The Humbled Homemaker

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Liquid Herbs for the Whole Family {Trilight Health Review...and Giveaway!}

I'm so excited for the opportunity to introduce you to one of my prime sponsors: Trilight Health.

I've never been one to jump to taking conventional medications, and honestly, through the years I've taken more of the "suffer through it" approach to any ailments. Finding herbal alternatives to conventional treatments--has seemed like a win-win for me!

Something that really impressed me about Trilight was that the company has been around for more than 20 years. New "health" companies are popping up everywhere these days, and I'm not quick to trust them. But Trilight has been specializing in non-alcoholic, safe herbal formulas for the whole family (including children and pregnant women!) for more than two decades!

For about a month now, I've been taking Trilight's NRG energy-boosting formula (usually during my mid-afternoon slump!), Tri Iron Formula and Circulatone for varicose veins (which ail me during pregnancy).

In a few weeks, I'll start taking their Labor Prep formula. I took all of these to my certified nurse midwife to look over before I began taking them. The only one she told me to wait on taking was the Labor Prep, which Trilight doesn't recommend taking until the last few weeks of pregnancy anyway.

What about the Taste?

I think taste is a personal preference. Some people love the taste of liquid herbs. Some people don't. My personal preference is to add my herbs to smoothies. (And I'm making lots of smoothies from my free smoothie book!)

Trilight offers FREE shipping on products over $25, and they give a $5 off coupon when you sign up for their newsletter!

For more information on Trilight Health, see their About Us page!

Want to try a Trilight product yourself?!

Trilight is graciously offering THREE Humbled Homemaker readers the opportunity to review their products! The winners will get a product to try, and I will feature their reviews in a post later this summer!

*Disclaimer: Please consult your trusted healthcare provider before taking any products.
*Disclosure: This post was generously sponsored by Trilight Health.
I'm linking up with: The Prairie Homestead, The Better Mom

Use the Rafflecopter form to enter! (If you are reading this via e-mail/RSS, you will have to click over to the blog to enter.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Saturday, June 2, 2012

3-Day Potty Training My Way, Part 2 {Guest Post at The First Years: Potty Training}

Today we continue our potty training mini series as part of our ongoing "The First Years" series that is covering the most precious little years! I'm delighted to have Anne from Quick & Easy, Cheap & Healthy guest posting today again! Please pay her blog a visit!

Guest Post by Anne of Quick & Easy, Cheap & Healthy

Yesterday, in part 1 of "3-Day Potty Training My Way," Anne gave us a look at pre-training. Today, she tells us how the 3-Day Method results in a potty trained child!

Training – Three Intensive Days
Once your child begins to show all the signs of potty-training readiness, then you can clear a spot on your calendar for 3 intensive days of real potty training.

And I really mean you need to clear your calendar. Choose three days where you have no obligations, or you can cancel any obligations you do have (for many people, a long weekend is ideal). If you have other children, find babysitters for them if you can, or plan to occupy them with TV for most of the day. Make meals ahead of time for those 3 days or budget money for eating out. It’s time to get serious!

According to what I have heard, the original 3-Day method requires that you let your child run around the house buck naked. Um, not happening in my house. I dressed mine in a t-shirt and undies so that he could have easy access to do his business. You can do either one of those, but whatever you do, avoid the pull-ups at all costs.

Here’s how the Three Intensive Days pan out:
When your child wakes up, take off their diaper and clean them up. Make a big deal about how that was the last diaper they will have to wear for the next three days (except at night, of course), and instead, they’re going to be wearing big kid undies.

Explain in simple terms your expectations for the day and how it’s going to work.
Show your child the bathroom and their own personal potty. Review how it is used, and give them a practice run to start off the day.Make sure it’s very clear that this is the only place where pee-pee and poo-poo happen!
Prepare yourself. Because pee-pee is definitely going to happen, and it’s probably not going to be in the bathroom for the first day. Arm yourself with all the appropriate cleaning materials and get ready for battle.
Gather your child’s favorite toys in a location near the bathroom, and let the day proceed as usual. Every 30 minutes, call your child into the bathroom and have them sit there for a little while. Read some books, sing some songs, talk about bodily functions. (Yes. Again.) Remind them that this is the perfect time and place to go potty if they need to, but don’t pressure them.

