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October 24, 2009

Sleeping improves children’s brain and health

Filed under: General Chit-Chat — Tags: advice, bedtime routine, Daily Express, educational psychologist, labels 4 kids, labels for kids, labels4kids, sleep benefits for children, sleep experts, sleep improves children's brain, sleep requirements for children, uk, xbox — Ann-Maree @ 9:42 pm

The latest research on the BBC news and the Daily Express yesterday was all about sleep requirements for children. It seems that sleep experts have proved that a regular sleep routine for children and sleeping 9 to 10 hours a night (more than 10 hours for under 4 years old) is beneficial in more than one way. Not only does it give you rest but it helps your body to grow, helps you relax, and reduces the chances of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and mental illness later.

The experts suggested what all new mothers are told – set a regular bedtime routine. They also tested and proved that the new routine worked with a number of parents. All agreed that although it was difficult to start with the routine of a set bedtime when you turn off the tv and the xbox or playstation, go upstairs, bath, have a bed time story and then tuck them into bed definitely helped to calm the children down, helped reduce the stress in the family, helped the children be a lot calmer at home and school and probably aided their education and concentration too.

I have experienced all these problems when my boys were younger and agree whole heartedly. The oldest woke 2 hourly until he was 2 and then stayed wide awake until 11pm most nights until we got tough. We ended up deciding that the “don’t go back downstairs after the bath” worked well along with the bedtime story to slow the pace down and get him off to sleep more soundly and quicker. He was then not crabby at all the next day. The only thing we have to watch is summer holidays when some families routines go to pot. For us bedtime tends to be stretched a bit later too but we still apply the same bedtime routine as in term time, just an hour later.

A child of any age can also be stimulated with computers and xbox or the like as you will see I also found to my detriment recently with my blog on xbox the curse of my life! The middle child had the same problem which was progressively getting worse over the last year. I blame it on the fighting games many 10 to 16 year olds are into these days and of course all the friends have them don’t they! We are now well back on track and in fact to my shock he is trying to sell his xbox to raise money for more tennis gear! How?

The change came after advice from an educational psychologist friend which was invaluable. I had to remove the xbox at least one hour prior to bed time as it stimulates the brain. The same with any electronic equipment like DS, playstation, or even the computer or ipod. Also I was to remove it for lack of following instructions of any sort like when to come off the xbox for example. If he was even 2 minutes over what we had mutually agreed were the set 1 or 2 hours a day at the agreed time of day then the xbox would get unplugged and removed from the house for up to a week but definately no less than 2 days. I used the 2 day rule as a trial. The rule had to be applied with exactly the same words and for exactly the same length of time and in the same way each time to be consistent. Low and behold – it worked! And it worked within around 2 weeks. I was amazed and I did let my friend know how pleased I was with the results. I just didn’t think it would work so fast.

The tricks to this method, though, if anyone wants to try are:

1 you have to agree the time the child is allowed on the equipment with your child and in advance and the time covers each day and weekend so they know the whole week’s allowance

2 the time has to be convenient with family timings of meals, social events, and ending more than an hour prior to bed time

3 the equipment has to be completely unplugged and removed from the house if rules or times are broken (other rules that you can use this for you see are for bad language or whatever you think appropriate)

4 the child has to be told all the rules in advance and this includes the fact that if the word xbox or can I have it back or anything remotely about that topic is mentioned they lose that item for an additional 2 days, and each time it is mentioned another 2 days are added. The idea being that the item is then returned on your terms in your time when and only when it has not been mentioned at all for 2 days.

5 You have to give a warning when they go on their game like “remember you have one hour and not a minute more and when I tell you the time is up then the time is up in 2 minutes then it is up in 2 minutes”

6 You MUST follow through and you must be consistent and follow the same rules as you set, not a minute out!

Believe me it works. It leads to a much happier and less tired child as well as the rest of the family. It helps them sleep better (no night terrors, a subject for another blog sometime I guess, and no broken sleep for the child and the parent) and no crabby early morning “I’m not going to school, I’m too tired” or the like. And on the subject of growing? Any one who has seen the height of my three would laugh at that one, always in the back of the middle row in school photos as they are so tall! I cannot testify for their improved brain power or height really but I do know that we are all much happier and calmer and I salute the advice given but just wish I had done it a lot earlier.

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October 23, 2009

Royal mail – a royal mess

Filed under: General Chit-Chat,News — Tags: alternative postal systems, British economy, labels for kids, labels4kids, modernizing of Royal Mail, postal strikes, Royal mail, small business, uk — Ann-Maree @ 8:34 pm

As a small business owner I really have to voice an opinion on this one.

