you're never fully dressed without a smile
I stopped at a dollar store and they had a whole bunch of Goody brand hair accessories for $1/ea. It suddenly occurred to me that here was a way to actually wear accessories again. My previous accessories of choice--earrings and necklaces--are both pretty much no go around babies and toddlers. And while Pippa will soon be old enough to learn not to grab Mama's earrings and necklace, I'm just super paranoid about the damage that can be done with a youthful yank. Especially with earrings. Shudder.
Anyway it occurred to me that with a pretty headband or scrunchie there isn't the same issue in terms of potentially pain and bleeding and mutilation and all that nasty stuff I like to avoid. So, I can use the hair accessories to look a little nicer, and I can use them to teach Pippa to keep her hands off other people's accessories, without worrying about severe pain.
The big thing I'm worried about with earrings is the sudden relapse. Pippa is mostly good now about not grabbing my glasses... but then out of the blue she makes a grab for them. I don't want to wear earrings again with her until I am sure she can be trusted to avoid/resist that impulse completely. So not until she's gone a couple months without making a grab for the glasses or hair accessories.
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I have another helpful tip!
Most parents want their children to be healthy and I would hazard that all parents who spend time researching and reading about pregnancy and childcare do. But the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, particularly when so much is depicted as do or die.
I think it's really important to retain a sense of perspective and I actually think it's dangerous the way that many media outlets, doctors, books etc depict even the smallest risks as huge, obvious, and certain, because when you're bombarded with that from every direction you burn out, if you swallow everything as it's depicted you'll definitely burnout, and pretty soon you'll be saying "Ehhhhh, that car seat is sort of strapped in, whatever, we're only going to the store."
I can remember reading a Dear Prudence column in Slate (so glad I don't read that anymore) in which the letter writer was throwing a fit du merde over attending a baby shower where someone gave the parents-to-be a set of homemade crib bumpers. The cause of the hysteria of course was that baby bumpers have now been shown to have a slight increased correlation with SIDS, and so very, very recently (like in the past few years) the AAP has officially discouraged crib bumpers. The letter writer had previously remonstrated with the gift giver and told her not to make crib bumpers, and was shocked when they were given and that the mom cooed over how cute they were, and wanted to know if she should tell the mom not to use them. Prudence, naturally, agreed with the letter writer that it was her duty, nay, her privilege to get all up in this mom's business about how her baby's gonna die if she uses the crib bumpers.
Now we didn't and don't have crib bumpers on Pippa's crib but I think this paranoia about how everything is a risk in pregnancy and infancy is toxic.
So the big thing I would suggest to combat this, and this is really easy now with the internet, is to compare official recommendations across countries. Blankets are the most striking example of how different recommendations can be. When I started my pregnancy, I was in the States, reading books in the States and States-based websites, and I got the idea that blankets were a positive Menace.
Then I came back to Canada and got the BC government official public health baby book. Here is an exact quote from the book: "Your baby and a light blanket should be the only things in your baby’s sleeping area." (You can see the quote here on the website as well.)
I literally did a double take the first time I read that, that's how hard the "blankets are baby eating devils" idea had infiltrated my mind. But after rereading it a few times and realizing what it said, I realized just how relative all this baby safety advice truly is. I don't mean chuck it all out the window and feed your kid shredded glass and milk of magnesia for breakfast if that's what you feel like; I mean that we're all trying hard, the moms and the experts, and we all want the best, and we do the best we can with the information we have, but we're always getting new information.
So it's a mistake to completely ignore the experts, but neither is the current position Holy Writ. Not by a long shot. When your baby is having babies, in fact, I guarantee you'll say "When you were a baby, the doctor told us to..." and he or she will say "Mom/Dad, I can't believe people used to do that!"
Anyway, if there is something about the official recommendation that bothers me or is proving difficult to impossible in real life, I often shop around to other countries and see if they're all saying the same thing. Of course some things are locally more important than others. Vitamin D, for instance, is more of a concern the closer you are to a pole, so it makes sense that Vitamin D supplements are stressed more in Canada than in the States. But in general, if some of the experts are silent about an issue, or if the experts from one country to another disagree, at the very least, you can know that the issue isn't a dire, open and shut thing; you're more likely looking at "out of 10k cases with X, there were 20 cases of Y, and in 10k cases without X, there were 30 cases of Y; we must spread the word that everyone must do X to prevent Y!"
You're trying to do the best you can for yourself and your family and you won't be able to do the best you can if you agonize over every risk. You'll get paralyzed that way.
For example, when we went to the dentist, they told me not to brush Pippa's teeth in the bathtub. They couldn't really give a reason why, they just said that was not a safe location to brush teeth, even if I'm in the bathtub with her and holding her exactly the same as I would outside the bathtub. But when I brushed her teeth in the bathtub and made it part of the nighttime ritual, in a part of the nighttime ritual where I am unhurried and least stressed, it never got missed. Now, it's been moved to post-bath and it gets forgotten all the time, and when it doesn't get forgotten it's very unpleasant because once out of the bath she's focused on what comes next (jammies and then breastfeeding) and she doesn't like stuff getting in the way of that. I think I'm going back to brushing her teeth in the bathtub. I'm her mother and when it comes to the risks I think that it's much better that she get her teeth brushed regularly and like having her teeth brushed than follow the expert advice and have the teeth brushing be irregular and upsetting.
