A Two Year Old's View of Christmas

I did say I wasn't going to do any more posts this year but I just had this conversation about Christmas with Little Girl which made me smile so I thought I'd post it:

Me: Tomorrow is Christmas Day - what do we do on Christmas Day?
LG: We eat Christmas cake.
Me: Yes, and what else do we do?
LG: We eat little Christmas cakes. [Christmas pudding]
Me: Yes, we eat Christmas pudding. What else do we do?
LG: We eat goose.
Me: Yes.
LG: We eat dinner.
Me: Yes, we eat Christmas dinner.
LG: We eat goose and Christmas dinner.
Me: That's right, we have goose for Christmas dinner. And we give...
LG:...thanks to Him and pray.
Me: Yes, we always give thanks to God don't we. Do we do anything else?
LG: We eat pineapple. [drink pineapple juice]
Me: Pineapple? Oh yes - we're going to have pineapple juice at breakfast time. And what do we give?
LG: We give presents to Daddy!

Snow!

This is what we had yesterday:


Then today there was even more. It's still less than two inches but you never know - it might be all we get this winter. Little Girl was so excited this morning she wanted breakfast straight away so she could go and play in the snow. She was planning to make "scrambled egg on toast, pancakes and porridge" but since we already had baked porridge from yesterday we went for that.



Apparently she is "digging like a man". (I think she means digging like the workmen who are replacing the water pipes in our street.)

Why I love staying at home #1

My daughter and I get to make a mess baking bread together.

Recovering

Little Girl is now recovering well from her chicken pox and seems to be feeling much better. We are also recovering from the lack of sleep caused by her being ill. Thank you to all those who have prayed about it.

Yesterday my brother e-mailed me a website with a family tree with links to mine and also e-mailed the owner saying I could probably give them a bit more information so since I am too tired to do anything energetic I thought it was a good time to do a bit of family history research online. Last time I did anything was nearly five years ago and there is loads more information than there was. I have even managed to find a photo of my great grandfather here (he is at the very bottom right) which is quite exciting for me as I don't have much detailed information about that branch of the family as my grandma couldn't remember much and he died when she was 12. I also found this picture of the house where my Grandma was born:


It's so amazing what you can find with the internet!

The Pox

Little Girl has chicken pox. We were expecting it as some of the children at church have had it. She first got the spots on Tuesday and the first couple of days didn't seem to ill apart from being happy to sit on my knee cuddling most of the time but the last two days have been worse. Last night we had to take her to the out of hours doctor because she has an infected spot (the most common complication in children under five) and she now has to have three different medicines - paracetamol for the fever, anti-histamine for the itching and an antibiotic for the infection. She doesn't mind the first two but the antibiotic tastes horrible so there is lots of crying when we give it to her (but she is good as she will take it even though she doesn't like it). We've also been giving her garlic and honey which we always give for colds but didn't think of doing with this until she'd been ill a couple of days. If you feel so inclined, please pray that she will be feeling better soon.

Keeping Kids Rear Facing For Longer

Well our trip last month was successful and we now have a rear facing car seat which will last at least until Little Girl is four and hopefully longer.

In Sweden children are kept rear facing at least until age four. Here in the UK (and most countries except the Scandinavian ones) children are usually turned to face forward when they are around one. We actually moved Little Girl on when she was nine months and only just at the legal minimum weight for forward facing (9kg) because she was too tall for her first car seat. Although we would have kept her facing that way longer if we'd been able to, we did not know how significant a difference it makes and we also didn't know that it was possible to get rear facing car seats in the next stage (Group 1).

I just happened upon the information when someone linked to UK Rear facing campaign on an online parenting discussion group. The statistical difference is quite significant. The following graph shows the deaths and injuries per 100 000 children in Sweden vs. Great Britain.

As you can see, for under ones (who are rear facing in both countries) the figures are fairly similar. This illustrates that the difference for older children must be because of the car seats and not a difference in cars used. You can see quite clearly that children in Great Britain aged 1-5 are more than twice as likely to be killed or injured in a car accident than their Swedish (rear-facing) counterparts.

Unlike an adult (who's head makes up just 6% of their body weight), a toddler's head can be up to 25% of their body weight. This combined with less developed bones puts the neck at much greater risk when forward facing. In a frontal impact a rear facing car seat will support the head and torso together. A forward facing seat holds the torso (by the straps) and the head is unsupported potentially leading to serious neck injuries

I found this video to be particularly helpful in illustrating the difference because being in the same test, the rear and forward facing seats are subject to the same conditions and you can clearly see the difference in effect on the crash test dummies.

For more crash test videos, see Car Safety for Kids.

