Air Conditioning Not Harmful to Babies; Fans Reduce Risk of SIDS

As I sit here in the humidity brought by the first heatwave of the summer, laptop burning a hole into my

thigh, I can’t help but wonder how my infant son is coping with the heat. He’s pulled his favourite toys together in front of the baby gate behind which I’ve placed a box fan in an attempt to circulate the air. If the heat bothers him, he’s not saying anything; he grins one of his toothy smiles at me when he notices I’m watching him, then goes back to playing.

Downstairs there is a central air unit missing one of the parts it needs to drain properly. The knowledge of its presence is almost taunting us. I look forward to the relief we will experience when we are finally able to cool the house down by only a few degrees.

Like everything else having to do with childcare, you will run into a lot of differing opinions about how best to help your children handle warm weather. The bottom of the pyramid here is hydration – like adults, children need more fluid to replace what they lose through sweat. Don’t feel shy about being generous with water and bottles especially if your child is going through a growth spurt.

Juices and pop should be avoided because they don’t give your child’s body any extra benefit – in the case of pops and sodas, the caffeine in the drink will actually act to dehydrate. Sport drinks like Gatorade may be helpful in small quantities during extreme heat because they will boost the electrolytes in your child’s body and help them feel more replenished.

There is a myth circulating around that air conditioning units are not safe for children because the cold can cause a chill or asthma later in life. This is hogwash. Air conditioning is safe for babies and can help them get a full night’s rest rather than tossing and turning because they are wet, sweaty and uncomfortable.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have an air conditioner, or if you don’t use one because you don’t feel your climate is oppressive enough, you may choose to use fans to help circulate the air. Good news! Research has shown that fans can greatly reduce the risk of SIDS. Sadly, fans do not cool the air, they only circulate the warm air already in the room.

Leave a comment with your tips for beating the heat in child-friendly ways!

Nine Month Old Refuses to Drink Bottle

Our son was having a bad week. No bottle was good enough for him, and the ones he did drink ended up being decoration on his shirt when he threw up ten minutes later. Since I was taking penicillin for my strep throat, we assumed that the baby had picked up my infection and took him to see his doctor immediately.

Diagnosis: Attitude, not strep throat.

Apparently, around the end of their first year, children start wanting to assert more independence – never mind that they don’t have the skills needed to do so. Even though your child can’t yet walk (maybe they can’t even crawl yet!) you will find them trying to push themselves away from you and travel on their own. Their nutrition changes and the time is right to start weening them off the bottle and onto real milk and solid food.

This is the same time that sleeping habits start to change and originally docile babies start to become menaces. Just when you thought you were getting used to the routine of parenthood, it all changes! It’s time to start baby proofing your home, if you haven’t already, because your child will be discovering all imaginable dangers very soon.

Jarred Baby Food vs. Homemade

I was shopping at Wal-Mart with my sister-in-law the other day and stopped in the jarred baby food section. She looked at the price of the jar and asked what the point was in making your own food if you can conveniently purchase it at such a low price. While the cost is certainly appealing, I worry about my child’s health if I were to feed him such preservative-rich offerings.

Depending on the brand, for $0.47-$0.67 you can buy jars of chemically processed food with a shelf life of 5 to 10 years. Alternatively, you can spend 20 minutes a week making healthy chemical-free baby food. To me it is worth taking the brief time each week to make healthy food for my child food that can be frozen. In a small fridge-top freezer, fresh-made food can last for 3-4 months; in a deep freeze: up to six months.

Society has gotten lazy about their food and eating habits and there have been repercussions: children aren’t tolerating foods as much, allergies are on the rise, and babies are becoming fussier eaters. If you’ve ever tasted baby food you have my sympathies I wanted to try it before my son was due to start eating to explore the taste textures etc. As a trained chef my opinion is jarred baby food in general is totally unpalatable; the colors are off and you can’t even differentiate what the taste is. For fun I had my cousin close her eyes and sample some of the food she was going to feed her son and tell me what it was. She didn’t know what she was eating – how scary is that?

The Good News
For parents who really think they don’t have the time to cook for their child, there is now a great company (Sweet pea baby food) offering pre-measured food that is flash frozen and good for 3-6 months in your freezer. The food is made from organic vegetables and if you tell them the age of your child they can tell you which product they have for that age group. I tried their product at the baby boom show this spring and I can actually differentiate the flavors; it was like a party in my mouth. It was bland compared to what a grown up pallet is used to but to a baby exploring a flavor for the first time it would have been superb.

Bottled Doesn’t Mean Better

In today’s society, everyone is used to getting everything from the store. For example when we want a refreshing glass of cold water we no longer go to the tap and wait for the water get cold. Instead, we open the refrigerator and open a plastic bottle as if it were always there. Heaven forbid company should come over and you offer them tap water. I use to think drinking bottled water was better that drinking the tap water; that is, until I had my son.

On one of our adventurous trips to my in-laws we forgot to pack our jug of water to make the babies bottles. We knew he had some trouble tolerating water from other places so out came the bottle water which we thought would be the perfect solution. At the time we were using powdered formula so in the mornings we would boil water and keep it hot in a thermos. When it came to feeding time all we had to do was add the powder and hot water to the bottle, shake it, and let it cool. This takes much less time than heating a bottle up. After boiling the bottled water and leaving it in the thermos for his feeding we opened it and found a grainy deposit on the bottom. Whatever this stuff was, it was going into our child’s stomach. After a little bit of research and reading the label on the water bottles we realized that there was a huge amount of sodium and other minerals which was creating the deposits.

So is the bottle water better than our good old fashion tap water? If regularly tested and maintained I think not. Let’s stop using those plastic bottles and just open the tap for crying out loud.

Traveling With Baby

At one time, visiting our parents was as simple as making sure the lights and oven were off and hopping in the car for a three hour drive. Now that we have a baby, that same trip can take up to six hours between getting all of the baby’s gear loaded (he has more stuff than we do!) and stopping to feed him when he cries. Traveling is a big deal when there is so much to be responsible for; it’s a wonder we are able to make it anywhere on time.

Our latest trick is to wait until the baby goes down for the night then load him into the car seat and take off. This technique means we can drive straight through without stopping for bottles and the baby wakes up at grandma’s house so there is a smaller period of adjustment. It can be very tiring to arrive at our destination so late, but the benefits seem to outweigh the drawbacks.

I was concerned about the advisability of letting the baby sleep in his car seat for such long periods of time. Doctors warn against letting babies sleep in car seats citing increased risk of SIDS but the problem factors seem to be unrelated to the child sleeping in the car:

• The airway can become blocked if the head is flexed forward
• When the head is flexed forward, the jaw contacts the chest, obstructing the breathing pattern
• This can happen when the restraint is not used and the child has poor control of their head – normally they are younger than 6 months of age
• The particular cases being warned about involved children being placed in car seats to sleep rather than during use as safety devices in vehicles

Car seats here in Canada are designed for babies to sleep in comfortably even when being transferred from the indoors to a car and back. Being able to load the baby without waking him up is convenient for parents and healthier for the baby. When used properly car seats reduce injury by 90 to 95 percent.

Back to traveling – is it safe to keep the baby in the car seat for those long trips? The answer is yes, provided breaks are taken when the baby is awake so he can be released from the car seat and allowed to stretch. An 8-hour non-stop trip in a seated position places a lot of stress on the baby’s developing spine so it is important to move him from time to time.