Baby Fat Don't Go Away

Mckenzee 3 months

Mckenzee is starting to thin out some. I am not ready for that. I like her little chubby self and if she is thinning out then she is growing up and I just don't want her to. Of course I want her to experience all kinds of things like playing babies and making friends, helping me bake things and going to preschool, but not for a LONG LONG time. I want her to stay my little baby longer. It just goes so fast and it makes me sad. When the rolls behind her knees are gone I think I will cry. I'm crying already writing this.

I am thankful for every minute because I know there are Mommy's out there that are missing their babies. And Mommy's with very sick babies. I really need to get over it because I have a healthy, growing baby, but I think I will be sad just a little longer, until she wakes up from her nap.

Pertussis

This is my little platform right now. I like to have a topic to get fired up about and I have been doing some research on this subject. Chris and I plan to have more children and so that is why this is of interest to me. For those of you that live in the area you may have noticed billboards that say Protect Your Family Against Pertussis. I am going to tell you a little more about it. The following is mostly copy and pasted so I am going to site these two websites http://www.drgreene.org/ and http://www.immunizationinfo.org/.

From personal experience-Dr. Greene
I stood outside the closed door of the hospital room where an adorable 6 week old baby lay all alone in her crib. As I scrubbed my hands in the sink outside the isolation room, an electronic monitor allowed me to hear her breathing peacefully.
Suddenly the quiet was shattered by a fit of coughing. And she couldn't stop. The coughs came so closely together that she couldn't catch her breath. I grabbed a mask from above the sink and, pressing it over my face, entered her room. The coughing continued. The pulsox monitor at her bedside complained insistently that her blood-oxygen levels were dropping too. The EKG monitor sounded an alarm that her heart rate was dropping. And she continued to cough. Even before I reached her bedside I could see that her face was turning blue. She began to vomit.
Moments later the peace had returned. Her various monitors beeped tranquilly; the coughing spasm was over. This little girl with pertussis survived, but she had many more weeks of coughing spasms before she could return home to her parents.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, which once ravaged children around the world, is again on the rise.

Pertussis is highly contagious
You or your child have been exposed if you spend a total of 5 hours in the same room with someone with the disease, or if you sit next to someone with pertussis for any length of time, or if you have any contact at all with infected mucus or saliva. Between 70 and 100 percent of susceptible people will catch pertussis if they are exposed.

Pertussis is one of the most contagious human diseases, so it is a great risk to those who are unvaccinated. Pertussis will develop in 90% of unvaccinated children living with someone with pertussis, and in 50% to 80% of unvaccinated children who attend school or daycare with someone with pertussis. Approximately 50 out of every 10,000 people who develop pertussis die from the disease.

Who should receive the vaccine
Adults 19-64 years of age should receive a single dose of Tdap (ADACEL®) to replace a single dose of Td for booster immunization if their most recent tetanus toxoid-containing vaccine was 10 or more years earlier. Tdap may be given at an interval shorter than 10 years since the last tetanus toxoid-containing vaccine in order to protect against pertussis, especially for:

Women less than 65 years of age who are planning to become pregnant.

Adults less than 65 years of age who have or anticipate having close contact with an infant aged less than 12 months should receive a single dose of Tdap and trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine. Ideally the vaccines should be given at least 2 weeks before contact.

Health-care personnel who have direct patient contact should receive a single dose of Tdap.

Spaghetti Slurping

I love hearing Chris laughing on this video!

Trying to be Healthier

I want to make better food choices for our family. I am concerned about the increase in cancer and other diseases. I have to think that it is something that we are doing by what we put in and on our bodies, in addition to air quality and environmental factors. This may be an area where my obsessiveness will start taking over. Maybe it already has. My interest in healthier foods started about two years ago when I started Arbonne and began to learn how the chemicals and ingredients in our personal care products get into our bloodstream and have an affect on our total body. This made me start to research the food that we put in our bodies. Then, when I got pregnant with Mckenzee I became even more concerned because now I had a tiny life to look after. I stopped eating french fries, stopped my caffeine intake, tried to cut out nitrites as much as possible, ate whole wheat breads, and began washing my fruits and vegetables with soap. I feel like this has been something that has interested me for a long time and I still only know a little bit about it. There is so much to learn.



I remember being at this crazy woman's house when I was pregnant and she began to show me everything in her pantry and refrigerator. It was all from Whole Foods and everything was organic...she was made of money. I thought wow...how cool is she? I want to be just like her! At that point I still did not know the importance of organic.



We have been making some slow changes in our diet for awhile now, and in the last few months we have started buying some organic. We are not made of money and cannot have a pantry like the lady above right now, but we are trying to do better. The Swinneys are sharing their knowledge with us and us with them. As Connie mentioned, Levi definitely contributes to my food obsessiveness... I have been known to throw away food straight from the fridge. Chris and Connie try to let us know when we are too crazy...and sometimes we listen. It makes for a good balance and good conversation. I wanted to share a couple of my favorite products right now and list the top 12 dirtiest foods and top 12 cleanest foods so if you are like me and have to be choosy with your organic you can choose the dirtiest things to go organic in first.

