Leaving the House with Baby: What Do I Really Need?
***** This is a guest post by Aldo Torner *****
Sometimes it is easy to identify new parents just by looking at what they are carrying. Simply size up the baby bag. As the oldest of six siblings, I remember watching my own mom’s baby bag evolution over the years. It seemed that shopping for just the right diaper bag – and it had to be HUGE – was only important during the early years. Once it came to baby number six, my mom had packing baby’s stuff down to an art, and everything she needed fit into her oversized purse – no diaper bag needed. Of course, the prospect of being out and about with the little one and not having something you need can be quite stress-inducing. So, what do you REALLY need when leaving the house with baby? Here is a brief rundown:
Baby food and drink
Bring baby’s bottle, in an insulated bottle pack to maintain its temperature. Even if you don’t plan on being gone during meal time, bring a bottle with purified water and a travel-sized packet of formula. If you are breast-feeding, of course, you can skip the bottle altogether. Additionally, bring a sandwich baggy or small plastic container with a snack. You don’t need the whole pantry; just some simple finger foods – crackers, for example – will do. Bring a sippy cup of water or juice to wash it down.
When baby gets soiled
Bring a travel-sized pack of baby wipes, a couple of diapers, and a simple change of clothing, like a onesie. Don’t forget clean socks. Either a disposable, or a very compact, changing pad could come in handy . . . but is not necessary, if you absolutely must pack as lightly as possible. Pack a couple of zip-lock bags to store dirty or wet clothing in until you get home.
Comfort
If baby has a favorite blanket, stuffed animal or chew toy, or uses a pacifier, bring those.
Entertainment
Don’t pack the playroom. Remember that baby will most likely be stimulated and entertained by being in a new environment. Pack a small rattler or travel toy. If you really want to conserve space in your diaper bag, opt for toys that attach directly to your baby carrier.
Taking baby out and about doesn’t have to be a nerve-wracking prospect. Just make sure you have these basics packed, and you will be prepared to handle most any situation. Also, remember that just like everything associated with parenting, leaving the house with baby may be scary in the beginning, but you will get better at it and more comfortable with it over time . . . and with a little (or a lot) of trial and error.
*****
About the Author:
Aldo Torno is a career counselor for several phlebotomy schools and plans to pursue a career in nursing within the next year or two. He was inspired to write this article after seeing many young mothers visit his schools while caring for their children. Some of them looked like they were about to move in permanently! Take a deep breath and don’t stress out when you take your baby in public. Be realistic and things will go much smoother than anticipated. Please visit http://www.associationphlebotomytraining.com/ if you’d like more information about phlebotomy as a career.
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Parents Who Hid Child’s Gender for Five Years Now Face Backlash
When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had their son, Sasha Laxton, five years ago, they decided that rather than make a big splashy “It’s A Boy!” announcement, they’d keep the news to themselves. Instead, they only told a select number of relatives that little Sasha was a he; to everyone else the child was referred to as “the infant” and described without gendered pronouns. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge …
Gun sales banned for Xbox Live Avatars
I’ve just found out on OXM online that the Gears of War Lancer and Hammerburst avatar items are no longer available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Apparently a new policy came into effect for all gun-like avatar accessories on the Xbox Live Marketplace from January 1, 2012.
If you’ve already bought guns for your avatar, you should still have those, but it looks like you won’t be getting any more. What a load of bollocks!
I am an adult Xbox 360 gamer and I don’t see the point of this ban. They put age limits on these gun games so why don’t they have the age limit thing on the avatar items if it’s that much of a problem? That way the people who don’t want their children playing around with TOY guns will be able to stop their kids’ avatars holding pictures of guns too. Lol.
I have six children and think it’s fair enough people don’t want their kids thinking its OK to play with real guns. Some parents think it’s bad to play with toy guns too. It’s not real when you play these GAMES. I mean come off it what’s next, are they going to ban kids from playing with toy guns and water pistols at all hmmm?
At the end of the day the avatars are only pictures and it’s safe to say kids have seen pictures of guns before, all over the place. And if they can still see guns on some Xbox Live avatars, given that guns already bought won’t be taken away, then what’s the point?
Army ads show men with guns all the time and show them as heroes – kids see that on TV all the time completely independent of anything Microsoft might do. I personally support the military because they’re sacrificing a lot to protect us, but if seeing pictures of people with guns is so bloody bad for kids, then surely everyone should stop advertising that way? Don’t be daft.
I’ve got a poster on our wall at home of Call of Duty characters holding guns and I don’t believe it does any psychological harm to my kids to see that piece of artwork. BIG DIFFERENCE between real life and games, BIG DIFFERENCE between interactive games and pictures.
