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A strong shoelace knot that slips open

In moving out of the breastfeeding and nappy advice age, I’m becoming newly qualified to give advice on all things Saturday mornings and sports fields instead. I’ll confine myself to one observation here: it’s possible to tie a shoelace knot that’s about as tight as a double knot but which slips open when you pull on the ends, thus less likely to result in irritation for kids, teachers, and coaches! The Secure Shoelace Knot / Double Slip Knot is a pretty and pretty easy strong slip knot.

I learned about these types of knots (if not this exact knot, I don’t recall) at Kiwifoo 2018, probably not quite the building the future they had in mind.

First extended rear-facing seats

In car seat news, I see Britax has the Premium SICT ISOFIX Compatible out, with rear-facing until the child is 2 or 3. Sadly, it also has a rear-facing depth of 600mm, more than 8cm greater than our current rear-facing seat. I’d need to rest my feet on the dash to ride in front of a seat that big, and I think it would even be impossible for Andrew. Extended rear-facing advocates (well, some of them) have been telling me for ages that extended rear-facing seats take up, if anything, less room in the car than normal rear-facing infant seats, because the seat doesn’t have to recline as much. If this is any guide… not so much.

Perhaps this will be true when cheaper extended rear-facing seats start to come out (apparently being a tall adult is not a “premium” parenting feature… except when you’re buying prams and strollers, when it totally is). I think it’s likely A will be pushing age 2 by that point anyway, so with any luck, this is the end of my very short career as a car seat blogger!

Disclosures: you can rest assured no one is offering me their giant car seats in return for a review!

A hardcore kids’ calendar

Here’s a sample of a little parenting thing I’ve been doing for a year or so now:

October calendar

Our family life is complicated — Andrew and have have taken three business trips between us this year and have three to go — and we’re pretty heavily calendared. V doesn’t read yet and his sense of time is not awfully sophisticated. Once he is told the weekday (sometimes he knows what it is already) he can tell what regular event is on, but presently the past is “yesterday”, “a few days ago” and “when I was a little boy”, that last being anywhere from a week to two years in the past. And in any event I’m not sure the most literate of four year olds would be quite ready for the five Google calendars I use to manage our lives. (One for each individual, one for the family. Plus Tripit calendars but let’s ignore that for now.)

So whenever a particularly complicated sequence of events is coming up, I make him a pictorial calendar. In this one, which is for the next two and a half weeks, you can see daycare on most weekdays, swimming lessons on Fridays, our plane trip this weekend (for a wedding), and the visit to his paternal grandparents next weekend (for my parents, who farm beef, I use a silhouette of a steer). And, new to this calendar, SCHOOL: he’s going to a Term 4 orientation program starting in a few weeks and going into December.

Even with this I haven’t quite brought myself to do the following week, when Andrew leaves for Tokyo on the Tuesday, I leave for Ballarat with A on the Friday, V stays with Julia and Barry on the Friday night (for Halloween), Andrew returns on the Saturday morning and picks him up and then I return on the Monday evening after Andrew is launched into one of his busiest work weeks of the year. I think that week will get its own special calendar. In blood, possibly.

ISOFIX seats now for sale in Australia

I hadn’t noticed, writing my car seat review (most of which I drafted about a month ago), that as of just a few days ago, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have signed off on the 2013 updates to the Australian Safety Standards allowing ISOFIX (with top tether) baby car seats to be sold and used in Australia. Car Advice has an article about it. Maxi-Cosi has seats for sale already. Britax (the Safe-n-Sound company) will apparently follow this month.

The new standards should also allow more extended rear-facing, which is good news for children’s safety in cars. That said, I am not sure if we personally will get A an extended rear-facing or ISOFIX seat for practical reasons: we car-share, and I don’t know the ISOFIX status of all the models of car we drive, and then of course there’s also the seat depth issue: if they have a longer seat depth (the two Maxi-Cosi seats so far are both 57cm), A is safer at the expense of me getting airbag injuries (and/or losing steering wheel play because my knees are touching it). Tricky!

But average sized people and/or people who own their own cars may be interested to hear that you can now get one brand of ISOFIX seat in Australia with more to come!

Review: Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat

This is a rare product review interlude for me to extol the virtues of the Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat for the Australian market, perhaps useful to other tall people I know.

We have giant giant children and I’m a giant giant person married to a merely tall person. This makes rear-facing car seats really difficult, because they take up loads of room, and you’re not supposed to push your seat back into them (some instructions don’t even want the front seat touching a rear-facing seat). But at the same time, it is neither comfortable nor safe to travel with your knees smooshed into the dashboard, or (as I would have to, in front of some rear facing seats) with your feet resting up on the dashboard: an airbag deployment will break your legs.

Most of the solutions I’ve seen to this are either calculated using hypotheticals I don’t favour (wouldn’t you shatter your femur on request to prevent injury to your child? no? what kind of mother are you?), involve one parent being fairly short (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DH drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) or don’t work (you can centre-install the seat… which then inhibits both front seats from pushing back, because infant seats are wide. Uh).

Anyway, after complaining about this issue a lot when V was young, I did a touch more research this time around, and discovered that the feature we were looking for in seats was called “rear-facing install depth”, and therefore the search term is something like “Australia car seat rear facing shortest install depth” and the answer is the Safe-n-Sound Compaq at 52.5cm depth (one of the InfaSecure Kompressors was just slightly deeper, when I searched). This is about 7cm more precious leg room than the Babylove Prelude we had V in.  That is quite a lot of room! To be fair, I actually still can’t really sit in front of it (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DW drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) but Andrew can and perhaps I could in a suitably large car.

