Nature babycare - Good for baby, good for Mother Earth

I often think that it is really hard to be environmentally friendly when you have babies and small children. There is so much washing, so much wasted food, so much packaging and SO MANY NAPPIES.

I will admit that I like the convenience of using disposable nappies. I know many cloth nappy users don’t find it to be extra work but for someone as domestically lazy as me, even part time cloth usage pushes me to my laundry-duty limits on any given day (and add in the stretch of wet days we’ve had recently exacerbates the issue) … so I was delighted to have the opportunity to try the Nature babycare range of disposable nappy products, a more environmentally friendly disposable nappy system.

The Nature Babycare nappies are made from GM-free corn which is 100% biodegradable, and a chlorine-free pulp – better for baby, better for the environment. The nappies come in a range of unisex sizes and as it happens, my 3.5 year old boy (not yet toilet trained) and my chubby ten month old girl both fit into the size range for the size 4 (9-20kg) nappies.

The nappies have a slightly ‘papery’ feel on the outside, but are certainly soft enough to be comfortable for baby. I found them nice and trim while still being absorbent enough to use as an overnight nappy on both my baby and toddler. We have had no leakages or nappy rashes using the Nature babycare range – and with children who are prone to red bottoms, this was important to me.

On a very slight downside, the adhesive tabs can lose their stickiness a bit by the time it comes to wrap them up for disposal, especially if you’ve had to reposition the tabs a few times during the dressing process with a wriggly baby – however this is not enough of a reason to avoid using these nappies (especially given how many tabs I’ve inadvertently ripped off other ‘premium’ brand disposables during normal use).

I also used the Nature Babycare wipes (RRP $5.39/70 pieces) and nappy sacks (RRP $2.98/50 pieces). I particularly liked the disposable nappy sacks, which have a softer feel and much less chemical/fragrance smell than the main brand available at our local supermarket. The wipes clean well, with a good amount of moisture (I really don’t like it when wipes are dripping wet or nearly dry!), and no chemical smell. I usually use sorbolene for nappy changes but I felt like these wipes were gentle enough on my children’s skin while cleaning thoroughly. My husband is a big fan of the wipes and bags, preferring them to our usual brands.

Nature babycare nappies are available at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets at a RRP of $21.99 a packet, although I have seen them cheaper during sales cycles. While they are comparable price-wise with the leading brand of premium nappy at its RRP, when the major brand is on sale there is enough of a difference in price to make cost a consideration for budget-conscious families (not to mention comparing it to the cheaper brands of nappies). I think for part-time disposable users (either overnight, or combined with cloth nappies) these nappies are ideal, and also for families who can afford to pay a little more for a nappy that is a better option environmentally.

On a balance, I was impressed with the performance of the nappies and will look for the other Nature babycare products to use.

You can find more information on Nature babycare products at http://www.naty.com

New national car seat safety laws announced

Car safety for children is an important issue for all parents. Currently 500 children under the age of ten are killed or seriously injured every year in car accidents with a further 2,300 receiving minor injuries.

Last week, Transport Ministers from around Australia announced unanimous support for new national child car restraint laws.

Babies up to six months of age must be in a rear-facing infant capsule, then in a forward facing car seat until four years of age and then in a booster seat from four to seven years of age.

Up to the age of four, children must be restrained in the back seat of the car. Children between four and seven years old must not be seated in the front seat unless all backseats are taken up with younger children.

Remember to make sure your child’s restraint is appropriate for her weight and height, that it meets Australian Standards, and that it is installed correctly.

The new laws use the child’s age as the best guide as parents will know their child’s age but may not be aware of their height or weight, however the safest position for small babies to travel in is facing backwards, so it is important to leave her in her rear-facing car-seat or capsule until she reaches the upper weight limit before moving her into a forward facing restraint.

Useful links:
CHOICE Child car rest

Australian Transport Safety Bureau – Simple Guide to Child Restraints

NRMA Q&A on Child and Infant restraints

Belletoni Association for child passenger safety - types of child restraints

Back to School

The count down is on to back to school time. We just get over Christmas/New Year and then jump straight into the chaos and expense of preparing to get the kiddies off to school again.

We have put together some information to help make Back to School a little bit easier.

Do you have a little one off to school for the first time? I do (though I am trying not to think about it, it’s too soon to cry!). NSW Dept. of Education has put together a great little booklet with some handy info for new parents.

