I'm now sugar-free for well over 2 weeks. And I must say: it's been fairly easy until now. This initial success is due to the fact that I already had fairly good eating habits and haven't attend any parties yet. But I know how hard it is to stay put, so I prepared myself for the worse.
First of all I went to the library to find some books on healthy eating habits. It was hard to find a relatively good book, since most books address serious problems like bulimia, obesity and anorexia. It's disappointing to see that there are more people who are interested in solving a specific problem they have, then proactive people who want to change a mediocre situation in an ideal one.

Anyway: I found a book that was reasonable. I learned some new stuff and some things I forgot through the years:

• Go for the slow carbohydrates.
  I'll first explain what the difference is between fast and slow carbohydrates. Fast carbohydrates are refined sugars (like sugar beet) and is, after eating it, available to the body in no time. That seems efficient, but it's not. The sugar level in the blood peaks enormously, just to go to rock bottom at the same speed as it peaked. As soon as you get to that low, you get hungry again because you need that energy.
  By eating slow (or complex) carbohydrates, the sugar gets into the blood over a longer period of time. So you can go on much longer before you run out of 'fuel' and have to refill your stomach.
  In short: eating refined sugar gets you in a downward spiral of highs and lows in your sugar level. It increases your chance of having diabetes.
• Eat a lot in the morning. Your digestive system is ready for that. Eat normal at noon and not that much in the evening, because your digestive system is getting slower during the day.
• Eat regularly. So don't miss a breakfast. You need to fuel yourself throughout the day. By fueling yourself with three good meals without fast carbohydrates, you don't need to munch that much between breakfast, lunch and dinner.
• Prepare yourself for weak moments, like parties and eating while traveling. Although it's best to discipline yourself, you may need some help from others in those vulnerable moments.
• Avoid alcohol. It will only make you fat. (in my case it will also make me sick)
• Don't buy sweets for some people come by to visit you. It's better to buy something just-in-time in a shop that's open 24/7 or a shop at a gas station. I must say: that looks like a good option to me, since I can't handle having sweets at home.
• Eat consciously by pausing regularly while eating. That way you take the time to feel if you really need to go on eating. There is no need to eat until the plate is empty. You eat until you're full.

Some snippets I found about sweets and children:

• It's better to have one good 'candy moment' than 10 small ones. Keep sweets something special!
• If you want to give something extra, you could give alternatives like dried figs.
• If you have a healthy lifestyle, you have a high chance your children will follow that example. Though I must say, I know some exceptions to that rule :)

Sorry. I don't have any links to give to you. My hard drive broke down.

Labels: food, health

It is said that when you're pregnant, it's like having a little stove in your body. The baby is an extra source of heat. Well, my wife is putting that statement to the test right now.

We are having our second heat wave in The Netherlands right now. Normally my wife would be the one that had the least problems with this heat. But now she's just knocked down by the weather. I hope that she doesn't have to give birth during this heat wave. We don't have air conditioning, but I read that you cannot use aircon anyway when you're in labor, because it would be then too cold for the new born baby.

Are there also advantages to having the end of your pregnancy in the summer? Sure: since you're wearing less layers of clothes in the summer, you'd have to buy less more pregnancy clothes. Unless you like shopping of course :)

Labels: pregnancy

My wife told me she wanted to keep sugared stuff like sweets and cakes from our child as long as possible and realistic. That way it's much easier to give our child healthy food, since he or she doesn't have sugar sugar on his/her mind. Our (future) child cannot miss something if it doesn't know it exists, right?

Before I go further: this doesn't mean our child will not have any sweets until it's 16 or something like that. We just want to keep it out of the viewfinder as long as it's reasonably possible. We live in an world that's practically totally sugar-coated, so it's better to learn our child how to cope with that fact. One way to do that is to show that leading a healthy lifestyle doesn't mean that you'd miss something.

So I think that it's a great idea, but that that would mean that we should review our eating habits as well. We already eat healthy, but now we had to make that extra mile to ban sugar from our house.

So we're both cutting down our sweets consumption until it will be close to zero. I already was relatively successful in reducing my sugar consumption, but I always had problems with that last mile. Every day I munched away something small, and at parties I had (and have) a real problem with resisting all that tasty stuff on the table. And although many people would be content with that amount of sugar everyday, I still want to be totally free of products that obviously contain a lot of sugar.

