3 Kids and Us

Everything You Need to Know About Getting Sleep as a New Parent

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Bringing home a baby is one of the greatest joys you will ever experience in life. You’ve just created a beautiful miracle and are ready to raise this baby with your values and happy memories. While you’re glowing in the glory of welcoming the new addition to your family, in the back of your mind you’re worrying about the lack of sleep you’ll have over the next few months.

It isn’t easy raising a baby, especially as a new parent. Luckily, there are great techniques and tips to help you get the sleep you need to take care of your newborn baby.

Sleep While the Baby Sleeps

It’s the oldest tip in the book for new parents, but it’s effective. Whenever the baby falls asleep you have the chance to grab a few good moments of sleep and relaxation. Even if you can’t fall asleep it’s a good idea to lie down and close your eyes for a bit to build up your energy again.

Create a Comfortable Sleep Environment

When you do have the chance to sleep, make sure it’s in a comfortable environment. Clean your bedroom and take out all of the clutter that can distract you and remind you of things you must do later. Your environment should be calm, dark, and sleep inducing.

Also create a comfortable sleep environment for the baby. Make sure he or she has a quiet room with a comfortable temperature to help them fall and stay asleep.

Practice Good Sleep Habits

Just like how we practice good habits in the shower and for our teeth, it’s important to have good habits when it comes to sleep. The three most effective sleep practices include:

  • No caffeine in the afternoon
  • No electronics an hour before bed
  • Create a sleep schedule

It’s important that you don’t rely on caffeine to stay awake. It dehydrates you and too much can increase anxiety.

Instead of scrolling through your phone, answering emails, or watching television, try reading a book or listening to a podcast before you go to sleep.

Lastly, while having a sleep schedule isn’t easy with a newborn, trying to stay consistent when you wake up and go to sleep can help you tremendously as a new parent.

Leave the Chores

You don’t have to be perfect. Every new parent is going to have all of their attention on taking care of their baby. If you leave a sink full of dirty dishes or a load of laundry in the dryer for tomorrow, nobody is going to judge you. Don’t over exert yourself trying to keep a clean house if it means sacrificing sleep.

Ask for Help

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It isn’t easy being a new parent and you deserve to have some help. Whether you ask your partner, friends, family members, or even sign up for baby coaching lessons, getting the help you need is essential when raising a newborn. Getting help means you can focus more on your baby and create the best life possible.

Why Is Home Health So Important for Families With Kids?

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Home health is one element of general health that unfortunately tends to go by the wayside for a lot of people. It’s important that you remember to consider your home’s health with the same seriousness that you would the health of any family member. After all, your home’s health can have a serious impact on your family’s health. For families with kids, it’s even more important. Here’s how this home health checklist can be even more influential when you have kids.

Home Health Checklist
Home Health Checklist Created By:   JES

Structural Health

You need to pay close attention to your home’s structural health in general; after all, poor structural health could lead to extremely serious concerns, including complete structural failure. However, even minor structural health concerns can be more serious when you have children in the home.

Structural health often centers around your home’s foundation. A strong home foundation is definitely ideal, but there are many potential reasons for foundation concerns. These can range from issues with the soil around your home to problems regarding the initial pouring of a concrete foundation. Regardless of the problems, it’s important to fix them because structural problems can end up causing irreversible damage without a fix.

Basement Health

Do you have a basement? If you do, you might think that the most important thing for maintaining safety in your home’s basement is ensuring your kids stay out of it. True, having a child who falls down the basement stairs could be a serious problem. However, the biggest problem could actually be issues with basement waterproofing.

Basements tend to have a reputation for issues with waterproofing. This typically occurs because the basement is below the ground’s surface and has surrounding soil that can be very wet. If water enters through the basement walls and you’re unable to get rid of it, you can have a musty smell, mold, mildew, and other problems. These can seriously impact the health of young children.

Crawl Space Health

Even homes that don’t have a basement often have a crawl space. Crawl spaces are a great way for inspectors to get in and look at things like your home’s pipes and structural supports without having to dig into the home itself. However, the problem is that crawl spaces can run into the same problems as basements, oftentimes even with waterproofing problems as well.

One big problem with crawl spaces is that many people don’t think about how much of an impact crawl spaces have on the rest of the home. Sure, you probably know that your basement and your home share air with each other, but did you know that your home gets up to 50% of its air through your crawl space? If your crawl space’s air is unhealthy, your home’s air will be unhealthy, which can cause health concerns for your whole family.

Home Concrete Health

The last element of home health to pay attention to is concrete health. Almost everyone has some form of concrete around their home. You may have concrete on your driveway, in your home’s basement, on your patio, and many more areas. If this concrete isn’t healthy, you could end up with very serious overarching problems.

