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As a parent, the natural response to your children getting hurt or injured is to freak out, but while this certainly shows you care, it can also affect the child. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that panicking is not the best way forward.

Instead, you need to stay calm, which is beneficial in most stressful situations but especially when your child is hurt. It’s not enough to stay calm, though. You also need to know what to do to help your child get over it. 

Why You Shouldn’t Panic

Panicking after your kid hurts themselves is something they will grow to associate with danger and pain for the rest of your life. While it’s healthy to understand pain, overreacting to the smallest injuries means they will struggle to distinguish minor scrapes for legitimate injuries in life. If they see you panic, so will they, so staying calm will help them realize it’s not that bad, even if it turns out it is. 

Recognize What The Problem Is

After an injury, check where they say hurts to get an idea of the severity. This will allow you to work the appropriate response and whether it requires minor treatment or a trip to the hospital. 

You should also ensure that you do not merely look at the source of the pain and instead look elsewhere to find other injuries they may not have realized yet. It might be that their adrenaline is pumping so much that they do not understand the extent of what is wrong, which will help you deal with the problem.  

Reassure Them It’s Going to Be Okay

Once you have worked out how bad the injury is, you can calm them down by reassuring them it will be okay. Once you have done this, you can then try to distract them from the pain by talking about other things such as school, sports, or their favorite TV show. By taking their attention away from the injury, they will be able to relax, which can halt any tears and ease their panic.

It might be that their initial response makes the injury to seem worse than it is, and once they have overcome the shock, they can realize that what they thought hurt a lot only hurts a little. 

Know What to Do Next

Following a quick examination of the injury and calming them down, you can then start focusing on what to do next. If you have a first aid kit, you can treat most minor injuries where you are, and if they are old enough, provide painkillers to make them more comfortable. 

For head, bone, or muscle injuries, you’re best off taking them to the hospital. You can also start thinking about insurance coverage, especially for concussions with services like www.braininjurylawofseattle.com/. This can make you feel better about potential costs and manage to get to the bottom of what happened to prevent it from happening to others. 

Everything Will Be Okay

It’s never nice when your child gets hurt, and your protective urges come out in full force. However, the injury is rarely as bad as everyone first suspects, and staying calm and resisting the urge to panic can help everyone deal with the situation much better.

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If you’ve already jumped on the sustainability train (or should you say bicycle), you’re likely wondering if you can do more to help the planet and live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. But as you look around your home, you might not see anything suitable for recycling. This isn’t the case, though, and you’d be surprised how many things you can recycle in every home across the country. 

Carpets

If you’re thinking of investing in a brand new set of floorboards or carpet to go somewhere in your home, then consider what you can do with your existing carpet. Most people would be satisfied with throwing it out. However, carpets that are in a decent condition can be recycled or even sold. You can search for carpet reclamation services in your area, or you can get in touch with the original manufacturers to see if they have a recycling program for you to drop the old carpet off at. 

CDs and DVDs

If you’re someone born before the nineties, you’ve likely got stacks upon stacks upon stacks of CDs and DVDs in your home. Some of these discs will bring back amazing memories, but others are probably purchases that you regret, and hope never gets out. If no one’s willing to buy them or if they’ve gotten scratched, there are recycling and repurposing solutions to that your brief Madagascan Country phase didn’t go to waste. 

Appliances

From washing machines to dryers and everything in between, these large household appliances are too often relegated to the side of the road where they are either picked up and destroyed or left to rust away until they become an eyesore. However, most of the parts used to make these appliances can be recycled. You can even make a fire pit out of a washing machine drum, which is perfect for camping.  

Home Electronics

Your home contains so many electronics that you may not even think about as electronics. If you’re anything like the majority of the country, you’ve probably got a drawer full of cables, plugs, and old cell phones to keep ‘just in case’. Face it, though, you’re never going to use them again, so check with your local recycling plant to find out how to recycle these items properly. 

Crayons

If you’ve got kids, there’s a significant chance that there’s a bucket somewhere in the attic full to the brim with old crayons. It’s unlikely your kids will ever use these again, but they don’t have to go to waste. The National Crayon Recycling Program accepts over 100,000 pounds of old and unused crayons every year, saves them ending up in a landfill, and melts them down to create new crayons to send to schools and other educational institutions. 

There’s Always More to Recycle

As manufacturing and recycling processes become more and more sophisticated, the more possibilities there are for embracing sustainability. If you’re struggling to find items and accessories to recycle, take a quick look around your house, in the basement, and up in the attic and see what sustainable treasures you can find. 

