That’s right!  You should always restrict good foods.  Of course, by good foods I mean foods your toddler actually enjoys.  It’s pretty safe to say that your toddler isn’t going to love the foods that are good for them!  Besides, even if he turns out to love carrots, he’s going to get enough of them, so rather then blindly give into your baby’s desires for the foods he prefer, instead limit all foods he loves in effort to balance his diet.

When you know your baby has had a complete days worth of nutrition, this is the time to allow your baby to indulge in his favourites.  It’s the – dessert after having eating all the good foods his body requires to function properly.  By the way, a child how’s getting the right nutrition from his foods is far less likely to snack and overeat.  Have you ever really thought about what foods are typically found at all-you-can-eat restaurants?  Usually, it’s foods such as wings, Chinese food buffets, pasta and breads, pizza and salty snacks (at least this is a food we can often consume endlessly), and the like.  These foods are completely devoid of nutrition which permit us to gorge on them.  Having a well balanced diet turns off the hunger sensors in your brain, inhibiting you from wanting to eat more foods – so you stop.  Calorie dense foods are great for gorging, but do nothing to make the hunger go away.  So instead of feeling healthy after eating, we grow accustomed to feeling stuffed!  It’s the stuffed feeling that is swapped out for feeling satisfied as we age.

Your child is in a great position to accept your dietary influence now that you understand this fact.  So instead of allowing your child to gorge on white flour items like pasta, bread, pastries, balance out all meals.  Make sure your toddler is getting their nutrition first and adjust things accordingly.  So if your baby picks evenly across his plate to each food group, veggie, starch, meat, then you’re good to go.  But if your baby rarely eats his veggies, you’re going to have to figure out a strategy.  You might consider stopping snacking or offering veggies as snacks.  You might introduce veggies first before he has a chance to eat any other more preferred foods.  You might make sure he’s truly hungry before sitting him down for a meal.  If a child is not hungry, they’ll simply eat as an obese person does – high calorie foods with low density nutrition.  Remember that if your toddler isn’t really hungry, he’s just gorging and in most cases, your toddler isn’t attuned or communicative enough to tell you about his feelings (hunger not excepted).  Lastly, I wanted to mention dessert.  For our family, dessert is something that follows a well balanced meal.  We offer fruits for dessert in most instances, but sometimes offer pastries.  If you stick to it and offer just good desserts, your baby isn’t going to know the difference between store bought processed foods and the sugar he’ll find in apples, bananas, oranges and berries.  While fruits are packed with sugars, they at least contain vitamins that the body needs.

Balancing a toddler’s meals is not easy and does take some effort and practice, not to mention a significant amount of strategizing so be patient and play around with various variables and preparation methods until you figure things.  And by all means never replace good calories for bad and never think your baby is starving himself, he’s not, no baby with food in front of him will go hungry so stick to your guns!

We gave the cloth diapers a serious shot, but they failed to meet our expectations.  Our honest bias was to use organic cotton reusable diapers.  We paid a mint for them and paid for them again once we washed them and again when they failed.  I’m not going to name any specific brands or paint all cloth diapers with that same brush.  What I will do is provide our opinion on cloth, take it for what’s it’s worth!

In the early weeks your baby is likely to pee and poo fairly infrequently.  However, in most cases your baby’s poo is going to be black and tarry.  It’s pretty gross stuff and is from swallowing amniotic fluid in the womb.  At this time, don’t use clothe because that stuff is nasty to wash out!  In most cases, your clothe diapers probably wont fit anyway since your baby is going to be pretty small at this time.

Next, your baby will fall into a pretty regular albeit frequent schedule of peeing and then pooing once the feeding schedule gets going.  Again, this stuff is going to be nasty and very much unlike adult poos, but luckily enough, not nearly as repulsive.  We did okay at this time with our organic diapers, but did develop a smell in nasty smell in them after soaking them in water to try to get the stains out.  We learned to never let diapers sit in water to soak!  Rinse with a spray nozzle in a laundry tub and wring out until you are ready to wash.  If you wait too long your diapers will start to mould.  When you wash use hot water and powerful blaster to shoot the poo off.  You can try to wash them in hot and 2 cold washes, but then you’ll get poo all in your washing machine.  This brings me to my next point.  It takes a lot of water to clean these things out.  After you got some semi clean diapers, put them out on the line to bake in the sun and kill the bacteria and smell.  If you can’t do this, consider not investing in diapers at all!  Try baking the crap out of them in the dryer.  This might have a decent result.

Once your baby turns 6 months and real foods come into play, watch out!  Now your baby’s poos are going to get nasty.  Have fun!  Invest in a metal spoon (kitchen variety) and scoop the poo out into the trash before even trying to spray them off!  If you are lucky, you’ll get some solid poos that tumble off into the toilet without help.  Next, follow the 3 wash routine, cold, hot, cold or some variation.  I was told not to wash in hot first – I’m not sure why.

After about a years worth of use, watch your organic cotton being to disintegrate and stretch so that poo leaks out the bottom.  Besides this, they can’t hold nearly enough pee for a toddler and so expect your guy to wake up wet up to his chest!  This is when we gave up and switched to disposables.

