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Push Walkers: A True Must Have

Of all the elaborate baby toys that found their way to my house, it was the push walker that we loved the most. The first in our household was fiercely opposed to being on his belly and crawled only if forced. He much preferred to be upright, cruising around looking to see what he could see. He could pull up from an early age and got cruising down pretty well. The baby walker had some use, but was limited to the tile floors. However the push walker gave him the freedom and independence he was seeking.

Push Walkers
The traditional walker has a seat in the middle of four wheels. Baby kicks his legs and the whole contraption moves around. The push walker is more like a small lawnmower, but in a sturdy triangular design. Baby either pulls up using the handle at the top is helped up by Mom or Dad. Once he’s upright and holding that handle, he can push the triangular walker in front of him as he walks anywhere he wants. The best thing about the walker is that he is truly walking and not just swishing his feet the way he would to move in the old fashioned walkers.

Push walkers are hard for baby to get figured out, and not every baby is comfortable with the push walker, but most thrive on the independence of it. A baby that seems close to walking on his own, but can’t get there yet is a perfect candidate for the push walker. He can use the walker as a bridge between the couch, where he can likely pull up and other exciting venues like rooms that had usually been off limits and the dog, who is often terrorized by the fast moving soon-to-be toddler behind the wheels.

Considerations of Push Walkers
The push walker is only used for a relatively short period of time in that first year. Baby won’t be old enough to really use it until close to nine months and will be done with it most likely by the time he’s taking his first steps on his own. For this reason, most push walkers double as something else. One variety folds down into a push bike. Others have toys and moving parts on the front that a sitting baby can play with before she can grab the handle and get moving. One I’ve seen recently is shaped like a shopping cart and another like a very sturdy doll stroller for toddlers to enjoy.

Push walkers are priced affordably, but you don’t need a particularly elaborate one. Look for a push walker that’s inexpensive without having too many bells and whistles. After all, you probably have plenty of other toys that are similar to the ones on the toy-based walkers.

Also, if you have a house full of tile and hardwood flooring, a push walker will be a challenge to use. The walker is four wheels on a triangular base. When those little plastic wheels hit tile or hardwood, they will likely go faster than your baby can. If this is the case in your home, look for ways to give the wheels more traction, such as large bands around the wheels or use the push walker only in rooms with carpet.

Push walkers are available from all baby retailers starting around $25.

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Disposable Placemats

I wish they’d been out when I was dealing with finger food drama, but if they were I was simply unaware of them. My sister, however, is spot-on with the latest in restaurant simplification techniques. When you take a baby to a restaurant who eats primarily finger foods, you have to put those foods down on something. Typically restaurants offer you a suspect table top, a flimsy napkin or a glass plate. None are ideal for the typical adventuresome toddler. Enter the disposable place mat.

The Disposable Placemat
There are a few different manufacturers who create disposable placemats, but the premise is the same regardless of brand. The placemat has a sticky tab at the top and sometimes at the bottom to hold the mat in place, and the mat itself is a lightweight sheet of paper coated in plastic.

To use the disposable placemat, you peel off the stickers, stick it to the tabletop in the restaurant and, just like that, you have a perfect work surface for your little one. The disposable place mat stays in place, provides a very large surface for the baby, and gives you a clean place to put food items that can’t be thrown onto the floor or picked up and dumped into a lap. The disposable placemat is bigger than baby’s reach in most cases and stays put. At the end of the meal, fold it up and leave it with the other paper trash at the table to be thrown away. The meal is neater for you, your baby and the server.

Drawbacks to the Disposable Placemat
The biggest problem with something like a disposable placemat is that it’s never there when you need it. The placemats that aren’t folded up into small squares are hard to take along and it’s easy to forget even the most convenient placemat if you’re not used to grabbing it as you walk out the door. The best bet to overcome this is to put a small handful of the placemats in with the diapers in your purse or diaper bag. That way the placemats are on hand and ready when you need them. You’ll just need to remember to restock when you use one.

Disposable placemats are available at baby retailers starting for less than $10 for a pack of 18.