Anyway it occurred to me that with a pretty headband or scrunchie there isn't the same issue in terms of potentially pain and bleeding and mutilation and all that nasty stuff I like to avoid. So, I can use the hair accessories to look a little nicer, and I can use them to teach Pippa to keep her hands off other people's accessories, without worrying about severe pain.
The big thing I'm worried about with earrings is the sudden relapse. Pippa is mostly good now about not grabbing my glasses... but then out of the blue she makes a grab for them. I don't want to wear earrings again with her until I am sure she can be trusted to avoid/resist that impulse completely. So not until she's gone a couple months without making a grab for the glasses or hair accessories.
---
I have another helpful tip!
Most parents want their children to be healthy and I would hazard that all parents who spend time researching and reading about pregnancy and childcare do. But the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, particularly when so much is depicted as do or die.
I think it's really important to retain a sense of perspective and I actually think it's dangerous the way that many media outlets, doctors, books etc depict even the smallest risks as huge, obvious, and certain, because when you're bombarded with that from every direction you burn out, if you swallow everything as it's depicted you'll definitely burnout, and pretty soon you'll be saying "Ehhhhh, that car seat is sort of strapped in, whatever, we're only going to the store."
I can remember reading a Dear Prudence column in Slate (so glad I don't read that anymore) in which the letter writer was throwing a fit du merde over attending a baby shower where someone gave the parents-to-be a set of homemade crib bumpers. The cause of the hysteria of course was that baby bumpers have now been shown to have a slight increased correlation with SIDS, and so very, very recently (like in the past few years) the AAP has officially discouraged crib bumpers. The letter writer had previously remonstrated with the gift giver and told her not to make crib bumpers, and was shocked when they were given and that the mom cooed over how cute they were, and wanted to know if she should tell the mom not to use them. Prudence, naturally, agreed with the letter writer that it was her duty, nay, her privilege to get all up in this mom's business about how her baby's gonna die if she uses the crib bumpers.
Now we didn't and don't have crib bumpers on Pippa's crib but I think this paranoia about how everything is a risk in pregnancy and infancy is toxic.
So the big thing I would suggest to combat this, and this is really easy now with the internet, is to compare official recommendations across countries. Blankets are the most striking example of how different recommendations can be. When I started my pregnancy, I was in the States, reading books in the States and States-based websites, and I got the idea that blankets were a positive Menace.
Then I came back to Canada and got the BC government official public health baby book. Here is an exact quote from the book: "Your baby and a light blanket should be the only things in your baby’s sleeping area." (You can see the quote here on the website as well.)
I literally did a double take the first time I read that, that's how hard the "blankets are baby eating devils" idea had infiltrated my mind. But after rereading it a few times and realizing what it said, I realized just how relative all this baby safety advice truly is. I don't mean chuck it all out the window and feed your kid shredded glass and milk of magnesia for breakfast if that's what you feel like; I mean that we're all trying hard, the moms and the experts, and we all want the best, and we do the best we can with the information we have, but we're always getting new information.
So it's a mistake to completely ignore the experts, but neither is the current position Holy Writ. Not by a long shot. When your baby is having babies, in fact, I guarantee you'll say "When you were a baby, the doctor told us to..." and he or she will say "Mom/Dad, I can't believe people used to do that!"
Anyway, if there is something about the official recommendation that bothers me or is proving difficult to impossible in real life, I often shop around to other countries and see if they're all saying the same thing. Of course some things are locally more important than others. Vitamin D, for instance, is more of a concern the closer you are to a pole, so it makes sense that Vitamin D supplements are stressed more in Canada than in the States. But in general, if some of the experts are silent about an issue, or if the experts from one country to another disagree, at the very least, you can know that the issue isn't a dire, open and shut thing; you're more likely looking at "out of 10k cases with X, there were 20 cases of Y, and in 10k cases without X, there were 30 cases of Y; we must spread the word that everyone must do X to prevent Y!"
You're trying to do the best you can for yourself and your family and you won't be able to do the best you can if you agonize over every risk. You'll get paralyzed that way.
For example, when we went to the dentist, they told me not to brush Pippa's teeth in the bathtub. They couldn't really give a reason why, they just said that was not a safe location to brush teeth, even if I'm in the bathtub with her and holding her exactly the same as I would outside the bathtub. But when I brushed her teeth in the bathtub and made it part of the nighttime ritual, in a part of the nighttime ritual where I am unhurried and least stressed, it never got missed. Now, it's been moved to post-bath and it gets forgotten all the time, and when it doesn't get forgotten it's very unpleasant because once out of the bath she's focused on what comes next (jammies and then breastfeeding) and she doesn't like stuff getting in the way of that. I think I'm going back to brushing her teeth in the bathtub. I'm her mother and when it comes to the risks I think that it's much better that she get her teeth brushed regularly and like having her teeth brushed than follow the expert advice and have the teeth brushing be irregular and upsetting.