This is a sponsored post. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Please view my policy page for more information.

Your mouth is one of the most used parts of your body - you use it to speak and to eat, and sometimes you use it to breathe when your nose is all stuffed up with a cold and congestion! And because of that, it tends to be one of the fastest naturally healing places in your body, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally capable of taking care of itself. 

Which is why it’s important to look up just how important your oral health is, and why it’s important to take care of your gums and your tongue and your teeth. Quite a few problems can crop up from irregular brushing or eating the wrong kinds of food a little too often, and now’s your chance to put things right. 

So here are some points to keep in mind the next time you think about skipping a dentist appointment. It’s important to keep in touch with your health, and attend as many regular check ups as possible, but don’t let yourself forget about your mouth in all that mess! 

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The Nerves Stretch Right Up to Your Brain

There are a lot of nerves in your mouth, that connect very closely to your brain and your spinal cord. It’s why toothaches and gum problems can be so damn painful! When you’ve got a whole branching network of nerves right underneath the source of all your thoughts and feelings, it’s going to hurt like hell when there’s an underlying problem. 

It’s why the pain we experience in our teeth and gums is often nothing to do with any mouth problems. Sometimes it’s just a headache that’s radiating that far down, thanks to the amount of cranial nerves that exist in your facial region. 

Some people have nerve endings very close to the surface of their teeth, and some people have them set deep behind them - it’s why some of us have no idea there’s a cavity in a molar, and why some of us are extremely sensitive to cold ice cream. And it’s why taking care of your oral health is so important; those nerves hiding behind your teeth are incredibly crucial to brain and body function. 

Your Mouth is Connected to a Lot of Life’s Problems

A lot of diseases can originate in the mouth. There's a lot of symptoms for serious infections or diseases that show up in the mouth, such as Diabetes, and if you manage to notice them ahead of time, it’s a lot easier to take care of yourself in the long run. 

We all know what plaque is, and what it looks like, and it can be quite dangerous for your oral health if you let it build up too much. Being able to brush and/or floss on a regular basis makes sure little to no bacteria makes its way into your bloodstream, simply because these preventative measures, combined with the magic of saliva, keep invaders away from the back of your throat and beyond. 

If you get to know how your oral health works, and you get comfortable with visiting a dentist on a regular basis, you’ll have nothing to fear from your mouth. 

You’ll Keep Your Teeth For So Much Longer!

Your teeth are useful to you for a variety of reasons. Of course, they’re needed for chewing and eating, but they also help you to speak and form the right words for whatever you’re trying to say. And when you take care of your oral health, you’ll keep your teeth for so much longer than your parents or grandparents may have! 

If you manage to brush twice a day, and you’re able to keep to a low sugar diet, you’ll be able to maintain a good sense of oral health and hygiene. Of course, there’s going to be quite a few outliers to this rule, and teeth and gum health can go up and down for all kinds of reasons, but it really is basic skills like that that help to keep tooth crown procedures to a minimum. If you’re someone who’s afraid of the dentist, prevention is always the best course of action to take! 

Your oral health has a lot to answer for, and you have a lot to do to take care of it. Thankfully, using a toothbrush and/or mouthwash is surprisingly easy, so dentistry issues can be few and far between. But make sure you know the run on effects of bad oral health. 

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Not two children are the same. Even identical twins can have completely separate personalities, and will be different people with different intentions and interests to some degree. This is a good thing. Diversity between personalities is always a thing we should celebrate.

Of course, as a parent, we often hope our child will fit in. We hope they will find good friends at school, and develop to walk or talk at the right ages, or that they’ll be as safe and sound as many other children have been throughout their childhood. However, this is not always the case. And as a parent, this can make you feel as though you are a bad or inattentive parent.

This is not true. Not all children are the same, but they should all be treated with love and respect. While helping a child with extra needs, this can be a difficult prospect. It can truly test you as a parent. But the willingness to try, to go through the tough times and to ensure that love is felt throughout, that can be a real gift.

If you find yourself in this situation, please consider the following advice:

A Perfect Place

Finding a perfect place which they can occupy may be essential for their development. For example, autism treatment centers or services can provide the most caring surroundings for a child developing with this highly specific condition, and through this they will find the best help. Additionally, being introduced to other children they can relate to, or perhaps heading to a school where these needs are more than competently cared for can truly lighten your load as a parent.