What I already did to cut down sugar intake before totally quitting sugar:

• Replacing sugared drinks
  In my youth I only drank sugar rich drinks like Coke, Tonic, 7Up and juices. I rarely drank water, although you should drink 2 liters a day. And that 2 liters can't be replaced by other drinks like juices, tea or coffee. Caffeine, for example, is a diuretic so it will only accentuate the symptoms of water loss. And juices are so rich of sugar, in contrast to your body, that it will attract water from your body than the other way round. So your body needs that pure water to keep the body run smoothly.
  I didn't like tap water, so I switched to bottled soda water. The soda makes it taste really good. After that I switched to tap water, because that's cheaper. I still drink juices, but keep the consumption to 2 glasses a day.
• Don't have sweets in your house
  I started to anticipate my weak moments. To make sure I didn't grab the easiest food around, I had to make sure it wasn't there. Seems easy, but you also have to have some sweets for visitors. So in the end it was me who ate most of the stuff we had bought for visitors.
• Have alternatives available
  Sometimes you just have hunger, or want to eat something small. So I made sure I had alternatives available: apples, bananas, carrots, etc. On top of that I made sure that I had these alternatives as easily available as possible. If you don't see that bowl with fruit everyday, it will still be full at the end of the week.

That's it for now. Soon I'll post part 2 of this post

Some links:

• Why drink water
• Two Litres a Day Helps You Think and Play

Labels: food, health

I know: my first child is not even born and I'm already talking about alcohol use under young kids. The reason is a documentary I saw a few days ago. It was about that topic. The reason for picking this topic were the results of a European survey. One conclusion was that Dutch kids statistically drank the most alcohol per person in Europe.

The journalists tried to make a connection between that survey and the liberal idea of the Dutch toward alcohol. There is a believe that if you introduce alcohol to kids at a relative young age (in this documentary "young" means 12 and up), they'll learn how to handle it earlier. Another argument is that if you won't permit that, they'll find ways to drink anyway. And I must say: it seems to make some sense. Right?

Well, a scientist in the documentary said that the statistics prove otherwise. Children that are introduced to alcohol at a young age and have the relative freedom to set their own limits, have a higher chance of alcohol misuse further in life. On top of that, the documentary suggested that alcohol is more damaging to a young brain than an older one, because parts of the brain of a youngster are still in development. The hippocampus would even grow and develop until the 24th year.

Although you can't buy beer until you're 16 in The Netherlands, there are of course countless ways to dodge the law. But the journalists wanted to show one specific way: drinking in a "keet". A "keet" is a shed being used as an improvised bar on a farm or something like that. It is run by the parents and their kids.

"Keten" are popular on the countryside in The Netherlands because it's sometimes the only way to go out for the kids. One of the 2 improvised bars the journalists visited was the Nova Zembar (great name!). The beer for the bar is bought by their parents. They buy lots of it in the supermarket when it's for sale.

Of course the children were asked how much they drank. The estimates began with 5 bottles. If they ever cared to count.

And what do I think of it? I don't know, but I do know I'm always sensitive for statistics. So if abolishing alcohol until the age of 16 is better, than I might just opt that.

I once read about someone who, as a boy, wanted to try some beer. His mother permitted that under the condition that he drank not one but about 5 cans. You can imagine that he got really sick. He never drank again. I don't think that I'm going to try that one, but it sure is a funny story :)

Labels: alcohol, teens

Phew! Finding a name for your baby is not an easy task. It took us months before we finally had a complete set of names for a boy and a girl. It took some time to find some good names, but the hardest part was definitely the part where we both had to agree to one name we both liked.

Comforting to know that we are not alone. Finding a name both partners like, seems to be a stumbling block for many parents. Giving someone a name that he or she will always carry around, is a very special task you may only be able to do once, right? Since it's such a very sensitive subject, everyone will eventually chooses their own tactics to dodge this problem:

• Divide the decision-making process.
  One comes up with a name for the boy, another one for the girl. You could also set the rule that both should have the right to veto a really bad name. But then you have a problem with the definition of a bad name.
• Search extensively and keep firing names at each other until there's a name you both like.
  
• Give your child more than one name.
  As an atheist I have only a first name and a family name. The region where I live is Catholic and most Catholics give their children extra names. Because I don't want to be part of the Catholic culture, I resented the idea of giving our children extra names at first. Now I see it as a great way to still use that fantastic name your partner didn't like.
  
• Give up the fight and let the other partner decide what the baby should be called.
  Unless you didn't care for choosing baby name in the first place, this would be a bad option. Always go for a win-win situation as it is one of the 7 habits of highly effective families.

I almost chose the last option, but my wife didn't take advantage of it. So we pulled ourselves to a win-win situation.

What makes a good name? Well, that's of course a decision you have to make yourself. But this is what we kept in mind while looking for baby names:

• Avoid spellings that are different from the obvious. Like "Crista" instead of "Christa". My wife always has to spell out how her name and in many letters sent to her the name is misspelled.
• A good name ideally sounds good in combination with the surname. An alliteration is always a strong technique. Like Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
• Make the initials easy to remember (we tried, but partially failed in doing that).
  
