The Happy Mother

Teaching your children healthy eating habits from an early age on will give them several significant benefits throughout their lives, especially while they’re still growing and developing.  Perhaps the biggest benefit they’ll receive is the ability to maintain a healthy weight.  These days, one of the biggest health issues facing children and adults alike is obesity.  And while there are many factors besides diet that contribute to obesity and being overweight, overeating and eating unhealthy foods are two of the most common factors.  Obesity is a major risk factor for many common health issues that arise later on in life, such as diabetes and heart disease.

If you aren’t sure where to start, consider visiting a registered dietitian to get recommendations for your child’s specific nutritional needs.  This is especially true for children that have specific medical conditions that restrict the types of foods they can eat, like food allergies or digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).  A professional will be able to give you all the information you need to build a healthy and easy diet plan.

However, even if you aren’t able to visit a nutritionist, you can still help encourage healthy eating habits with your child.  One thing that all parents should be focusing on when it comes to improving their child’s diet is fat intake.  By increasing the amount of low-fat foods and decreasing the foods that are high in saturated fat, you can easily improve the overall benefits of your child’s diet.

Tips for Getting Your Children to Eat Healthy

One thing you can do to encourage your children to start eating healthy is to make sure that there’s an abundance of healthy food choices available in your house.  It’s also important to teach your children to eat slowly.  Research has shown that it takes at least 20 minutes for the stomach to begin to send signals that it’s full, so eating more slowly is an effective way to discourage overeating.

Another thing that can help parents who are trying to get their children to eat healthy foods is to make sure they have set meal times.  This can be extremely helpful when trying to ensure that your children aren’t eating unhealthy snacks and other foods outside of set meal times.  This will also allow you to better keep track of the foods your children are eating.

Allowing your children to be involved in the grocery shopping process has also proven to be quite effective.  Letting your children choose the foods they want from a selection of healthy choices will make it much easier to get them to buy into the new diet than just trying to get them to eat foods you’ve chosen without their approval.  You can also take this time to teach them to read food labels, so that they’ll know what to look for later in life.

All parents that have had difficulty trying to make the shift to healthier foods will definitely be able to benefit from these techniques.  However, the most important thing you can do is to start the process of encouraging healthy eating early so that it becomes a routine your children can carry on into adulthood.

Before it ever occurs to you to buy your first pregnancy test, you have a sneaky suspicion something is going on with you. The funny thing, well you will think it’s funny when you look back on it, is that there were so many clues. In fact you can’t believe you didn’t figure it out much sooner. At least a lot sooner than when you had that first “oh my God” moment. 

You would think that getting up to pee in the middle of the night, every night, for the last two weeks would have caused red flags. It did not, mostly because you were half asleep and just going with the flow. Feeling extremely hungry didn’t get too much of your attention either, it seems. That one was easy to explain to yourself. It was the weather. Everybody knows appetites can be affected by changes in the temperature outside. So what if you were too tired to even think about doing anything outside for the last couple of weeks. Your body knew. What did, kind of, get you thinking was how freakishly sensitive your breasts were feeling day after day. How many hours did you spend wondering about that one? You lost track because you have just been so darn forgetful lately. Any of these events happening independently would mean, pretty much, nothing. These events taking place two weeks before you look at your calendar and realize you are three days late on your period, has you frozen. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion.  The strange phenomenon of days, just past, starts flashing before your eyes. You think you may faint, but you can’t. You don’t even know if you can. But you really feel like it.

As you sit on the cold tile floor of the bathroom waiting for the results of the pregnancy test you are not sure if you should be happy or scared. You are both. You time the test with the precision of a countdown to a missile launch. When you see both lines telling you, that yes you are definitely pregnant, no doubt about it, you run out and go buy a few more tests, just in case these were somehow tampered with. One large coffee and three tests later, you decide that the pregnancy test was accurate, and not lying to you. Now all the craziness of the last month starts to paint a picture. Too bad you have no idea what to do now. All the things you have been feeling lately are all perfectly normal for someone who is newly pregnant. All the normal feelings are well covered in books and movies. What about the not so normal feelings that seem to be happening now that you know?

Where is the beautiful glow? All you feel is bloated. How can your jeans feel tight when the baby is supposed to be the size of half of a half of a pea? The truth is, your body is, and has been, changing since conception. Some women know on a subconscious level, the exact moment they become pregnant. The first few months of pregnancy can be a very confusing time. There is everything to be hopeful about, and scared of at the same time. It is a state of being that is very similar to that of an animal because of the heightened state of instinct and awareness. It is definitely a good time for a woman to forget about what she has always expected to happen and to get ready for the unexpected.

