September 17th, 2010
By Whitney
Safety is clearly our number one concern when it comes to our children, and this starts from the moment we are expecting them. Parents may be totally overwhelmed with information about the various threats to their children’s well-being, so we hope that sharing this information will not result in you lying awake tonight pondering the dangers of being alive. It just seemed like a good time to do a round-up of some helpful information that you may not have come across yourself.
- Breast pump care – if you are using a pump, make sure to keep the parts clean and sterilize when possible. Bacteria in milk are no good. If you’ve tossed the manual that came with the pump, find it online and read up on how to take care of your pump properly.
- Safe sleep tips for babies. Make sure you are following all the guidelines to reduce SIDS. It’s not hard to do, but recommendations change. Here’s a recent video
- Stay up-to-date on issues surrounding BPA and other chemicals in your environment with Healthy Child Healthy World. (Liking them on Facebook makes it easy to stay informed.)
- 7 Days To A Safer Home – this step-by-step plan from UL will give peace of mind to families who follow it.
Tags: baby, mother, Safety, UL
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August 20th, 2009
By Whitney
My husband has had the same cell phone number for 10 years. You can imagine how surprised I was when I began to dial his cell phone number from my home phone one day and couldn’t remember the order of the digits. Why did I suffer this memory loss? Two minutes earlier, my 4-year-old son had run full speed ahead into a doorway and was now cradled in my arms, bleeding profusely from the forehead. And my cell phone was acting wonky. And my two-year-old was clinging to my leg. And my home phone is not programmed with speed dial numbers because, well, I have a cell phone that does that.
So there I was, carrying my bleeding kid around the house, searching for a scrap of paper on which I may have written my husband’s cell phone number for a babysitter, cursing myself for having not kept it on the fridge like I did when my son was first born and my habits were more safety conscious.
Safety tip #1: Do not rely on memory or technology for phone numbers. Use the old-fashioned method of posting critical information on the fridge.
Later that week, as I repeated this now funny anecdote to some other moms as we sat waiting for our children’s swimming lessons to end, our conversation turned to 9-1-1. I had not forgotten the conveniently short number 9-1-1 during the head-bleeding incident. But, I knew that the wound I was dealing with, which required one stitch across the eyebrow, did not merit a 9-1-1 call. (I had lost my memory, but not my mind.)
When I have called 9-1-1 in the past, I told the other moms, I have waited a long time for my call to be answered. Also, a 9-1-1 call placed from a cell phone may not be identifiable to the call center in terms of location. The call is picked up by the nearest cell tower and then dispatched to the appropriate local law enforcement agency. If you are in a true emergency and call 9-1-1 from your cell, be sure to provide your location clearly.)
Safety tip #2: Look up your local police dispatch phone number and program it into your phone. Use “9-1-1”as the contact name to force your electronic address book to list it first.
Tags: babysitter, cell, home, mom, mother, phone, police, Rookiemoms.com, Safety, UL
Posted in Safety | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2009
We are Heather Flett and Whitney Moss and we’ll be your hostesses on this blog. We both live in Berkeley, CA and we both have two children. Since becoming moms, we struggle to balance keeping everyone safe with having fun. This blog will explore some of the many aspects of safety as we face it in our everyday lives. We hope you’ll join us and help make this blog a dialogue that we can all learn from.
We write another blog together at RookieMoms.com and just published our first book, The Rookie Mom’s Handbook.
We love hot chocolate, comfortable shoes, and the television show Lost, but that’s where the similarities end. Now we need to stop using “we” and introduce ourselves separately.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: baby, Berkeley, blog, California, children, daughter, environment, Heather, Heather Flett, mom, mother, Rookie, Rookiemoms.com, Safety, son, UL, Whitney, Whitney Moss
Posted in Events, Holidays, Kids, Safety | 7 Comments »