Another Royal Mail disagreement and another pain the pocket for small business owners. How far is it likely to go until the government realises the whole postal system needs to be sorted out and it needs done FAST before more small businesses go out of business completely (not us we hope now our busy period has ended, but many more are quite likely to feel the pinch). I do feel for all small businesses selling to the public especially those relying on cheques in the post or unable to swap to courier companies due to lighter weight deliveries.

How many more absurd answers are people likely to come up with? We are being told to use email and to use the phone and mobile? How stupid is that… no kidding, we didn’t know these things existed did we? We’ve been hiding in a black hole all these years and never knew! I have news for the government advice line – It is NOT the answer. The customer still needs to be POSTED THEIR GOODS! We live in an age of the internet yes, but we rely on delivery by planes, trains and automobiles not magic wand!

I am luckier than a lot of small business owners as our money is not coming in by post. We are linked to the banks online and so we are paid upfront for personalisation of orders and it goes straight from their banks to our bank. The biggest issue for labels4kids is getting orders to customers in a timely manner. Especially in the Summer this is a really important issue for us and we don’t like to let anyone down.

In my experience since we started business we have had quite a lot of postal strikes to deal with and have managed to successfully on the whole though some customers have had to have reruns or to wait… we have found that there is no point posting out any orders in the couple of days prior to industrial action. These orders seem to get held up in the backlog for months at times and lead to screaming customers demanding we rerun their labels as they never arrived. I do understand their point of view but we are also stuck as Royal Mail have set regulations on the amount of time we have to wait before we can claim for lost post and that means as a small business if we decide to help out our customers and rerun earlier than around 20 working days then we are normally out of pocket if the second packet eventually gets either delivered or sent back to us when it is found. It really is a difficult situation to be in.

The other problem is that customer often know nothing about these strikes for some time as it does not hit the media when it is a rolling area by area stoppage. We had strikes in August but it was 3 weeks before this hit the main news headlines and quite a few customers did not believe that there was any industrial action happening at all. Well who could blame them if it isn’t on the news reports? However, we had phone calls from GERMAN customers before it even hit the news in the UK saying there is probably no point ordering until after the terrible UK postal strikes ended as they saw it on their news reports!

At labels4kids we tend to wait for the strikes to finish (temporarily perhaps but still finished for that week even) and then we post our orders out. It is like the new post gets priority and the old post is cleared progressively at the end of the day as a secondary task, which is why it takes so long to get cleared!

There is a lot in the press about Amazon, Department stores, Ebay and the like swapping to other couriers already and the damage this is doing to Royal Mail losing some major contracts. But there seems to be an implication that all businesses will follow suit. A lot of businesses just can’t. If someone buys a £5 pack of labels (at the lowest end of the scale but possible still) are they going to pay a £7 courier charge if you can even get that cheap a fee from the courier companies? Most are charging for a standard parcel we would send something between £17 and £50 a parcel. It just isn’t feasible for customers to pay this and it isn’t feasible for us to run a business and absorb that cost! Get real!

So, as we hunt for alternatives, as most small businesses also do, we are frustrated that the UK which once had one of the best postal systems in the world and has some great staff working for them too, has deteriorated to one of the worst and most outdated in the world, and why they just can’t get a grip and restructure with success like so many private enterprises have had to do. The unions need to help out here too and are not entirely blameless but for goodness sake, for the future of the British economy, get it sorted fast. We live in hope!

Good luck to any of you who run your own businesses and let’s hope the end is in sight sooner rather than later.

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The reality of the poor Euro and sports academy in my eyes!

Filed under: General Chit-Chat — Tags: British visitor numbers, cheap flights, coaching for kids, euros, football training, golf training, labels for kids, labels4kids, mini vinyl labels, parents, poor euro, Spain, tennis training, uk, what parents to best, what the pound can buy — Ann-Maree @ 7:57 pm

Well in Scotland it is the end of our October school break and we are due to go home in a few days. We decided to get a “cheap” deal away to the sun in Spain and let the kids take in some tennis training at the same time. Cheap flights with Ryan air seemed good at the time, and cheap villa rental too privately rather than through the resort. All sounded very good. The reality of what the pound can buy in Europe though, is harder to swallow!

At our resort hire of the tennis court by the hour or just about any other thing, mini golf for example, is 26 euros AN HOUR! A one course meal for 5 with no alcohol and one drink is costing us on average 70 euros! Even a trip to the supermaket a 300g pack of cereal is almost the equivalent of £4, yes 4 pounds sterling! I can’t help but wonder how these resorts are coping with the drop in British visitor numbers and the tightening of the belts by the Brits. Staff here have told us that the numbers and bookings of extra activities have indeed plummeted and now they are looking to attract more Scandinavian tourists instead. There are more Germans, French and some Russian but I would say on the whole here in Spain most visitors are still British. British and feeling very poor and not wanting to splash out like we would normally on our holidays.

