Another class and car seats

We had another class this weekend. It was called "All about babies". It was a very long class that went from 9-1:30 on Saturday. Lyle and I were thinking this would cover things like how to put a diaper on a baby, how often to bathe a baby, illnesses a baby might have, feeding...stuff like that. Well ends up the first two on the list were covered in excruiciating detail. In fact I think that we spent around an hour learning to bathe the baby. This covered really helpful things like "clean the baby's face with the washcloth before you clean off their butt" and "don't submerge the baby fully under water". With numerous disclaimers by the RN teaching that if your doctor tells you to do otherwise you should always follow that advice.

The other 3 hrs of the class was spend on discussing household safety and interaction with your child. For safety this included things like "don't leave the baby alone balanced on top of the changing table", "don't leave the child alone in the bathroom with the toilet open" (drowning hazard), and "don't leave live electrical wires within the child's reach". Very helpful let me tell you; as if any individual with slight common sense couldn't figure this out.

The interaction portion of the class talked about positive reinforcement for your child. So further down the road if child tries to help put away the dishes, you should always thank them and not fix what they do; even if they put the tupperware on the bottom of the dishwasher. This was not popular with Lyle who has a thing for dishwasher efficiency. He spoke up about this; saying in a much more polite way that this was just plain silly. He thought you should thank the child and then show them how to do it right. This led to the teacher being a bit cranky with us. Next came discussion of what would you do if the child helped fold the towels and not only folded them wrong but put them away incorrectly. The teacher said Lyle would have a problem with this. To which Lyle replied "Nope, but my wife would". To which the teacher asked me "what would you do Karissa?" I said I would refold the towels and resort them. I like my towels in color order and neatly stacked. Wow, wrong answer there.... After this she began to discuss how your house should look like a kid has taken over; this is healthy. For example she personally is a Gma and has 3 washbaskets full of toys all over her living room. Which led Lyle and I to discuss (quietly amoungst ourselves) how maybe she should invest in some sort of toy storage system like the cute toy bin organizer we built in the baby's room...

Okay enough about this; as you can see the class was *very* educational (insert sarcasm here) and we were definitely disappointed. Next weekend we have birthing class and we hope that class will actually involve some sort of solid factual basis.

The only other thing that this class brought up was car seat safety. We found out the last car seat safety session of the year in Nov. 8th. So on Sunday we worked on assembling the travel system that Gma and Gpa R kindly bought us. It really wasn't that tough. Although we came to a solid understanding of why you don't uninstall the carseat base once it's installed. The base is not an easy thing to install. So now I am driving around with a car seat base in my car. I guess it's something to get used to. The travel system itself went together very easy and should be great to use. The thing is very sturdy and looks like it could "offroad" pretty darn well. The infant carrier is awesome but pretty darn heavy. I know my girlfriends had mentioned a great increase in upper body strength while carrying around an infant carrier; I now understand why. So Lyle and I wanted to put a shout out saying "thank you" to Gma and Gpa R for the wonderful travel system. It's awesome!