• A personal issue: the name should be pronounceable in English.
  Ok, this may look like a non-issue, since I say this on an English blog, but I'm from the Netherlands. I have a name that is hard to pronounce in English. And on top of that unpronounceable in any Roman language.
  I believe English is the new Esperanto and I'd like to promote English where I can. Besides that: the influence of the English language is felt everywhere, especially in a small country like The Netherlands. So an English name is important in this borderless world.

So what are good places to find baby names? Well, this is what I had bookmarked:

• NameVoyager: Man! That's a good online application! It's a graph that shows the popularity of all the names in America from the 1880s to 2005! It's not the most practical for power searching, but it looks great. You need Java to view it :(
  If you don't know what Java is, just try the link. If you see a graph in the page, it works.
  
• BabyNamesWorld.com: This is more to the liking of power searchers. You can search for a specific name length. I like the search feature that looks for specific letters in a name. It has an impressive list of non-American names, but don't let it fool you. I searched for Dutch names in the database, but there were just 20 Dutch names in the database. Nobody in The Netherlands will call his/her baby "Wagner", since it's a German name.
• Parenthood: Here you can find a name beginning and/or ending with a particular letter.
• Social Security Online: What? The US Social Security Administration? What do they have to do with baby names? Well, they have a list of most popular 1000 names of the 2000s through 2005. The data is based on all names from Social Security card applications for births that occurred in the US.
• Babynames.com. What's in a name :)
• Kindernamen.nl: I'd prefer an English name, but if you want an exotic name, you can always choose a name from the top 100 Dutch names.
  
• Still haven't found that perfect name? Then browse through all the links on DMOZ Baby names directory. That should satisfy your need for baby names. Otherwise you just have to lower your standards :)

...and finally two offline tips:

• Pay attention to the names that you see and hear in the media. We found a great name that way. And the end of a movie can get very interesting all of a sudden :)
• Make your own name. We combined the names of our two rabbits (who themselves were named after 2 Star Wars-characters), which resulted in a beautiful and more important unique name. I even Googled the name and although it sounds like a very normal name, Google couldn't find anything.
  

Labels: baby names

We all know that pregnancy doesn't have to go the way we think it would be. But frankly: I now really know the need for being prepared for everything that knocks down the time table you had in mind. My wife is now in hospital because of light, but premature contractions in the 33th week of her pregnancy. Although the contractions were not that strong, it could easily turn into strong ones if these minor contractions would go on for some time.

So that's why they gave my wife medication to slow down the contractions and to accelerate the development of the lungs of the baby. But here in The Netherlands the policy (this will vary between countries I guess) is that hospitals won't try to stop contractions after week 33. So we could easily have a baby that's born 6 weeks too early. It's not that you can't buy all your baby needs after birth, but you will then most likely have some other things to do than extensive baby shopping. Not to mention some other things on your mind! And your wife/girlfriend won't do that for you because she's too exhausted, that's for sure.

I knew a couple that still had a lot of work to do in the nursery in week 36. They finished it that week on an afternoon with the help of some friends. Afterwards it wasn't necessary, because it then still took about 6 weeks before the baby was born. But if the baby had a time table of it's own, they would be happy with all the immediate help they could get.

So what do the statistics say? Well, there's a lot of numbers to be found and they all differ a bit, but this graph I found on transitiontoparenthood.com gives you a rough idea of what the chance is of having a baby week by week.

And by being prepared I do not only mean that you have to have the baby room in order early. It's also comforting to have a little emergency bag ready in case you have to rush to the hospital. That way you have your stuff and that of the baby in just one grab.

All in all: pregnancies are unpredictable, so make sure you finish your preparations early.

Labels: birth, pregnancy

What is this blog all about?
The blog is a way to post my experiences as a parent and more important: what I learned. So I won't talk about our trip to Disneyland, because that's no use for you. What I will do is reflecting what it means to be parent and discussing the different options I have to feed up my children.

How many kids do you have then?
None. But that won't be for long. It's just a matter of weeks before I will be a father.

Why don't you use your name? It's feels like you're a fake person.
My wife thought that it's best to keep this blog anonymous, so I can have all the freedom to write what I want, without having our friends and relatives reading all our private stuff. What I can tell you is that I'm 30-year old guy, living in The Netherlands. And because I live in the Netherlands I will beforehand excuse for some awkward mistakes. English is not my native language.

I see banners. Do you want to get rich or something?
Well, don't we all want to get rich :)
It would be nice to earn some money with this blog, but I don't expect much of it. It's more like a little reward if I succeed to create useful content.

What's the post frequency?
I don't know that either. I think about one post a week, but the most important thing is that I write quality posts. So I rather take 2 weeks to write a decent article than posting 5 crappy in one week.

I placed comments everywhere on this blog. Why don't you reply?
I appreciate feedback very much. It's important for me as a parent. I will read all comments, but my time is limited. So instead of trying to reply all comments, I'd rather like to focus on creating quality posts.