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.

More Halloween ideas for baby

I think my first set of Halloween ideas is still the best, but I've had a few more ideas for a baby's first Halloween.  Some are more practical than others.  Our son's hair hasn't grown in yet, and this Halloween I want to capitalize on his lack of hair by doing a bald costume.  I've been saying that he could be Pinhead:

Pinhead

But it turns out it's easier to do this with a bald wig, not a bald person.  And I don't know anything about leather-working, so the rest of the costume would be difficult.  They do make it in adult and children's sizes at Spirit Halloween, Halloween Hellraiser Pinhead Adult Costume (Google Affiliate Ad).  They sell a Halloween Lifesize Hellraiser Pinhead Animatronic (Google Affiliate Ad) and a Halloween Pinhead Hellraiser Mask (Google Affiliate Ad) also.  It would be cute for our baby in a psychotic kind of way.

Dr. Evil would make a good costume, with Mini Me:

Replica of Dr. Evil's pinky ring

Dr. Evil and Mini Me

You will need Dr. Evil's pinky ring, and another for your Mini Me.  They sell a Dr. Evil accessory kit with a bald cap and ring that goes for around $20 most places.  I wouldn't give one to my child because of the choke hazard.  I would draw it on baby's finger somehow, that would be safer.


Pennywise the clown from Stephen King's IT would be scary, another inappropriate bald costume for a child:

Pennywise the Clown

I think everyone was scared of this evil magic psychotic clown.  Stephen King is a genius, and I wish I could say I've read more of his books.

How about Uncle Fester?  He's creepy and kooky but not that scary:

Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester

Jackie Coogan from the original TV show

Curly from the Three Stooges would be fun:

Curly

The Three Stooges would be a good group costume theme, and either siblings or adults could play Larry and Moe.  If it's just the baby dressed as Curly people might not recognize the costume, so I wouldn't do this unless we had a group.  It would also be hard for our baby to do Curly's facial expressions, which are fundamental to playing the character.  They sell Moe and Larry masks, but they're a little scary:

There were some other ideas I found like Voldemort or freakout Britney Spears, but Voldemort's nose is far too difficult and there really is no reason to do a bald freakout Britney Spears.

Bald freakout Britney Spears

No nose

I'm sticking with Captain Picard as his costume.  It's a simple, recognizable costume that would allow me to dress as Commander Riker.  It's going to require some sewing, because they don't make baby sized Starfleet uniforms, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Make it so

There's an audio clip from some radio show where the hosts ask Sir Patrick Stewart what he would say to a sewing machine repair person if he had a broken sewing machine, but it's not very satisfying.  I recently discovered that there is a Sesame Street starring Patrick Stewart.  This video is funny if not predictable, but I wonder how many children watching Sesame Street are as well versed in Star Trek as I:

I can't resist one more, Patrick Stewart doing "Soliloquy on B":

6-month doctor's appointment

Today baby had his 6-month checkup.  They measure the circumference of his head, measure his length, and weigh him.  In the past he's been well behaved at the doctor's but I think he's starting to make negative associations with the table you sit on.  He was fine while the nurse measured his length, which is probably the least accurate measurement they take.  The nurse draws a line on the medical paper at the top of his head then tries to hold him straight and measure at his feet.  The problem is, our baby likes to kick and squirm so much it can't be perfect.

To get his weight I strip him down to just his diaper and they take him to the comfort of a freezing cold, stainless steel (with a sheet of medical paper) balance scale.  He immediately starts screaming when he get put on the scale, probably because of the cold.  For the rest of the visit, any time he gets put down, he screams.  The balance requires a minute or two to find the weight, and his squirming and rolling around didn't make it any easier.  Every time he moves and puts force on the tray arm of the scale starts swinging again and the nurse has to adjust again.  If you're unfamiliar with a balance, remind me not to invite you when we need people in an emergency shelter after some apocalyptic cataclysm.  A balance is the most accurate type of scale; other scales rely on a tensioned spring or pneumatics or some other new-fangled method to measure weight, but a balance simply uses a lever to compare two items.  One side has the item to be weighed, and on the other you add weights until the two sides balance.  In the doctor's office the weights are built into the scale.  The fulcrum of the lever is very close to the little weights on the doctor's scale, so it doesn't have to have your exact weight to be in balance.  The little weights proportionally match your weight at whatever ratio the position of the fulcrum dictates.  I'm sure this is all very fascinating.

I didn't mean what I said earlier about the emergency shelter and the apocalypse.  I don't have an emergency shelter, and I'm not expecting the apocalypse.  If I did, I would indiscriminately let as many people in as supplies or the nature of the destruction permit.  Family members have dibs.

I knew at his 6-month appointment he would need some inoculations and of course would be getting a shot.  I didn't know he would need four shots and a vial of some sort.  They told me there is a shortage of the last shot he had, so they would have to give four separate shots instead.  I head from the nurse and the doctor that there was a shortage, then the nurse who gave the shot told me it was because of rationing.  My first thought was that he's not going to like getting four separate shots, and then I thought of the war in Iraq and wondered if the rationing is because of it.  It could just be because of a bad crop of vaccines this year, I have no idea.

He took them pretty well, in part because I think the nurse did a good job giving them.  She gave him two shots in each leg, and didn't give him a chance to squirm away or anything while she did it.  I got to hold him in my lab, which was good, but I had to hold his hands so he didn't hurt himself with them as he was getting the shots.  I didn't know exactly how he could hurt himself with them, maybe by poking himself in the eye or grabbing the needle somehow, but you do what the nurse tells you.

