Attachment Parenting Blog: Raising Children with Love
Run by an attachment parenting couple with three kids, this site is your best place to learn more about attachment parenting, keep up-to-date on parenting news, and much more.
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- Is "Agents for Home Buyers" a Real Estate Scam?
I'm trying to figure out what's behind a letter that I received today from a local Boulder company called "Agents for Home Buyers, LLC", in which they coyly suggest that they might have someone who is interested in buying our house (which, of course, isn't on the market because we have zero interest in selling and moving).
What's curious is that they boldly say "we are not interested in listing your property" and explain that they're focused on helping buyers, but then there's the topper:
"Typically, we ask the seller to pay us a sales commission of 2.8% of the sale price at closing... Compared to the common fees... this could save you anywhere from 2% to 4% of the price."
Wed, 23 May 2007 20:46:18 -0700 - Is it possible to set nursing boundaries without actually weaning?
This is a user contributed article.
As my daughter’s second birthday is getting closer, the subject of weaning has popped into my head a couple of times. I believe that making it to the two-year mark will be a remarkable goal for us, and I have a hard time believing that she’ll be willing to give up breastfeeding simply because she has another birthday. Which led me to wonder if I should plan to wean her at all or just let nature take its course?
If there are no extenuating circumstances that justify the need to wean, is it best to go the child-led route. Child-led or self-led weaning is said to naturally occur between the ages of 2 and 4, and I am completely comfortable with the idea of nursing my daughter throughout that period of her life because I want her to receive the benefits of breastfeeding and breastmilk as long as she can.
Thu, 17 May 2007 16:46:06 -0700 - Cosleeping, Age Appropriateness and Nudity
I was just reading through the many comments on my earlier blog entry about cosleeping and bed space and am struck with the frequency of people asking about when children are too old to cosleep and issues related to the parents sleeping without pajamas.
As far as I know, there's no "official cut-off date" for when children shouldn't cosleep and I have certainly heard of friends who have their children still sporadically sleeping with them in their teens. Me? I think that's a bit much, but in special situations, like the child experiencing something traumatic, it might be a wonderful gift to let them sleep with you for a few nights until they get their feet back on the ground.
Sun, 13 May 2007 07:40:34 -0700 - Life in the 'burbs: babysitter poker?
Without naming any names, I have to say that I find it highly amusing that the latest here in the suburbs is what I'll call babysitter poker, though it's mostly all about bluffing more than anything else.
The situation came to my attention because we're desperate for a babysitter for an upcoming evening and all of our usual babysitters are unavailable. Ugh, what to do? My thought was to simply ask the neighbors for a recommendation, someone that they've worked with who might be available that evening.
Nope. That's not how it works...
Sun, 06 May 2007 21:03:37 -0700 - We heard back from Norwegian Cruise Lines. Sorta
If you're a faithful reader of our blog, you know that it wasn't two months ago that we took a terrific Mexican Riviera cruise with my parents, sister and brother in law. We had a good time until we tried to get off the ship, and that disembarkation experience was so terrible that I not only blogged about it (see Norwegian Star Cruise Embarkation, Yech!), but wrote a letter to Colin Veitch, President and CEO of NCL Corporation and Andrew Stuart, Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Passenger Services about the experience.
Well, six weeks later we finally received a communiqué from them about our letter. Ready for it? Here it is:
Not too inspiring, all said and done, after six weeks. But it's at least something, so I'm hoping to have a more detailed followup from them soon. Meanwhile, it's heartening to read the comments others have left on that blog entry talking about their own disembarkation experiences on cruises.
Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:54:56 -0700 - Back from holiday, drowning in bad juju?
This is just weird. We just a few days ago got back from a glorious three weeks in Hawaii and the last two days have been extraordinarily difficult, with tons of things going wrong.
Just before we left, I bought a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop, and wouldn't you know it, the power button's now akilter, the trackpad button is acting flakey, and today suddenly the battery just vanished from the computer. Literally, one moment I'm running along writing an email and everything's going great, then blamo! the computer's shut down. I can see that the battery is 50% charged, but the computer can't see it at all.
Fortunately, I called Apple on their ever-helpful 800-SOS-APPL line, and it's a known problem with these MacBook Pro batteries: a new one's already on the way to me. I won't have it for my trip to Chicago on Thursday, which is a huge drag, but at least the laptop works just fine when it's plugged into the wall.