Back to school dates

Back to school dates vary from state to state and between Public and Private schools, many states returning on the 29th-30th. Check the details for your state or check out the noticeboard outside your school for details.

Back to School Sales

Kmart back to school sale-
3rd Janurary to the 16th Janurary
Second catalouge 10th Janurary- 16th Janurary

Target Back to school sale-Jan 10th-Jan 16th

Office Works- Jan 2nd- Feb 1st

Big W- Jan 10th- Jan 23rd

School Lunch box recipe ideas

If your like me, you struggle coming up with ideas for yummy and exciting lunch box ideas beyond the good old jam sandwich. You might not have time for a bento box everyday but here are some great fun and nutritious ideas and tips for you lunch boxes.

• Healthy Lunch boxes (lots of great links here!)
• Sanitarium lunchbox ideas
• Snack attack and lunchbox ideas
• Healthy lunchboxes for children
• A healthy lunchbox
• 5 day healthy lunchbox meal plan

Personalised kids labels

Personalised labels are a great way to help protect all the expensive uniforms, stationary and other bits and pieces the kids need for school (and seem to be very good at misplacing!)

I have been looking around for some myself this week, and have decided on Bright Star Kids labels. They have a great range of stickers and iron on labels at great prices. What I love best about them, that I haven’t seen the others offer is their split value packs. So you can order a value pack, and split it between 2 names. Along with super fast FREE delivery, if you order is over $20 you will receive 40 tiny pencil labels FREE for each name in your order. So check out Brightstar Kids.

Helping girls move beyond Bratz, Britney and Bacardi Breezers.

Guest post by Dannielle Miller, CEO of Enlighten Education.

What is really going on in the playground and behind closed bedroom doors?

Teenage girls are living in a girl poisoning culture and, whilst they may appear to be coping as they are still performing well academically, underneath that “oh so perfect” façade, many are silently imploding:

• A quarter of teenage girls in Australia say they would get plastic surgery if they could, and two per cent have already gone under the knife.
• Almost 60 per cent wanted to be lighter on the scales, and 45 per cent said they knew someone with an eating disorder.
• 3 per cent have tried the party drug ice, five per cent had swallowed an ecstasy pill and 13 per cent have smoked marijuana.
• half said they drink alcohol, with one in five confessing to having done something they regret while they were drunk
• 85 per cent worried about achieving at school.
• Peer pressures is also a reality for many, with 70 per cent of girls confessing they have been bullied.
• As many as one in ten teenage girls self-harm. There is evidence to suggest that women, particularly those under 25, attempt suicide and self-harm at a higher rate than men, although male suicide rates remain considerably higher than female suicide rates. Estimates of self-harm rates suggest there are between 150 and 300 acts of self-harm for every female suicide.
• Sexually transmitted diseases are on the increase amongst young people, it has been estimated that as many as 28% of teenagers may have Chlamydia. In Australia, pregnancy termination (abortion) is the second most common hospital procedure for girls aged 12 to 24 years.

Whilst I am well aware that statistics can be misleading, I don’t think we can afford to dismiss such findings as alarmist. Certainly my own experiences as the co-founder and CEO of Enlighten Education, a company that works nationally with teen girls in schools delivering programs that aim to boost self esteem, foster a positive body image and help girls deconstruct the media messages they are bombarded with, confirm that this is true. I also don’t assert that there are necessarily any direct links between negative body image, incidents of self-harm and risky sexual practices – yet surely all are indicators that teenage girls are stressed, unhappy and looking for love? And surely there are implications for those of us raising and teaching young girls?

Courtney E. Martin, in her insightful new book “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, the Frightening New Normality of Hating Your Body,” laments the fact that many young women, raised by feminists who told them they could be anything, have misinterpreted the power messages and are now obsessed with becoming everything…successful, thin pretty and sexy. As there is nothing more bitter to a perfect girl than the taste of failure, self hatred has almost become a rite of passage for many teenage girls.

Courtney challenges readers to “step through the looking glass” and create new stories. She emphasises that no one story describes our healing as women, but rather that there are a series of moments when the light is let in.

 

“There is no healing without help.

There is no power as potent as possibility.

There is no transformation without truth.

There is no change without vulnerability.

There is no wisdom greater than that found inside you.

There is no beauty without struggle or aberration.

There is no statement like your life. There is no end.

There are only beginnings. ”

enlighten aims to be just one more beginning of a series of amazing, brave, wild adventures into self acceptance, and indeed self-love, for many girls. Wow. We love this role.