***** 4nim4l *****
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Image of the Week: Window disclaimer by Karen Neoh
There are a lot of things I like about this. First of all, I’m just happy that somebody bothered to make up some nice professional looking signage rather than just writing it on a piece of paper taped to the window. That restores my faith in the quirked priorities of humanity.
I also like the fact that their offer of a puppy goes some way to ameliorate the threat to give children strong caffeine beverages. And look, if you don’t want the kids to drink espresso then don’t leave them unattended, right?
You can see more of Karen’s photos on Flickr.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you prefer. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Science Says: Santa’s Reindeer Probably Girls
Just had a text from Vix asking me whether Santa’s reindeer are boys or girls so that she can answer the question posed in her 7 year old daughter’s note left out for the Fat Man.
The answer, fact fiends, is this:
Most male reindeer tend to lose their antlers by early December, so there’s a good chance that the majority of Santa’s reindeer are female.
We should probably have guessed this from their ability to take Christmas multi-tasking to an entirely new quantum level in delivering all those presents in one night. I am knackered and going to collapse on the sofa with the cheese board very soon. How do they do it?
Merry winter stuff, everyone.
Winter Gingerbread Porridge Recipe (for Toddlers and Grown-Ups)
This porridge is lovely on a cold day because it’s warm and fruity and biscuity. It’s a special happy winter recipe that makes you feel all glowy and full of solstice cheer.
You can add pretty much anything you like to it; this recipe is reasonably healthy, though if you’re an adult trying to lose body fat then you might want to use lower fat milk and go easy on the sweet bits. Sorry, did I just type that? Call an exorcist; I may not have much time.
To serve 1 hungry toddler, we used:
- About 40 g of porridge oats
- About 125 ml of full fat milk
- About 20 or 30 g of gingerbread (we used Organix mini gingerbread men)
- A small handful of raisins or sultanas
- About a teaspoon of apple with the peel left on, chopped into fairly small bits
- About half a teaspoon of orange or lemon peel, grated
- A pinch of ground cinnamon
What to do:
- Put the oats and fruit stuff and cinnamon into a microwaveable bowl [Note: if you don't like microwaves, put it in a pan instead] and stir it all together a bit.
- Set 2 or 3 gingerbread men/pieces aside, and break the rest up into toddler-bite-sized chunks. Throw the chunks into the bowl and stir them in.
- Add the milk and give it another quick stir.
- Microwave it for a minute on full power; stir it, then nuke it again for another 30-60 seconds. [If you're using a pan, bring it to the boil and keep stirring for 2-3 minutes.] Watch it in case it overboils, but don’t panic – it will bubble a lot, but it thickens up as it boils and is unlikely to spill over unless your bowl is really full.
- Take it out of the microwave [or off the stove] and stir it for a good minute while it cools.
- Stick the spare gingerbread men/pieces in the top for decoration.
- Check the temperature’s OK, then eat it.
Image of the Week: The Small Hand That Kills by Skippyjon
This is just outstanding in so many ways. Enjoy.
You can see more images by skippyjon on Flickr.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Giant Lazy Fairy Cake in 7 Easy Steps
It’s huge, it’s awesome and it took very little effort. This is the ideal cake to make if you don’t, in fact, have time to make a cake. It’s really more about the fun of decorating and the oversized cupcake look. Low-energy cake-making (and parenting) at its best.
We used:
- 1 sponge cake sandwich (from the shops, we were short of time) with raspberry jam and buttercream filling
- 1 giant choc chip cookie (you could buy that too, but we made ours)
- Raspberry jam or whatever jam you like
- Hundreds and thousands, or any kind of small edible sprinkles
All you have to do is:
- Cut two slots about the same length and width as the cookie out of the top of the cake and eat the cuttings.
- Smear jam all over the top of the cake.
- Cut the cookie in half.
- Push the cookie halves into the slots in the cake until they don’t fall over anymore. Curved side up or curved side down, whichever looks better.
- Sprinkle the hundreds and thousands all over the top of the cake.
- Admire the cake.
- Eat the cake.
Bath with Baby (the place, not the verb (the bath, not the baby))
This week we’ve been in the lovely [rainy, chilly, yet pleasantly not at all like our rainy, chilly home] city of Bath.
The joys of travelling with a toddler in tow meant that I had a meal plan, a huge grocery shopping list, and an even huger packing list before we could even think about leaving the baby-proofed comforts of our flat. Playpen, sleeping bag, travel mattress, twice as many clothes as seemed necessary (because she’s always twice as grubby as you think). Every toy we thought she might not sleep without, yet she still hasn’t slept through the night the whole time we’ve been here.