Trips and falls are extremely common with concrete issues. This may be because of cracked concrete, uneven concrete, or even just concrete that doesn’t have the right grip. These can be even more prominent with children, because children can trip over even very small uneven spaces between concrete slabs.

Conclusion

All home health hazards are important for any home, but this is especially true for many homes with children. If you have children, it’s important that you keep your home as safe and secure as possible for everyone’s sake. That may mean talking to a home health expert, such as a foundation repair expert, to learn more about your home health options. Remember, your entire family lives in your home. That should be reason enough to maintain its health, even if you need to call in outside help.

Sports Are Good For Children—But Injuries Can Happen

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A Clear Tradeoff

There are many positive benefits for children involved in sporting events. For one thing, they learn to work toward a goal. For another, they learn how it’s necessary to function as a team to achieve that goal. They learn discipline in the form of regular practice so certain aspects of the sports become ingrained at the subconscious level. This also involves exercise.

With sports like ice hockey, a new skill must be learned just to play the sport—you can’t play ice hockey if you can’t skate, and you can’t ice skate well enough to be a valuable team member unless you practice. Getting the balance right involves “growing” new muscles. You’ve got to have stronger ankles and leg muscles, and you get them through skating.

Image Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/child-soccer-playing-kick-613199/ 

It may take a whole season for a young child to learn skating well enough they’re able to be a valuable part of the team; that’s one of many reasons it’s good to start children on hockey early if there’s an interest, or you want to see them get good by the time they’re teenagers. But hockey isn’t the only sport which requires those who play it to learn new skills.

Swimming is similar, and many swimming sports exist. Singular sports like biking or hiking, more appropriately athletic activities, also require new skills to be learned. But regardless of the athletic activity your young ones are getting involved with, increased physicality naturally expands the risk of injury. So there’s a clear tradeoff. But as a parent, how do you manage it?

Safeguarding Children And Preserving Positive Sporting Benefits

The benefits of sports events outweigh the potential hazards; but those hazards certainly can’t be ignored. Especially with a sport like ice hockey, between “checking”, the hardness of the ice, general clumsiness, fast-flying pucks, high tempers, and general clumsiness, it’s a greater surprise if young ones sustain no injury whatever, than if they get scuffed up a bit over the regular course of the season.

What makes sense is securing the trustworthy services of a local sports medicine physician. The thing about injuries is, their recovery may require a lot of time or a little; but there are definitely best practices. Sometimes your child will pull a muscle, or dislocate something. While they’re in definite pain, with a slight adjustment they can return to practice.


Image Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/quarterback-american-football-sport-67701/ 

Other times, a given injury might be at a level where it’s going to take a few months for the young one to recover, and then there will be physical therapy to consider. For such situations, it makes sense to secure the services of a trusted orthopedic surgeon at Ocean County; or wherever you happen to be.

When you’ve got orthopedic or sports medicine options available prior to the start of the season, recovery happens quicker, you get the right medical attention sooner, and you can probably reduce associated costs in either surgery or therapy right off the bat. You’ll know what the doctors charge, and you’ve got time to shop around—if you prepare beforehand.

Your Child’s Sports Experience Benefits Through Preparation


Image Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/heart-health-family-tree-strong-3306996/ 

So there’s a mild dichotomy to consider here. On the one hand, you want to provide your young ones the best possible opportunities as regards development. Athleticism, new skills, team building, socialization, long-term planning and preparation—sports provide such outcomes in a natural, organic way that’s fun for everyone. But injury potential exists.

You can diminish associated injury impact through acquisition of proper medical professionals from the outset. Doing things this way allows you to shop around for the best medical options, preserving your bank account by helping you avoid the emergency room when possible, while simultaneously setting your children up for success in sports.

Peak Fertility and Pregnancy

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Source: Unsplash | Alexander Krivitskiy

Getting pregnant isn’t necessarily as easy as you would hope and for some people it can be a challenge that makes the efforts you go to to avoid pregnancy when it’s not wanted into a cruel irony. We also tend to see fertility as a black and white issue: either you are fertile or not. In reality, there are many graduations of fertility and even if you stand a low chance of conceiving, you can improve your odds by identifying when you’re at peak fertility in each menstrual cycle and concentrating your attempts to conceive on that period.

What is Peak Fertility?

For women, their effective fertility rises and falls over the length of their menstrual cycle. During their ‘fertile days’ or ‘fertile window’, the average lifespan of an egg after ovulation can overlap with the average lifespan of sperm after ejaculation. During this time you are at peak fertility: you stand the best chance of conceiving. If you don’t know when your fertile window is, your chances of conceiving drop dramatically.