He cried really hard for a minute or two, and I comforted him by rocking and singing to him.  This helped a lot, but he was down to his diaper and falling asleep; it was almost nap time.  I still had to get him dressed and I didn't want to have to wake him up again, and when I put him down to get him dressed that started a whole new round of crying.  Lately he's been crying a little when I've been trying to get him dressed; I think he doesn't want to bother putting on pants and long-sleeve shirts.  He wants to be awake and start playing right away.

He stopped crying shortly after going in his carseat, then went to sleep almost immediately when we got in the car.  I think it's a good strategy to take baby to the doctor a little before nap time.  It might not seem like a good idea, because the baby might be cranky while getting the shots, but they're going to cry no matter what.  This way when the bad stuff goes down the baby is ready to sleep as soon as he is calm.  I'm going to try it again next time and see how it works.  He's got a flu shot next week and the appointment is at about the same time, hopefully it doesn't backfire somehow.

Arsenic in Infant Rice Cereal

On the news two days ago there was a story about elevated levels of arsenic in rice in the United States.      At first I only marginally paid attention to the story; I don't eat that much rice and when I do it's usually at a restaurant.  Also, I have a vague memory of arsenic naturally occurring in rice.  That's why cooked rice smells so bad when it's left unrefrigerated.

We've been feeding our son rice cereal mixed with formula for more than a month now, and he likes eating from a spoon.  It wasn't until the group discussion during today's Scooters Baby class at Isis that I made the connection between his rice cereal and the rice with elevated arsenic.  Actually, some other parents made the connection for me; the class had a brief discussion about the findings.

There was some confusion about which brands were effected and to what extent, and if organic versus non-organic made a difference.  I decided to do some research here on the trusty ol' internet to get to the bottom of things.  I'll provide all the links and sources I used so you can read further or want to check things for yourself.

On September 19th the FDA released a study entitled "Arsenic in Rice," looking at both organic and inorganic arsenic in rice.  Much more informative was another page on the FDA site, "Questions & Answers: FDA’s Analysis of Arsenic in Rice and Rice Products."  Inorganic arsenic is the type that can lead to increased risk of "skin, bladder, and lung cancers, as well as heart disease."  There are types of organic arsenic that can be toxic, but the inorganic types are typically the most toxic.  There is no real difference in arsenic levels between between organic and non-organic rice, according to the FDA.  Looking at the infant rice cereals in the Consumer Reports chart below, however, one can see that many of the organic infant rice cereals have less arsenic than the non-organic.  This International Agency for Research on Cancer monograph has a lot more information about arsenic and other carcinogens, for people who want to learn more and like to read very formal scientific studies.

Arsenic is absorbed into food from the soil and water, and according to the FDA rice absorbs arsenic at an increased rate.  According to Discovery News, "the way rice is cultivated in water-flooded conditions makes it more vulnerable to absorbing arsenic."  The way I understand it is that because rice has the opportunity to absorb arsenic from both the soil and the water, it does so at a higher rate than other grains.

I found the Consumer Reports article to be the most informative, and also the longest.  Consumer Reports provided some explanation as to how elevated levels of arsenic get into our food.  Much of it comes from industrial pollution, and arsenic remains in the environment longer than other substances.  States that used to produce cotton were found to have the most arsenic in the soil because arsenic was heavily used as a pesticide to fight the boll weavle beetle.  The use of arsenic insecticide was banned in the 1980's, but it is still used in animal feed and is present in agricultural soil to this day.  Part of the problem is that arsenic remains in the environment for a long time, even after its use has been discontinued.

Consumer Reports found a lot of variation even within the same brand of infant rice cereal.  We've been feeding our baby the Gerber brand rice cereal, both organic and non-organic.  Some of the samples studied had the lowest overall (organic and inorganic) levels of arsenic within the category, while others had the highest.  You could buy two boxes of the same cereal from the same shelf at the market and they could have very different levels of arsenic.

There is a difference between brown rice and white rice, and when it comes to arsenic white rice is the healthier of the two.  All rice has the husk removed, then white rice also has the outer layers (the bran and germ) removed.  This is what makes brown nice more nutritious because the bran and husk are protein and nutrient-rich.  They also absorb arsenic, so removing them from the rice leaves the rice with less arsenic overall.

The FDA does not recommend that we limit our rice consumption.  They give the standard advice that one shouldn't eat only rice but consume a variety of grains from many sources.  Consumer Reports gives different advice, however, which you can see in the graphic below:

Image from Consumer Reports' article

What can you do about arsenic in your food?  The Consumer Reports site provided a link to a Consumers Union website that allows you to send an e-mail to policymakers, urging them to set limits on arsenic levels in food and to ban the use of drugs containing arsenic in animals' feed.  Based on the logo of Consumers Union, I can safely say they're affiliated with Consumer Reports in some way.

We've switched baby to barley or oat cereal.  Rice contains more nutrients than these other grains, but we're trying to limit baby's exposure to chemicals and toxins as much as possible.  Given what I've learned about the increased absorption of arsenic by rice I think the negative effects outweigh the positive.  Arsenic may be present in barley and oats as well, but these grains should not contain as much as rice.  I have yet to find a study as extensive on the arsenic content of these other grains, but I'll keep looking.

Below find the Consumer Reports table detailing levels of arsenic found in different U.S. brands.  The FDA's tables only make reference to sample numbers and don't identify any brands in particular, probably to avoid any possible litigation that could result from singling anyone out.

Image from Consumer Reports