While we fully intended to stick to clothe, we couldn’t for sanitary reasons.  At over $18 a pop, we probably lost money given the fact that we needed to wash them 3 times.  We should also factor in the pain in the ass the diapers where to clean by hand – all that extra labour, their maintenance, not to mention the mess.

We did have one polyester brand cloth diaper and it seemed to hold up pretty good.  I’m not sure how it would stand up to my son’s pees nearing two years, but I would consider given them a shot.  I will say for certain that I wouldn’t bother with the organic cotton.  While it’s nice to have something free of pesticides (so the company says), it’s not as if your child is going to be isolated from polyester for his entire life anyway.  As they say, if you can’t beat’em, join ‘em!

Yeah, it’s totally possible!  Take it from a friend of ours, a teacher taking time off to raise her two boys.  She and my wife recently had a conversation about her son who was board to tears – in kindergarten!  She figured she was doing the right thing by teaching him to count, the alphabet, and started him on reading.  She discovered something totally different when she put her kid in school.

Despite being something parents would have done not long ago, teaching their kids the basics, today’s parents instead, wait for a “specialist” to take over.  We employ specialists to do everything for us, from hem our clothing, to clean our houses, to preparing our foods (processed store-bought).  In fact, the list of people we employ is as endless as there are professions.

The average parent figures that it’s the schools job to educate their children.  I’ve even heard parents make complaints about how little their children learn at school and how they don’t learn the basics about life there.  What?!?  Since when is teaching your child how to do basic things someone else’s job?  From a teacher’s perspective, kids come to school not even knowing how to catch a ball, any of their basic letters or shapes, sometimes not even potty trained!  Some kids are coddled to the point where they can barely function productively and have routine meltdowns during the first few months of class until they figure out it’s not tolerated.  Surprisingly, these kids are ready and able to take instruction.  In fact, for the most part, they far too ready and their parents have missed their hunger for learning.

This blog entry has a dual purpose.  For one, you shouldn’t over-teach your children before they get to school.  Why?  Because he’ll be turned off by school.  He’ll suffer from the stress that comes with trying to tolerate misbehaved children coupled with the shear boredom from a lack of challenge as he waits for his classmates to catch up.  The story from our friend was that her son would show signs of stress when the other children couldn’t even sit still or would run around like savages.  Parents of children today should fully expect to be immersed in an environment full of both well behaved children and exceedingly poorly behaved children.  There will be some middle ground, but for your well-behaved and learned child, it won’t matter much.  An overachiever may be looked at in just a poor a light as an underachiever.  It’s always the middle ground kids who win because they are what the lessons tailored for. I should also add that in far more instances, even underachieving children and especially challenged children are included in the classroom.  These kids usually have an extra teachers add to help them along.  However, in a lot of cases they can disrupt classrooms.  I won’t make a judgment either way, it’s just something that you should be aware of as you prepare your child for the real world.

What you can do?  Simple, focus on the basics and refrain from getting too far advanced.  What’s the point in pushing your child so far ahead that they become stressed about school.  If your toddler wants to learn, by all means do so, and make learning a part of play, but also factor in the above stated pitfalls.  Focus on the basics such as sitting calmly to read or listen to music, tying their laces and putting on their jacket, potty training, letters and numbers, but probably not reading (unless you really, really want to).

If your child is already ahead you can always consider moving your child ahead a grade, but I wouldn’t recommend this, or you can also teach your child at home where you can both experience a more personal pace of learning (which will be faster by the way).  Lastly, you might consider private schools, although these are expensive.

So while you might be gung-ho to turn your child into a super learner, I would strongly consider what avenue you wish to take.  While your intensions will be nothing but genuine, your efforts might backfire and do more harm than good.

Many people are unclear about what it really means to be a parent.  I for one, never really understood the full scope of the operation until I was deeply immersed into my second year as a Dad.

For one, I assumed I would be able to take my toddler on small construction jobs with me and toss him in a play-pen.  Boy was I off!  I ended up spending alternating days one-on-one with my boy instead.

If there’s any one piece of advice I would give to new parents, is to expect to be a glorified assistant to your baby.  You might think you’re doing much more than this (and you are), but if you really boil it down, you’re just doing things that your baby can’t do yet.  You will feed your baby when he can’t coordinate his arms or reach the stove, you’ll change his diapers when he can’t figure out how to use the toilet, you’ll dress your baby until he can coordinate his clothes and on and on and on.  You’ll also love your baby unconditionally such that he grows to care for others and himself.

As your baby ages, he’ll take on more and more jobs on himself allowing you to become more free of your facilitator status.  As the years pass, your child will mature and in a flash, will want to prove he’s a different person than you.  Puberty.  Then he’ll experiment, go to school, travel and try to find a new niche.  All along you’ll have less responsibility and control over what your baby does.

One day, your baby will be gone, only to revisit on occasion when his life isn’t too hectic.  Sometimes your baby will call, and sometimes he’ll bring you another baby of his own to love.

But while you’re thick into parenting, remember, that your job is short-lived.  It won’t last forever, and your job isn’t to do for your baby, to serve him, but rather to facilitate him doing things for himself.  Parenting seems complex, but it can be boiled down to the basics.

By doing so, you can keep your and his evolution in perspective and appreciate every moment.