on the feet! Socks or out­fits with feet built-in are much more prac­tic­al. Although I did dis­cov­er that if you put socks on first, the bootees do stay on longer.

The res­ults of the Hawaii knit­ting are here, show­cased on a table­cloth I got in Hawaii… Baby's jacket and bootees

The jack­et is a seam­less cabled jack­et, knit­ted in Baby Soft by Lana Gatto from a pat­tern that’s no longer avail­able. The only slightly tricky bit was mak­ing the increases work into the cable pat­tern prop­erly, that required a piece of paper and a cer­tain amount of cal­cu­lat­ing. Oth­er than that, a reas­on­ably easy knit and the yarn is lovely and soft. I just hope she spends as much (or more) time wear­ing it as I did knit­ting it!

Liberty Baby

 Family, Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Jul 212006
 

The Liberty Alli­ance quarterly spon­sors meet­ing was in Van­couver this week, so even though I’m still offi­cially on mater­nity leave, I decided to attend as much as I could (baby allow­ing). It was worth­while going, the baby was a little fussy but slept through enough of the time that I could take part in some of the meet­ing, although I will admit there was one time while I was watch­ing a pre­vi­ously fussy baby lie on the chan­ging mat in the ladies, wav­ing her legs and arms and gurg­ling hap­pily at the sight of the under-basin plumb­ing, when I wondered wheth­er I should be at home instead. That “why am I here” feel­ing passed once she let her­self be put in the sling so I could go back to the meeting.

The Liberty meet­ing itself seemed to go well from what I saw, quite a few people took advant­age of it being opened up to non-mem­bers to observe and par­ti­cip­ate, at least in the meet­ings I was in. It’s always hard for new people to really take part, but I think this exper­i­ment was successful.

The Iden­tity Open­Space meet­ing, jointly pro­duced by the Liberty people and some people from the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop, was sched­uled for the Thursday and Fri­day after the Liberty meet­ing. Lots of people stayed over for this, lots more came spe­cific­ally for the meet­ing. I did­n’t see every­one on the list of attendees that I knew, but that’s prob­ably at least in part because the baby melted down in a big way in the early after­noon on Thursday so I had to take her home, and decided mak­ing her take in a fourth day of meet­ings and present­a­tions on Fri­day would be too much for all con­cerned. Still, she slept through Jane Win­n’s Leg­al Basics, lunch, and Robin Wilton’s Pri­vacy and ID Theft before throw­ing her wobbly, so I got to par­ti­cip­ate to some extent.

Jane’s present­a­tion, as usu­al, was ter­rif­ic. She’s quick to grasp the cent­ral points of issues, her talks are always thought-pro­vok­ing and suit­ably cyn­ic­al, and I was glad to be able to attend it, and also glad she took part in the Liberty meet­ing before the IOS event. Robin is also a deep thinker whose blog often por­trays things in a dif­fer­ent way to the gen­er­ally accep­ted dogma; he’s part of the group I’m in at Sun, and I think we’re lucky to have him there.

The IOS did seem to go well from what I saw and heard, bring­ing togeth­er people with dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences, know­ledge, and view­points. Kaliya Ham­lin organ­ised it and ensured people doc­u­mented the ses­sions on the wiki. This goes some way to neg­at­ing one of the chief unavoid­able prob­lems of this format — that there are often things going on in par­al­lel that I’d like to attend.

Kaliya put up a sign encour­aging people to con­trib­ute or learn, or go where they could con­trib­ute or learn, and I hope that those who sat there quietly, not con­trib­ut­ing, will con­trib­ute what they learned some­place else in the future. Iden­tity man­age­ment, with all its rami­fic­a­tions of pri­vacy, secur­ity, and the user exper­i­ence, is a com­plic­ated issue and affects all of us and the more people talk about the issues and try to come togeth­er on solu­tions, the bet­ter. I think this meet­ing helped with that and it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of it. Right now I’m an out­side observ­er until my mater­nity leave is over but I’m already look­ing for­ward to par­ti­cip­at­ing lots when the baby allows.

