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A little Torticollis, a little Flat Head Syndrome

Published on June 10, 2014February 6, 2020 by a.simple.mama1 Comment

As new parents there are and will be many many things that you’ll do wrong. Or that you’ll be totally unaware of. Or that you’ll have no idea even exists as a potential problem, until you do that thing and it affects your child.

As new parents ourselves, we had no idea how hard surfaces and a tendency to turn his head one direction would cause not only a giant flat spot on the back side of J’s head but that it would also affect the muscles in his neck. When he was really tiny I’d lay him on my desk at my office (which was the best place to keep an eye and a hand on him)…this is way before he started rolling, don’t worry. Who knew that this hard surface would lead to such a flat area on the right-back side of J’s head?! And who knew that you had to pay close attention to the side of the head your little one likes to lay on?! Well, these are all things that you learn ONLY if these things happen to your kid!

We’d only just noticed that J’s head was a little flat right before we headed to his 3 month appointment. Of course the Doc noticed as soon as he walked in the door. Dead giveaway is when the baby isn’t looking straight up at the ceiling…for further reference. Apparently what happens is that when they tend to turn their head only to one side (J preferred the right) that the neck muscles tighten on that side, and stretch on the other side. So to resolve this you have to stretch the neck the other direction to loosen that side and even up the lengths and strengths of the muscles. So began the many weeks of neck stretches. BTW babies don’t particularly like this. You have to hold them down and gently tilt their head the opposite direction of whichever way they normally tend to tilt it. Then you also rotate their neck from side to side. Yeah…so much fun to do this while they are screaming at you. Makes you feel like you’re torturing them.

The flat spot on his head the Doc described to us as when you push on one corner of a cardboard box and the opposite corner also tilts out-of-place. J had “plagiocephaly” as shown in the pic below.

To correct this and avoid needing a helmet, we had to very closely watch which side of his head he laid on at all times. For the first few weeks we had to do everything in our power to keep him from laying on the right side of his head. Not so easy, let me tell ya. It involved tilting his body to one side when he was laying or sleeping, and using extra padding around the head support in his car seat. We also used the Tortle – a hat or sorts that was created specifically to help with torticollis and Flat Head Syndrome in infants. It worked pretty well when J was still little enough not to squirm too much, but we had to stop using it once he could wiggle his head enough to get the “tail” of the hat moved around. Another product I learned about much later was the Baby Elephant Ears – this product would really help towards prevention of torticollis and FHS, and is super cute too!

Luckily for us it only took a few weeks of doing the exercises and making sure to even out which side J laid on to get the flat spot to mostly go away and for the neck muscles to even out. By his 6 month appointment he was as back to “normal” as we would be able to get him.

Such a silly little oversight, but something that I warn all my new parent friends about. J will always have a slightly flat spot and misshapen head to go with it, but luckily we caught it early enough to correct it enough that you can’t tell unless you know what you’re looking for. Even after years of childcare for infants, I’d never seen either Torticollis or FHS…but hopefully now you can share this information with your fellow first-time parents and avoid a little headache 🙂

Making a House a Home

Published on June 7, 2014June 7, 2014 by a.simple.mama1 Comment

We’ve been in our new house for about 9 months now. There are so many things that we love about this house, which is why we are so glad that we bought when we did and that we were lucky enough to find a home with so many of the things on our checklist. It has 5 bedrooms, which means that there’s enough for as many kiddos as we end up having, plus a guest room or man-cave. The backyard it huge and already has some pretty awesome flowering bushes, grown trees, and yet still room for a little improvement. And it’s in a quiet, family friendly neighborhood. The hubs and I lived in both a condo and a townhouse before we found our home now. We’re incredibly grateful to have a space of our own that isn’t connected to anyone else by a wall or a floor, or both.

