Welcome to my circus.

March 23, 2014
by Maralee
1 Comment

A Life in Status- February #3 & #4, 2014

Get involved in the dialogue on Facebook or Twitter.

Went to check on my crying toddler in bed. He points to a book on the floor and only stops crying when I’ve put it away correctly on the bookshelf.
#Mennoniteproblems

If the ability a boy has to pay attention to the toilet while peeing has any correlation to their future ability to pay attention to the road while driving, we’re in trouble.
#EYESONTHEROAD

Having kids means when you’re alone, you unnecessarily speak in the Royal “we”. Like when you almost run into someone at Target and say, “Excuse us” and then realize the kids are at home and that one was all you.

Danny: Mom, we cleaned the room. But. . . don’t go check.
#sureyoudid

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March 20, 2014
by Maralee
4 Comments

Ask Maralee: The Radio Edition

I love helping people problem solve parenting issues. It truly is one of my favorite things to do. This is one of the reasons I try to regularly write Parenting Tips of the Day and why I have the Ask Maralee posts I do on occasion. You can ask my friends, I promise I’m not nosey into everybody’s parenting business, but I love to think through these issues when I’m asked.
This was an especially fun conversation for me to have because I go to do it with one of my parenting mentors, Stan Parker. Stan is a major influence on my parenting both in how he has thoughtfully created a parenting philosophy and in how I’ve watched it work out practically with his lovely kids who I have seen go from little ones to adults. I’m really thankful for his influence in my life and how he’s chosen to invest in my family. (And happy 50th birthday, Stan!)

So listen and enjoy! AND there’s kind of a big announcement tucked into the first minute of this broadcast. . .

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March 17, 2014
by Maralee
1 Comment

Don’t waste your childless years

If you have not yet had kids, people are probably telling you to make the most of these days. Now is your time to travel, to sleep in on the weekends, to spend your money on whatever interests you, to take a class, to party, or develop a hobby. I wouldn’t say that any of those options are inherently wrong and I can understand how they become much more complicated when you have young children, but I want to challenge you to something more. Something deeper.

When I talk to my peers today about investing in kids from crisis situations, I realize there are limits on what many families can do. And rightly so. I intentionally encourage parents to foster kids who are younger than their youngest to minimize the potential for harm that can come when a child with a complicated life experience is exposed to children from a sheltered upbringing. While we want to do our best to offer help to kids who need it, we don’t want to do that at the expense of the children God entrusted to our care. Creating issues in our children while trying to solve the issues of other children is counter productive.

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March 12, 2014
by Maralee
0 comments

Kids in Context

(You can read or listen. Because I like options.)

In conversations with young children, context is key. The other day my four year-old said, “Mom, we get a caterpillar, put him in a jar and he make a raccoon and then be a butterfly?” Thank goodness for context or I would have had no idea he meant “cocoon” instead of “raccoon”. A couple nights ago my three year-old was crying that she couldn’t find her ipad. This seemed odd since she doesn’t own an ipad. After some questions about what exactly she wanted, it became clear what she was looking for was her Magna Doodle.

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March 10, 2014
by Maralee
0 comments

Ask the Pediatrician: How contagious are we?

A big thank you to Dr. Mark McColl for sharing his expertise for this series of guest posts.

When should a parent keep a child home from school or out of the church nursery or daycare?

Why are there times when parents get the same illnesses as their children and times when they seem to avoid it?

The heart of these questions centers on the contagiousness of our child’s infections.  In most circumstances, our children are very contagious prior to our recognition that they are ill at all.  For many viruses the most contagious period is the three days prior to a fever.  That being said, a fever is a fair indicator of when parents should keep their children home from social events.  Whether an infection needs therapy or not, once the fever has resolved and the child is feeling better that seems like a fine time to get back to normal life.  Even without a fever though some children feel ill enough to warrant staying home. I usually tell folks to wait 24 hours after becoming symptom free before reengaging in social functions. It’s not a scientific rule but rather one that makes good common sense to me. For colds I suggest being fever free and being able to control their spittle (cover a cough, wipe their own nose, and wash their hands, etc.).

