Parenting Blog

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Lara

5 Tips For Getting Your Baby To Sleep Through The Night

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Getting your baby to sleep through the night is an incredibly common search term on Google. Getting a baby to sleep long stretches is such a challenge for many parents, that they often find themselves tearing their hair out, trying to figure out how to get some rest.  While there’s no single magic formula that works for everyone, ultimately, it’s a skill that has to be taught.  

Here are some of the best tips to get started. 

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New Mom Challenges – Psych Yourself Up to Meet Them

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Having a new baby is an exciting new moment indeed. However, along with the excitement can also come a considerable number of challenges. You may feel uneasy about whether you’re bonding enough with your baby or whether they’re getting the right amount of nutrition. They may cry for unreasonably long periods of time or leave you sleepless for nights on end.

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4 Tips For Moving On After Divorce

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The truth is that divorce can be incredibly traumatizing. In a way, divorce can be like a death, leaving both people in pain, mourning the loss of a relationship that once meant the world to them.  

After the divorce takes place, it may feel like a shock finding who you are again. Adjusting to becoming single again after being in a couple requires taking your time. You won’t settle into your new life overnight, particularly if you were married for a long time.  

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4 Great Ways To Create Relaxing Places Around Your Home for Your Family

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If you’re looking to improve your experience with your family at home, one of the things that you might consider focusing on is creating relaxing spaces for everyone. Though this might sound like an easy task at first, it does take a bit of thought to do it right, especially if you want to stay within a particular budget.

So what are some examples of ways that you can improve or create relaxing spaces in your home? You could create a patio area with an awning. Maybe you want to put together a game room somewhere in your house. Perhaps you consider finishing your basement to create a relaxing area. Or, if you have space, and a specific area has large windows, you can build a sunroom.

An Awning with a Patio

Going outside to relax with your family is always fun. However, if the sun is too bright, or there is rain, outside areas don’t work. That is – unless you put up an awning. Depending on where you live, this may have to be an industrial awning, or perhaps even a retractable one. There may be a small investment that you have to put into this high-quality accessory, but once that shade is up, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

A Game Room

Depending on the age of your children and what their interests are, maybe you want to create a game room for your household. Even in a small place the size of an office, you can put things that everyone will appreciate. Maybe you put in a table in for playing cards. Or perhaps you set up a computer system for video games and online entertainment. Large game rooms might include something like a pool table if you have the money to do it. When everyone wants to take a break, they go in this area to relax.

A Finished Basement

If the upper levels of your house are all full, consider that finishing your basement might be a good home improvement project. Then you can do whatever you want with the downstairs area. If you have a TV or entertainment center, that could go down there, or you could leave it minimized and free of clutter. Whatever kind of tendencies your household has, the finished basement could be the best of all worlds.

A Sun Area

If you enjoy plants and sunshine, maybe you want to create a relaxing sunroom. This is an area where you can collect all of your living things so that they can get enough sunlight, and you can explicitly set it up to be clutter free and designs to be calm and no matter who drops in. [Read more…] about 4 Great Ways To Create Relaxing Places Around Your Home for Your Family

Steps To Take Care of Your Kids In the Case of Parental Separation

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Going through a relationship separation is hard on everyone. But it can be especially hard if there are children involved. And, because emotions run so high and so much is at stake regarding a standard of living, parents have to figure out the best way to take care of their children in cases of separation and divorce. Not everyone always agrees on the best way to do this.

Think about some of the steps a parent may have to take through the separation process. It’s important to understand the stages of going through a divorce. There is also the matter of child custody. Beyond that, one parent probably will owe child support payments. And it is essential for lawsuits and court arrangements that everyone keeps the evidence that proves their perspective to be the correct one.

Going Through a Divorce

If you and your spouse decide to get a divorce, then there are lots of consequences to that action. Particularly when it comes to your kids, you need to figure out what age-appropriate facts to tell them. If your children are older, they will expect to know specific details about why the divorce is happening. If they are younger, there is different information that you have to tell them for their emotional stability. It all depends on context.

Custody Orders

One point of conflict between parents when they go through a divorce is who is going to get custody of the children. This can be a very complicated, emotionally painful, and passionate discussion or sets of actions that have to occur. The important thing is the parents always keep in mind the children’s best interests. So many times, decisions get lost in politics or grudges that the kids get left behind in the wake of the arguments.

Child Support Payments

Then there is the matter of figuring out what child support payments which parent needs to make. This is based on a lot of different evidence. Perhaps one parent makes significantly more money than the other. Or, maybe one parent has more value in possessions. A judge should be able to look at all that information and figure out what child support payments should be.

Keeping Evidence

No matter what the relationship is, if a case of divorce goes to court, it’s crucial that you keep evidence. Particularly when it comes to a custody battle over children, you want all evidence to support your case. So, you should be able to look over text messages and emails, and it should showcase how awesome of a person you are. You should keep this evidence and submit it to a judge if there’s ever a question of your character. [Read more…] about Steps To Take Care of Your Kids In the Case of Parental Separation

Different Ways To Start Building a Family or Close Connections

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When most people think of starting a family, it’s usually a pretty narrow perspective that they’re thinking through. However, especially with the way modern culture is going, there are more ways than ever to create a family unit, or even just to form a very close circle of people that function the same as having a family unit.

Think of a few ways that this sense of family and closeness can be initiated. You could adopt a child. You and your partner might go through a surrogacy process. For the closeness of family without blood ties, you can get into volunteerism. And, a technique that many people forget about in the grand scheme of things is that you can reach out to your neighbors to get that physical proximity closeness as a part of your daily life.

Adoption

Deciding to adopt a child is one of the ways that many people choose to add to their family. There are a million different reasons that a couple could choose adoption as opposed to natural childbirth or other methods, so it is important not to judge people who are in the situation. Loving parents can take care of an adopted child just as well is a natural child, and there are millions of loving families that operate under this pretense.

Surrogacy

For families that want to choose a different option, there is a way to go through a surrogacy process that creates a situation that is much nearer to a natural birth than adoption. Surrogacy can involve a lot of additional details though. There is the matter of donors, mothers, expenses, and legal contracts. Surrogacy is not for everyone, but the people who do find it to be a good match discover that it is the only way that they can have the feeling toward a new child that they are desiring.

Volunteerism

Outside of the idea of blood relatives or adoptive children, it is possible for people to become heavily involved in volunteerism to get that sense of family. Especially for people that are single and have lots of extra time on their hands, volunteering for the community is a way to establish close daily bonds with some of the people that are closest to you culturally.

Meet Your Neighbors

It’s amazing how many people never take the time to meet their neighbors. There is such an emphasis on nuclear families that sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that there are people who live right next to you! As long as your neighbors have the same sense of community that you do, you can find that the people right next-door can give you the closest feeling of family that is physically possible, and there are none of the additional hoops to jump through as for other methods. [Read more…] about Different Ways To Start Building a Family or Close Connections