Maria Aviles: Here you go girl.
Liwaza Green: Thank you so much Maria. I could sure use a pick-me-up today.
Kathie Larkin: Oh! Did someone have a late night last night?
Liwaza Green: Yeah, right, but now what you think Cathy? Kimoni had a fever all night.
Maria Aviles: Oh! I am so sorry. Is she feeling better this morning?
Liwaza Green: She is feeling better, but you know how it is when your child has a fever. No one gets any rest. I am exhausted.
Kathie Larkin: Well, you know Liwaza. I should introduce you to my friend Laura. She and her friend are pediatric nurses and they started a unique telephone support hotline where you can call in day or night to get advice and if you have ever needed help in the middle of the night, you will definitely appreciate this next segment.
Kathie Larkin: Isn't it every new parent's dream to have someone readily available to answer your baby question 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, especially in the middle of the night? Some lucky parents in Atlanta, Georgia can make this call at any time day or night and get immediate answers to there child care questions from two pediatric nurses, collectively called Moms On Call. Laura Hunter and Jennifer Walker are two pediatric nurses and mothers of 8 children between the two of them that includes two sets of twins. They never had a babysitter or a nanny to help them with their children and still worked fulltime. Yeah, they still made time to take phone calls from frantic new parents, 7 days a week. Laura even manages to fit in home visitations.
Laura Hunter: Moms On Call started about five or six years ago Jennifer and I got together. We were doing the after hours calls for a pediatric practice and we notice after about 300 phone calls that the calls were the same over and over and over again and a lot of those calls after hours were from new moms wondering how to get these babies to sleep or when am I going to worry and we wanted to try and take away some of that anxiety. So we put together a packet of information and started going out seeing new moms.
Kathie Larkin: One of the most common and perplexing issues of new parents is putting the baby to sleep. Laura and Jennifer came up with an innovative approach that worked very successfully. Almost 90% of the babies 8 weeks and older were sleeping 6 and 7 hours after only three days of their bed time routine.
Laura Hunter: You want to keep the routine as consistent as you can. So you start off with the bath, you go into their room, you read them a story, you love on them, you dance, you sing, you do that last feeding of the night, swaddle them correctly, put them into their bed with the lights off. And if you do that fairly consistently, they come to expect those things very early on.
Jennifer Walker: Swaddling is not a new concept. So this is something that has worked for centuries and we have just refined it to bring to these modern day moms and one of the essential elements in swaddling is you have to have a blanket that is large enough and I think one of the best parts about that is especially for these younger babies is that reminds them of that tight warm environment of the womb. Well, often here mom say, well I kind of try to swaddle them, but like to have their hands up by their face and they probably like different positions. However, every three hours in the sleep cycle the startle reflex will make their little hands move, startle is on, they wake up. So we will see in every three hours these babies wake up at night. When we swaddle them nice and tight, then they don't startle themselves and we get 6 to 10 hours at night with babies as young as 3 and 4weeks old.
Kathie Larkin: Another very frequent question deals with reducing fevers in very young children.
Laura Hunter: Fever is one of the most common phone calls that we get calls about and what do we do, they won't take the medicine they are spitting it out, they are vomiting along with that fever and FeverAll of is one of the things that we have been there for years for parents to use. It gives an opportunity to get that medicine into these babies or these children who are running a fever and can't take oral medicines, if you want to get that fever down.
Kathie Larkin: It is easy to administer. There is accurate dosing each time without having to measure and it is safer in infants as young as three months. If your child can't take medicine, is allergic to additives in the medicine or is vomiting, the suppository is an easy to use alternative we recommend in our general shopping list. Start by cleaning the area around the rectum with a mild soap and warm water. Gently fan the area dry, unwrap the suppository, but avoid handling it too long. This medicine has been designed to melt at body temperature.
Place the child on his back or in his side, gently insert the suppository well into the rectum, use your fingertip to complete the insertion. If you think it is necessary hold your child's buttocks together for 30 to 60 seconds to make sure the medicine stays in place. The medicine is fast working and your baby's fever should come down within the hour. The rectal suppository comes in three strengths; for infants 3 to 11 months, toddlers 12 to 36 months and children 3 to 6 years of age.
Check with your doctor for children under three months old before giving them any medication to learn the correct dose. Having a sick baby can be very distressing for both mother and child. Giving them medicine to help them get well doesn't have to be. In order to address all of the questions and concerns of new parents the packet of information grew into a self published book entitled Moms On Call and it comes with a step-by-step DVD that clearly demonstrates the how-to portions of the book.
Jennifer Walker: The book and DVD came about, because we knew that moms needed more than a voice on the other end of a telephone to be able to accurately perform some of the basic baby care things that we need to do like suctioning the nose, being able to massage tear ducts; a lot of babies have blocked tear ducts when they are infants, to be able to take rectal temperature.
Laura Hunter: Our concept was we would like to have a reference book that answers the most common questions that parents ask and that also had an element where the parents were able to watch and have more confidence, because they could see how to do these things and I think that; that just speaks volumes to their ability.
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