Horizon Organic

What a great company! Learn more at http://www.horizonorganic.com/

We started buying this milk for Mckenzee and now buy it for us too. I wish I would've known it's importance sooner. It is made without added growth hormones, pesticides, or antibiotics. They treat their cows well and use 100% clean wind energy. They also make yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, butter, sour cream, ice cream, smoothies, and eggnog. I have to figure out where all these things are sold. Now for the price. It is over $6 for a gallon. You might be thinking "We cannot afford $6 milk!" I ask you this...."Can you afford to go out to eat?" I had to get real with myself one day because I kept saying that we were going to go organic when we were making more money, but then I thought we go out to eat regularly. We can be sure that going out to eat is not increasing our family's quality of life and buying this milk is. So we made some adjustments. Trust me, the more I learn about food, the less I want to eat out anyway.




Laura's Lean Beef

Learn more at http://www.laurasleanbeef.com/
Okay I'm not going to go into this beef. It is pretty much the same principle as the milk. It is not organic, but there are no antibiotics, growth hormones or food additives and the cows are treated well.

Okay, are these two things the very best milk and beef that are out there? No. The best beef would be a cow you raised yourself that you knew for sure what it ate and how it was processed, etc. Same with the milk. These are the things that I have chosen for our family for now and I feel good about it.

The Dirty Dozen
The 12 most pesticide-laden types of produce
Peaches
Apples
Sweet Bell Peppers
Celery
Nectarines
Strawberries
Cherries
Pears
Imported grapes
Spinach
Lettuce
Potatoes

The Clean 12
Consistently showed the least amount of pesticide residue
Onions
Avocados
Sweet Corn
Pineapple
Mango
Asparagus
Sweet Peas
Kiwi
Bananas
Cabbage
Broccoli
Papaya

Info from data by the USDA and FDA 2000-2004

Best place to buy your produce is from a local farmer that you can talk to about their farming practices or grow it in your own backyard.

Hopefully, this did not bore you completely. Like I said before, I am no expert on this subject, and if you see any incorrect information PLEASE tell me...I want to know! We are trying to learn all we can to give our family better safer foods.
Join the "Band Wagon" or "The Band Wagon Extreme!"

Peed on Twice in One Day!

Pee #1:

I like to put Mckenzee in the sink to fix her hair. She likes to look at herself in the mirror and sometimes I even get her naked and turn on the water for her to play.

Today I was fixing her hair and letting her play in the water and I picked her up out of the sink to dry her off. I put her on my hip while Chris got a towel for us.........and then I felt the warmness.

How a little one year old could have that much pee in her I can't figure out. She never pees on me straight out of the bath or sink because I know she has just peed in the warm water she was sitting in.

There's nothing you can do once it's started. It doesn't benefit you to hold her out because then you have a mess in two places. So I just held on to her while she continued to soak me and then I handed her off to her daddy.

Pee #2

We spent the evening at church for a special event and visited with friends afterwards and got out of there way too late. Kenzee needed a diaper change very badly when we got to the car. I was all ready to change her and get her in her pajamas which I was very proud of myself for remembering because I knew she would probably fall asleep on the way home.

I took off her shorts and her diaper and was waiting for Chris to hand me the next diaper.

If you are a mom you have probably already noticed the mistake here. Important rule of diaper changing: Do not remove the first diaper until you have the new diaper positioned underneath it.

Then, he says to me there's not one. What? How could there not be one? I just refilled the bin we keep in the car.

Then, I look down to see that my naked child is peeing on my back seat. She is also smiling.

Again, it is not beneficial to move the peeing child. It would probably scare her and just drip pee in more places.

So now we have a naked baby and no more diapers. I found a cloth diaper in the bin that I would just use for messes. I wrapped it under her and tried to put her in her car seat.

She did not want to go.

Wall-eyed fit begins!

I begin to wrestle and fight with her to get her little hiney down in the car seat. If I can just get her to bend then I can get the harness clicked.

She is very strong.

It takes both of us to get her pinned down and she is screaming and I am sure people walking by wonder what we are doing to torture her.

In the meantime I have gotten myself in the pee on the seat.

It really doesn't matter to me right now. She is in her car seat with the cloth diaper wrapped under her little naked self and we are going home.

Early Mornings

Mckenzee has an ear infection.... AGAIN! I am not happy about this, especially because I was, for some reason, under the impression that breastfed babies don't get ear infections and this little one has had five! She doesn't sleep well when she has an ear infection, but it has actually been very sweet to get up with her the last few nights. The first night I got her and went and sat with her on the couch. I turned on Baby Einstein and she sat on my lap facing me. I closed my eyes. A few minutes later I feel some tiny soft fingers barely touching my nose. I open my eyes and she is right up close to my face and kisses me and smiles real big. I love that! A little while later I doze off. Then I feel a tiny soft mouth kissing me awake again. What a sweet girl. It makes it so worth it to get up from my cozy bed in the middle of the night to get kissed by my one year old.

This morning she woke up at 5:30. Daddy and I both got up to get her and she and I were sitting on the couch and he turned on the TV to get the dvd ready and we saw that the Eukanuba AKC dog show was on. Kenzee started pointing and whispering pup pup pup. So we decided to watch the dog show. She sat very still and pointed every now and then at the ones she liked. She loves puppies! It was fun. After awhile we put her back in bed and she slept until 9:00! Woo hoo!

God Cares about Mascara

I have been reading Connie's blogs about God taking care of us, even in the smallest details of our lives and I just have to share what happened to me today.

I have had pink eye this week. I need a new mascara. Arbonne's mascara is just the best and my eyes are super sensitive and that's what I need. However, it was not in the budget for this month, as Arbonne's mascara is not cheap. I got a shipment in today and my sister had ordered black mascara and........lo and behold there were TWO mascaras in there!

You might think that was just a coincidental mistake, but I am thanking God for bringing me some new mascara for FREE!

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"

Matthew 6: 25-27