What Works for Us

There are so many ticks out there this year! It can be a tricky line to walk wanting to get the kids outdoors but also wanting to keep them safe from nasty chronic stuff like lyme disease. I talked to our ped’s office extensively about this after finding our first deer tick — which looked like a freckle — this spring and what they emphasized most was finding the ticks and getting them off within 6-8 hours to minimize chance of transmission.

These are some things that we have embraced in our family’s tick prevention campaign:

• making bath time an after-hike ritual or at least changing clothes shortly after the hike
• wearing hats (we love Sunday Afternoons hats)
• offer the kids something tasty (like a chocolate chip) if they find a tick on themselves or their siblings or you
• google lyme disease — it totally motivated me to step up our tick checks
• if you find a tick, a pair of clean tweezers is all you need for removal — forget all the crazy ways to remove ticks that we grew up with, like flames, alcohol or oil (yes, I had exciting childhood tick removal experiences)
• talk to your pediatrician if you find a tick or if you have questions

In case you need further motivation, I have an fascinating story involving a tick, a belly button — not mine or my kids’, thank goodness! — and a trip to the emergency room. I will spare you the details and just let your imagination alone motivate you to do tick checks after every hike. (Getting off soap box now….)

If you do find a tick that has embedded itself, make sure you remove it as soon as possible. If you remove a deer tick, you may wish to keep it intact and bring it to your doctor for testing to determine whether it is a lyme disease carrier. If it is not a deer tick, what you do with the pest is entirely up to your own discretion.

Happy hiking, and don’t forget to channel your inner apes by participating in a post-hike communal tick-check grooming session!

After numerous false starts Peter has created the bookshelves I have been wanting for over a year.

I like it so much I put him to work on another set of shelves.

In the end all it took was a half dozen wooden dowels, screws, hand saw, electric drill, and no more than an hour to convert the kids’ regular shelves into something special. Even at Discount School Supply it would cost over $100 for something similar.

As with many of our projects there were failed attempts along the way:

• Plastic gutters from freecycle. Too big. We converted these into ramps for water and ball play out back.

  

• Metal wall shelves from Ikea. Too tempting for little children to climb, too easy to push books onto the floor. We moved these into a utility closet.

  

Here’s what worked for us: soak in hot soapy water indefinitely, scrub a little with sponge, and then finish the job with rubbing alcohol (or the strongest stuff in your liquor cabinet if you don’t have rubbing alcohol). Good luck!

This post is not meant to dismiss stay at home dads or any hands-on work outside the home parent as needing a list of ideas, but to respond to the fact that (like or not) in many areas stay at home moms are often the primary provider, and sometimes they might need to give their partner a list of ideas to get some time alone in the house.

My husband is in charge of the kids a lot while I work in the evening or on the weekends. They like to go…

• on hikes with the dog
• to the river (with nets)
• to any park
• play at the mall
• grocery shopping
• to the pet store to look at animals

However, they spend most of their time together right here at home searching YouTube for cute videos of kids singing Raffi songs, playing with our pet rats, and helping my husband re-learn to play the guitar

Once our kids started to show an interest in climbing I switched to the pack and play which seems to be harder to climb out of, and by approx 18 months they were in mattresses on the floor - which seem safer than toddler beds to me, and are more comfortable on nights when one of us ended sleeping with a little one to ease the transition. They are now 2 and 4 and we still haven’t bothered with a toddler bed. We’ll probably keep their mattresses on the floor until they are ready for bunk beds

Here’s what worked for us:

We went to the store and I let him choose a bunch of gloves. Then we put them in a basket by the door and he could choose which one he wanted to wear every time we went out. Once he was in charge of which gloves to wear whether or not to wear them was less of an issue. We’ll see if the same tactic works for #2.

I am not an “expert” in any field, but I am an experienced parent and childcare provider. In these roles I have discovered solutions that work for me and the kids in my life. Some work so well that I would like to shout them to the world.

However, I HATE being told what to do and a vividly recall the anger rising up from the midst of my post partum fog when everyone from the supermarket clerk, to my extended family, to a stranger at the dog park seemed to have an opinion about how I should care for my child. I placated them all with the response that I would consider their advice or ask about it at the new moms support group or breastfeeding support group at my local hospital. In the meantime I relied on trial and error and trusted my instincts while filling in the gaps using online resources like the Berkeley Parents Network and sometimes even embracing the unsolicited advice I had at first resented.

So in these posts I will shout our successes (and maybe even our failures) to the world, and I hope that letting it out in writing will help me to keep my mouth shut when I see the new moms in my life struggling and to support them in whatever way they ask while they find their own way.