If they do go potty in the toilet, make a HUGE deal about it. Jump up and down, sing and dance, reward them with candy or stickers. Make sure they understand how awesome it is that they are learning to pee in the right place.

Periodically ask your child if they feel like they need to go. Remind them they can go use the potty any time they think they should.

Stay close so that if your child starts to pee outside of the bathroom, you can catch it right away, and lead them quickly into the potty to finish the process. (Don’t forget to clean up the mess!) Don’t berate them for pee-ing in the wrong place; simply remind them of the proper procedure and give them plenty of opportunity to finish the job. Once again, if anything makes it into the toilet, make a HUGE deal about it!

Keep doing this for 3 days. On the first day, my son peed in the actual potty about 20% of the time. The rest was in the living room. By the third day, this ratio was flipped, and he was peeing in the potty 80% of the time, and catching himself if he started to pee elsewhere.

Cut yourself – and your kid – some slack. Realize that these three days are not the end of the world. Commit to the three days, but only the three days. If your child is just not getting it by the third day, then you’ve lost nothing but three days of your life. Resume diapering, and try again in 3-6 months (but keep up the pre-training!).

Follow Up
If your child seems to be catching on to the whole pee-in-the-potty concept after the three days, then you are ready to move on to Phase 3: Follow Up.

You’ve already accomplished so much! Your baby has now learned to recognize the signals that his body needs to relieve itself, and knows what to do about it. What needs to happen now is consistency. Don’t let baby fall off the wagon!

Continue giving your child opportunities to go potty whenever you have the chance. Every 30 minutes is great, but if you can’t do that, as often as you can. Constantly ask your child if they feel a need to go, and encourage them to use the potty if they think they should.

Now, when your child has an accident, your approach should be a little different than it was during the intensive 3-Day phase. Don’t get angry with them, but do remind them that they know what to do now, and you expect them to follow through.

It’s helpful to establish some sort of reward/consequence system. My son was very partial to gummy bears and looked forward to getting one every time he peed in the potty. If he started out peeing anywhere other than the potty, he lost his gummy bear.

After the 3 days, you’re going to have to bring your child out in public at some point. Make sure you give your child every opportunity to go potty before you leave the house, while you’re out, and when you come home. You probably won’t want to deal with cleaning up messes in the car seat or grocery cart, so consider some underwear with waterproof lining, or cloth potty trainers. One friend of mine would put cloth diapers underneath a pull-up, so that the feeling of the underwear was still there (and so was the uncomfortable-ness in the event of an accident), but the mess was minimal.

For the next month or so after the three days of intensive training, expect accidents to occur on occasion. Depending on the age and maturity (and physical ability) of your child, it might take even longer. But as long as the general trend is one of progress, keep on trucking and continue to be consistent. For most children, accidents are rare after the first week or so of training.

An extension of Follow Up – a fourth phase, if you will – would be night-time or sleep-time training. This usually happens a while after day-time training and totally depends on your child’s readiness. Initially, you’ll want to keep your child in diapers whenever he or she is sleeping. When you notice that those diapers are dry more often than not, for several days or weeks in a row, then give diapers a try.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t happen as soon as you think it should: boys, in particular, can take years to develop the physical ability to hold their pee in their sleep.

Like I said, I am no expert in this field. What I do know for sure is this: following this method, my son was completely potty-trained within a month of his second birthday, and was completely nighttime-trained within 6 months after that.

We are currently in the Pre-Training phase with my 16-month-old son, and I’m proud to report that he peed in the actual potty for the first time just the other day! He’s not ready for the intensive 3-Day session yet, but I am confident he will get there, and will be just as successful as his older brother. I highly recommend this method of potty-training to everyone!