Finding Ovulation

If you want to find your fertile day you need to find out when it’s likely you’re going to ovulate – your ‘ovulation window’.

There are two primary ways of doing this: using test strips that react with your urine in the presence of the hormone that stimulates ovulation, LH (or Luteinising Hormone). You can also chart your basal body temperature: this is the low level your body drops to overnight, during an extended rest. Minute changes at this base level can reveal when you’re going to ovulate.

Modern technology can make BBT tracking more accurate and less difficult. Automated sensors can take temperature readings overnight for more accurate data, and apps can process those into results and predictions, to reduce the risk of error.

Finding Your Fertile Window

With this information in hand, you simply need to plot it on a calendar, along with the dates your period begins. While cycles may vary between women, if yours is regular you can expect to ovulate at the same point in your cycle from month to month. Noting how long ovulation falls after your period begins in one month gives you a good indicator for when it will fall in the next and the next. This can give you the vital insight you need to improve your chances of conceiving when you want to.

How to Look After Yourself After a Workplace Injury

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Following a workplace injury, particularly an incident resulting in you needing to take extended time off work, it will be necessary to look after yourself; to both recover in body and mind, and to manage your change in circumstances on a more practical level.

This brief how-to guide will give some guidance on taking care of yourself post-injury; physically, mentally, and financially.

Physically

For physical recovery, the most important, and likely the most obvious, thing to do is make sure you follow the guidance and advice given by your medical practitioners.

  • Make sure you take any medication prescribed and avoid any strenuous activities as advised, such as heavy lifting, or sports
  • If receiving physiotherapy for injuries sustained, then be sure to complete all home exercises designated to your recovery process
  • As well as the to-do’s, make sure to abide by the do-not’s, such as avoiding alcohol, certain foods, or smoking, for example. In addition to the physical implications, this can also have legal ramifications, such as driving while on pain medication, following surgery or while incapacitated, voiding motor insurance

As well as following medical advice, it will be necessary to take your injury, and any long-term implications of it, into account when preparing to return to work:

  • Can you carry out your previous role without causing further injury, if not then a new role should be found or created to allow you to return to work safely
  • Do not return to work before you are sufficiently recovered enough to do so

This can be challenging to stick to as it can be frustrating to wait, and can also be a cause for anxiety and stress if it is having an impact on your finances.

Mentally

Being injured and restricted is likely to be an upsetting and anxiety-inducing time for you. It adds additional pressures to families and relationships and can have a detrimental effect on your mental wellbeing.

  • Seek external assistance if you find yourself struggling to cope. Therapy can be a great way to unload your emotions and is not a sign of weakness or failure.
  • Accept help from family and friends and be sure to communicate. You are not a burden to them, and they want to support you, but they cannot do this if you don’t tell them what you need.
  • Practice meditation, yoga, or other therapeutic, relaxation techniques. Find time in your schedule to be calm and focus on your breathing to reduce stress levels and boost your mental health.
  • Stay abreast of your financial circumstances, acknowledge that there may be financial implications to your injury, and seek out support and advice to manage them. Money is a leading cause of stress, and ignoring it will only make it worse.

Financially

As previously mentioned, an injury at work that puts you out of action will inevitably have financial implications for you and your family; there are many things to consider during this time, including:

  • Compensation – You may be entitled to compensation following a workplace injury, and you should not be hesitant to pursue it. Personal injury solicitors London, Washington, Paris, or wherever you are in the world, are there to help you regain financial control and support you following your accident.
  • Insurance – You may find that your employers have insurance to cover workplace accidents, you should speak to your employer and discuss your rights. Your own medical insurance cover, if applicable, may also help with any resulting medical bills.
  • Sick pay – Another one for your employer. Check your contract and see what you are entitled to for time off of work due to a work-related injury.
  • Budgeting – If you find yourself out of pocket, then it may be necessary to review your household budget while you are off work and reduce non-essentials.
  • Research other support services – You may be entitled to additional benefits or financial aid. Research what is available in your area and be sure to claim everything you are entitled to. It is what it is there for, and you should not feel guilty using it.
  • Returning to work – Know your rights for returning to work after sickness or injury. Your employer should consider alternative roles within the business if you are no longer able to carry out your original job. They should make a significant effort to facilitate your return.

Prioritize your recovery and the wellbeing of yourself, your family, and anyone that may be affected by the incident. Getting better is top priority, and this guide provides tips for ensuring that you take care of you and yours.

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We left our home in Sydney, Australia many moons ago in May 2012 and, other than a brief stint back in Perth for Christmas and a wedding in early 2014, we have been travelling the world nomadically ever since, running a business from our laptops and we’re here to show you how to do it!