Summer Travel Safety

It's summer travel time, and as one of TBB's unofficial car safety geeks, I thought it would be a good time to post a few helpful links.

Traveling by car and wondering if your child still needs a booster seat? The helpful certified Child-Passenger Safety Techs (CPSTs) at Carseatblog.com have a nice article on the 5 Step Test (with photos!) that shows you how to determine if your vehicle's seat belt fits your child properly without a booster.

Found that your kids still need boosters but aren't thrilled at the prospect of bringing them on an airplane for use at your destination? Maybe the new (don't laugh at the name) BubbleBum inflatable booster would make your travels easier - check out the review here (thanks again to Carseatblog.com). Or, if your kids are at the well-almost-but-not-quite-ready-for-a-booster stage, the RideSafer Travel Vest is another handy and portable option.

A good overview of airplane travel tips for families with small children can be found here (yes, more Carseatblog.com links):

Airplanes, Carseats, and Kids: What You Need to Know Part 1

Airplanes, Carseats, and Kids: What You Need to Know Part 2

And, if you needed any other reasons to check out Carseatblog.com, there's even a helpful reminder about water safety here with the author's own personal experience of why she needed that reminder herself here

Best wishes for a safe and happy summer travel season!

A Song for our Uninvited 6-legged house guests

Our family has an admittedly peculiar coping mechanism when faced with some exhausting or exasperating event - creating new lyrics to a familiar tune. When our daughters were infants and Christmas was approaching, our late-night soundtrack might feature a solo of "Hark! The Herald Baby Screams" or "What Child Is this, Who Will Not Rest?"

And now that they're elementary schoolers, we have a new set of challenges that occasionally try to drain the laughter out of us, but we're trying to keep our sense of humor intact. Yes, trying to clear our home of head lice is a tedious ordeal of laundering, vacuuming, and "nit-picking" in the most literal sense, but this event won't escape without a commemorative song to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"....

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

We know from the sound of it - it’s something quite atrocious

Giving families ev’rywhere an itchy-scalp neurosis

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

It started as a little itch, a minor irritation

Soon it grew into a source of anguish and frustration

When we checked our childrens’ hair at close examination

We found they were harboring an insect infestation!

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

We know from the sound of it - it’s something quite atrocious

Giving families ev’rywhere an itchy-scalp neurosis

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

The presence of those icky bugs just couldn’t be denied, so

We headed to the drugstore for shampoo insecticide

And crossed our fingers as the goop was carefully applied

Then washed or vacuumed every place we thought that they might hide, oh...

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

We know from the sound of it - it’s something quite atrocious

Giving families ev’rywhere an itchy-scalp neurosis

Super yucky, quite unlucky, bad pediculosis

I've never really felt part of any group or club. I've been in several, but always felt like the outsider or like I was pretending and they would figure it out soon. In high school drama, in business school, or even in the PTA...I've just never really felt part of "it".

Until now. Twin parents are in an automatic group. A club defined by how many children they have. You are either in or out. There is no ambiguity. Which I like. Here's an example of how that effects me.

I was driving home from Los Angeles yesterday with my three kids in the van. We were in one of the boring parts of I-5 somewhere in between the grapevine and no where. I saw a minivan ahead of me. I noticed that it had a sticker on it that said, "Got Twins?" I smiled to myself, while passing it.

Then I remembered I had a pen and some paper with me (to keep the kids entertained in between their Dora episodes) and I wrote, "GOT TWINS TOO!" on it.

I changed lanes and slowed down a bit and as they passed me, I held up my sign to the window and as they drove past, the woman (wife?) in the passenger seat saw it and started smiling and laughing. Then I saw her motioning back to us and pointing. I did the same with my kids and we sat there smiling and pointing and waving to each other for a few minutes.

I didn't know her and she didn't know me and I will probably never see her again, but we were instantly connected and it was a good feeling.

With A Perspective: Raising twins

Someone in the twins club posted this link to an NPR "With A Perspective" about starting a life with twins. It's worth the quick read as it sums it up nicely:
Raising Twins

Are You Smarter Than a Second Grader?

Although I've never thought of myself as a math whiz, I did consider myself to be at least above average, having managed to eke out at least a B in all my math classes up through and including 1 year of college calculus.

And then I started looking at the math homework my second graders are getting. One week, the "Challenge" problem (which comes straight from the Houghton Mifflin "California Math" curriculum) was something like this "The sum of two facing pages of a book is 325. What are the page numbers?"

My first thought: "What's an algebra problem doing in a second grade math homework packet?"

My next thought: "If this is what they get in second grade, I'm not going to be able to help them with math homework for much longer!"

Maybe I'll ask my kids to check the math on our tax returns while they're on spring break this week.

Double or single, you just can't win

One thing all parents of multiples have in common is the attention you get when out and about with twins. Strangers are always coming up to us and making all sorts of comments, the most popular seems to be: "double trouble." It's usually said with a smile and the belief it's so funny because you've probably never heard any one say that to you before.

As my twins got older, I noticed we gradually stopped getting as many twin comments. Maybe it's because it doesn't look as hard to have 3 year old twins as it does to have 3 month old twins, or perhaps because my two are so different in appearance and size now people don't recognize right away that they are twins.

Then recently we started getting comments again. What happened? I've had the opportunity to go out more with just one twin at a time. So instead of the "double trouble" genre of comments, we get: "What happened to the other one?" "Only one??" "Did you loose one?". Every time.

Let it Snow- but not too much :-)

Nature gave us an early Christmas present on Monday morning, December 7: enough snow for the kids to make snowballs and footprints, but not enough to require shoveling or cause any traffic disruptions. Those who live in parts of the country with "real" weather and seasons would probably laugh at the amount of excitement that this little flurry generated (according to one of my girls' teachers, this was the most snow she'd seen in town for 30 years).

Personally, I was glad it happened on a Monday: for once, I didn't have to tell my kids to hurry up and get ready for school. Once they looked out the front window, they were determined to get out and make snowballs before school. I've never seen them eat breakfast and get their shoes and jackets on so quickly!