health

As my fellow blogger Andrea mentioned yesterday, baking with kids is messy. A one-hour cookie project can easily take just as long to clean up!  I thought it would get better when my boys got older, but it hasn’t. Every time they master a skill, like measuring, they want to do something tougher, like separate eggs.

The upside to all the cleanup is that baking is excellent for kids’ healthy development.

I love pulling out of the driveway headed for a long road trip – there’s such a lovely illusion of abandoning all my work and worries for the duration of the drive (in the case of our Thanksgiving trip, 14 hours). But I’m just as over-connected as the next mom, and I usually wind up checking my e-mails in the car. Or searching out apps for my Droid, something I never have time for in day-to-day life. I could easily have spent all 14 hours this way. Unfortunately, Nebraska is not particularly well supplied with 3G networks!

Before I lost coverage, I made a find that will come in handy when my kids are killing time back in St. Louis. Apps for Healthy Kids showcases winning entries in a U.S. Department of Agriculture contest to develop tools and games that teach kids about healthy eating and/or exercising.

At a baby shower for a first-time mom over the weekend, my fellow guests got onto the subject of product recalls. The mom-to-be mentioned that her sister-in-law had offered a used stroller, but that it had been recalled due to a problem with the hood and she wasn’t sure whether she should accept it or not. Since the sister-in-law had used it for a good many years without losing one of her fingers to the potentially faulty hood, she wasn’t all that worried about the recall. As it happens, she also has two kids, so she had the wisdom of experience on her side.

It’s not that first-time parents shouldn’t worry about potential dangers to their baby (or, in this case, themselves). But a study done last year found that they are not very good at spotting true risks to in a mock home setup – and they tend to think that their child is smart/coordinated/lucky enough to avoid risks in their own home. Consequently, their risk assessment for their child tends to be all out of whack.

Cue the carols on the radio — it’s the holiday season. If you’ve been in a store in the past 10 days, you’ll know retailers are not letting us dig to the bottom of our kids’ Halloween bags for those last few Milk Duds before they start tempting us with candy canes and tinned popcorn.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot Thanksgiving. When the average person manages to cram away between 3,000 and 7,000 calories. In one day.

The first rounds of seasonal colds struck our household last week. I try not to be a worrier when it comes to colds, but one son is prone to ear infections and the other to asthma-like breathing problems, so we are no strangers at the doctor’s office.

This time, although our nurse practitioner confirmed that my 7-year-old had indeed brought home a viral cold, there was no ear infection, and she was ambivalent about whether he should stay home from school the rest of the day. That response seemed a little peculiar until I looked into it, and it turns out the medical community is pretty much in agreement that kids are going to get colds, so if they are energetic enough to follow through with the normal school day, a sniffle or a cough need not keep them home.