One note of caution is what to do if you’ve been exposed to someone with a serious infection.  The incubation period, or the time it takes after contracting the infection and the onset of symptoms, can be variable.  For influenza it averages only two days but for measles it is 21 days.  In the San Diego measles outbreak in 2008, a 7 year old unvaccinated boy returned from a family trip to Switzerland having unknowingly contracted the disease.  He infected 11 other unvaccinated children while exposing over 800 to the infectious agent.  Forty-eight people were quarantined for having been exposed and were required to spend 21 days under house arrest awaiting the outbreak of symptoms.

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March 6, 2014
by Maralee
5 Comments

Foster payment pet peeves

I recently wrote about some of the common misconceptions I hear about foster parenting and financial compensation. I work hard to help people understand the realities of foster care and I find it hard to do that in a climate that implies it’s shameful to talk about how foster parents are paid. Any family hoping to make an informed decision about if foster care is right for them needs to know the realities they are going to face and if they’re able to take on the challenges.

So while we’re clearing up some of the misconceptions, I’d also like to address some of my personal pet peeves when it comes to how foster parents are paid. Again, I don’t represent an agency and these are only my thoughts after spending years working with “the system” and doing a lot of research on this topic.

Abuse in the system. This is probably a universal pet peeve for everybody involved in the system. I once heard about a foster family who was getting highly compensated for a child because of the child’s level of need (emotional/behavioral problems). This family had the child in school all day, childcare (paid for by the state) until the evening, then brought the child home, gave him meds to help him sleep and put him to bed. The amount of care provided for this child was minimal, but the monthly check was huge. This is what I think of when someone asks if we’re foster parenting “for the money.” There are ways to make money foster parenting, but they may be less than ethical. The point of having a child in a foster family is to allow them a safe place to live where they can develop healthy relationships in a family environment. I have been involved in providing care for children with behavioral and emotional problems. I know exactly how exhausting that can be. One child we worked with went directly from our home into a psychiatric facility and he has been in and out of them ever since. Some kids require a level of care that can’t be provided by your average foster family or may not be safe to have in a family environment at all. But if you are taking a child into your home and making them part of your family, then please MAKE THEM PART OF YOUR FAMILY. Don’t just be the place they drift into a medicated sleep. I wish the system had more flexibility to look at individual situations and determine compensation based on the care the foster family is actually providing, not determining it based on a checklist of behaviors the child has. We should be providing financial incentives for doing the hard work of creating relationships and bonds with these kids.

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March 5, 2014
by Maralee
21 Comments

Are we foster parenting “for the money?”

There are a lot of misperceptions out there about foster parents and money. The problem is that “good” foster parents know it’s taboo to talk about compensation, so there’s no way to clear up the confusion. We don’t want people to think we’re in it for the money, nor do we want them to worry if we have the money to take on an additional child, so we opt not to talk about the financial impact of foster care. I want to do my best to address some of the misperceptions I have heard, but I want to be clear that I do not represent an agency and my answers may be specific to the area of the country where I’m providing foster care. These are my observations from my own experience and the research I’ve done. Feel free to do your own research about what the reality is in your area.

Here are the misperceptions I most commonly hear:

“Foster parents are in it for the money.” The rate a foster parent is paid is based on a state’s assumption of how much it costs to raise a child in that state. This varies greatly from state to state, agency to agency, and based on the particular needs of a child (kids who need more specialized care, have behavioral problems, more medical appointments, etc. may mean foster parents get compensated at a higher rate). You can imagine, getting paid close to exactly what it costs to raise a child is not a way to MAKE money, but is how you keep foster children from being a financial drain on a family. My state has one of the lowest compensation rates in the country. This was recently changed by our state legislature and the increased rates will go into effect this summer. Until that happens, we will be paid 50 cents an hour to provide round the clock care for our foster kids. This is the rate we’ve been paid for the last 5 years we’ve been fostering. Obviously, 50 cents an hour is not an amount we would take if we were “in it for the money.” There will always be unscrupulous people who manipulate the system for their financial benefit (I’ve got a future post coming about that), but for those of us who foster parent with integrity, this is not likely to be a money making venture.