Slow Learning

 Family  5 Responses »
Jul 162006
 

Hav­ing a new­born is a les­son in many things — in fact, one could prob­ably write one of those “Everything I Needed to Know About ABC I Learned From DEF” (try typ­ing that into Amazon, there are some inter­est­ing titles in the res­ults that show up, includ­ing “Everything I Needed to Know about Busi­ness– I Learned from a Cana­dian” and “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor”).

  1. The top les­son would have to be patience — when you think that almost 6 weeks after being born, the baby is still not in much of a routine (well, she some­times has a nap in the morn­ings, and she inev­it­ably wakes up and wants to be fed just as we put food on the table for us, no mat­ter what time that is, unless I wake her up to feed her first). Even­tu­ally babies can get to a routine of sorts, but it can take a long time. So you just keep try­ing. Even if it takes weeks.
  2. The next would be just how much you can get done when sleep-deprived, and when to recog­nise that you really do need a break. Doing some­thing when you’re sleep-deprived is fine when the qual­ity of the end res­ult isn’t import­ant, or it’s easy to do (it’s hard to really go wrong put­ting laun­dry in the wash­ing machine) but hav­ing to redo things because you mucked up the first time is annoy­ing. Sleep depriva­tion often equals not think­ing prop­erly, or for­get­ting import­ant aspects, or over­weight­ing unim­port­ant aspects, of any­thing you’re think­ing about. And drink­ing cof­fee only helps a little if you’re really sleep-deprived (and too much cof­fee just makes the baby fussy any­way, so it’s self-defeat­ing). I keep lists for lots of things, it’s the only way to make sure noth­ing import­ant is forgotten.
  3. Which leads me to effi­ciency — when the baby only naps for short peri­ods, and you need to get things done (blog post­ing, shower­ing), you can­’t pro­cras­tin­ate or muck about. If it needs to be done, you need to do it in the few minutes you have, oth­er­wise you may not have anoth­er chance until tomor­row. Or next week. Or next month. And you really need to pri­or­it­ise (which explains why I haven’t been post­ing much, showers take pri­or­ity if I only have time for one of those in a day).
  4. Break­ing action items into steps is also neces­sary. Since the naps might be short, which will only give you a few minutes at any giv­en time, you need to have stop­ping points all the way along and a sys­tem to remem­ber quickly where you were. Unfor­tu­nately this does­n’t work when you need to think deeply about some­thing, but there’s the think­ing time you get while nurs­ing, which you can try to use, assum­ing sleep depriva­tion, see (a), does­n’t make it a waste of time. Or you don’t nod out while nurs­ing (I haven’t yet, but I’ve come awfully close). And you have to fig­ure out how many items you can stand to have going at any one time, so the house or com­puter isn’t overly littered with items in vari­ous stages of completion.
  5. And finally, the need for bal­ance. I take walks to the corner to clear my mind and get me out of the house, with or without the baby depend­ing on wheth­er someone at home can mind her; this gives me some bal­ance and a chance to be a per­son in my own right rather than solely “moth­er”. Being a per­son and not solely a whatever-your-job-is, no mat­ter how inter­est­ing or import­ant or ful­filling that job, is equally import­ant to life’s bal­ance in the work life. It seems to me that every­one I know is busier than they were a few years ago (maybe it’s just the people I know) and they’re hav­ing to work harder at find­ing that elu­sive bal­ance, while at the same time real­ising more how import­ant it is.

Time is mov­ing slowly right now, like mov­ing through treacle or molasses. I’m blam­ing it on the sleep depriva­tion; I have to be care­ful what I do and how I do it and think­ing straight isn’t all that easy. Once the baby starts sleep­ing for longer at nights it’ll be easi­er. In the mean­time, I’m learn­ing patience. Slowly.

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