AA Gifts & Baskets Idea Blog

Archive for March, 2008

So its time to potty train your child, I know what your thinking! How am I ever going to do this? This is one of the great joys of parenthood; it can be a very difficult step in your child’s development. A child is ready to be potty trained anywhere between 1 1/2 to 3 years old and you will usually get clues as to when your child may be ready like showing an interest in the potty or wanting to wear "big kid" underwear. Everyone eventually gets the hang of it, it’s very unlikely that your child will go to high school with a diaper on so don’t worry too much, but if you need a little extra help here are some potty training tips to get you child on the road to going on his own. First let’s talk about the don'ts of potty training your child:

• Don’t force potty training on your child. Forcing your child to go will only create an atmosphere that he or she may be scared of and you will face more resistance.
• Don’t start potty training when a big life even is going on, stress, good or bad can be bad for potty training. Wait until life settles down so that your child will associate potty training with structure and routine. Don’t make accidents a big deal.
• Don’t get mad or upset, make sure they know that its natural and everyone does it and take the opportunity to show them the potty and explain to them that this is where they need to go next time. By getting angry or making it a big deal when your child ahs an accident it will actually reinforce it and may cause more accidents.
• Don’t expect your child to be trained to last through the night anytime soon. It is completely normal for bedwetting to happen up to age four.
• Don’t discount your child’s fears about potty training. Some children will be afraid of the sound of the toilet flushing, they might not understand where the toilet is going too, or they may be afraid to fall in. Explain and be patient with them no matter how silly the fear is.
• Don’t try to set a deadline, or a day that your child must be potty trained by. Each child is different and it may take some a week and others a year. Programs that promise your child will be trained in 7 days only leave the parents and children feeling as if they failed.

Ok now we can move on to what you should do:

• First you need to help your child recognize the signs of having to go to the bathroom. Usually your child will tell you after they have already done their business but this is a good sign that your child is starting to understand this bodily function. Make sure to praise your child for telling you and tell them to try and let you know next time before they go.
• Make trips to the potty a routine thing. If your child acts like he needs to go take him to the potty and let him sit but only for a few minutes at a time. If your child resists strongly do not force him to stay. Take your child at the same times everyday like first thing in the morning, after eating, after naps and before bed.
• Teach your child good hygiene and explain the purpose of bodily waste. Let your child know how to wipe properly (girls should wipe front to back to avoid bringing germs from the rectum to the vagina) and teach them to wash their hands after using the potty.
• Encourage the use of training pants and underwear.
• Consider rewarding success trips to the potty with a small children's gift.
  

It may seem impossible in the beginning but if you take it slow and pay attention to your child’s needs you should have no problem. Trust me this probably won’t be the biggest challenge you face with your child.

Whenever your child is ill, your observations of what’s going on are very important. When you are assessing your child’s illness, you’re really looking at two different things-signs and symptoms. These terms have specific meanings to your doctor.

A symptom is something a patient complains about. A sign is something the doctor [or you] can see, measure, hear, taste or smell. So, if your child complains of her ear hurting, that’s a symptom; if she’s pulling on her ear, that’s a sign. Signs and symptoms are indications of illness, but they are not illnesses themselves. When your doctor treats your child, he or she may treat the signs and symptoms of the illness, the illness itself, or both. For example, aspirin or acetaminophen is frequently given to a child with a fever, either may reduce the fever, but neither affects the underlying illness causing the fever. However, an antibiotic given to your child when he has an ear infection, actually helps the body to fight off the infection and, so, is treating the illness. The earache [a symptom] and the fever [a sign] will go away because the infection [the illness] is being treated. Most of the medicines you can buy in the drugstore without a prescription treat symptoms but doesn’t treat the illness itself. So the “cold” medicine you may buy for your child doesn’t make the cold go away any more quickly, but they may make your child feel a little better. There’s an ongoing debate about treating signs and symptoms of common illnesses. Some doctors believe that unless the signs and symptoms are severe, you’re better off not treating them. Some of the symptoms of an illness may actually be beneficial and speed recovery. Every medicine has side effects, and sometimes these can be worse than the illness itself. If you know someone that is sick, consider our selection of get well gift baskets to cheer them up.

Sometimes the word offering is used as anything offered as a gift. It is normally used to mean something offered in worship or devotion, as to a deity; an oblation or sacrifice. An offering is a collection of donations during worship. An offering can mean a religious sacrifice of plant or food that one does not partake of. You give up enjoying the plant, food or money in order to gain favor with the clergy or the gods. The one item to think about is that this is really just a form of mysticism.

Mysticism - meaning the beliefs, ideas, or mode of thought comes from the Greeks as a means to “initiate or initiation” such beliefs. The gift of the mystic or mysticism is that it leads us to believe that reality and the unknown is really one thing. This is essentially a double edged gift, because it lets people feel that they have a control over both what they can see and what they can not see.

Recently, I heard an explanation for why many people get nervous about writing exams or taking tests. The reason many people get nervous about this, as it was explained, is that people have a problem about making choices and predicting outcomes. Human beings are not very good at predicting outcomes. If they were good at predicting outcomes, Casinos would cease to exist. It is difficult to predict the outcome of a test or exam unless you know the questions and their answers beforehand. As this is seldom the case, people get nervous about writing tests.

When human beings have to make a choice, and there are only 3 things to choose from they are normally pretty good at deciding which of the three items will have the best outcome. By that I mean which of the three items will give the best benefit or satisfaction to the person making the decision. If there are more than 3 items to choose from it gets a little harder to be certain which one will give the best satisfaction. It can be over-whelming to the point that the person making the decision cannot make up their mind and will defer the decision until some future time. Think of this when you are at a specialty coffee shop where they have 15-20 different kinds of coffee, espressos and lattes.

You could also feel the same way when looking for a gift or offering a special gift for that special person. The optimum outcome is to achieve an increase in esteem in the recipient’s eyes. This will have the added effect of increasing your own feelings of esteem or self worth. Your subconscious mind may see an aspect or quality of something, which will make it an appealing gift for the recipient. Your conscious mind may not be able to see this quality and you will only get a subconscious get a feeling that this would be an appropriate gift.

So you may want to listen to those feelings when considering the purchase of a gift for that special someone.

As you recognize your life to adjust to having a baby, do not forget your own requirement to have some time for yourself, however difficult it may be to schedule. You need private time to be a person in your own right and not only a parent, a homemaker, a spouse, and perhaps an employee.

You need the time to build and maintain the self-esteem that makes you effective in all those roles and effective at being yourself. You need time to exercise, to groom yourself, to read, or to work on a hobby… or to look at sky or water and let your mind wander. Finding this time will probably never be easy for you again, but it will continue to be very important that you do find it. Always look on it not as a luxury or a reward, but as an obligation to yourself.

You won’t always be able to have the hour or more that would do you the most good and be the most enjoyable, but you’ll find that even a few minutes snatched from a busy day will refresh you. If you are a early riser, at your best in the morning, you may enjoy a few minutes of peace and privacy over a cup of coffee or tea before the rest of the family is awake. Your baby’s daytime naps may give you some precious time. Even later, when you may not feel the need to sleep every time your baby does, nap time should be for you, not for housework.

Evening is a wonderful time for a leisurely bath, even for a good read in a warm tub. And evening is probably also the best time for a quiet hour or two for spouses. As important as it is for each to have some solitary time, it is equally necessary for a married couple to spend at least some time together alone.