October 2012 – The Beehive

October 18, 2012October 18, 2012

. . . Butt Where do you Draw the Line?

Rebecca has a number of outfits with “stuff” on the butt. She has a romper with a fish on the butt, a sleeper with a bee on the butt, pants with a heart on the butt . . . you get the idea. These happen to be some of my favorite outfits, and I think they are totally adorable.

I’ve been browsing for baby clothes online lately since Rebecca will soon me moving up a clothing size, and today I found myself wondering at what age clothing manufacturers stop putting fun stuff on the rear end of kids’ clothes. Well of course it dawned on me that they never do stop, not even for adult clothes! It is not uncommon to see high school and college age girls wearing lounge pants or shorts with “Juicy” or “Pink” plastered across the butt. This I find not so adorable.

Now I wonder, at what point does butt adornment go from totally adorable to totally skanky? Does a child wake up one morning, say, on the first day of pre-school, and suddenly these things are no longer acceptable? Or is there some sort of gradual continuum where the stuff is really cute on babies and toddlers, somewhat amusing on grammar school kids, questionable on junior high and high school students, inappropriate on people over the age of 18, and really gross on anyone over 40?

I really don’t know the answer. For now, I think as long as Rebecca wears a diaper that gives her a big puffy butt, I can safely put her in clothes with pictures on the rear end.

*Juicy butt picture from andrewapeterson.com/2009/08/hairy-butt-logo-pants/.

October 17, 2012

Party Like It’s 1989

A little over a year ago, I wrote this post about disaster preparedness, and set a goal for myself to get our family prepared. On this anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, it seems as good a time as any to revisit the topic and evaluate my efforts. Plus, tomorrow is “The Great California Shake Out“. The program encourages Californians to participate in a “drop, cover, and hold on” drill at 10:18 am on 10/18, as well as practice what to do after the shaking stops and take steps to get prepared for an earthquake.

Sadly, I haven’t done as well as I had hoped and we still have a ways to go to be truly prepared. So it is with renewed vigor that I again share this information and discuss how we’ve prepared ourselves and where we could still use some work.

Disaster Plan:

have at least two escape routes to exit your home We actually have three escape routes. However, they are all from the ground floor and if you are on the second floor the stairs are your only option. We should get some emergency window ladders before checking this one off.
keep a pair of shoes and a flashlight under each bed in case you need to evacuate at night
have two designated meeting areas, one near the house and one within walking distance in case the neighborhood is evacuated
have an out-of-state emergency contact to let family/friends know your status (long distance lines are usually fixed faster than local lines)
know the location of the gas main and other utilities and know how to turn them off I know where/how to shut the water off, but not the gas.

Some of these planning items are really simple and easy to do quickly, so there is no excuse for not having done them. In other words, I should get on that.

Household Safety:

have fire extinguishers on each level of your home and know how to use them We have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, but we don’t have one on the second floor. As for knowing how to use them . . . I know I’ve looked at the directions before, but it’s not like you can practice or anything to make sure you are doing it right! So I think that’s the best I can hope for.
~~make sure your smoke detectors (and as of July 1, 2011, CO detectors) are functioning and change the batteries every 6 months~~
make sure all heavy furniture, such as bookcases, hutches, or media centers, is properly secured to walls
~~don’t hang mirrors or heavy pictures/artwork above beds or sofas where they can fall on people~~; make sure all wall hangings are properly secured with a closed hook
secure books and knick-knacks on shelving with non-skid surface material or putty; store heavy items on low shelves
~~be sure your house number is visible from the street so emergency services can find you~~

Technically we haven’t done all these things. Some items are bolted to the wall, some are not. Some wall hangings are on closed hooks, some are not. But honestly, I look around the house at wall hangings and knick-knacks and such, and there is nothing that concerns me that would fall and hurt someone. This may not be the best way to think about it, but I think for us, finalizing our emergency plan and making sure we have all the survival items we need is more of a priority.

Disaster Kits:

~~water (1 gallon per person, per day)~~ and non-perishable food items; can opener; plates, utensils, and cups
~~first aid kit~~ We have a first aid kit in the house, one in the garage, and one in the trunk of my car.
~~flashlight or battery operated lantern and extra batteries~~ We have a lantern you wind with a hand crank.
~~battery operated radio and extra batteries~~ We have a solar/hand crank powered radio.
copies of important documents and phone numbers
warm clothes/rain gear/hats
blankets
work gloves
dust mask
liquid bleach and an eye dropper (for water purification and sanitation)
hygiene items (toilet paper, paper towels, moist towelettes, feminine products, hand sanitizer, soap, etc.)
heavy duty plastic bags and a bucket (for waste and sanitation)
emergency cash (including small bills and change)

I struggled with whether or not I should cross more items off this list. We actually have every single item on it, but the items are not all in one location in “kit” form, save for the ones I did cross off. We also haven’t prepared “go bags” in case we need to leave the area quickly. Since the whole point of having a kit is to have everything in one easy-access location (and we might not be able to get to items in certain areas of the house if there is major damage), we need to get duplicate items and put them in a centralized location.