Anne is the wife to a wonderful, caring husband and mommy to two wildly-tender little boys. She loves all things Jesus, music, natural, nutritional and chocolate. And coffee. She loves coffee. She was born smack dab in the middle of 10 children and loves being able to stand out amongst the big crowd with her corner of the blogosphere, Quick and Easy, Cheap and Healthy, where she blogs about how to make healthy food without losing money, time, energy… or your sanity. You can also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Don't miss a post in this series!

Infant Potty Training

I'm so excited about the other upcoming posts in this series, including:

Potty Training a Child with Food Allergies
Potty Training Regression
Potty Training "Failure"
Grace for Potty Training
A Cloth Training Pants giveaway from Sew Crafty Baby
and more!

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Thursday, May 31, 2012

3-Day Potty Training, My Way {Guest Post at The First Years: Potty Training}

Image by abbybatchelder

Guest Post by Anne of Quick & Easy, Cheap & Healthy

Let’s start off with some disclaimers, shall we? First of all, I have only ever potty-trained one child, so I am far from an expert. Not even close, actually.

Secondly, I’ve never read the famous eBook, 3- Day Potty Training; I’ve only read lots of articles and blog posts about it and have had extensive conversations with other moms about it.

Thirdly, and this is the big one: It takes longer than 3 days. Sorry. I know, I know! Three-days and done? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

But no, of course, it couldn’t be that simple. Like anything else in life worth doing, potty training is going to require some effort on behalf of both parent and child, and it usually takes a certain amount of time as well.

Let’s think of the 3-Day Method more in terms of 3 Phases: Pre-Training, Training, and Follow-Up. The 3 days occur in the middle phase (Training) and are the most intense and active portion of the process.

Pre-Training
For the first one and a half years of my oldest son’s life (he’s now three and a half), I did a lot of Googling research on the subject of potty training. I read what seemed like hundreds of articles and blog posts covering all sides of the issue; I browsed through mommy forums all over the internet, learning about the various approaches that real moms tried; I read books and magazines about it; and I observed the successes and failures of all the moms I knew in real life.

All of this observation led me to the same conclusion over and over again: the moms who described potty training as “easy” had inevitably spent some time (as much as months) pre-training their little ones.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this made perfect sense. How could we possibly expect a toddler to be intellectually, emotionally, or physically prepared to use the potty when they have never had any experience whatsoever with it? You wouldn’t give a kindergartener a novel to read on the first day of school, would you? No, of course not! First, you teach your little genius the alphabet and phonetic principles, then you start handing them books. Easy ones.

Potty-training is no different. You need to start at the very beginning, with the “alphabet” of bodily functions. You know the oft-repeated advice to start potty-training “when the child is ready”? You can speed that process up with pre-training.

What does pre-training involve?
Talk, talk, and more talk. Even before your child is capable of responding, talk about bodily functions. Talk about where pee and poop come from. Determine what you want your child to call his or her private parts and call them by those names.

Whenever you change your child’s diaper, mention the contents: “Wow, Baby did lots of stinkies today! Pee-yew!” or “You must have drunk a lot of water; this diaper is very wet with pee-pee today!”. Yes, fascinating conversation. Your child will love it.

Place a child’s potty front and center somewhere. Preferably in the bathroom. Make it easily accessible to your child as soon as they have begun toddling around and climbing onto things. The motor skills needed to climb on and off a potty require some development, so give them plenty of chances!

Before and after diaper changes, and whenever your child shows an interest, offer them the opportunity to climb up on the baby potty and have a seat. And again, talk. Talk about what people do on potties, and how big boys and girls and mommies and daddies don’t do such things in diapers. Talk it up!

Allow your child to observe either yourself or his/her siblings using the potty. Really, this is the easiest way for them to learn exactly what goes on in the toilet and what its purpose is. Demonstration is an essential element of all learning!

As your child’s motor skills improve, give them every opportunity to practice pulling their pants up and down. Potty-training simply cannot be done adequately until this process is learned, so work on it as soon as your child is capable.

The biggest difference between pre-training and real training is the expectation. When pre-training, there is absolutely no expectation that your child will actually suddenly begin going potty on their own in the right place. Pre-training is all about preparing the way, and setting the stage for Phase 2.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of the 3-Day Potty Training Method!

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