Living in Harmony » consumerism

Sickies

AttachedMama — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:03:49 +0000

We’ve had colds here. Meredith didn’t get it too badly thankfully, Kris got it the worst. I’ve been napping with her during the days though and that’s normally when I would post. Or at night, but she’s started going to sleep later in the evenings too so I’ve been tending to go to bed with her.

I have a couple of meme’s I’ve been tagged for that I would like to do at some point, and a few ideas for other posts. Otherwise, we’re doing well. Getting ready for Christmas, sort of… We haven’t actually really started gifts, and considering we want to handmake them all that’s not a good sign! I think I might make bathrobes for our nieces and nephew our of towels, and embroider their names on them. I’d really like to make one for Meredith too and they don’t look too hard. We’ll see though. I need more ideas for younger kids though. We have baskets planned out for most of the adults that should be good I think. I love everything about Christmas except the consumerism, so we started handmaking gifts last year and I think they ended up going over well with most people.

We are discussing selling our car. We bought it brand new 2 1/2 years ago and it has been great, especially when we lived in Sidney, but now that we’re in town we walk almost everywhere. It seems silly to be paying the payments on a car we use a couple of times a week. If it sells, we might buy an older American car (because they depreciate so fast, it’d be cheap), and just plan to rent a car for trips to Calgary. It would still be far cheaper than the payments on our current car. I put the car up yesterday just to see if there was any interest and already have someone coming to look at it today. If he decides to buy it I’m not sure what we’ll do, we can’t afford to buy another car until January when Kris gets his bonus. (We’ll just barely break even with what we have left owing on the car if it sells.) We’ll make do though, I’m sure. Maybe we’ll find we don’t really need a car that much anyway. In our ongoing efforts to declutter, I’ve also put a bunch of other things up for sale and had some interest in those too.

Meredith is really starting to become quite vocal. She still doesn’t have many “real” words but she makes a lot of new sounds and has started to string sounds together a lot too. She loves to say “uh oh”. She’s also making up new signs too. She will use the signs we use a few times, and then make up her own and stop using the one we’ve tried to teach. I’m not sure why but it’s pretty cute. I have a cousin who is deaf and was hoping Meredith would learn ASL, but even if not, at least it’s a way we can communicate with her.

Her favorite activity lately is to look through books, or have us read to her. She has one book in particular she loves. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? was cute the first time, and the second, and maybe even the third. But Kris and I both have it memorized now we’ve read it so much. She also seems to be teething again and has been less willing to play independently so I can clean up a bit or do dishes. I hate how messy that means the house gets, and would like to raise Meredith to appreciate a clean house (something I feel I didn’t get from my parents forcing us to clean our rooms once a week and otherwise our house was often messy), but really, I know that this is another phase and a messy house for a few weeks won’t hurt anyone. Sometimes if she gets really clingy or I’m tired of Brown Bear, Brown Bear yet again, I’ll take her outside and we’ll walk and explore. If it’s near nap time I’ll put her in the mei tei and walk until she falls asleep. A good friend just moved into our complex and she has a two year old son, so she will often come with us on the walks and the kids will play. It’s wonderful having someone so close by with similar parenting values.

Hidden crib dangers

AttachedMama — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:05:56 +0000

So I suck at this post every day for a month thing. Oh well! I tried at least. Maybe next time.

I came across this article today and thought I would share it. There are so many misconceptions and misinformation about cosleeping, that it’s nice to see an article about the dangers of cribs for once. (Not that I ever want to hear about any babies being harmed, but I’m glad the information is getting out there for parents to see.) I firmly believe that cosleeping, when combined with common sense, is far safer and definitely a more natural way for babies to sleep. (And there is no nicer way to wake up than seeing your child grinning up at you in the morning.)

One of my half-written posts is actually on the joys and benefits of cosleeping (and a rebuttal to some of the “dangers”), but I’ll leave that for another post and just concentrate on cribs for this one. Here is a quote from the article.

Though cribs are designed for a family to leave a baby unattended for many hours at a time, they are the most deadly nursery product. One missing screw, one broken spindle or one loose mattress support can turn a crib into a deathtrap.

It made a good point at the end.

Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety at the Consumer Federation of America, wonders whether crib companies, in an effort to compete on price, have cut corners on designs and materials and failed to institute strong quality-control checks at factories overseas.

“Is the quest to produce lower cost cribs leading to a sacrifice on the quality of the wood and other parts?” Weintraub asks. “They are making their products overseas, so they’re getting the benefit, but they’re not taking additional measures to deal with increased risk.”

With all the attention China has been getting in the news in the last year: adding melamine to their dairy products, lead paint, etc., it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they are also cutting corners when making cribs.

I only wish the article had mentioned cosleeping as a safe and viable alternative to cribs. It’s great to get the information out to parents about how dangerous they can be, since I don’t think many parents realize how many accidents happen every year in cribs, but without giving them alternatives it may not change much.

Clutter and Stuff

AttachedMama — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:59:35 +0000

Kris and I have spent the past few days decluttering and moving rooms around. It’s a great feeling to watch our boxes and piles of stuff slowly diminish. I have a whole pile of stuff to post on FreeCycle or Craig’s List, and a huge bag of clothes to consign or donate. It feels good mentally too, like the less stuff we have lying around with no real place to go, the less burdened I feel. We’re discussing getting rid of some of our books (we have 100′s of books, maybe 1000′s), as well as some of our DVD’s (we have 100′s of those too). What point in keeping them if we’ve only read/watched it once and likely won’t again?

There is still a lot more to go through and organize, but most of it is in boxes now, so should be easy to bring down when I have a spare moment (ha!) and go through them one at a time. I’d like to tackle the kitchen too. I’ve started it a little bit. I bought some cool spice jars from the dollar store and have been playing around with different ways to organize our spices. But we have lots of kitchen utensils and such that never get used and I’d like to slowly start weeding those out too. There are also clothes that were packed away while I was pregnant and never got unpacked when we moved, meaning I haven’t worn some of them in over a year. I’d like to go through those boxes and only keep the clothes I really miss, and sell or give away the rest.

I’m hoping to raise Meredith to not value stuff as much as most people these days do. I would love it if Meredith looked forward to birthdays and Christmas because of the celebrations and traditions surrounding them, rather than the mountain of presents she might get. I think that cosleeping and not letting her cry it out (and therefore potentially turn to toys and blankies for comfort instead) is a good step in that direction, but I feel that not being surrounded by all sorts of stuff we barely use or don’t look at is important too.