BBC News Video Clip about UK Rear Facing Campaign

One concern that people have about older children in rear facing seats is that they won't have enough leg room. This is actually not the problem you would expect and I was surprised at how much leg room there actually is. We have also found it is easier for Little Girl to get into the seat herself as she can stand right in front of it and then sit down whereas for the forward facing seat she had to climb into it over the side and then turn around in the seat (which would always take a very long time so we tended to put her in ourselves rather than waiting). Another issue with legs is that people sometimes think that having the legs like that is dangerous but in fact bent or crossed legs are not dangerous.

As you can see in this picture, Little Girl had plenty of space on the journey home:

In fact, she was so comfy that she fell asleep:


Obtaining a rear facing seat for an older child
Although it is possible to get rear facing Group 1 seats on import, there is one - the Recaro Polaric - which is specifically available on the UK market. We bought ours from Babyworld because they were the easiest for us to get to but we were very impressed with the service and would definitely recommend them to anyone who is UK based. The person who fitted it for us talked us right through how to fit it and the reasons for everything and was clearly very knowledgeable about car seats in general and about why rear facing is best. He said the reason they only stocked the Recaro seat is because if they got others on import then they would not know if there was a safety recall so we were glad we had gone for that particular seat in the end.

Useful Links
Keeping Kids Safe in Cars (North American car seat safety site)
Rear Facing Rocks (Illustration of the difference in head size at different ages, statistics on types of crashes, lots of links)
Joel's Journey (Joel was in a car crash in September last year. He suffered internal decapitation and now is Grandpa is trying to raise awareness of the risks associated with putting your child forward facing compared with rear facing.)
Pictures of kids in rear facing car seats.

Alphabet song

A while ago I saw this video posted on Mommy Life:

I showed it to my husband who then managed to find this alphabet song by Barbara Milne:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK9VPtz3EHQ (Embedding is disabled so I can only post a link and not the actual video.)

Little Girl absolutely loves to watch it and sometimes requests it. She also often goes round singing bits of it. Although it does have some American words or pronunciations which we wouldn't use (such as cookie, undershirt and zebra) they are not significant enough to put me off and it is by far the best one I could find. If you happen to have a child of the right age I would definitely recommend it as it is also an enjoyable song which doesn't get annoying after you have heard it a million times.

Rear facing Car Seat

This is an autopost. I'm not here at the moment because we're off in search of a rear facing car seat for Little Girl. Hope fully by the time you are reading this we have got one.

Here's why:




I'll probably post some more links/info when I have time.

Who needs toys...

...when you've got a recycling bin.

(Just so you know it only has paper, cardboard and plastic in and it's all clean.)

Getting Used to a New Routine and Other Bits and Pieces

From yesterday until Christmas Eve, Hubby is working late shifts Monday to Saturday so we're having to get used to a new routine. Yesterday was rather disorganised but today has been better. I'm trying out a meat loaf recipe I found on New Life. I never made meatloaf before (I think maybe it's an American thing) so I'm looking forward to seeing how it will turn out. I did make a couple of modifications as I used lamb mince instead of beef mince and I'm putting salsa on the top instead of ketchup. The loaf is now sitting in the oven ready to cook and the salsa is made and ready to be added.

Last year Little Girl was too young to particularly notice that Daddy was around at different times but yesterday after bath time she was calling, "Daddy" and trying to go downstairs to look for him. I'm sure we'll all get used to it soon though.

A while back I read about the "box of beans" toy at Lentils and Rice and had been trying to think of something suitable for Little Girl as I knew she would love it but beans would be too small at her age. Today I finally thought of pasta so she spent the half hour before lunch time playing with a cup of (dry) pasta and three plastic tubs:

One last thing I wanted to share before Autumn is over is our Autumn table decoration:

It's not really an English thing to do but I've been reading about Autumn decorations on lots of American blogs and thought it sounded like a nice idea to mark the seasons so this is my first time. The stuff is actually on a lazy susan which is nice as we can turn it to face different directions and it makes it easy to remove and put back when we need to. Hopefully on Monday morning we will go out foraging for holly so that I can make a Winter one.

Toilet training?

Toilet training. We think of this as one of those necessary parts of raising a child. However, we do not intend to "toilet train" our daughter. This is not because we intend to leave our daughter in nappies (American = diapers) for the rest of her life but because we have not nappy-trained her in the first place. Think about it. Why train a child into a habit when two or three years later you are going to expect them to start doing the complete opposite? I suppose you are probably thinking that it is necessary because a baby has no bowel or bladder control. This is simply not true. Babies are born able to control both their bowels and bladders. If we recognise this, we can avoid the difficulties of toilet training by allowing baby to use the toilet (or potty) from birth.