That's the first problem we had...
Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:37:45 -0700 - Of videotaping school plays and burning DVDs
My older daughter's school is big into performing arts and her fourth grade class just recently put on a hilarious play about the Norse Gods, Valhalla, and the mischief of Loki. Weeks of practice, original songs, costumes and even a basic set. Great fun and at about 40 minutes long, a complicated and involved production.
When they're ready, they perform the play for the other grades in the school, a few mornings in a row, then on the Saturday, the gala encore performance for the parents. Is there anything more delightful than watching children you've known for years perform in a play together? :-)
Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:34:13 -0700 - The dark side of our Norwegian Star cruise: embarkation and disembarkation
It's been a few weeks since we returned from our Norwegian Star cruise to the Mexican Riviera and we still have lots of great memories and have enjoyed looking at the over 800 photos we took between the four of us who had cameras. If you haven't read my previous articles, I encourage you to start there before you read this one, however: Part I: Our Cruise to Mexico and Part II: Food, Norovirus and Excursions.
This time I am going to write about by far the worst part of the entire cruise, an experience that so marred our holiday that we'll really have to think carefully before we take another cruise, our experience getting onto the ship and, far worse, our experience getting off the ship when we returned to port.
I can best explain by sharing the letter I've sent to Colin Veitch, President and CEO of NCL Corporation and Andrew Stuart, Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Passenger Services... The photograph I have of the embarkation mess was not included in what I sent to NCL, however.
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 22:24:44 -0700 - General Pace says homosexuality is immoral. So?
I'm a bit baffled by the rabid response people are having to a recent statement by General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC. In an interview he was asked about the rather daft "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allows homosexuals to be in the United States military if they keep a sufficiently low profile. His response was that he thought the current policy was inappropriate:
"[It] to me says that we, by policy, would be condoning what I believe is immoral activity, and therefore, as an individual, I would not want that to be our policy."
Okay, so he thinks that homosexuality is immoral. Isn't it his right to have an opinion, don't we want military leaders who have a strong sense of morality, and are illuminated by their spiritual or religious beliefs, not the latest CNN poll?
Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:27:41 -0700 - Of Food, Norovirus and Excursions on our Norwegian Star Cruise...
Hopefully you've already read the first installment of my writeup of our recent 8-day cruise on the Norwegian Star to the Mexican Riviera. If not, you should probably read it first...
This time I want to talk a bit more about our dining experiences, about our one organized trip off the boat in Puerto Vallarta, and most especially about germs. Yes, if you haven't been paying attention to the persistence and toughness of modern bacteria and viruses, you might not realize that there's a scary stomach bug called the norovirus (aka viral gastroenteritis) that gives you a yechy few days of bad digestive problems. Its most common habitat? Cruise ships.
Avoiding Norovirus and Scary Germs
on our NCL CruiseThe US Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) has an entire section of its Web site focused on norovirus, including Cruising with Confidence, which explains that "CDC investigators believe that most of the recent norovirus infections on cruise ships were spread person-to-person through hand-to-mouth activity. "We suspect that people are probably coming on board with the virus," says Dave Forney, chief of the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program. "On a cruise ship, people are out and about in very public areas, and so we have this depositing of the virus on various surfaces that then would be easily picked up by others."
Great, another thing we had to worry about on the ship!
Fortunately, as you might expect, the cruise ship industry has responded with great vigor to this viral threat and we were particularly impressed with the Norwegian Cruise Lines and the omnipresent alcohol hand washing stations. One of them's shown to the right.
We were apparently quite lucky that our kids really enjoyed washing their hands at the washing stations (heck, they washed them at every station we'd pass, sometimes three or four times in just a few minutes!). To give them credit, NCL added mint scent and some hand softeners to the alcohol wash. By the time we got off the ship, my hands were lovely and soft. Who would have thought? :-) The importance of on-ship hygiene was highlighted when I realized that there was a crew member assigned to remind everyone to wash their hands every time they came into the Garden Cafe for food. That's all she did, just stand there and point to it with a smile.
Ironically, though, while perhaps that's what we should have been most worried about on the germ front, we were rather quite more concerned about the different bacterial life in Mexico and originally had considered never getting off the ship at all.
Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:29:49 -0700 - Our Norwegian Star Cruise to the Mexican Riviera
A few days ago we returned from a totally unique experience: we boarded the massive, beautiful Norwegian Star ship and embarked on an 8-day cruise out of San Pedro, California (LA harbor) to the so-called Mexican Riviera. Our ports of call were Acapulco, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas, and also on board were my LA-based parents (who are cruise experts: this was their 17th cruise by their count) and my sister and brother-in-law, who flew down from Alaska for the journey. [My sister has a blog too, btw: art dolls.info]
In the interest of retaining our sanity, Linda and I booked two adjoining cabins on Deck 5, one for the kids and one for us. At least, theoretically. One further cabin over was my parents, who didn't realize they were setting themselves up to hear the late-night cries of the wee one when we arranged everything!
Deck 5 is pretty low on the ship but we found that a benefit because the ship was more stable and we experienced less sway and motion than my sister did up on Deck 11, where their fancy cabin with a deck was located. We didn't have a deck -- too dangerous with K-, our 3yo! -- but we did instead have a very large window in each room, about 6x5 or so. Plenty big enough for sightseeing!
Grand Atrium, Norwegian StarThe ship was amazing, with more large, open space than I ever imagined was possible. To the right is a photograph of the Grand Atrium, looking down on the Deck 7 from Deck 12: The open space in the middle is where a four-player group played pleasant muzak every evening. I found it a bit hard to listen to their pablum covers of ABBA, the Beatles, and more, but everyone else in my party thought they were very good. What do I know about music? :-)
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:40:01 -0700 - Do kids in Waldorf schools start reading too late?
There's an interesting discussion happening on a Waldorf education mailing list I'm on about the relatively slow speed at which children in Waldorf learn how to read. While public schools are pushing reading to earlier and earlier grades -- to the point where kindergarteners are now expected to gain some rudimentary reading skills -- a typical Waldorf curriculum doesn't have the children begin learning how to read until second grade.
As you might expect, this causes lots of anxiety with parents. Indeed, in our experience in Waldorf, that's the #1 concern that prospective parents have when they consider this alternative educational approach. It can arise in surprising and unexpected ways, too, like taking your 7yo to the optometrist and being embarrassed that they can't accurately identify the letters on the eye chart.
Like any educational approach, however, I think it's unfair to look at the narrow experience of, say, first grade, without looking at the whole experience, the big picture...
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:17:33 -0700 - Do News Stories About Breastfeeding Help or Hinder?
In the past year, several stories about mothers breastfeeding in public have made it to the national media circuit. Who would have thought that infant feeding would be such a hot news topic? From movie theaters and Toys ‘R Us to Victoria’s Secret stores and a Freedom Airlines flight breastfeeding moms were being told to cover up or leave.
The mothers in these stories are so often made out to be renegades when they are simply trying to meet the needs of their infant children. Breastfeeding in public places can be stressful enough for a mom. Is it necessary for a news story to come out to say “she wasn’t being discreet and was making other customers uncomfortable?” Once the mother speaks up for herself (and others follow), the opposing party usually offers the same excuses “there was a misunderstanding” or “the employee was unfamiliar with the breastfeeding policy.”
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:44:09 -0700 - Do you have to breastfeed to be an attachment parent?
I received an interesting question from a reader and know exactly where she's coming from, but thought that in addition to my own answer, it'd would be interesting for her to read other opinions too. So what do you think? Do you need to be breastfeeding or nursing your baby to be a "good" attachment parent, or can you practice the basic tenets of attachment parenting regardless of if you use the breast or bottle?
Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:07:55 -0700 - Internet access and cell phone service on the Norwegian Star?
Okay, so we're planning a big adventure in the near future: we're going on an 8-day cruise to the Mexican Riviera on the Norwegian Star cruise ship. Should be fun, my parents and my sister and her husband are joining us for a true family reunion cruise!
Since I like to plan at least a bit in advance, however, I've been digging around trying to figure out both Internet and cellphone access, and, oh, how complicated they make everything!
Norwegian Cruise Lines does offer Internet connectivity on our ship, apparently at an Internet "cafe" on Deck 9, but it's not cheap, and, frankly, it's not easy to figure out these costs in advance either:
Fortunately, that's where Google comes in, as always. Instead of thrashing through the pretty, but only marginally helpful Norwegian Cruise Lines site, I just searched for norwegian star internet access cost...
Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:16:16 -0700
