Daylight savings time for a baby

Daylight savings time is coming up, and in the life of a 6-month old baby an hour's shift can make a big difference.  At least that's what they said at Scooters class at Isis.  I thought I should look into it to start getting baby ready for the change.  Most of what I learned came from one of the Isis sleep webinars, which are totally free through their website.  It's an audio presentation with a series of slides, similar to what I've seen used in some online college courses I've taken.  The webinars are live every Tuesday at noon EST, and very informative.  It's worth checking out.

Daylight savings time effects babies the most when they're between 4 months and two years old; under 4 months a child hasn't yet developed a solid rhythm and older toddlers can handle the change in time better.  If you have an older child you may still want to follow these steps, but the overall transition time can be shorter than a week.

Why is an extra hour of sleep a problem for babies?  The circadian rhythm is a 24 cycle that all living things follow, including plants, animals, fungi, and cyanobacteria.  I learned a lot from the circadian rhythm wikipedia page, including that the name "circadian" comes from the Latin for "around" and "day," so any cycle that follows a 24-hour pattern qualifies as a circadian rhythm.  When the circadian rhythm shifts more than 30 minutes it takes the body a few days to make the shift.  It's a lot like jet lag, but only an hour's worth.  We dealt with jet lag in my very first post, Flying and jet lag with baby, but I didn't think to do any research or try to adjust baby's schedule at all beforehand.  This time we'd like to be ready; waking up for the day at 4am was not a lot of fun.

Start preparing for the change about ten days ahead.  Daylight savings time ends on November 4th, so begin by October 25th or 26th.  You can start earlier, but try not to start later because the point is to make the shift gradually so it's best to give at least a week.  For the first three days, keep your baby in darkness and do very calm, soothing things for 30 minutes to an hour.  The morning shift takes longer for baby to adjust to, so it is important to make sure you're doing all you can to let baby know that it's still time to sleep.  When daylight savings is a week away, begin to push back baby's bedtime 15 minutes at a time.

You want to extend your baby's exposure to light at bedtime slowly to give the baby a chance to adjust.  Start by keeping baby awake 15 minutes longer than his or her regular bedtime for 2 days.  Keep bright lights on for baby during the extended time; natural sunlight helps but as we all know the fall shift makes the days seem painfully short.  Here in Boston the sun will start setting at 4:30pm after the shift, so we'll be using artificial light.

Every two days add another 15 minutes to baby's bedtime.  Try to include your daily activities in the shift; feed baby 15 minutes later, take your walk 15 minutes later, take naps 15 minutes later, take a bath 15 minutes later, do everything you can 15 minutes later right until the end of the night.  This is hard if your child is in day care, but you might ask if your day care has any plans  Expose your child to as much light as you can right up until bedtime.  It'll help baby get the hint.

It may still take up to 10 days for the shift to happen!  It seems like a long time to me for just an hour's change, but that's what the experts say.  When we changed time zones by six hours it didn't take 10 days for baby to go back to normal, but that was also when he was little more than 4 months old so his rhythm probably wasn't established yet.

Really it doesn't matter if you start 10 days before, a week before, or Sunday, November 4th.  The transition will happen on its own, but hopefully this will ease the burden on you.  Your day is going to change by an hour but your schedule is not, so you may want to adopt this technique.  Do what works for you, and remember that if it doesn't go well the clocks will change back in March.

Rody the horse

We had another Scooters Family class at Isis, and in the class they had these fun Rody horse toys.  Your baby sits on the horse facing forward and you let them try to balance.  He moves all over but I keep my hands close to his waist to keep him centered on the horse when otherwise he'd already have fallen to the floor.  It works baby's core muscles and hopefully will help him get the strength and coordination to start sitting on his own.  The toy is supposed to still be fun for a 4 year old, but our 6-month old isn't ready to balance on it by himself yet.  He loves the Rody; he tries to eat the ears and laughs and smiles when I help him bounce on it.

Our Rody is green and blue

Hobbyhorse

It was a bit expensive, and I was sad to see it's cheaper above than what we paid.  It is inflatable, and they did blow it up for us at the store, but I have a bike pump and I'm sure it's not too difficult.


When we described it to my mom she called it a hobbyhorse, an old toy that can be just a stick with a horse head on it.  I think the term applies to any horse shaped toy that a child rides, rocking horses included.  I'd like to try and make my baby a rocking horse, but I always have so many projects I might miss my chance and end up buying one.





This Morris dancer has a hobbyhorse, from the wikipedia page:

Morris dancers along the Thames at Richmond, c. 1620

I only mention it really because of Edmund Blackadder's hatred of Morris dancers.

Big Bird and PBS

Big Bird could be the only thing preventing WWIII

It would be a travesty if PBS and Sesame Street were eliminated.  There's a lot more to Sesame Street than I ever suspected, and I learned most of it from "The American School" by Joel Spring.  As the title might suggest, it is a textbook on American schools; it starts in pre-colonial times and covers through the current era.  It is massive, comprehensive, and dry.  Toward the end I learned that Sesame Street was developed to help students learn some basics for entering school.  Too many children came to kindergarden or first grade not knowing their numbers or ABCs, so by presenting it in a fun way on public television lots of kids learned what they needed from Big Bird.

