This is what happens...

...when daddy is in charge of mealtime!

Thankful Thursday: Picnics & Playtime

It's thankful Thursday time! We all have so much to be thankful for and we love to take this opportunity just to write down each and everything that comes to mind. Please take this time to share with us what you're thankful for as well. If you have a blog expressing your thankfulness, please share the link! Without further ado, here's what we're thankful for:

Mandi's List:

I'm thankful for picnics. Ronnie and I are so blessed to both work from home, which gives our family a lot of flexibility. Yesterday, for lunch, we enjoyed a picnic together in our backyard under the shade of a tree. We ate, Mckenna splashed around in a bin (yes, bin, not pool ha!)

I'm thankful for new words. Mckenna has a new sound she makes. She has been making the sound Dadada all day for the last month and a half, but her new sound is...wait for it...MAMAMAMAMA! WAHOO!

I'm thankful for a gym that's close by. On Tuesday, our plans for the day changed a bit last minute, but because our gym is so close, we were able to both make it to the gym independently for a quick workout.

Ronnie's List:

I'm thankful for playtime with Mckenna. Each and every day I get to play with Mckenna and watch her discover all types of new things. I'll be the first to say that at times, playing with a baby can get a bit boring, BUT I am thankful for this time in her life and try to remember that she'll only be this age once. Plus, any one-on-one time I get with my baby is a good thing!

I'm thankful for AIM. Mandi and I work in separate parts of the house and AIM makes it much easier to communicate. There are a few times when we can't get our point across via the interweb, but 9 times out of 10, it does just fine. Plus, we save our voice boxes from trying to shout our messages across the house :)

I'm thankful for the pest guy that just came. We had a "professional scorpion hunter" (my title, not his) named Jason come out to our place and dust/spray our yard plus black light for  scorpions. We ended up catching about 30 adults and 30 babies. Not bad for a night's work! Let's just hope that the dusting and spraying does a number on any that are left.

So, what are you thankful for today?

Hospital Noise Fractures Sleep, Slows Healing

I found this article/study very interesting as I am a big believer in hospital stays and feel that they contribute positively to my health. What about you? Read the article and then tell me what you think!!

Nighttime noise in hospitals adds up to poor sleep, which may hurt healing when patients need it most, researchers found. 

In a laboratory sleep study, recorded hospital sounds of overhead paging, IV alarms, squeaky carts, and the like disrupted sleep and raised heart rates, Orfeu M. Buxton, PhD, of Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues reported.
Electronic alert sounds like ringing phones and IV alarms were the most "potent" in arousing sleepers, disrupting normal sleep brain wave patterns more than half of the time, even when set at their quietest settings. 

Likewise, staff talking and voice paging at a level of 50 dB -- quieter than normal conversation -- disrupted sleep half of the time in the study, which appeared in the June 19 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. 

"Preservation of patients' sleep should be a priority for contributing to improved clinical outcomes for patients who are hospitalized," Buxton's group wrote. 

Those benefits might include lower sedation requirements and shorter hospital stays, and even lower incidence of delirium in the intensive care unit, they suggested. 

Many centers contacted by ABC News in collaboration with MedPage Today have started implementing various strategies to limit night noise, which is consistently a top complaint from inpatients. 

That's important to tackle not only for the sake of patients but also for the hospital's reputation, Vineet Arora, MD, of the University of Chicago, commented in an email.
"Noise is a publicly reported quality measure for U.S. hospitals in CMS Hospital Compare [part of the HCAPS survey] and only half of patients report their rooms are kept quiet at night," Arora wrote. 

Common strategies cited were putting posters or stoplight-style monitors in hallways to remind staff and visitors to keep voices down, a switch to visual paging systems, and setting up "quiet time" hours. 

The study included 12 healthy adults who slept in a sound-dampened sleep lab for polysomnography over three nights. 

After a run-in night, participants were exposed to 14 common sounds -- such as voices, IV alarm, phone, ice machine, toilet flush, laundry cart, outside traffic, and helicopter noise -- played at levels increasing from 40 to 70 dB during specific sleep stages to test the impact.
Sleep was easier to disrupt in the phase after the transition into sleep, called N2, that adults spend most of their time asleep in, compared with the next deeper, slow-wave sleep phase called N3 or the rapid eye movement phase (REM, both P<0.001). 