Let me now pose a challenge to you all - what is one small step you will make this week to end the culture of self hatred and help create a new beginning for yourself as a women?

We knew he was bright

The author of this guest post has asked to remain anonymous, we thank you for sharing your story with us.
“I have a child with special needs”.

Stating this in the waiting area of any school in Australia is bound to get you sympathy and a willing audience.

However continuing the conversation with “yes, you see my son has a high IQ, and the school just doesn’t cater to his needs” is going to make you about as popular as a blowfly at a Barbie.

Having an extremely bright child presents educational challenges, and yet it’s often hard to find support within the general community and within the school. A proclamation that you have a gifted child sounds so pretentious, that it’s almost a taboo subject.

Jay (not his real name), came into this world as a first child and a couple of weeks late. When he was two, he announced he hadn’t wanted to come out of my tummy, as he liked it there. I got goosebumps and wondered just how far back he remembered.

Being first born I didn’t really have much to compare him to. I joined a new mothers’ group – women who all had babies around the same age, give or take a month either side. It’s funny that I never considered Jay so much as advanced, but rather the others as a bit behind with the usual milestones.

He was sitting around 4 months, crawling at 6, and walking at 9. By 18 months he was putting two words together, and knew over 100 words and by 2 was speaking in 8 word sentences. These things are not necessarily signs of giftedness, or pre-requisites, but I mention them as they factor in the whole profile.

He was particularly articulate as a toddler, and we’d often hear the expression “he could talk underwater with a mouth full of marbles” and “he’s been here before” because he would just seem to know stuff that he “shouldn’t” have known.

Despite the fact that he “failed miserably” at cutting out at preschool, we decided to send him to school at 4 years 9 months, (an April baby) rather than hold him back for a year. I don’t regret that decision for a second, and think that holding him back would only have served to amplify the problems that were to come.

Kindy was a challenging year. I suppose combining immaturity with boredom didn’t create a good mix. This kid who loved watching documentaries and playing on his computer was forced to “learn” rudimentary facts and computer programs he’d mastered two years earlier. The school’s solution was to co-opt him as a peer tutor.

In year one, he was diagnosed with A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder). This is not surprising as I read once around 30% of gifted boys have the same diagnosis. Perhaps a common trait, or the effects of boredom, I’m not quite sure. It was at this time that Jay had his first IQ test, which indicated that he was “gifted” - to the extent that he was placed in the top 2% of children.

Apparently, this score didn’t qualify him as “gifted” according to the school he attended. The principal told me herself. In fact, she told me that they didn’t have ANY gifted students at the school (which was K-12 and over 1,200 students). I daresay she was right, an attitude like that would drive them away en masse. The mandatory “gifted and talented program” was poorly administered, and revolved around sporadic “thinking groups”, which Jay loved, or advanced reading programs, which he didn’t “qualify” for. It was a constant battle with the school.

It wasn’t until Jay was re-tested a year later, that we learned the true extent. You see the IQ test that was originally used (WISC-III) was not designed to be used with really bright kids. Upon being tested on the Stanford-Binet Form L-M, his IQ was calculated to be 180 – statistically (although not in practice) occurring at the rate of 1 in one million.

Whilst you think your first reaction might be pride, or joy, I can tell you I was shocked, shaking and numb. I turned to the internet, books, what ever I could get my hands on that would help me make sense of the situation.

That was even scarier. I read tales of socially inept children, doomed to be misfits and outcasts. Articles about how his curriculum needed to be drastically altered, that he would require radical acceleration, that if he wasn’t placed with “like minded” individuals he would suffer.

I obsessed about this for a couple of years. He went to three different primary schools (including a private school OC in years 3 & 4 and government OC in years 5 and 6). He also attended many weekend and holiday courses suited to his interests. While years K-2 were pretty rough going, years 3-6 were an improvement.

In the end, I learned to relax and not look for potential problems. I learned to simply be guided by whether Jay was happy, and to trust his judgment as to whether his environment was adequate. He didn’t want to be accelerated, and he never wanted to be singled out as being different. In reflection, I also learned a lot about myself and my own abilities, and how girls are very good at “dumbing down”.

I don’t mean to trivialise the situation. I think a lot of kids with high IQs do have a really hard time growing up, and many do yearn for acceleration and extra challenge. But I’m just saying don’t look for problems that may not exist, and don’t forget that each child is an individual so you can’t just “typecast” them in a “one size fits all” solution.

