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Have you ever been in the middle of a busy park with your toddler? Have you ever been just a little too caught up in adult conversation to notice your toddler wander off? If so, I bet it was an experience that you never forgot.
Just this week, I listened as two different friends recounted their “scariest parenting moment” as the time when their two year-old wandered off into a busy park alone.
One in Brooklyn.
One in London.
In each case, the child was curious and wandered off after something (the boy wondered what was beyond the hill; the girl wondered where her Daddy had gone).
Both families were lucky and had happy endings. In each case, a large group of concerned friends was on hand to search for the meandering toddler. Each miniature search party radiated outward from the picnic toward the outer reaches of the park, asking fellow park-goers for help and information.
The safety tips I offer are in the name of keeping track of your child and finding your child.
1. Know who’s on duty. Have one person designated in charge. If you need to swap out with someone, make sure they know they’re on now. My pediatrician suggests using a name tag to officially keep track.
2. Teach your child to “stay where you can see me” Subtle as it sounds, don’t say “stay where I can see you” because most young children don’t know where YOU can see THEM, so phrase it the other way.
3. Label your kid. The Brooklyn mom is considering sewing her cell phone number into her child’s clothes. Another option is to write that phone number on her child’s belly with a sharpie. The sharpie trick is particularly good for large crowded amusement parks.
4. Teach them whom they can trust. Asking a parent for help is a start. Whitney also suggests finding a person in uniform.
I hope that our readers can offer a few more suggestions in the comments!
My college roommate and go-to “rescue me” friend lives within blocks of my house, but when we dug through her infamous junk drawer, we discovered a collection of fifteen or twenty unlabled keys. Sure that mine was one of the ones with a distinct key chain, she sent me off with two to try. Neither worked.
My kids were totally fine with playing in our backyard with no access to our house. My husband joked via text message that we could pee in the grassy area and survive on our meager garden vegetables. (He had already agreed to begin his commute home early if I needed him to.)
The whole thing was over in a couple of hours, as it turned out that my friend did indeed have a copy of my house key. After discovering it at her house, she surprised me and my children by emerging from our backdoor and inviting us inside our own house.
So I guess tomorrow I’ll go hide a key under a rock in my neighbor’s backyard. What’s your rescue plan?
I was browsing the urban safety myths on UL.com recently and I saw the piece about dryer lint. I was immediately intrigued.
No really.
My friend, the home contractor, has told me some excellent stories about dryer lint linked to spontaneous explosions in old, dusty basements so I wanted to know “is dryer lint really a big deal?”
This is some of what I learned:
At coin-operated laundries, laundry owners are adamant about maintaining proper air flow through their commercial dryers. With 30 to 50 dryers at the average laundry, operators clear trashcan amounts of lint everyday from their screens.
The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers urges consumers to clean the lint filter after each load and occasionally remove the filter and clean it with a nylon brush and hot, soapy water to remove residue. This simple chore not only improves air flow and energy efficiency, but it also reduces the chance of a dryer fire.
“Lint is the bane of our existence,” says Brian Wallace, president of the Coin Laundry Association. “We can’t afford not to clean lint, not only as a safety issue, but to keep our energy costs down and ensure proper performance.”
After hearing my friend’s stories and reading about the improved energy efficiency and safety issues with lint traps, I hauled my vacuum cleaner attachment into the slot and sucked up all matter of sand and kid detritus along with the standard helping of lint. I have yet to get busy with a nylon brush and soapy water.
P.S: did you know that dryer lint is compostable?! You’re welcome.
We are a big biking family. Our set of bikes comprises our “second car” and we like it that way. In fact, I’ve written about bicycle and helmet safety a number of times on this site.
My son was hit by a car while riding his bike this weekend. On my watch.
“Hit by a car” sounds very dramatic. True, but terrible. “Run over by…” is, thankfully, not what happened, but perhaps the story is softened if I say “backed into by…” or “knocked over by…”. In any case, a parked car started backing (from a dead stop) out of a driveway while my five year old son was riding on the sidewalk behind him.
