Sleeping In A Car Seat

I'm shaking my head after having just watched a segment on Canada AM about a Health Canada warning, urging parents to not let their infants sleep in car seats. Tragically a couple of babies have died this way.

I shake my head because while they refer to sleeping on their backs in cribs as being the safest, on the news segment they showed a sleeping infant with a head band on (strangulation) in a crib lined with thick soft bumper pads (suffocation).

(sigh)

While I agree that babies should not be unattended for any length of time in a car seat, in my opinion letting baby sleep in a car seat that's sitting at your feet while you have coffee with friends (so you can watch baby as you visit), is safer than putting an infant to bed for the night with a hair band on.

C'mon now.

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Cutting Myself Some Slack

I try not to judge other parents too harshly (like I did before I had kids, lol) but sometimes you see something that makes you feel a bit better about your own parenting.

I'm certainly flawed myself. I don't think I spend enough time playing with my kids, and I go through phases where I kind of give up fighting to get veggies in them (although the "give up" phases usually don't last too long, thank goodness). I raise my voice too often, and I don't listen enough. (This could be a post about parenting New Year's resolutions, ha ha.)

I was at a house party recently with a lot of kids. The average age I'd say was 7 or 8, but they ranged anywhere from 10 right down to little Angie (fake name, btw, to protect privacy), who was a year and a half. Her mom is a sweet lady - easy to talk to and lots of fun. She loves both her kids dearly (she has an older daughter as well who is 6). This goes without saying of course but I had to throw that in there in her defense.

At the party she wasn't watching Angie all that closely, and Angie was by far the youngest and smallest kid there. I have been called over protective many times (I'm a helicopter mom - I can admit it ;) but I think many moms would agree that letting an 18 month old crawl around underfoot with a bunch of rambunctious, running, falling and dog-piling big kids is a potentially risky situation.

Nothing happened of course, and Angie left safely in her mom's arms. Still, it made me realize that none of us are perfect parents, and close supervision in a busy social situation isn't something Angie's mom is good at, just like sitting on the floor doing a puzzle for the tenth time isn't something I'm good at.

So there! I hereby, if only for today, officially cut myself some slack :)
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Trampoline Warning

If you're looking for another "trampolines can be dangerous" story, read on.

Fortunately it wasn't that serious. During our son's backyard birthday barbeque, one of our friends' daughters pulled the ligaments in her ankle. She was jumping on the trampoline with a larger child (he's probably twice her weight), and she landed awkwardly because of the movement of the jumping surface. Had she been jumping with someone her size it probably wouldn't have happened.

A point to consider is that she's about 35 pounds, and the trampoline has a weight capacity of 200 pounds. As a result she wasn't big enough to generate much instability by herself, and had she been jumping with another preschooler, they probably would have been OK. However for the older child, given his weight and ability to move the canvas, my opinion is that jumping alone would have been only safe option.

Up until now our rule has been three kids or fewer on the trampoline, but from this point forward, we're going to reduce that as necessary, based on the weight of each jumper.