Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Four Non-Safety Related Reasons to Leave your Child's Carseat Rear Facing


I have long been a proponent of extended rear facing for my girls car seats.  There are lots of great resources online that support the benefits of extended rear facing and the American Academy of Pediatric recommends that you leave your child rear facing until at least 2 years old.  My goal for my girls was rear facing until 4 yeas old.  My oldest will be 4 later this month but a few weeks ago we noticed that she had hit the height limit for her seat so we decided to turn her around.  After a few weeks of having her rear facing I noticed that there are actually benefits to rear facing that are not safety related and so I wanted to share four of them today.

Seat Kicking


One of the first things I noticed when we turned my daughter around was that she can now easily kick the seat in front of her. This kicking can come from random feet wiggling, angry kicking or kicking just to annoy mommy.  While rear facing the only seat they can kick is their own :).

Seat Sharing

I have daughters that are only 17 months apart and very close in size so it has always been a benefit that they can use the car seats interchangeably.  Some days one wants the pink seat, some days they both want the cow seat so we play car seat roulette.  I also like that if I only have one child with me I can put them in either seat.  With one forward facing and one rear facing now we can't share seats :).

No More Sneaking Snacks

With both of my girls rear facing, as long as I eat quietly and don't slurp any drinks they are none the wiser to my snacking.  Now there is no way I can give them apple slices and eat a doughnut without my forward facing daughter noticing the inequality and announcing it to the whole car!  This bring ups the dilemma of no doughnuts for everyone or giving them a doughnut too (note that munchkins can be individually purchased, this has solved the problem so far).  It also really adds on to the guilt of everything I eat or drink in the car if you have someone always asking "what is that you are eating/drinking?".

Back Seat Driver


Now that my daughter can see where we are going instead of where we have been I have a mini back seat driver.  She knows that red means stop and green means go and will call me out if I sit at a green light for too long before advancing.  She also likes to announce to everyone else in the car (namely her sister that can't see) things that are going on or how I should be doing things.  She is pulling off the "three-nager" designation perfectly.



Well there you have four very good reasons to leave your child rear facing as long as possible.  If the safety reasons for rear facing don't have you convinced maybe a few more months of eating your doughnut in peace will :). 

 
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Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Good News and Bad News

Today I am excited to share some of the exciting things going on for the Naturally Crafty Mom.  The title of course says good news and bad news but really they are both good news ;).  



The Bad News


I started this blog over 2 years ago when I was testing diapers for my newborn.  I am very analytical and just using the diapers wasn't enough for me so I decided to track how everything went so that I could decide which diapers we should buy.  Of course this lead to my obsession with trying out new diapers and creating this blog to share my results (see a full listing of my diaper trails here).  The "BAD NEWS" is that my "baby" has potty trained in the last month and therefore can't try out diapers for me!  I am so proud of her for learning to use the potty so well that I don't really consider it bad news but packing up my 80+ diapers was a little sad.  Thankfully I am still using diapers on her for naps and night time so diaper laundry isn't completely gone but it's not as much fun when you don't get to look at all of your pretty diapers all of the time.  The associated good news is that my sister has volunteered to take over the diaper testing for the time being so my 18 month old niece will be testing all of the diapers for a while.  



The Good News

The good news is that in just a few short months there will be another Naturally Crafty Baby to try out diapers!!!  We are so exciting to be expecting our third child in early January.  We had our 21 week sonogram last week and everything looks great so far, so we are thrilled.  Like our first two children we do not find out the gender before birth so we can't wait to see if #3 is a boy or girl.

I have already begun purchasing newborn diapers to try out and I look forward to sharing the results.  This will be my first baby that I have cloth diapered from birth so it will be exciting to see how that goes and share any tips and tricks I come across along the way.  



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