I watched the whole thing from the position of one or two bike lengths behind him. It was terrifying.
I screamed, “STOP!!” (at my son, at the car, at the world) and the world listened. Everyone stopped.
My son stood up, crying, and ran from the bike. The driver and nearby friend stopped and sat with us to make sure we were all okay. His helmet (and head!) never hit the ground or the car. He suffered a scraped knee and a bruised shoulder but otherwise he and his bike checked out just fine.
These are some great tips on kids and bike safety from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For our part, we were following all of them and our accident still happened.
Every time we bike past a driveway with a car in it, I tell my five year old to check for a driver. In this instance, the driver was not visible to my son nor was my son visible to the driver. Maybe we need to get him a flag?!
Do you have any special tips to share for a child new to two-wheelers? Does your child under ten ride on the sidewalk? Do you have a near-heart attack letting your over-ten-year-old ride in the street?
I’ll be honest, when I come home to a clean house that smells like vinegar, my nose does a double-take. It’s just not that fresh (chemical-laden) smell I grew up with, but that’s a good thing. I know that cleaning with natural products is better and safer for me and my children.
When you make cleaning supplies with natural, non-scary things like lemon juice and white vinegar, you can call them recipes. I love that. What if some lemon juice spills on your child’s hand? No big whoop. Can’t say that about most of our cleaning products. We started cleaning with homemade products when my second son was crawling. I felt better knowing that he was licking up vinegar rather than bleach. Know what I mean?
Inspired by watching the documentary about No Impact Man (super cool, whole family project by the way), I renewed my curiosity about creating more natural house cleaning products at home. Colin and his wife actually did their laundry in a bathtub by marching around on it.
Here are a few recipes to get you started:
All purpose spray AKA Counter Intelligence Cleaner
Combine the following in a non-aerosol spray bottle using a funnel. Shake gently until the ingredients are dissolved.
1 teaspoon borax (a common household cleaner that you might need to purchase)
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1/4 teaspoon liquid soap
2 cups hot water
Spray onto surface and wipe with a damp sponge or cloth
Toilet Cleaner
Mix 1/4 cup baking soda and one cup vinegar. Pour the mixture into the toilet bowl and let it sit for a few minutes. Scrub with a brush and rinse.
Mold and Mildew Cleaner
Simply apply white vinegar or lemon juice at full strength with a sponge. Boom. Done.
Ready for more? We have more natural cleaner recipes under “kitchen chemistry 101” on our site.
At my daughter’s day care, a place where 2-4 year olds learn to serve each other water, to give themselves “thinking time” if they can’t control their arms from grabbing or hitting, and take turns playing simple board games, all heck breaks loose when a mother arrives for pick-up carrying an infant in a carseat.
A mad swarm of two-to-three year-olds rushes to the carseat (the four year-olds are too cool for this behavior) and lifts up the blanket to reveal a sleeping or wide-eyed infant. The toddlers then proceed to finger any dangling pacifiers, rub the baby’s head, and point chubby fingers at her eyes. What is a second-time mom to do?
Here are a few guidelines we can provide preschoolers with in relation to the handling of new babies.
Appoint the older sibling as the safekeeper of her newest family member. She can tell her classmates to look without touching the baby
Tell the children what they can touch. Popular choices are the carseat handle and the baby’s feet.
Give the interested children jobs to do – rock the carseat, wash the binky and bring it back to you (without touching the nipple), shake a toy to show the baby how it makes noise.
Allow them to interact as much as your comfort level allows. Place a pillow across a 2 year-old’s lap and she can do a pretty good job of holding an infant.
Of course, the other choice for a protective new mother is to wear the baby on her body when entering a potentially poking and prodding-filled situation. What did you or do you do to protect a second or third child?
