News Moms Need

Our daughter is on the verge of crawling. I’m excited, but nervous at the same time. Everywhere I look around our house I see a potential hazard — the stairs, furniture, cabinets, outlets, lamp cords and book cases. We have a lot of work to do! We plan to go through one room at a time on our hands and knees to make sure we don’t miss anything, remove/secure potential risks and make a shopping list as we go.

A close friend of mine (hi Tricia!) appeared on the evening news a couple of days ago. Her home was assessed by a professional who offered some great recommendations on making her home safer for her toddler twins.  Click here to watch the clip.

According to Safe Kids Worldwide more than 4.5 million children are injured in the home every year. Taking simple prevention measures and closely supervising your children can help protect them from common household hazards, such as fires, burns, drowning, suffocation, choking, firearm injury, poisoning and falls. A few easy, relatively inexpensive steps – locking household cleaning materials in a cabinet out of reach, installing carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms, blocking stairways with baby gates – can greatly reduce your child’s risk of injury in the home.

The March of Dimes and Consumer Reports have worked together to produce a helpful online guide called, Safe Products for Baby. It includes shopping and safety tips for car seats, strollers, cribs, changing tables, play pens, clothing, bathtubs and more. Click here to check it out.

Please feel free to share any safety tips that you may have!

Remember my girlfriend who had the twins? Those little monkeys are now four and half months old and are absolutely precious. Well, I’m meeting her with the babies at the mall this Sunday for a work-out. You read correctly! We’re not browsing or window shopping, but going for a brisk walk to get the heart rates up. Hopefully, we’ll arrive before it gets crowded to avoid plowing into shoppers with the double stroller! 

Let’s face it…the holidays are stressful. The financial strain, coping with family drama and the pressure to make everything appear picture perfect is down right draining.   Managing stress with high-calorie, holiday meals is not a great coping strategy either. Trust me…I tried to do this with mashed potatoes and gravy. I’m still paying for it.

It’s getting chilly outside and our activity level may change, but don’t abandon the importance of physical fitness during the holiday season (especially if you’re pregnant). Be creative. Buddy up with a friend. With twelve weeks left until my due date, I can’t let up either and need to stay in shape for the big day.

Click here to watch a video on managing stress during pregnancy with Dr. Dolan.

The rising number of multiple pregnancies is a concern because women who are expecting more than one baby are at increased risk of certain pregnancy complications, including preterm delivery (before 37 completed weeks of pregnancy). There are a number of steps a pregnant woman and her health care provider can take to help improve the chances that her babies will be born healthy.

To help couples achieve the best outcomes from fertility therapy, the March of Dimes, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have prepared the paper “Multiple Pregnancy and Birth: Considering Fertility Treatments.” 

To download the paper (pdf, 1.1mb), click here.

A very dear friend delivered twins on Sunday afternoon. The babies are doing great, but she had an extremely difficult pregnancy. With the help of various medications and twelve weeks of bed rest they were born full term at 38 weeks. They didn’t even require a trip to the NICU. I quickly ran over to the hospital during my lunch hour to see everyone. I’ve been an aunt for almost 18 years, but it was the first time I held newborn twins. I was completely mesmerized by them. Twenty fingers and twenty toes! What a gift. 

Becoming pregnant in the first place was a real challenge for my friend. After a long, frustrating year of trying to conceive naturally, her OB/GYN recommended that she speak to an infertility specialist. She and her husband were told that she was a candidate for IVF (in vitro fertilization). They educated themselves about the process, cost, and risks associated. They weighed the benefits and decided to go for it. I learned a lot from their experience and found some useful websites that guided my understanding of what they were going through such as http://www.theafa.org/ and http://www.sart.org/

By the way…she had a boy and a girl! How cool is that? And I should probably explain the title of this post, too. Well, it’s a nickname we lovingly assigned the babies before they were born. Throughout her pregnancy my friend managed to maintain her sense of humor even under the most demanding circumstances. I truly believe that’s what got her through this whole thing. Trying to keep her mind off the threat of delivering too soon,  we would joke around and say that she was going to end up with the chubbiest and most hyper kids. Thus, the name Fat Monkees emerged.