Green Mom: Ban on lead and phthalates

Last year, ModernMom expressed her toy recall fatigue. Well fear no more, ModernMom. President Bush has signed a bill banning lead and other harmful chemicals from children’s toys. This law will impose the world’s toughest lead standard regarding children’s toys. Hopefully the next step will be to eliminate BPA from plastics and asbestos from sandbox sand.

Modern Mom: Skipping Stones

Who would have thought that something as simple as skipping stones could provide hours of entertainment? Certainly not I. Truth be told, before last week the closest I had come to skipping stones was reading a Mark Twain book. But there we were, in a cottage on the beach, with nobody but our family for miles, and endless stones that were ripe for the skipping. Turns out my 6-year-old is somewhat of a stone-skipping-prodigy, if there is such a thing. Time after time, he was able to skip his stones with perfect form, each one going farther than the one before. My 1-year-old got into the act by sitting at the lake’s end and throwing stones that landed approximately 3 inches from his feet. (I’m just waiting for the child care center to call me today to report that he was throwing stones on the playground.) My 3-year-old daughter kept herself busy finding the stones for her brother to skip.

My skills in the stone-skipping arena turn out to be somewhat limited. No matter the size or shape of the stone, the distance from the water, the arc of my arm, I simply can’t do it. Maybe that’s what makes my son’s skill that much more impressive to me and the whole endeavor that much more interesting. Or maybe it was simply hanging out for hours on end with my children on the beach wiling away the hours skipping stones.

New Mom: OlympicMomia

There is a new type of sleep deprivation in our house, but New Girl is no longer the culprit. She had been sleeping fantastically, at least 11 uninterrupted hours a night for months until two weeks ago when she was waking either uncharacteristically early or in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason except to be with Mommy. After a week though, we’ve gotten her back into her normal routine. But then the Olympics started, and apparently I’m inextricably addicted to the Olympics. I’ll watch gymnastics, judo, badminton, fencing, weightlifting, even the very long and boring women’s marathon (which was not even close for the entire second half), as long as it has an Olympic gold medal at stake.

I could go four straight years without so much as thinking about competitive swimming, but now I can’t go to bed until I’ve seen Dara Torres take to the pool and witnessed Michael Phelps win another race and break another world record. I take comfort in the fact that there is a 56-year-old American woman competing in the Olympics (she’s a shooter). It makes me feel that maybe my Olympic dream simply has yet to mature.

And then New Dad and I contemplate what sport it will be that will take New Girl to her first Olympics in 2024. Will it be doll stroller pushing (where the artistry of moving in a straight line and maneuvering obstacles such as a crack in the sidewalk count for more than speed). Or perhaps stuffed animal carrying, in which there will be separate events for mastering the quantity of animals carried and for the weight and size of the animals in relative proportion to the athlete. I take copious notes during Debbie Phelps’ (mother of Michael) interview with Bob Costas. No doubt that will be me sitting proudly next to my gold medalist daughter one day, and I want to be prepared. In the meantime, New Girl’s playground training is going very well, even if my compromised sleep means I can barely keep my eyes open to watch. By the way, if you’ve ever wondered if your child is too proud a winner or too sore a loser, you might enjoy this very interesting article about the body language of Olympic winners and losers.

Commuter Mom: Drop In

One of the wonderful benefits we get at Bright Horizons is the opportunity to take advantage of our back-up child care services. We can use any Bright Horizons child care center, if space is available, for emergency care at a discounted rate — up to 20 days per year. Since Commuter Girl is enrolled in a child care center full time, we haven’t found much use for back-up care. But, last week there was an event after work that I wanted Commuter Girl to go to so I decided to use a back-up day at the center in our office park.

I had several mental hurdles to overcome before the big day. Would Commuter Girl have a meltdown due to our change in routine? Would she like the teachers at the other center? Would she cry all day being in an unfamiliar classroom? Would there be bad traffic forcing us to start our day with two miserable hours in the car? Would the new teachers know how to make her happy if she was sad? Would she like the other kids?

A few days ahead of time I started talking to her about going to a new school for one day. She made a picture for the new teachers. She got very excited about the new friends and new toys. So much so that the day before Commuter Dad took her to the new back-up center she told him she didn’t want to go to her usual center, she wanted to go to the new school.

The big day arrived and things went pretty smoothly. Commuter Girl was thrilled to get to watch Curious George while we commuted. She thoroughly enjoyed her chocolate munchkin on the way in. (I thoroughly enjoyed a big dose of guilt — TV and munchkins!) We got to school and I felt like a new parent all over again. But, Commuter Girl got me through it. She wasn’t thrilled when I left, but she wasn’t crying. They said she had a great day. She ate all of her lunch. She loved the new playground. She made lots of new friends. I was a little worried she wouldn’t want to go back to her other school. But, by the end of the day she turned to me and said, “Mommy, I want to go home.”