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February 25, 2014
by Maralee
16 Comments

Praying for your foster child’s family

Foster parenting is a continual struggle to come to terms with our lack of control. While we are responsible for all the practical decisions that effect the child in our care, we have no control over the major decisions that effect their future. This is a precarious position to find yourself in and has been one of my major challenges in foster parenting. Sometimes I have tried to respond to this loss of control by worrying or even trying to manipulate the situation to go in a direction I think is best, but ultimately I have had to let go of my need to be in charge of what happens.

So what do you do when your heart is heavy in a situation where you have no control? You pray. Prayer becomes not a last resort when you’ve done all you can do, but a first line of defense since there was really nothing you could do to begin with. In most of our prayers it seems simple to just be honest. We are telling God what we want and generally don’t have to consider all the implications. Praying for your foster child isn’t quite that simple. Am I willing to pray that a biological father wouldn’t be found? Or that he would be the kind of man who would want nothing to do with his child? Is that really what I want? Do I pray against a parent’s recovery because I want this child to have the stability of a home where substance abuse was never an issue? Do I pray that Grandma won’t step in and help? That a parent will be picked up by police? That a prison sentence will be long? These are the uncomfortable moments in my prayers where I face my own ugliness when it comes to how badly I want what I think is best to happen.

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February 24, 2014
by Maralee
1 Comment

Ask the Pediatrician: Antibiotics?

This is part three in our Ask the Pediatrician series focused on seasonal illnesses. A big thanks to Dr. Mark McColl for sharing his wisdom here.

When do we need antibiotics? Are they over prescribed? What should a parent do if they are concerned they are being unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics for their child?

Antibiotics are a powerful class of medications designed to kill off bacteria that have invaded the body. They are useful medications that can rapidly change the tide of a worsening infection. In the strictest sense, antibiotics are only used when the invading bacteria are not being sufficiently killed off by the body’s typical defense mechanisms thereby causing significant risk to the individual’s health.

This indication for using antibiotics is not as simple as some would like to think. For instance, ear infections in children may commonly be a bacterial infection that would dramatically improve with antibiotics. Different countries and cultures have different levels at which their healthcare community typically prescribes antibiotic help. In the United States, we have a low threshold for pain and suffering in our children and the standard for treatment is much sooner than the Northern European countries. The trade off is more antibiotic use but less complications from untreated infections.

The advice I give my patients is that I use antibiotics only when I feel they have a bacterial infection that their body cannot clear adequately enough on its own. Sometimes the evidence is very clear and sometimes it becomes a decision based on experience.

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February 18, 2014
by Maralee
0 comments

Ask the Pediatrician: Cold or Flu?

*This post is part of a series of guests posts by my friend Dr. Mark McColl*

 

What is the biggest mistake you see parents making in treating the common cold or flu?

 If a child has a cold, when would it be necessary to see a doctor? If they have the flu, when would it be necessary?

What are the pros and cons of cold medicine for children?

The common cold and influenza are both caused by viral infections of the respiratory tract.  That’s about where the similarities end.  The common cold is caused by over 200 different strains of viruses while influenza only has a couple predominant strains each year.  The common cold causes a runny nose, congestion, a sore throat, cough, and often a mild fever.  Influenza on the other hand can be devastating.  It causes a violent infection of the upper respiratory tract (the nose and throat) as well as usually infecting the lower respiratory tract (the trachea, bronchi, and lungs).  Fevers up to 104F are typical.  The common cold hits its stride during the fall and winter months but can be a problem all year long.  Influenza tends to come in mini-epidemics for individual communities.  January through mid February is the peak season for my town.

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