That’s really the main point of the review, I buy car seats on one axis. But it has a couple of other features I like: first, it comes in colours other than grey and black (although you can get it in grey or black if you like). We got the 2012 model in “apple green”; the current model, the Compaq AHR, comes in Cool Berry and in Blue. Second, as the baby gets taller, you can change the height of the shoulder straps by sliding the back up and down rather than re-threading the straps through higher holes. This was only ever slightly annoying in the Prelude, but I do think it’s an improvement. Finally, and importantly, it seems to allow the child themselves to be quite tall while still rear-facing. A is nearly 9 months now, and on about the 95th percentile for length, and it looks like she’ll be rear-facing until close to her birthday. This is longer than we were able to keep V rear-facing (although back then, rear-facing was by weight, not length).

Disclosures: this review was not solicted and I was not compensated for it in any way.

Pump bra

When V was young, I used to write a lot more stuff here that was vaguely intended for an audience of intending parents, based largely on all the parenting and somewhat-parenting blogs I was devouring in the 2000s for the same reason. (See our advice tag for a bit of older stuff that’s still public.)

These days I skip that a fair bit, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, most of the intending parents I know of who read this now have children, and have no particular use for my advice. Either they ignored it, it worked, or it didn’t work; I think a mixture of options one and three. Second, I have no advice on parenting four year olds. Don’t look at me. I was (am) OK with babies, but kids are hard.

But once more unto the breach eh? I’d just like to note Sarah’s and L’s advice about getting a pump bra (or making one, I know) so that I wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes hunching over and clutching my pump to my chest three times a day every work day. (Hunching because I want the milk to flow down, and my nipples point up.) I’m on day one with the Simple Wishes bra (L: your advice was good, but I am so uncrafty and lacking in even basic supplies that by the time I got around to following it, I’d not be pumping any more) and it’s working well. Very flexible sizing too, as far as I can tell. I only regret that when I chose “pink” from the store they meant “pale pink like pale skin”, not “pink like fuchsia” which was what I was hoping for. PINK LIKE FUCHSIA PLEASE.

So there you go. If you’re going to be pumping multiple times a day, at least, if you’re going to be using an electric pump, my advice is to get a pump bra and go hands-free. This advice is brought to you transitively by people who advised me thus a few weeks ago.

I’ve generally been having a harder time pumping for A than I did for V. I think a few things are going on:

  1. It’s boring hunching over a pump for ages every work day, which is what I am hoping this bra will sort out for me. So far so good.
  2. I learned in the last month or so from pumping for V that I didn’t actually need to pump three times a day lest I explode (get mastitis), so I’ve neglected to pump three times a day for A even though she actually needs me to pump at least that much to supply enough bottles while she’s still exclusively breast-milk-fed. Mastitis was so motivating.
  3. I don’t think my supply is what it was when I was last pumping in 2010, probably because I’ve been lactating for a good long while now and I’m very demand driven. I remember with V being able to pump 250mL at a time, three times a day, quite regularly (which was far more than he actually drank, I ended up with about two months of milk frozen for him). My record with A is about 160mL, and 120mL is common, which is less than she drinks each feed (I visit the childcare centre at least once every work day to nurse her directly).
  4. On reflection, he was only exclusively breast-milk-fed at daycare for about six or eight weeks, because he wasn’t as young when he started there. So they were able to use solids to fill his belly much sooner after he started than A’s carers have been able to. (He didn’t really reliably eat solids in my presence for many months, but on his childcare days he ate there.)

In other news, she and I depart for the United States in about eighteen hours. So, expect stories.

Breastfeeding pain

A peer breastfeeding counsellor asked on one of my old entries what would have helped me cope with the severe early (3 weeks or so) breastfeeding pain I had when V was born. I thought it was worth repeating my comment here:

Things that I think actually helped:

(1) opposing pain, kind of like some people use in labour. Andrew used to grip my shoulder really hard as V latched on. (The IBCLC suggested on the phone that some women sing or chant to themselves as an alternative.)

(2) expressing milk before each feed until my nipples were nice and soft and stretchy. At the time I didn’t do this enough because I was terrified of making my oversupply worse, but now I think, screw it, it wouldn’t have lasted long, and expressing 30mL or so is not going to increase supply that much. It did help some.

(3) the hot packs and hot showers I think did help a bit, if only in relaxing me. It was just that (I thought) they were presented as compulsory, so I thought I had to get up in the middle of the night and heat up a hot pack and apply it before feeding every single time.

(4) other distractions, especially having visitors. It’s hard to scream when trying to entertain visitors.

I think in an ideal world, this would have happened as well:

(1) feeding more often so that everything was softer and he was less hungry. But it hurt so much I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I can see how it works though.

(2) I would have seen an IBCLC just to definitively rule out latch problems and so on. He didn’t have a nursing problem, but I kept getting slightly different and confusing advice from midwives and it undermined my confidence a lot. So just for confidence it would have been good to see an expert LC.

(3) Drugs. I took codeine for blood pressure headaches when pregnant (while waiting for the BP meds to stabilise it), and I probably should have busted it out for this too. I suspect there’s a vicious cycle with being tense and scared that drugs might break.

(4) Visits from breastfeeding peers. However, because very few of my friends had babies at the time, there really wasn’t anyone to talk to a lot about it except my mother (she had more or less the same experience).

Things that I didn’t find useful:

(1) cold packs

(2) anything that made night feeding more complicated (hot packs, showers)

(3) fiddling around all the time with his angle of approach as recommended by various midwives