I am obviously in favor of keeping Big Bird and PBS.  The public owns the airwaves, and having PBS is like having public libraries.  Our priorities are crazy; the amount of money cut would be a minuscule sliver of the entire operating budget of our government.  The next graphic says it well, and I think I've seen a similar one with Big Bird vs war spending:

Big Bird vs Fossil Fuels

Baby's flu shot

Today I took my 6 1/2-month old baby boy to get a flu shot.  He had four shots last week, so I'm not as worried about the actual shot, but there is some controversy surrounding flu shots and if they should be given to infants.  There is also a difference between the shot given to infants and that given to adults.  To top it all off, my wife noticed yesterday that baby's sniffling a little so that could have prevented his getting the flu shot.

It was all business this time, as compared to his 6-month checkup.  The nurse took his weight and his temperature, and the doctor used the stethoscope and checked his ears and throat.  He didn't cry as much as he did last time on the scale; he cried but didn't try to roll around and calmed down quickly afterwards.  The doctor checked listened to his chest with the stethoscope, then when she looked into his ears he cried a little.  She felt his glands under his jaw and looked at his throat.  The doctor was making sure he wasn't already sick before giving the shot.

The flu shot is not a guarantee that the person will not get the flu.  What we get as a flu shot has to be incubated for around a year before there's enough for the population, so each year doctors try and predict what next year's flu strain will be.  They develop a strain of the influenza virus, and kill it.  This is what's injected for an "inactivated" flu shot.  The immune system builds the antibodies to fight the virus, so if later you are exposed to it your body is ready.  There is also a "live, attenuated" way to be vaccinated involving nose spray.  Not for us.

There are several flu shots that are given depending on a person's age and health.  The elderly can get a "high-dose" inactivated vaccine, and infants get a special, no-preservative version.  I'd heard something about mercury and MSG being some of the nastier ingredients that have somehow made their way into flu shots, but I couldn't imagine that a doctor would inject a baby with mercury.  That shot that he was given did not have thimerosal, the preservative in adults' injection.  There is even a wikipedia page about the Thiomersal controversy, with a side note about the spelling.  Thiomersal is the "international nonproprietary name," different from thimerosal (its name in the U.S.).  At one point people believed thiomersal had something to do with increasing autism rates, but rates have continued to increase while infants and children are no longer given thiomersal.  It is a mercury derivative, and it's really best to stay away from mercury.  I might ask that all of his future flu shots be without thimerosal.

When I asked the doctor about thimerosal or thiomersal (I called it "the preservative"), the Doctor said she likes it when people do their homework.  She told me that they don't use thimerosal for babies, but I'm not sure if this is something their practice has decided or a blanket policy for pediatricians.  The best thing to do is ask your pediatrician; if you don't trust the answer you either need to work on your trust issues or a pediatrician that's not as sketchy.

There are people who don't believe in flu shots with or without thimerosal.  I'm sure there are lots of different reasons.  People who want their child's immune system to develop naturally, people who think the vaccine will give their baby the flu, people who believe the government puts mind-control drugs in the flu shot, alien super-virus, you name it.  Here's an interesting site with 10 Immune Boosting Flu Shot Alternatives.  I don't usually get a flu shot, probably because I think it's better to let the immune system work on its own.  But modern medicine does have some good vaccines for babies, so we're opting to have our child vaccinated.

The nurse and the doctor both asked if we thought baby was allergic to eggs; apparently that can be a problem with the flu shot.  We're supposed to watch for any bumps or redness on his leg where he got the shot, like with any injection.  We're also supposed to watch for fever, and I would guess that we give him tylenol if he does develop a fever.  The nurse asked if we had a tylenol dosing chart, I think she said tylenol rather than acetaminophen.  She told me that a fever was 100.5° for a baby, then immediately asked if I had a tylenol dosing chart.  I took that to mean give him tylenol if he goes over 100.5°.  The Colorado Children's Hospital tells all about what temperature is dangerous at what age, and I wouldn't start calling the doctor until he got to 102°.  Taking his temperature isn't fun either; when the time comes I'm sure I won't want to do it.

We don't have this exact thermometer, but it gets its reading from the same place:

He was a trooper again after the shot.  He cried hard at first but with my rocking and his pacifier he calmed down pretty quickly.  He does pretty well after shots, at least compared to the screams you hear in the halls of the pediatrician's office.  I hugged him and rocked him and before the nurse left he stopped crying.  When he turned to look at the nurse, however, he started crying again, maybe he's learning to associate her with the pain of the needle.  He's past the point of no return with the pacifier; someone told us that at around 6 months they become more attached to the pacifier if you don't take it away.  We haven't taken it away.  Now it helps him get to sleep at night, feel better after a shot, calm him down on a car ride, or buy us a few minutes if he's fussing for some reason.  I'll look into pacifiers more for a future post.

The CDC has a Q&A page about the flu shot, but it's mostly about adult flu shots.  It may still help to answer any questions you have, so check it out.

Here's another article from Forbes Magazine on a recent Congressional hearing on immunizations.  The article is very pro-immunization, and has the same air of know-it-allism that it accuses several congressional representatives of.  It's a big issue, and I'm sure it won't be resolved any time soon.