Hubs and I do like to be able to have some projects to work on to make the house really our own. Of course that doesn’t mean that given a choice (or a million dollars) that we wouldn’t change 90% of the house in the blink of an eye. Our list of “To-Do’s” seems to be never-ending. And like many things in life, there just isn’t enough time in the days or dollars in the wallet to get them all done when you’d like. As much as we like the projects, it’s also hard not to get yourself burnt out on them. When we were in the townhouse we completely demolished the master bathroom down to the studs, put in a custom shower with floor to ceiling tiles, redid the vanity, lighting, drywall, and floors as well as added crown molding. The whole project looked great, but took us almost a year to complete. It’s easy to start a project but once you get all the way into it, it takes much longer than you originally hoped to actually complete and often you find yourself twisting your own arm to get the small finishing touches complete. I’m convinced the only reason we finally finished that bathroom is because we had to – can’t sell a house with a bathroom that’s only 3/4 done!

When we moved into the house we barely had enough furniture to fill 1/2 of the rooms. Since we doubled the amount of space we had in the townhouse, it made sense…but was quite a shock when we moved everything in. If you want to make yourself feel like the ton of crap you thought you had is actually nearly insignificant, double your space. Anyway we had 1 very nice sectional and living room setup…but 3 family room/living room spaces to fill. I finally got the Hubs to break down and let me buy another couch and ottoman so that at least 2 of our main living spaces would have something in them. It took me a while to feel like this house was actually MY house. The furniture was a tiny start.

When we walked through the house the first time, all the things that we saw as positive attributes seemed much greater than once we moved in and had to start meshing together our belongings with what existed in the house already. It’s funny how once you know that your intention is to stay in this place for the next 30+ years, it seems harder to find the perfect place to put your towels, your kitchen utensils, your toiletries. Even with the knowledge that you’ll have the next 30+ years to move things around and change things up as you see fit, it still took me (and still is to some degree) a while to really feel at home in this house.

Making all the desired changes with an infant makes the process even slower. After 9 months we have painted only 2 rooms (of 12+), replaced the sprinkler valves, replaced the sprinkler timer, put in new house lights, built a workbench in the garage, put in a new kitchen faucet, got a new refrigerator, and hung up about 75% of our pictures. Even after typing that I feel like we’ve just barely began to make this place OUR place. But with each thing that we manage to accomplish, I feel like it’s truly becoming a house that we can call a home.

Simple burlap wreath

Published on June 3, 2014June 3, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

Wreaths are IN right now, you see them everywhere. Many of them use burlap to give kind of a shabby-chic touch. Here’s another version of a simple wreath using burlap ribbon and some super cute burlap flowers that I found at Hobby Lobby. If you catch them on a 50% off sale, it’s gonna run you less than $20 to do the whole thing.

To start you’ll need one of those foam rings – you can get one in the floral department or one of the white ones with the rest of the hard foam forms. They usually run around $5 each either way.

Then grab a roll of a burlap ribbon of your choice, the chevron stuff looked pretty awesome too, but I went for plain ol’ wire edge burlap ribbon on a 30 yard roll. Which was more than enough to do the wreath, the hanger, and a bunch of big bows from the other spring wreaths craft.

Then I grabbed two shorty burlap flowers (these were actually in the wedding flower section)

Start wrapping the burlap ribbon around the foam ring and overlap as much or as little as you want. I overlapped about 1/2 the width on each wrap, but you could easily do more or less to change up the pattern.

Once you get all the way around, secure with hot glue. If you want you can loop a little extra ribbon around to make a hanging loop too, but that’s up to you. I had just enough leftovers to use it for the loop, so I kept it all attached and used extra hot glue to attach the end and make the loop. Then I twisted the loop so that it was a little more simplified, but you could leave it wide too.

To attach the flowers I poked a hole though the burlap and into the foam with a screwdriver. Then I cut off the stem and added some hot glue to the whole. The tip on the back of the flower fit nicely into the whole and then was nice and flush with the ring.