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Huggies Overnights Diapers – A Bed and Sleep Saver

As the mother of two little boys, it became quickly evident that having the right fit and absorbency in diapers could make a huge difference in how well we all slept at night. My oldest slept on his back, and still does, leaving diapers prone to leaking out down the back and down the legs. He’s woken up in a puddle with the back of his shirt soaked countless times. The youngest is the opposite – sleeping on his front and leaking up the front of the diaper and often winding up soaked from his neck down.

With heavy wetters and heavy sleepers, I needed a powerful diaper for nights. My first step was to simply change diapers in the middle of the night to try and keep them dry while they slept. A dream change rather than a dream feed – although they usually woke up and then wanted to drink more milk or water anyhow. But eventually I stumbled upon an online recommendation for Huggies Overnights and I was hooked.

Huggies Overnights
The purple pack of diapers looks like a pack of regular diapers, but picking up the actual diaper inside the pack lets you feel a bit of the difference. The overnight diaper is thicker and feels a bit heavier. That’s because it has more absorbency in it than traditional diapers. By my completely unofficial and unscientific approximation, the overnight diaper can hold almost twice as much urine during the night as the traditional diaper – and it kept my boys dry all night long.

The bulky overnight diaper isn’t ideal for crawling or racing through the house, although it’s not that much bigger than a traditional diaper, but it is noticeably bulkier. But once little ones go to bed, both the front and back of the diapers are heavily lined with moisture absorbing inner gel. The diapers are not gender specific, so they can catch urine from any direction, it seems. And best of all, they worked. The boys didn’t feel wet and we all got more sleep.

On the rare nights that I’d run out of Huggies Overnights, I’d dig out a regular diaper for bedtime and not surprisingly, I’d get a 2am call to change sheets and pajamas. I learned quickly to avoid running out of the diapers although we don’t need as much protection now as we seemed to back then – less to drink during the night is part of the solution, I’m sure.

But for roughly the same price as regular diapers with twice the absorbency for nights, I’d recommend every parent keep a pack on hand next to the pajamas. It’s amazing the difference a diaper can make in a good night’s sleep. Huggies Overnights start around $20 in certain grocery and baby stores.

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The Girlfriends Guide to Pregnancy

I’m a reader, especially when it comes to pregnancy and what to expect and then on to the years of motherhood when surprises are hurled at you around every corner it seems. But of all the books I read, one of the most informative was one that wasn’t written by an expert in anything except the trials of motherhood.

Vicki Iovine makes no bones about her working mommy time in a legal career as well as her comfortable lifestyle, although she doesn’t flaunt them. Regardless of her lifestyle, Vicki is absolutely refreshing as one of the most blatantly honest and upfront pregnancy and parenting writers out there. The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy and subsequent books take the reader through the entire pregnancy experience in a fun, light-hearted way that tends to fill in the gaps left behind by the more medical renditions of pregnancy.

The Girlfriend’s Guide
Easily one of the most informative books, I ever read, Vicki doesn’t use vague phrases to describe vague things that leave you more confused about what’s happening in your head or to you’re body – she’s upfront about every body change, every appetite change and every emotional neurosis she experienced. Not only does she include her own experiences, she uses her huge network of friends to broaden the experience to many other mothers who have had similar experiences.

While the Girlfriend’s Guide would never take the place of a medical book of what to expect during pregnancy, it serves as a paperback support network of things you want to know, even if they aren’t the things you want to hear. It’s real life, it’s raw, it’s hilarious and it’s extremely helpful when you’re looking ahead into a pregnancy with the idealized version of things in every other book around you.

Using the Girlfriend’s Guide
While you can look up various sections in the book, the guide is more of a chapter book you can read cover to cover to learn about all kinds of various things during your pregnancy. As you approach the end of the pregnancy, you can jump into her next book, the Girlfriend’s Guide to the First Year before moving on to the Girlfriend’s Guide to Toddlers and the Girlfriend’s Guide to Getting Your Groove Back. Iovine is also alleged to be working on the Girlfriend’s Guide to Teenagers, which will be warmly welcomed after her other terrific books.

Vicki’s books can be purchased for under $15 from many book retailers.

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Toss Spill Proof Cups

With two little ones growing up, we’ve gone through a lot of sippy cups. My oldest was pretty picky about his cups for awhile, but only because he gave up the bottle at ten months, but as he and then my younger son moved off the bottle and into the realm of sippy cups, the cheapest and the most available has most certainly become our favorite.

