Backwards is Best!

Riding rear-facing is safest! One of the most important jobs you have as a parent is keeping your child(ren) safe.  Automobile crashes are the number one cause of death for children under fourteen.  This makes car safety especially important. Parents often ask, "How soon can I turn my child to face forward?" The universally accepted response is to keep your child rear-facing until AT LEAST one year of age AND 20 pounds in weight.  This is the minimum. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other Child Passenger Safety organizations strongly recommend that you to keep your child rear-facing as long as possible, and that may mean up to 35 or 40 pounds for most convertible car seats.

• Rear-facing is safest for both adults and children, but especially for babies, who would face a greater risk of spinal cord injury in a front-facing carseat during a frontal crash.
  
• Rear-facing car seats spread frontal crash forces over the whole area of a child's back, head and neck; they also prevent the head from snapping relative to the body in a frontal crash.
  
• Rear-facing carseats may not be quite as effective in a rear end crash, but severe frontal and frontal offset crashes are far more frequent and far more severe than severe rear end crashes.
  
• Rear-facing carseats are NOT a safety risk just because a child's legs are bent at the knees or because they can touch/kick the vehicle seat.
  
• Rear-facing as long as possible is the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and can reduce injuries and deaths.   

Sources: www.car-safety.org and www.healthychildren.org

Gross Shopping Cart News

Fuel for my Germaphobia  . . . from MSNBC.com:

"Every day, parents blithely drop their toddlers into the baskets of shopping carts, never giving a moment’s thought to who might have had their hands on the handle last. Preliminary results from a new study show that may be a mistake.

Researchers from the University of Arizona swabbed shopping cart handles in four states looking for bacterial contamination. Of the 85 carts examined, 72 percent turned out to have a marker for fecal bacteria.

The researchers took a closer look at the samples from 36 carts and discovered Escherichia coli, more commonly known as E. coli, on 50 percent of them — along with a host of other types of bacteria.

The study’s results may explain earlier research that found that kids who rode in shopping carts were more likely than others to develop infections caused by bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter, Gerba said.“That’s more than you find in a supermarket’s restroom,” said Charles Gerba, the lead researcher on the study and a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona. “That’s because they use disinfecting cleaners in the restrooms. Nobody routinely cleans and disinfects shopping carts.”

Shopping cart handles aren’t the only thing you need to worry about when you go to the local supermarket, Gerba added. In other research, he’s found that reusable shopping bags that aren’t regularly washed turn into bacterial swamps. “It’s like wearing the same underwear every day,” Gerba said."

I alway try to use disinfecting wipes or a shopping cart cover and diligently wash my both cart covers and my reusable bags.  This article made me feel less like I'm being obsessive and more like I'm being proactive and smart!