Intervention for Twitter?

I am completely and utterly obsessed with Twitter. For those of you that have been living under a rock, Twitter is the latest social networking obsession of the world. Children, adults and businesses are twitter-crazy. Businesses especially have found Twitter to be such a wonderful and successful tool to reach people. It's insane! Newspapers, emails and television news are all now a second thought because of how quick information travels and to so many people at once with Twitter.

I spend every other minute watching my crackberry to see if the light is blinking, which indicates I a new tweet has come in. I have to hold myself back from tweeting all day. I feel a high when someone responds to or retweets my tweets. It's all crazy. But I love it. I use it to read up on what my friends are doing, which is similar to Facebook but Twitter is more of an IM style because of how fast information flows. :) I also use Twitter for education purposes. You will find experts of all sorts, including Dr. Oz and Jillian Michael's, and you can follow them to read up on their latest advice, findings, research, etc. I'm into skincare right now and it's unbelievable how much I have learned in the last months from just reading tweets. Check me out (partlycloudi) sometime and the other folks I follow. It's all day, FREE entertainment.

Catchalaters,
Claudia

New Mothers, if you never read anything ever again...

...must read this!

Naps will be your ticket to sanity. Nap start and end times are extremely important. Baby MUST nap!

Around 2 months of age, I started noticing that Olive would get cranky 90 minutes after she woke up from her naps. 3 weeks after religiously following the clock and putting her down every 90 minutes, a friend gave me a book about the N.A.P.S. program, which proved my time theory right. Bottom line in the book: note the time your baby wakes from a nap and 90 minutes later, put them down for another nap. Because of the sleeping patterns, this works. Want to know what happens when your baby doesn't go down for a nap...disaster for mommy. The baby is more cranky and it is much harder to get the baby to go to sleep if you pass that 90 minutes. What happens is that the baby will enter a new cycle of alertness.

Before I learned to read her cues and pay attention to the clock, that monster of mine would cry even though she was fed, clean and held. If those three things are checked off as done and the baby is crying like crazying...chances are that they're just tired. The baby may not act like they're tired because they may cry even more when you put them down, but give it a couple of minutes. You'll find a crazy, crying baby will be a quite, sleeping one soon enough. The key!...is to start rocking and putting the baby to sleep 10-15 minutes before the nap time. That way, you're not doing play time to nap time in 60 seconds. They need time to wind down and get ready for sleep...just like us. This same logic applies to when you're ready to put baby down to sleep for the night.

Putting a baby to sleep either for naps or bedtime can be pretty rough. Most important thing to do is be consistent, stick with it and remember that it may not be comfortable with whatever method you choose to put your little one down. It WILL pay off in the end. Good luck

Confessions and Shout-outs

I've been feeling real bad about the lack of posts I'm doing on my blog. You'd think I have more time to do so now that I'm a stay at home mom. Truth is, that little baby is keeping me tied up. I used to think that when she naps, I can clean or write, but I've surprisingly been taking naps at the same time. I've never been a napper, so it's very new...not to mention lovely! There's also all the updating I'm doing on Facebook and Twitter, so sometimes I forget to show love on here. But I'm going to try to get better about writing more. There are some reviews I'd like to post on stretchmark creams and new makeup I've recently tried. Be sure to visit every once and again...

Fashion Week in Austin kicked off last night and I had a blast. We visited a couple of places, but by far my fav was Waterstone Aesthetics on Guadalupe near campus. A lovely pair owns the place and I'd love to go back for treatments or a cut/color. Good luck and congratulations on the new baby, Waterstone!