Recently I have noticed the subject of dealing with 3 & 4 year olds popping up here at Mothertalkers. As the parent of a 3.5 year old girl, it has been nice to know that I am not the only one struggling with this age. My daughter seemed to become a different kid overnight when she turned 3. We'd never had tantrums before that, and even though she would get upset at things easily, she was always respectful. Over the past 6 months, and especially over the past two months since we have a new baby in the house, she has become so much more difficult. Backtalking me, being rude, throwing her body on the ground having tantrums, etc. Dinnertime is a disaster -- I've come to the point where I will only serve us all the same thing, and if she doesn't want to even try it, fine. She can leave the table and sit quietly with a book.

Well, so much for an uneventful pregnancy. After having elevated levels from my 1-hour glucose tolerance test, I moved on to the 3-hour test. This in itself didn't worry me a bit. The same thing happened with my first pregnancy, and the 3-hour levels came back normal. So, this time around I was more annoyed at the inconvenience of hanging out in the waiting room for 3 hours than anything else. Actually, I was pretty nonchalant -- even telling my best friend that it wasn't going to stop me from having a donut the day I found out about the 1st test. Oops.

Yesterday I picked up my 3yo daughter from school, and she had been given a little Easter goodie bag. There were about 5 large jelly beans, one Cadbury chocolate egg with a hard candy shell, and one Hershey's Kiss. As a treat, I let her eat the candy on the way home. When I went to take her out of the car, I noticed she had what looked like a rash on her cheek. I thought it was from laying her head against the car seat. A little later I put her down for a nap, and my usually quick-to-go-to-sleep dd would not settle down. After over an hour of trying to get her to calm down for a nap, she finally fell asleep.

So, when I went in to get her when she woke up, I helped her pull her pants down to use the potty. That was when I noticed the rash was actually all over her legs, ankles, arms and back. Poor kid couldn't sleep because she was itching all over! The rash looks almost like bug bites -- lighter welts surrounded by red skin (probably from the scratching). There were blotches all over.

I'm about 16 weeks into my 2nd pregnancy, and have been avoiding eating fish because I just don't know what is safe anymore. I think I've had fish twice so far (snuck some sushi in), which has been tough because normally I enjoy it. Now it seems that not eating enough fish during pregnancy can actually be detrimental to your future child. A team of researchers tracked the eating habits of 11,875 pregnant women in Bristol, Britain.

Hibbeln and his colleagues concluded that women who ate more than 340 grams per week of fish or seafood -- the equivalent of two or three servings a week -- had smarter children with better developmental skills. Children whose mothers ate no seafood were 48 percent more likely to have a low verbal IQ score, compared to children whose mothers ate high amounts of seafood.

These results were enough to catch my attention, but now I am even more confused than ever. Which fish are safest? There are so many conflicting studies that my reaction has been to cut fish out of my diet entirely. At this point in my 2nd pregnancy it sounds like I should be adding fish back onto the menu, and I'm even thinking that it doesn't matter a whole lot what kind of fish it is. This study suggests that by limiting fish intake, we're doing the very harm to our children that we are trying to prevent.

Eating even more than three portions of fish or seafood a week could be beneficial, Hibbeln suggests. "Advice that limits seafood consumption might reduce the intake of nutrients necessary for optimum neurological development," he and his colleagues wrote.

I'll do my best to figure out which kinds of fish are safest (I know about Wild Salmon, but it seems unusual to ever see any of the other "safe" fish on a menu in a restaurant). What about the rest of you? Any recommendations? How did you incorporate enough fish into your diet while pregnant? The linked article is fairly brief, so check it out. I'm interested to hear what you think about this topic. In the meantime, it's Fish n' Chips for dinner for me tonight!

http://news.yahoo.com/...

I am not too up on the latest cell phones/techie things. I only recently got an iPod, and rarely use my cell phone. I'm the worst IMer, and feel years older than I am when I see people IMing...I think about how unappealing that is to me!