Take & Toss Spill Proof Cups
I’ll readily admit that we are hard on cups. The breakfast cup with milk will get hidden by the couch for a few days before discovery and the cups of water travel around in the car for more than a week before rolling out from under the seats again, which is what makes the Take & Toss cups so perfect for us. They are cheap, and they can be used quite a few times before needing to be replaced.

When we used the cups with the valves, there were far fewer leaks, but there were also many incidences of lost or melted valves and a few special orders placed online to replace the valves since they don’t seem to sell them in store anymore. The Take & Toss cups don’t have valves. They don’t have insulation and they don’t have any frills, although you can get them with pictures of cartoon friends for a bit more.

Simple and Ready to Go
The Take & Toss cups are truly simple. There is a formed thin plastic spout on the interchangeable lids and a simple plastic cup with a rolled lip. The lid snaps onto the rolled lip and stays put rather nicely. The cup does leak a bit when turned upside down or shaken, but fluid doesn’t pour out of the three holes on the top of the spout.

Because there is no valve baby and toddler don’t have to work as hard to get the fluids out of the cup, and the spout is a natural form for the mouth. The best part of the Take & Toss cups is how easily they are lost and replaced.

When a cup is deemed too gross to wash after being left in the yard overnight, it gets thrown away. When a lid cracks from little boys testing their teeth on it, the lid is thrown out and plenty more in the cabinet still fit the cup. If I need to restock, I can do so for less than $5 and get three or more cups from any grocery, drug or baby store.

Growing with Take & Toss
The Take & Toss cups are still very much in use with my four-year-old, although not the sippy version. The cups stay the same as children age, but the lids change. The preschooler uses the straw lid. The lid is simply the same plastic fit but with a small hole punched through making it great for holding regular drinking straws – a safer way for the older kids to drink without have all the juice in the glass exposed to the carpet.

Looking back in time, my infant was able to drink from the smaller versions of the cups that actually come with special handle rings that snap over the lids to hold them in place through all the drama of a baby first learning to drink. That handle ring can be used on the small or large cups as all of the pieces are interchangeable. Outside of a few leaks, these cups are a terrific deal at the price.

First Years Take & Toss Spill Proof Cups are available just about anywhere for around $5.

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Activity Centers for Babies

Most activities centers are given the same name by parents – exersaucers, even though that is technically the brand name for one version of activity centers. The activity center is designed to do two things – replace the walkers of old and to help baby find way to play sitting up.

The Exersaucer (And Other Activity Centers)
With few exceptions, activity centers are a cloth seat in the center of a circle. The circle is filled with all kinds of toys and activities for babies to play with and the seat in the center turns as she “walks” with her feet. Some of the exersaucers also have a bowl shaped bottom to rock and turn for added fun. Stationary or rocking, the baby sits in the center of the activity center and plays with all of her favorite toys kept directly in reach.

The low seat of the exersaucer helps her to sit upright even before she can really do it well on her own which makes the exersaucer especially great for the baby who hates to miss anything and is easily frustrated by the prone positions. The legs of the exersaucer expand as baby grows so that her feet and legs fit properly. She’ll be sitting correctly when the balls of her feet touch the base without bending her knees.

Praise for the Activity Center
Activity centers replaced the mobile walkers and gave babies a safe place to play that wasn’t in a playpen or regular infant seat. The exersaucer can be nicely educational as well depending on the sorts of games and activities present. Babies who need a bit more activity tend to love the exersaucer for the stimulation it presents, although it should be used in reasonable amounts.

Concerns for an Activity Center
The activity center should be an opportunity for your child to be enriched and play. It can also fill in for a seat if you need one for some basic snacks or even meal time, but it is not an area where baby should be for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Babies can learn a bit from an exersaucer if the games are thing that involve developing skills, such as moving beads and turning pages, but if your child is only smacking a button to make the lights go, her time is better spent elsewhere.

Being in the exersaucer for long periods of time will also hamper her physical development in the areas of crawling, but it can aid in her balance and core strength as she struggles to sit up on her own and reach for areas of interest.

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