Wanna win some soft, organic, fair trade clothes for you little one? Nature’s Child is having a contest where you could win $250 worth of Speesee’s cute and vibrant clothing…all by sharing a tid bit of the best parenting advice you’ve received as a new parent. Just make sure to do it by the end of September 2008 or you’ll miss out.

After you enter the contest, come back here and tell us what piece of advice you shared with Nature’s Child by commenting on this post. If it’s the best advice ever, we’ll showcase it on our website with your name for all other parents to see so they can get a jump start on great parenting tactics.

Although most infants are not technically diagnosed with asthma at such a young age, many infants do suffer from asthma-like symptoms. Disposable diapers have been studied to link the chemicals that are released from them to bronchial irritations found in infants, children and asthmatic parents or caregivers.

I have experienced this first hand and have to say that I do believe that young children who are already sensitive can be highly affected by the use of disposable diapers. My son suffered from RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) as a newborn and has had asthma-like symptoms since. His symptoms sometimes require breathing treatments. Recently we had to put him in disposables because he developed a reaction to synthetic fabric. (We were using Fuzzi Bunz which have polyester fleece lining.) The wait for cotton diapers took longer than anticipated and after just a few days of being in disposables he began to have labored breathing which did not subside. Keeping him in the Fuzzi Bunz cloth diapers was probably a lesser evil then using the disposable diapers.

Parents with children who have existing breathing problems have a good reason to switch to cloth diapers. There is not a good reason to keep using products that have a large possibility of increasing health risks. Read the complete article about disposable diapers being linked to asthma and find out which disposable diapers did not release the bronchial irritants.

Ever since having my second baby 9 months ago I have wavered about the idea of having one more baby. Mostly because I just love sweet, little, tiny newborns and it is fun to watch them grow. I also want my children to have other siblings. There are pluses to having only two children because they often have a very strong bond because there isn’t another sibling to go to when one gets mad at the other so they must resolve disagreements quickly. But, as a woman, there is nothing like having a sister to call on when you need her. I really want my daughter to have a sister. But I have also had the feeling that I don’t want to go through the awake at night, crawling, falling over crying, putting everything out of reach stage again.

Read more…

Recently I bought a few jars of baby food because my 8 month old wasn’t very interested in eating so I never knew when I might offer him some food. The jars just seemed convenient even though I had some frozen cubes of homemade apple and butternut squash baby food that I had made. Over the past couple of weeks, he has shown an increased desire to eat food and we now feed him at least twice a day.

I was heating up a jar of food in some hot water on the stove while holding him on my hip and making some food for the rest of the family. After thinking about it for a minute I didn’t understand why I wasn’t making him food. The logic is pretty simple, I make wholesome meals for everyone else in the family, why wouldn’t I make homemade food for our baby? Read more…

Yeah, I know…what happened to the train? Well, I can only say that I wish we would have had a train ride on part of our travel trip because they are really so nice since you can move around freely and sit at a table playing games. Unfortunately, our only options to get from California to Arkansas were planes and automobiles.

I took the advice of my sister who only has one child…(why I’m not sure) and took our 3 suitcases as carry-ons as well as a laptop, a diaper bag, a stroller, my daughters backpack and our two children. I will never again take more than one carry-on total while traveling with children. It is far too much baggage to deal with while having an infant to carry and a three year old to push in a stroller.

Although the 14 hour travel time was long and draining, we had a great time and our children were very good. I think this mostly had to do with mine and my husbands good attitude toward the situation we faced. So take it from me, one who has experienced the flight…don’t take carry-ons. It’s worth the wait at baggage claim.