Whitney and I had the opportunity to pose a few questions to home safety expert John Drengenberg, the Consumer Safety Director at Underwriter Laboratories.
I asked two questions that John answered for safety-minded parents.
We know you’ve been testing and certifying electronic items for over 100 years; do you certify non-electronic items?
Yes, UL also tests many non-electronic items. John cited roof shingles (tested for fire penetration and spread) and life jackets for boats (rated for both children and adults) as two examples.
Today, UL is also beginning to move beyond safety and toward environmental sustainability by verifying environmental claims of energy and water usage.
What’s the best way to dispose of items that are not UL-certified?
To get rid of items in your home that are not safe or are no longer functioning, it is best to do proper recycling. Contact your municipal recycling center or your local electrical utility to inquire about the best place to leave your item.
As the days get longer and longer (thank goodness for those blackout shades or I’d never get my kids to bed!), we are spending more time outside. We have also started to plant our garden.
From a purely practical standpoint, installing a timed watering system was one of the best things we’ve done to keep the garden growing on our busy family’s schedule.
Here are a few tips to make gardening safer for the whole family:
For the little ones:
Think about hygiene. Make sure your child helpers wear gardening gloves and wash their hands well afterward.
For adults:
Think about your body. Knees can get sore with too much kneeling in the garden. Use knee pads or a rolled up towel. Also mind your level of exertion for back strain.
For everyone:
Think about sun protection. Wear sunscreen and a wide-brimmed gardening hat.
Think about chemicals. Whether you choose to go 100% organic like we did is a personal choice, but beware chemical pesticides around pets and children. Natural pest-eaters like ladybugs are fun as well as being garden helpers.
This video shows my small garden helpers working with the tiny insect garden helpers last year. It helps to release ladybugs in the cooler evening temperatures so they are most likely to hurry off to bed in your produce.
Next on our gardening agenda is to get our Brussels Sprouts in the ground at the right time – not yet! – and to patiently await our first produce.
I’m a fan of bike helmets for all humans. Nothing gets me more steamed than when I see someone riding their bike with the helmet draped over the handlebars. Ugh. What are they doing?!
This weekend, we attended our local Bike Rodeo and Safety Day. My two sons cruised around obstacle courses made out of chalk lines, orange cones, and traffic signs. In previous years, the rodeo has included an all-bike-powered bus.
Lucky for our community, the day of fun also includes free helmets and fittings for children. My youngest son replaced his dinosaur helmet with a “very fast red one that looks like Daddy’s” fit by the volunteers.
Did you know that a helmet has to be properly fit to your head in order to protect you? Did you know that once it has “done its job” in a crash, it must be replaced? Or that excessive sunshine can also cause a helmet to weaken and crack?
The good news is that many manufacturers will replace your helmet if its been in a crash. But if you leave it out in the sunshine and the helmet starts to disintegrate, its on you.
By Whitney
I have a fire extinguisher under my sink, but I must confess that my confidence in my ability to use it is low. When I saw mom blogger Real Life Sarah’s video demonstrating her visit to UL and the fire extinguisher practice she got to experience, I was envious!
The PASS acronym she describes is [...]
By Heather
I was joking today that summer in the Bay Area means wool sweaters and flip flops. Most of our homes near San Francisco don’t have air conditioning and we don’t miss it. Heck, we’re just hoping we don’t have to turn on the furnace on the foggy days.
For those of you enjoying the heat [...]
By Heather
Since a dear college friend fell to his death through an open window on a warm day, I have been especially cautious around windows in high places. Add toddlers to the mix, I’m double paranoid. With the warm weather in full force, we keep windows open to keep a breeze blowing (and to freshen [...]
By Whitney
You’ve surely heard that duct tape can fix anything: patch a leaking air mattress, hold a dangling headlight in place, and even protect a blister in a pinch. So go ahead and pack it if you’re going camping in the wilderness.
But if your summer travels involve a hotel room or a vacation house, bring [...]