And yet. I've been a Mac geek since high school, so when I saw this today, I couldn't help but instantly want one! It's the new iPhone, which is brought to us by those clever Apple people. It combines the cell phone with an iPod with iLife (photos, email, calendar, IM). It's super sleek...no buttons, all touch screen. Sigh. Maybe someday when it's not $599 I'll be able to get it. Until then I'll just have to walk slowly by the Apple store wistfully, like I did before I got my iPod.

http://www.engadget.com/...

It's 13 degrees (Farenheit) here today. My daughter and I have been sick with a bad cold since the weekend, so time outside has been pretty limited. This morning I was catching up on some work while my daughter was watching "Big Big World" on PBS, and I heard her say that she needed to wash her hands. So I went in to the living room and found her covered in brown goo...when I asked where she got it, she said the couch. Sure enough a tube of my lip gloss was on the couch and she had squirted it out and bathed herself in it. I suppose under normal circumstances I'd find this funny (if it hadn't involved my favorite lip gloss which is now gone or my new couch which is brown for a good reason, but, still new), but I don't feel good, and this is just the latest in a string of Avery-finds-something-then-smears-it-all-over.

I have been hoping for this day for 14 years. When I was 7 and new to an apartment complex, I met another 7-year-old, Tyler, and her 5-year-old little sister, Melissa. They lived in the complex next to mine, and our apartments backed up to each other. Their mom was divorced, like mine, and also raising them on her own. I don't know if it was that fact that made us fast friends, but for years we were inseparable. While Tyler and I were officially best friends and annoyed to have a tag-along little Melissa around, in truth, we were a threesome. When it was time to go dumpster-diving for other people's junk (I finally broke the news to my mom this year that the little wastebasket she'd been using for 20 years had come from the trash), or time to rock out to Friday Night Videos, Melissa was always included.

It's not an exaggeration to say that I spent more time at Tyler's house than my my own. So much was I treated like part of the family, I'd even get scolded right alongside them when we behaved like wild banshees. My mom would take us all to Disneyland or the movies, or give us each $5 and drop us off at the swap meet for the day. Their mom included me on family trips and everyday errands. In 4th grade, my mom took me out of Montessori and I joined Tyler in her class at the public school. Each day I'd come over before school, and then would stay after school to do homework until my mom picked me up in the evenings.

We had our fights, too, though. I can't remember now who colored on whose masterpiece from the Scooby Doo coloring book, but it created a fight so bad that I raced home on my pink bike, sure the friendship was over. In sixth grade, she "dumped" me for another friend, and I promptly picked out a new best friend. Within weeks, I recieved a note asking me back, and it was done. But it seemed that neither of us was able to withstand the power of going to different high schools...I moved a few miles further south, and we lost touch. To be truthful, had we gone to the same high school, it probably would have happened anyway. We were on different paths -- hers led to popularity and cheerleading, mine led to being a yearbook editor and general quiet type. After an awkward visit when we were 16, neither of us bothered to ever contact the other one again.

This week I was told that my mother is dying. She's been dealing with cancer for the past couple of years, so I guess it shouldn't come as the shock that it is. The last time I saw her was in February (she lives on the west coast, I live in the midwest), and she was doing great. The chemo had worked, she looked healthy, had energy, and felt like it was a new beginning...she has been planning to move out here to be close to me and her granddaughter since last fall. In the past 3 months, her body has been turning against her, and her cancer is now inoperable and terminal.

As grown-up children, it is the natural order of things that at some point we watch our parents die. At least that's what we hope happens, as no parent wants to outlive their child. My mom always said "I'm going to live to be 100, then I'll die" in a matter-of-fact way, and believed her. We'd joke about it, because she said I could take care of her when she was old (I'm an only child, she is still unmarried) -- "But mom," I'd counter, "If you live to be 100, how will I take care of you? I'll be 81! My kids will have to wheel both of us around!" The joke was always played out with that punch line.