I hope you all out there are more prepared than we are. If you are not, get to work! Take a look at my prior post for links that were helpful to me in learning about disaster preparedness. I also encourage you to check out shakeout.org, which has information about how to participate in the Great Shake Out in California and in other regions, as well as information about getting prepared for an earthquake.

October 11, 2012

Medical Insurance Weirdness

This morning I received a call from someone in Blue Shield’s prenatal program. She said she needed to ask me a few questions so she could “close out” my file, whatever that means. I haven’t been a Blue Shield subscriber for several months, but she said it would only take a couple of minutes. I agreed, mostly just to satisfy my curiosity as to exactly what they needed to know.

Frankly, it was dumb stuff that had me wondering if these people ever talk to each other. “How many nights did you spend in the hospital?” One, for which a claim was submitted and you paid. “Did you have an epidural?” Yes, you paid for it. “Did you go in for a six week follow up appointment?” Yup, you paid for that too. Seriously, I have seen the line item claims the hospital made, and you guys have all this information already! I wonder how much of my premiums went towards paying people to call subscribers and ask them stupid questions.

October 2, 2012

Cloth is King

Rebecca will be graduating to a larger size cloth diaper pretty soon, and her new diapers arrived today, so I thought it might be a good time to write about why cloth diapers have been a good choice for us. Three main factors influenced the decision to go with cloth:

Cost: Disposable diapers are expensive. Here is an article where the author did a cost comparison of disposables versus gDiapers. I think gDiapers are one of the more expensive cloth options, so if you were to go with a less expensive system the difference would be even more dramatic. Use your cloth diapers on more than one child and you are talking major, major savings.
Environmental Impact: If you do a little research, you will find that some people think disposables are more harmful to the environment because they contribute millions of pounds of waste to landfills, while some people think cloth are more harmful because of the water and energy required to launder them. Who knows? I lean towards disposable being more harmful, but explaining my reasoning behind that would be a whole post in itself, so let’s just leave it at that.
Early Toilet Training: As far as I know there are no studies finding this conclusively, but some people say that cloth diapers help kids potty train sooner because the child can feel when he or she is wet. With disposables, you can’t. As a result, the kids have more incentive to use the potty to avoid that uncomfortable wet feeling. Makes sense to me.

I did initially have some concerns that cloth diapering would be very inconvenient. We certainly do use disposable diapers from time to time. For example, Rebecca was pretty tiny when she was born, so the cloth diapers weren’t exactly a great fit. We used premie and newborn disposables for about the first six weeks until she grew into her cloth diapers. Even then, we continued to use disposables overnight. Initially, when she was a newborn, she pooped in every diaper, and we didn’t want to be rinsing poopy diapers in the middle of the night. Now she does not seem to poop at night, so it’s more because the disposables are pretty reliable in not leaking #1 during the night (when she doesn’t wake up and get changed anyway). We also use disposables when we go places so we don’t have to tote dirty cloth diapers around with us until we get home. In addition, the disposables are a little bit more compact for travel than the cloth diapering paraphernalia.

Occasional disposable use aside, I have not found the cloth diapers to be all that inconvenient for day-to-day use. Tossing a soaked cloth diaper in a diaper pail isn’t really different from tossing a disposable in the trash. The one exception would be poopy diapers, which have to be rinsed. This takes a bit more time and if you are not careful can lead to . . . accidents. But, now that I’ve had some practice, it does not take too long and I rarely have . . . accidents . . . anymore. Plus, Rebecca only poops once, maybe twice a day now, so rinsing diapers is no big deal.

In the few months we’ve been using cloth, I’ve also noticed two other benefits:

No Diaper Rash: As I mentioned, Rebecca was in disposables for about six weeks. During that time, she got some pretty wicked diaper rash. We tried everything to clear it up. We changed her constantly to keep her as dry as possible. We lubed her up liberally with rash cream or ointment. We regularly let her hang out diaperless on a waterproof pad to air out her little butt. Even her doctor said we were doing all the right stuff; sometimes diaper rash just is. Well, the speed at which it cleared up when we switched to cloth was amazing, and we haven’t seen a trace of the rash since.
Better Containment of Super Poops: In the cloth, we have had one instance of feces escaping the confines of the diaper (which I wrote about here). With disposables . . . I haven’t kept count but it has definitely been more than that, even though we don’t use them very often. So even though it may seem like a hassle to rinse poopy cloth diapers, it’s better than having to change a whole poopy outfit.

So that’s my two cents as to why I think cloth diapering was a good choice for us. It’s not for everyone, but it’s really not as much of a pain as you might initially think. What was difficult was choosing a cloth diapering system, which took me hours and hours of research to see what all the options were. But that would be a whole different post.