Jay is now a happy well adjusted teenager (I should clarify, “as well adjusted as your average teenager”!). He has a great circle of friends, and satisfies his additional intellectual needs through documentaries, books and the internet (via special interest forums and the internet friendships he’s formed). He does really well at school, in the subjects he likes. Those that he doesn’t like he coasts through. I know that theoretically he should be top of his class, school or state even, but he’ll come into his own one day. Perhaps he’s an underachiever, but he’s a great kid, and that’s what makes me the most proud.

And in case you’re wondering, Jay has three younger sisters. The eldest has an IQ “somewhere” over 145 (she hit the ceiling on some parts of her test), but we didn’t feel the need to get her tested on the SB L-M. As for the two younger ones - I don’t think we’ll even bother getting them tested, we know they’re very bright. The rest is just academic, really. Let’s just say that sitting through the entire 2 hours of the Lost Queen of Egypt with little Miss 5 brought back a sense of déjà vu.

Australian Resources
Gifted-Children.com.auNSW Association for Gifted & Talented Children (incorporating ACT)
The Queensland Association for Gifted and Talented Children
The Gifted and Talented Children’s Association of WA
Victorian Association for Gifted and Talented Children
Gifted and Talented Children’s Association SA
Tasmanian Association for the Gifted
Northern Territory Association for the Education of the Gifted and Talented
Gifted Education Research Resource Information Centre
Australian Association for the Education of the Gifted and Talented

Australian toy recalls

There has been disturbing number of toy recalls in the last few week due to dangerous toys in the marketplace.

Today Mattel has announced yet another recall, 18 million toys including more than 460,000 in Australia, citing injuries to at least three children who swallowed small magnets that had broken loose.

2 weeks ago Fisher-Price toys, also made by Mattel, recalled characters including Dora the Explorer, Sesame Street’s Ernie and Barney the Dinosaur after they were found to be coated in dangerous levels of lead.

Last month there were the recall of the a popular range of Thomas the Tank Engine toys again due to toxic lead in their paintwork.

What on earth are these companies thinking, allowing lead paint to be used in the manufacture of our children’s toys?

For infomation of the various recalls and which products are effected
Mattel Polly Pocket and Cars recall
Fisher Price Dora and Sesame Street recall
Thomas the Tank Engine recall

Information on latest Bindeez recall

National Simultaneous Storytime 2007

The first National Simultaneous Storytime was held during Library and Information Week 2001.

In 2006, approximately 40,000 children at over 620 locations took part in the simultaneous reading of Good night, me written by Andrew Daddo and illustrated by Emma Quay. We read this book last year, it was such a beautiful story.

The Australian Library and Information Association organises National Simultaneous Storytime
in September every year. The aim is to:

• promote the value of reading and literacy
• promote the value of books
• promote an Australian writer and publisher, and
• promote storytime activities in public libraries and communities around the country.

National Simultaneous Storytime provides a great opportunity to involve parents, grandparents,
the press and others to participate in and enjoy the occasion. At the same time, it highlights
the importance of reading and literacy for children, and demonstrates how this can be a fun experience.

This years book is The Magic Hat Written by Mem Fox and National Simultaneous Storytime will be held on Thursday 6 September 2007 at 11:00am.

Visit the The Australian Library and Information Assocation for details on how you can get involved.

Teaching children to take tablets

And people think cats are bad, I have perfected that..can pill a cat with my eyes closed. Kids on the other hand, that is un charted territory.

I spent 30mins this morning trying to get my 8yr old son, Hayden to take a nurofen tablet. I handed him the water and tablet, here take this. I had no idea of the drama that was about to unfold. How hard could it be? I have no trouble taking tablets, I can take 2 at a time or without water, which is weird as I have a very strong gag reflex. I had no idea other people had such problems.

No matter what we tried, cutting them in half, hiding them in stuff…that little sucker would not go down. “I got it!…oh, no I didn’t…yay, it went down…wait, no it didn’t” We went thought 4 tablets and he got nothing down, in the end I thought perhaps he has absorbed enough through his tongue and or his bladder was going to explode. I was tempted to use my very skilful cat pilling technique but thought that probably wasn’t a good idea.

He complained that the hole was too small and that huge tablet (the smallest kind you can get) had no way to fit in there. It’s smaller than the half unchewed food you shove down your face..of course it can fit!

So please, share with me..what are the magical tricks you all use? (apart from a suppository *blink*)

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