GreenMom: Down the Toilet

I never thought I’d be the mother that would consider using cloth diapers. However, now it seems like the cloth vs. disposable debate is the new mommy war. I was recently made aware of a type of hybrid diaper with a cute cloth outer layer and disposable inner layer. The whole idea behind gDiapers is that you can flush, compost, or throw away the insert and they will decompose either immediately (flushing) or within 100 days unlike the 500+ years it takes regular disposable diapers. After hearing the statistic that the average baby will use 10,000 diapers before age 2.5, and convincing my husband they wouldn’t be hard to use, I decided to give them a try.

They are actually pretty easy to use, but can create a mess at times. They are definitely not for the squeamish as you tend to get more, um, poo on your hands than you do changing a disposable. Flushing does create less trash and a less smelly diaper pail and think of how nice the lawn would look if you composted the wet inserts. Given the higher cost, they might not work for everyone, but it’s nice to know there is another option.

New Mom: Potty Seat

It’s 2:10 p.m. on Friday. The office is quiet, as it tends to be on Fridays this time of year. I have a ton of work to do, but all of it requires returning phone calls and e-mail responses from people who are probably frolicking at the beach, enjoying the local pool, or otherwise taking advantage of summer vacation. Meanwhile, I’m trying to fill the 17 minutes (I’ve already killed three since I started typing!) before my 2:30 p.m. conference call. Because, once I wrap that up, I can get out of here myself and accomplish the most important goal of the day…buying a potty seat! You see, we had a near disaster last night in the bathtub, which New Girl is apparently unable to distinguish from the toilet.

It’s the second time she’s had such an accident, but in all fairness, the first time she was suffering from a real stomach bug. This time, she announced “poop” plain as day, which I dutifully ignored until I saw the undeniable look of concentration on her face. At that point, I scooped her up with lightning speed and held her over the toilet. With that, her look of concentration turned to utter confusion and a bit of fright, as if to say “Why are you dangling my very little butt into this very big hole? I thought you were my mother and that I could trust you. Now I just think you’re strange.” Needless to say, she produced nothing until five minutes later when, squeaky clean from her tub and now wrapped in a fluffy white towel, and without a diaper, she completed her business. I know she’s not ready to toilet train quite yet, but I am thinking a potty seat may minimize the chance of another such disaster. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?

Modern Mom: Getting Ahead of Ourselves

It usually begins around mid-January. I start renting movies that take place in tropical locations. Fashion magazines begin showing their spring/summer collections. As I’m digging my car out of snow drifts or squeezing the kids into their snowsuits, I fantasize about driving with the windows down and basking in the sun with my children. I research camps, plan exotic summer vacations (that never make it past the planning stage), and even start counting the weeks until summer officially starts.

So why does it seem like so many people rush summer along? On July 4, at least three people I know said things like, “Can you believe it’s already July 4? Summer will be over before we know it.” I thought July 4 was supposed to mark the unofficial start of summer! And now that it’s August, it’s nearly impossible to go a day without someone remarking that the summer has flown by. Back-to-school promotions are old news by now, and last time I checked the school supplies at my favorite store were dwindling. I’M NOT READY!! I’m not ready to get back in the rhythm of school…packing six lunches each night for the next day, figuring out before- and after-school care, teacher conferences, homework, etc. I want to grind my heels in and slow down these last weeks of summer. And when it really is officially over I guess there’ll be only one thing to do…start dreaming about next summer.

Commuter Mom: Princess and the Pea

We went on vacation last week. The first night was spent at a hotel on the way to our final destination. It was going to be an ordeal to get bed rails from the front desk, so we just asked for a whole bunch of extra pillows. The room had two queen-size beds so we decided Commuter Girl would get her own bed with a wall of pillows on either side of her. Good idea in theory. Every couple of hours throughout the night we were picking up and repositioning the pillows, picking Commuter Girl up off of the floor, or moving her when her legs dangled perilously over the edge of the bed.

Our newest sleeping challenge I will blame on Mother Nature. We’ve had a series of pretty loud thunder storms in Massachusetts, and now Commuter Girl has decided she is afraid of thunder. We’ve had two all-nighters, and several late nights with a very crowded bed — how can a little toddler take up more than half of a queen-sized bed?! The good news is that our 75-pound dog doesn’t sleep with us, too.

I can understand her fear of thunder. It’s loud and you can’t see it. It can be surprising. But what has put me over the edge is that for the last week or so I have been dealing with a screaming toddler at night and now nap-time, too. She says the thunder hurts her ears. I’ve tried to reason with her, but how do you reason with a toddler? So, I turn up the volume on the music and settle in for an hour or so of sitting in her room until she is sound asleep. Why am I now at my wit’s end? It hasn’t rained, or thundered, in the past three days.