I know of a time when girls and women of all ages had to leave town if they became pregnant out of wedlock. The married women did not have to flee, in the middle of the night, to a distant relative’s home, but they were hardly seen. Of course, this era seems like hundreds of light years ago. But there have been enough movies on the subject to prove it really happened. Part of the stigma was the fact that these women were having sex. There was really no way to deny it considering the bulging belly. Since sex was such a taboo subject, it would stand to reason that the product of that sex would be as well.

Happily the human race evolved. There was the sexual revolution, and suddenly sex was no longer a shameful dirty act. It took a little longer for pregnancy to be liberated, and when it was, it was not as glamorous, but it was okay, as long as we remembered we were mothers now, nothing sexy about that. Women seemed to go through a time where being pregnant meant being fat, unattractive, and off limits. To all but the closet prego lovers, it was just a given that pregnant women were not attractive. And to reinforce this, we had  maternity clothes. You know the baggy over-alls, shirts and blouses much longer in the front to make sure and completely cover the belly, and long flowing dresses. The men of this era all seemed to have an unspoken pact to just tolerate us at our most unattractive. Hope was huge that we would not just let ourselves go, but it was expected we would end up being more huge than that hope. 

Fast forward a couple of decades. Movie stars got bored and decided that they were going to keep making money even while they were pregnant. They were going to not only, not hide their bellies, but they were going to put the spot light right on them. Naked  pregnant bellies on magazine covers, photo shoots, starlets out and about with shorts and half tops, and most shockingly, bikini wearing jezebels splashing at the beach, for all to see. At first most  women reacted with disgust as they promised they would never be caught dead doing those things. But it was too late. Women started noticing, men noticing, the new pregnancy confidence, and liking it. Men have always been attracted to confidence in a woman, and this was no different. Suddenly there was nothing more beautiful than a woman who was ripe with a new life growing inside of her. Boundaries were broken, and taboos where cast out, like the women they had cast out years before.

Currently there are dating sites, modeling jobs, and even a market for porn dedicated to the pregnant woman. It seems the more a woman embraces her body and what it is doing, the more we can not get enough of her. It is now a time in a woman’s life when she is considered to be at her most attractive. There is no shortage of men ready, willing, and able to date and marry a pregnant woman. This is an amazing time to be an amazing woman with child.

There is an undeniable element of excitement in just the simple thought of taking a vacation. Vacations have been around for a long, long time. Vacations started out as small celebrations of holidays, or breaks from the usual work of the day. One definition of vacation explains it to be a scheduled period of time spent away from work or responsibility.

Today we have summer vacations, vacation time from work, mini vacations, family vacations, and every other vacation that can be thought up. Any reason can be a good reason for a much needed, or much desired break from routine. There are even many books devoted to training one’s mind to take mental vacations. Though these may not be as fun as hitting the open road, they are known to be very beneficial and restful for the mind.

A new kind of vacation that seems to be attracting a lot of interest lately is the less expensive, closer to home, and for a shorter period of time version of the mini vacation. Many times this getaway is fifty miles or less from home base, and can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand. Still very reasonably priced compared to cross country or international travel. And as an added bonus you don’t need to get any funky shots or pass ports.

There are really no downsides to this type of holiday, and so many upsides. All it takes is a look in your local newspaper to find undiscovered places of interest and fun. But they go unnoticed because of busy schedules and the hectic rat race. Places like Disneyland and the zoo can be transformed into a whole new vacation experience with some creativity. Disneyland, for example, offers guests the opportunity to enter the park one hour before it opens, to it’s hotel guests. They also have various activities for the children most hours, and daycare services. 

Maybe you do not live near any major theme parks or tourist destinations, or, have no interest in them, you still have hundreds of ways to get your grove on. There are spas almost every way you look. Luxury hotels are a dime a dozen, of course, they offer heated pools, room service, and maid service. Sometimes they will offer extra incentives for guests staying more than two nights. Just not having to make beds and do laundry can be a sort of vacation.

So what if you are like Dorothy, and there’s no place like home? You can still check out of the game for a while and still have your vacation. Plan it like you would any other vacation. Go to the grocery store and buy all your favorite foods (and paper plates, cups, etc.). Choose you entertainment and have enough of it. For some people that would be sleeping, and that’s okay too. Tell people you are on vacation so you will unavailable for call, texts, and e-mails. Remember, it is a vacation, so you will need to shop for new clothes, even if they are all under clothes. Be relaxed, be lazy, or even crazy, but never forget; what happens on vacation, stays on vacation.