Now that we’re here, of course, we don’t need half that shit. We will, however, be needing a new suitcase to take it home again. Oh well.
Meanwhile, this is my office for the week. Likey?
If your dad’s got a motorbike then you win, even if your dad is ginger.
This is pretty much how I remember the logic of comparing and competing about our parents when I was a kid.
I remember my sister telling people her dad was a strong man. I told him this and he said she was right. She meant like in a circus though, with a fancy mustache and tight leopard print pants with the fashioned-in braces.
I’m only thinking about all this because we went with the Animal to visit some of his other kids yesterday and I was reminded of how important it is, at a certain age, to be able to brag about your family and especially your parents.
Let’s not let them down, eh.
How to make a shitload of cash without working too hard
This is how I see myself and my business in a few years’ time. Especially the chart.
Seriously though, how are you going to get from here to there?
My plan involves working bloody hard (but,like I said,not too hard) and training the Animal to make money from blogging too. That way I can just put in a regular few hours a week working for other people, a few more working on my own side projects, and spend the rest playing ball and reading books with Mini-MI while the Animal plays househusband. In the park. With ice cream. Cos that’s how good it will be, if I get it right. Right?
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Image credit: Snugg LePup
15 Safe Ways to Entertain a Baby (or Toddler) in the Car
We did a roughly 12 hour trip each way on our jaunt to Echternach, and Mini-MI suffered all the indignities of a long hot day in the car admirably. There were times when some of these ideas came in bloody handy, though.
BTW, when I say safe I mean it in a relative sense — nothing is truly safe when you’ve got a one-year-old with you.
- Books. Preferably soft ones, to prevent injury when they’re thrown at your head.
- Music. Mini-MI will be happily distracted for up to half an hour at a time if there’s something to listen to.
- Pulling faces. Doesn’t matter if you’re no good at it, they’ll show you how.
- Water games. On a hot day it’s particularly good – just drip a bit of water on the baby’s head or arm, let them do what they like. Give them the beaker and leave them to it if you can…
- Singing. Any kind will do, especially if you’ve got no other music.
- Hand signs. Vulcan, Gangsta, Rocker, Surfer – all genres welcome here. You copy them or they copy you; this is an easy one.
- Food. Let’s face it, this is one of the easiest distraction tactics in the world. Something that takes a while to eat is best.
- Hunt the Food. When your darling little one drops half-chewed snacks into the mysterious cavities of the upholstery & luggage, you’re gonna play this one anyway. Might as well play for laughs.
- “Look!” (like I Spy, but for younger infants the objective is just to point out the window at stuff. Mini-MI likes spotting bikers on the road.)
- The paper fan. Fold a paper sheet in zigzags, pinch one end and fan the other out, waft it at your offspring. Cooling and entertaining.
- “Where’s your…?” (like Look! but pointing at bits of your body)
- Drawing. Provided nobody gets stabbed with a crayon, this could occupy a whole 20 minutes before the upholstery’s at risk.
- Clapping hands. Mini-Mi absolutely loves the power trip of grabbing our hands and clapping them for us, or you could play pat-a-cake if you remember how.
- Winking and blinking. Younger kids typically haven’t figured out how to wink yet, but they’ll give it a damn good try.
- Sleep. Yes, OK, you can’t make this one happen. But it’s the longest period of quiet you’ll have, so make the most of it when you get it.
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Hard times getting to see my kids
I have six children with three different women. Some would say I’m a glutton for punishment, but hey ho, I’ve made my bed and all that. I’m happy to have 6 great kids but I’m frustrated at how difficult it is to get to see all of them.
4 of them live hours away from me with ex #1, because she wanted a new start and decided it would be better for them to get out of the place where we both grew up. But it’s not, I can’t afford to visit them as often as I’d like and they have an unpredictable lifestyle.
I only really get to see them on school holidays and even then their mother makes that difficult. She punishes our children for being naughty with her by stopping them from coming to visit their dad, or goes the opposite way and tells me I have to take this child or that off her hands because they’re misbehaving not because it’s their turn. That’s just unfair and messes with everyone’s heads.
I have got a 6 year old boy with ex #2 and have only just won a court case after 2 years to have regular contact with him. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but my ex wanted to cut me out of his life completely and she held everything up for as long as she could. I’m just glad the courts could see that my ex only stopped me seeing him out of bitterness.
