A Time of Magic » Family

Do you breast-feed?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:13:10 +0000

Breast-feeding seems to come in cycles like many things.

After the major promotion of breast-milk a decade or so back with campaigns to make it more socially acceptable in public areas, the interest in it seems to have died down considerably in recent years. Ten years back and you’d have seen women making a point of feeding their baby in public but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it done in a public place.

Whether that reduction in the visibility equates to a reduction in the amount of breast feeding being done is quite another questions obviously. The benefits of it certainly haven’t changed and it makes a great start in life for your baby as it always has done. Is it just that it’s become less acceptable to do it in public these days?

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Preparing for the big four-oh

admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 15:37:27 +0000

The 4oth birthday seems to have more of a significance than any of the other “oh” birthdays largely for historical reasons: it represented the half-way mark for one’s life.

However, when you’re looking for 40th bday gifts for her, none of that matters. It’s a difficult one to call as women rarely want their age bandied about and still less so when it’s the 40th with it’s feeling of “over the hill”.

Best to steer clear of anything highlighting the actual age I think!

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Sleeping easily

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:40:46 +0000

The problem with sleeping problems is that it’s often very much a family problem with one non-sleeper keeping at least one other person awake because of it.

Which, of course, means that there’s even more of an interest in sleep aids than there would be normally. But do they work? Well, yes, but that’s not the problem. The issue is that when you can’t sleep there’s generally a reason behind it, most commonly some form of stress leading to your brain not closing down normally. It’s that problem that you need to look at as sleeping aids aren’t a long term solution.

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Essential items when you’re pregnant

admin — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:10:53 +0000

It’s not quite eating for two when you’re pregnant but there are things in your body that will run a little low if you don’t do something about it.

So, for example, you can basically take it as read that you’ll not be taking enough vitamins if you keep eating the same way as you did before you were pregnant. Thus pregnancy vitamins are something that you almost certainly need to take.

The snag with vitamins is that you almost certainly won’t notice if you’re a bit short of one or other of them as the effects of a lack in vitamins are often peculiar.

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Awful health decisions

admin — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:52:10 +0000

One of the things I’ve come to wonder is whether it’s really worthwhile prolonging life in a whole bunch of situations if that life is merely existence.

For instance, my uncle is “living” with some version of asbestosis that a good Mesothelioma lawyer would probably shudder at. For getting on for ten years he’s basically been a vegetable and gradually been getting worse, or would be if that were possible.

The problem is that it’s long since past the time when he was able to make a decision about his own life and, of course, none of his immediate family really want to take a decision to end his life such that it is.

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Everything but the kitchen sink

admin — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:39:40 +0000

That’s the saying but in the case of our upcoming house move it looks like it will almost literally be true given the volume of stuff that we seem to need to move from the old house.

Thankfully, bringing the kitchen sink isn’t an option or I’m sure that we’d end up doing just that. As it is, it looks like we’ll be bringing beds, settees, and oodles and oodles of boxes. Somehow I suspect that the majority of those boxes will never be opened, but then you feel that you can’t leave them behind either.

Oh well, at least it’ll create some work for the movers.

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Different kinds of shops for more unique toys

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:35:02 +0000

As Christmas approaches, parents everywhere will be trawling the shops for toys.

Usually, they’ll hit the big toy shops and so be presented with an identical range of toys to choose from as all the other parents. These days the supermarkets will have a reasonable selection and, usually, with lower prices than those in the specialist toy shops.

However, for something a little different I find that it’s always worth having a look round Maplins which is a specialist electronics store. Now, 99% of the stuff is electronics components but for various reasons they always have a substantial number of toys too and ones that you’ll usually not see elsewhere. For example, the remote control hovercraft of last Christmas was there and there’s always a range of surprisingly cheap remote control cars. In fact, for remote control toys it seems to always be the place to go. At the moment, it’s the only place I’ve seen remote control diggers, tanks and assorted sizes of cars ranging from one inch models through to things that would be almost large enough for our little guy to ride on.

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Going to sleep easily

admin — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:15:54 +0000

I always find it odd that so many people have kids who they claim they can never get to go to sleep when they’re young. Our two went straight to sleep from the day they came home for the first time.

But sleep aids are big business these days. One big factor in that is worry with the economy remaining in the doldrums and so many people either losing their job or living in fear of losing it.

The problem with any of the sleeping pills is that you effectively get addicted to them. Not so much because they are addictive themselves but that their effects are: you get to the point where you take them because you’re scared of not being able to get to sleep without them.

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Closing down the fun things

admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:03:33 +0000

Isn’t it sad the way that people always take a “do it somewhere else” attitude to things?

Just this afternoon we were driving through the countryside and passed by a field that clearly wasn’t being used in any way at all. Not just fallow, quite simply not being used, with weeds growing as high as they can grow. It also sported a sign to the effect that it wasn’t to be used for ATVs. Why not? It certainly wasn’t being used for anything else.

To be fair, it would be better if some Polaris Accessories place were to buy the field and let it be used for what it seemed best suited for but it’s very rare that the sensible things happen, isn’t it?

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Where to go in Orlando

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:15:20 +0000

The problem with planning Orlando vacations is that that there’s just too much to see if you’re going for anything less than a month and even then you’d have trouble packing it all in.

As usual, the front runner for the kids is Disney World of course though that’s largely down to the massive advertising spend that’s put into promoting it. The big downside of it is that there’s so much packed into the place that you really need to pace yourself and anything longer than two or three days is going to be extremely tiring for young children even though that’s far too short a time to see it all. And each year it just gets “worse” with more and more attractions added.

Around the Orlando area there’s heaps of other things to do with a very high density of theme parks but there’s also a fair amount in terms of natural attractions too with great beaches and wildlife to be seen.

Basically though there’s so many attractions that you need to plan on going back several times over the years.

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