Overall, as expected, louder sounds were more likely to disturb brain wave patterns during sleep. 

Arousal occurred at lower sound levels on the third night than on the second night, suggesting some sensitization to nighttime noise in the hospital. 

Heart rate jumped about 10 bpm when a sound fully roused a sleeper. 

These results likely underestimated the impact of noise on sleep among inpatients due to the young population studied, whereas the typical hospitalized patient is older with medical and psychiatric conditions, as well as pain and medication use, all of which contribute to a harder time reaching the deep N3 stage of sleep, Buxton's group cautioned. 

Another limitation in that regard was that noise exposure was sequential, kept to 10 seconds or less, and halted if a participant started to wake up, which is not the case in a real hospital setting, the investigators added.

Original article: http://www.medpagetoday.com/article.cfm?tbid=33223#.T9i_EOwNECE.twitter

Can you relate? I sure can, but I still think the positives of a hospital stay outweigh the negative. You?

Childcare with Cystic Fibrosis

Ran onto this old question and I thought I'd share...

I am in a serioius relationship, and am starting to think kids might be a possibility for me. I have a couple questions - are you the primary care giver? Do you have help? I don't know how I would be able to take care of myself and a child too. I just would like some insight.

Right now, I'm not the primary caregiver as my wife is on maternity leave. When she goes back to work, I'll be the primary caregiver on the days she's working. We won't have any consistent help, but we both have family in the area that would be more then willing if needed.

As for us, it's just one of those things that comes down to priority. My family is my priority. For me, this means taking care of them as well as myself. Everything outside of those two things just simply isn't as important. This may mean less time for myself, my friends, my hobbies, ect, but I knew that and was willing to make that sacrifice going into this. It's hard work, but it's doable and rewarding.

With that said, if you feel that having a family would put an undo strain on your health, then I think it's really something you should think about. It could be very unfair to a child to bring him or her into a situation where you know that one parent will always be there, but not there, because of their health. Our children not only need us there physically, but mentally as well. Just something to think about.

Thank you for this question. Hopefully I was able to shed some light on our situation as well as my thoughts on this subject.

(Almost) Back in the Saddle

As I posted last week, I was struggling to get back into the workout groove after vacation, so I set some goals. I promised I'd report back, so here I sit...reporting.

My goal was to run 4 times, lift weights 3 times and evening walks. Well I'm happy to report I get a B+. I got the hard stuff in. I did 4 runs, and lifted 3 times. We did go for a couple family walks, but they weren't in the evening and they weren't daily. Time of day obviously doesn't matter, but number does. So This week I need to step that up.

It felt awesome getting back at it. I will say though, I made the mistake of lifting on my legs on Saturday morning, and it reminded me EXACTLY why I don't lift on my legs...ever. I tend to totally overdo it, and then my legs are incredibly sore for the next 3-4 days. Sore muscles are good. They show that whatever you're doing it working. The problem is that really sore leg muscles don't exactly bode well for running. So last night, I did a shorter run, to just get my run in, but only did 2.5 instead of 3. I ran like Frankenstein the whole time, but I was glad I at least got out and did it. Needless to say, I will be neglecting my legs in my lifting routine once more though!

This week my goals are similar but I'm going to up them a bit. I want to run 4 times, lift 4 times, and go for a family walk every day. I already got one walk in this morning, so far, so good! Ha!

Other than that, life is nothing new; work, child-rearing, working out, and occasionally cleaning the house (anyone else let the cleaning go a smidge with young kids? Yikes! It's always picked up, but clean, clean...not so much).

Oh, one exciting thing. I think we are going to go look at some bikes today. We got come cheapy ($80-$100) beach cruisers when we got married, but needless to say cheapy bikes don't quite hold up. So we are going to invest in some bikes that will actually last, and buy a kids seat, so family walk time can be family bike ride time some days! I'm pretty excited! We're dubbing them anniversary, mother's day, father's day gifts...because, no, we haven't gotten each other anything for any of those occasions, pathetic, I know.

That's about it! Hopefully next week I'll report an A+ and have some pictures of new bikes :)