I feel for anyone who has to jump through hoops to see their kids like I did and I say stick with it, don’t let anyone make you think about giving up. Your children are a part of you. I can’t understand people who walk away from their kids, when I’ve had such a struggle to see mine, and I can’t understand people who stop their ex from seeing their kids without reason either.
If you’ve been through fatherhood issues of your own, feel free to tell me about it, and you can always get good advice from Dad.info.
***** the Animal *****
Image credit: WorldIslandInfo.com
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Shh… Even sleeping babies can hear you’re unhappy
You know those times when you’ve argued, wept, or otherwise stressed out while your baby was sleeping? Turns out if a baby can hear you, it still knows how you feel.
fMRI scans of sleeping babies aged from 3 to 7 months show activity in the middle temporal gyri, right lingual gyrus and medial frontal gyri when human voice sounds including crying, laughter and other neutral noises were played to them. Basically that’s the same as you’d expect to see in an adult listening to those sounds, awake.
What’s more intersting is that unhappy human voice sounds – crying etc – activate the insular cortex and gyrus rectus more strongly, again just like in fully conscious adults. So babies can hear us and interpret our mood from our voices even when they’re asleep.
Nobody’s really sure why this is. Maybe the babies are processing the sounds and learning as they sleep. Maybe they’ve already learned to recognise those sounds and associate them with maternal stress they experienced in the womb. Maybe they’re just evolved to be alert to any sign of danger while they sleep, and people arguing or crying around them could potentially do something dangerous.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that science has finally supplied some evidence to back up all the anecdotes and old wives’ tales about not doing your freaking-out in the same room as your sleeping infant.
Source: New Scientist
Image credit: ECohen
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
Baby TV: Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Baby TV, at first glance, seemed like a great idea. 24 hour broadcasting, no advertising, just developmental programming for the under-3s.
A couple of the shows I watched were OK (with the volume really low, at least – all that singing is hard to take at times). There were some nice short animations that I found quite appealing. And I figured the lack of advertising would make Mini-MI a bit less likely to start demanding happy meals and branded character merchandise.
Then I started picking up on the odd thing here and there that set my teeth right on edge. My most jaw-dropping OMG-they-didn’t moment thus far came from Learn with Baby (2006), in which the twee but slightly breathy voice-over lady enthuses, “There are many different shapes of eyes: slanted… big… and small!”
That’s wrong wrong wrong on so many levels. Except the ones where it’s not even wrong, just bollocks. I mean, for a start, none of those are shapes. Slanted is an orientation, big and small are sizes. All of them are relative measures referring to the rendering or presentation of a shape, hence not to do with the shape itself. It downright pisses me off that they’re leading ickle babies up the geometric garden path.
And did they get Prince Philip to script this? It might as well say, “There are big and small versions of normal eyes, then there are some weird people with slanted ones.” I should sue them for the injuries sustained in dropping my jaw to the fucking floor.
They’re lucky I’m British and accustomed to hearing that shit from our noble prince consort, so I just switched to a different channel.
Image credit: Stannered
Crash Test Mummy
Should anyone want a way to get to the baby-related stuff without passing through the unlikely wastelands of my modelling career, sex life and other unmentionables that I mention from time to time: you can now go straight there by clicking the “Crash Test Baby” link in the nice short menu at the top right of the page. Or just bookmark it, it’d probaby be easier.
I’m bound to swear and talk about NSFW subjects sooner or later, no matter what category you visit, but I promise there’ll be no naked pics in the Crash Test Mummy category so visually at least it’s officially Safe For Work. Yes, me. Really.
Oh gods, I’m a mommyblog
It’s come to my attention that my blog now has (a) lots of mentions of Mini-MI, and (b) absolutely bugger all modelling going on because I’m too busy writing and raising a baby to get my shit together and scrub up for a shoot. Can this state of affairs continue?
Let’s be clear on this point: I’m not about to turn the site pink or start thinking I’m Dooce. And I’m a bit less kerr-azy than The Blogess, so the title of Kookiest Mum Online isn’t up for grabs either. But I like being able to share my chaotic parenting skillz (would you take a book called Chaotic Parenting down off the shelf?) and occasional outbursts of maternal pride with you. So the baby stuff is in. Feel free to go & look at Barbies instead if you prefer your girls non-reproductive.
That said, I’m buying a new camera soon. Then I can set up my own shoots, and the Animal can push the trigger for me. So far I’ve been thinking of maybe doing a set in our nice new shower, and there must be something I can do with the Kinect… oh, and I’ve still got my LoveHoney Real Top Model prizes to show off, if they fit after all this time.
Any other ideas?
Image courtesy of Gabi Menashe via Flickr
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