When that part was done I felt like it was missing something…but then I came across this wrapped letter that I’d made a while back to hang on the door. (a wood letter from Hobby Lobby, some twine, hot glue, and a little bow)

It fit perfectly in the middle of the wreath and adds a little something extra. Now it’s perfect for the front door! Probably more of a fall wreath, or maybe later this summer, or maybe I’ll just hang it above the fireplace…

Water Play

Published on June 3, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

I’m so excited that it’s warm enough outside to break out the water play outdoors! I think J is gonna be a water baby! He loves bath time, fountains, and sprinklers. But water play can be just a bunch of kitchen tools and a tub of water. Easy peasy and keeps the little ones entertained for quite a while. J especially loves the baster brush and kept using it to splash the water or paint the patio.

What a fun simple way to spend an afternoon, and it’s totally FREE too!

Other Kids Parents

Published on June 2, 2014 by a.simple.mamaLeave a comment

Every parent is guilty of judgement of other parents. Whether it be their parenting style, their discipline methods, their hygiene or dietary prerogative, etc. We are also all guilty of judging other people’s kids – but that’s a whole other blog… We all find ourselves at one point or another saying “I love how they did that _____, I want to remember to do that with my kids”, or “eesh I’ll never treat my kids like that.” Guilty as charged. We all do it. But what happens when the words of a parent appear just plain mean? Not when spoken to the child necessarily, but when spoken about that child to another adult or other children.

I was a teacher in childcare for 5 years or so, and now being a parent there have been several “habits” of other adults – not always other parents – that have really started to hit a sore spot for me. Mainly I am finding it very hard to accept anyone speaking ill of a child. Especially when this person should be the one that is supporting and standing up for the child. To be very specific I have two examples that I’ve come across – both recently and as part of my teaching experience.

When I was a teacher there were always those “problem children”. Unfortunately these kiddos seem to struggle in a number of tasks and are forever deemed as “problems” or “pain-in-the-asses”. Even as teachers we fall into the trap of not being able to like every kid that crosses our path. It’s the unwritten rule though that teachers of all people should love all of their students. And we do, each in their own way, but as Kate Hudson puts it in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – “I love you…but I don’t have to like you right now.” Same goes for teachers. And really for parents too… Anyway, it’s silly to think that every person will get along with everyone right? So why would you expect every child to get along with every adult and visa-versa? Sometimes people just clash. Yet in the teaching profession it is not acceptable to mock, speak ill of, or degrade a child in any way. Not acceptable. Now it obviously happens, but I’ve found it increasingly annoying to hear any of these types of disrespect towards a child coming from an adult who should be someone in a supportive role for that kid. You may not agree with the way that child has been brought up, you may think that child needs to learn how to sit still or how to listen better, and that child may get on your very last nerve. I’ve been there – I know that some kids just drive you crazy, and I’m sure that I’ve been one of the guilty ones who’s talked badly about this child or that child. But there is just something about listening to another adult speak ill of a child that gets to me.

The most specific example I have of this occurred recently and is really probably a better way of explaining why this particular type of talk gets to me. In this instance the parent is a step-parent. Now I know nothing about the relationship between a child and a step-parent. So excuse me if I am totally off base here and over-judging. But as a parent on any level, how can you complain about a child? How can you complain about a child that you are caring for? The role of a parent in this case differs from the role of a teacher, so in my mind it is completely wrong to place judgement on your own child. In most cases, children are doing the best with what they have been given in life. Yet somehow the blame for the child’s actions go punishable onto the child themselves. So why does this parent feel the need to speak ill of this child to me? Or why does any adult/parent/teacher feel that it is OK to speak ill of any child to anyone else?

This is something that I’m really struggling with today. How do you react to a comment made about a child that you know nothing about, but whom probably doesn’t deserve to be degraded in this way? And worse is knowing that I’ve done this myself as a teacher and been fed up with certain children. Do we think that we will get support for feeling this way? I feel like that is really the only explanation for needing to air such dirty laundry to other people. But how do you not almost take it personally when someone speaks badly to you about a child you know nothing about?

Do other parents struggle with this? How do you react without placing further judgement onto the child or the adult themselves? How do you mind your own business while supporting your friend or fellow parent with their struggles?