A Patient Parent

Patience will become one of the most valuable virtues you have to practice when dealing with a child who has extra needs. To fail to admit that this can be hard on you will only prevent you from practising adequate self-care, and this can harm your ability to stay a present and loving parent. Working on your patience, understanding that a child with extra needs may not be able to help their behavior, and learning from the challenges to the extent that you can will be the philosophy you keep to work well, day after day.

A Loving Connection

A loving connection is more important than anything. Thought a child with extra needs may not be able to specialize just how much they love you, or due to their disability they may find it hard to always behave as a perfect child (which no child ever is), they adore you. Ensuring that love is the basis of everything you do, encouraging them, always being there for them through the good and the bad is the beauty of parenthood, and no one can take away this connection you have. It can sustain you during the challenges, and it will also grow your character to new heights. Be mindful of that, because it will help you cut yourself some slack from time to time.

With this advice, you’re certain to correctly help a child with extra needs.

1. Make lists of their likes. Create pages of their favorite things and decorate them accordingly. You could do different pages for their favourite animals, or a page with a list of their favourite things to do during the Summer. When your kids are a bit older, you can look back on these lists and remember what they liked best at different ages, and see how their tastes have changed as they’ve got older. They might like to look back at these pages too to see what they liked at ages that they don’t have clear memories of being. 
2. Create a page about a family day out, like a trip to the zoo or a theme park. Include pictures that you took on the day, and ask the kids to draw some pictures of what they saw while you were all out together. Use washi tape or masking tape to mark places for the kids to write about what they remember. The tape creates some effective white space on the page, which makes for striking designs, and you can see what stood out about the trip to them. They could write down their memories of things they saw, something that Dad said that made them laugh or some of their favourite things about the trip. 
3. Record facts about the family. Give each family member their own page in the scrapbook, with photos of them, and send the kids to find out some random facts about the different family members. They can do this in the form of interviews. This is a fun way to get the kids talking to different people in the family, and you can record some different information about them to look back on later on. You could even make some similar pages about family pets. 
4. Create a whole scrapbook about a family vacation. There are lots of fun ways to display vacation memories in a scrapbook besides the obvious photos. Save ticket stubs or other keepsakes from the trip to include. Use scrapbook embellishments that make you think of your trip, like tape in the same color as the sea or little decorations in the shape of seashells or different foods you ate. Arrange different pages for the travel itself, the food you ate while you were away, a page about the beach and pages for different trips you made while you were abroad. 
5. Instead of trying to scrapbook an entire childhood, make a page for each month of their early years. Make a record of any milestones, things they like, their favourite foods and toys, their height and include some pictures. As the kids get older, they can contribute to their monthly pages themselves, and help you decide what to make a record of. You can use these pages to save memories of your children growing up. 
6. Make use of maps. You could use a map of your hometown to mark your favourite faces to go as a family, or your kids favourite places. Use maps to travel family trips, in your own country or abroad. This can be a good way to start helping kids to learn directions and some basic geography, as well as making pretty scrapbook pages. 
7. Use a Polaroid camera. Take a Polaroid around with you, or away on family days out and vacations. The instant pictures create interesting, candid snaps of the memories and make an interesting addition to scrapbook pages, along with pictures you’ve had printed out or the children have drawn. These cameras are easy to use, so the kids can take their own pictures to include as well, for a more personal touch that they’ll enjoy getting to create. 
8. Give the kids old magazines. They can use these to look through and cut out any pictures that catch their eye, and then can use the pictures they’ve saved to create collage style scrapbook pages. Use the pictures to create themed pages, like animals, houses they like, or clothes they think are pretty. 
9. Encourage the kids to use mixed media. They can use photographs, images cut from magazines, stickers, glitter, ribbon, washi tape or any other embellishment that appeals to them. They can add their own drawings and artwork to the pages too to create pages that are all them. They can write down their thoughts, or write down favourite song lyrics or quotes from a favourite book to make things even more personal.
10. Choose one important picture to highlight on a scrapbook page. This could be something like a photo of your child holding a new sibling for the first time or a special moment at a family Christmas. Put this picture centrally on the page and decorate around it with any embellishments that your kids think go with the picture. Pages like this are a good way to get them to talk about these memories with you, and for them to commemorate what they think is special about that moment and that picture. 
11. Create interesting visuals on the page by surrounding a black and white image with colorful page decor, or do the exact opposite and show off a bright image with a page decorated in black and white. You could also show off bright images by decorating the page in the same color scheme that the image is in. Ask the kids to help find things that go with the main colors in the picture to get them involved and thinking about colors.