The kids think this is a fantastic place – tennis training is great and they would prefer to do the extra 3 hours pro academy (as of course they think they are pros but the reality is far from it). This is out of the question at 550 euros a week per child! “No boys”, says dad, “I think it’s too hot to play tennis all day, I can give you a hit instead”. Training by dad versus a tennis professional? Hmmm, would I fall for that as a kid? I think not! However, it just ain’t happening. Sometimes kids have to realise that money growing tree has not yet been planted, and perhaps never will be.

Which leads me on to 2 other thoughts…

1) How did Robert manage to take in £2 to school for the seniors enterprising tuck shop on a Friday and come home with £6? Ahhh, well may be we do have a money maker amongst us in future years – he bought £1.50 worth of sweets by paying off the kid at the front of the queue with 50p to take his place, then buying sweets with the rest which he sold off at four times the price to the poor sods who could not be bothered joining the back of the queue. The seniors better watch out…there is some younger competition out there which may be doing them out of some profitable business! Very clever I must admit.

2) Now, my other thought was, why are all these parents pouring money into tennis training, golf training, football training and so on? Is it in the hope that their child is going to be one of the professionals who makes millions and goes on to support their entire family for life by travelling the world doing what they like to do? Is it just to please them? Are they reliving their lives through their kids? Are they just keeping up with the Jones’? I guess we can dream and some of the kids will perhaps get there, but a very minute few. Meanwhile we are all hoping ours is going to be the one, and pouring money at it. Is this right? Should we be doing it? They do need some training but at the end of the day they also need to have a passion for their sport and just be out there every possible chance morning, noon and night playing and practising for the fun of it. Yet, if there is any chance that mine can improve playing the sport they love doing and I can affort to pay it then I will keep on giving…why? Because that’s what parents do best! Support them. I guess they just tug at the old heart strings and we crumble. As long as we don’t give more than we earn, I guess that’s OK too.

Anyway, all in all a great holiday but next time I think it will have to be out of the Euro zone, even if that means staying at home in the UK.

Oh, and by the way, with hundreds of tennis racquets hanging about here at warm up time the mini vinyl labels have been handy and labelled all the tennis racquets so parents have commented on them and asked where they came from! Another great tip for you from labels4kids. Trust me!

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October 7, 2009

Swine flu or just flu?

Filed under: General Chit-Chat — Tags: antibiotics, flu, influenza, labels 4 kids, labels4kids, swine flu, tamiflu, uk, what to do if you have swine flu — Ann-Maree @ 3:13 pm

I feel rubbish! This has got to be the worst flu yet. Even taken me out of action away from the office for a couple of days, which is just not me…been sleeping so much I have to be woken for X-Factor! I have had flu before but nothing like this…so off to NHS24 I trecked. Well, the verdict is – it’s INFLUENZA. Maybe swine flu, maybe not, maybe just influenza, maybe pluracy, maybe maybe but just take Tamiflu anyway and also antibiotics for a week.

So have I or haven’t I? What do I do if I have swine flu and how would I know? Now here is the dilemma – or multitude of them:

1 Do I go to work?

2 Do I tell the others working with me?

3 Do I tell the school since it’s me and not the kids who may or may not have whatever?

4 Do I go out in public?

5 Do I have to stay in quarantine?

6 Does everyone else in the family have to take the tamiflu too?

7 Am I tested, blood tests or whatever, for swine flu?

8 My son is about to start immune-suppressive drugs so should he be anywhere near me? Should he take tamiflu too?

A multide of questions flood my waking mind, or what little of it there is at present! The answers to all the above were:

Obviously like any influenza don’t go into crowded places (like I could drag myself out anyway) and stay in as much as possible until you feel better, don’t therefore go to work, tell anyone working close to you IF YOU WANT TO, keep warm or cool down if you have a fever (changes by the hour due to the fever), drink plenty, take plenty of SUGAR (now I like that and in fact that’s about all I could eat, chocolate wafer biscuits or jacobs fig rolls or something or a crunchie bar), and take the tablets, don’t bother telling the school as the kids don’t have it (yet), there are no tests done to confirm if you do or don’t have it unless you are in isolation or high dependency in hospital in which case you probably would be tested for it, and that’s it. Go back to the doctor if it doesn’t improve. As for my son, who knows. I’ll get my husband to ask when visiting his consultant tomorrow but he is on the list to get it as a high risk patient anyway when it comes out at the end of October in Scotland.

And the symptoms? Well I’ve heard of others who also have this and are stuck at home and much of the same really – severe stomach cramps and feeling sick, a little dizzy at times, headaches, off food, completely and utterly shattered and sleeping a lot, fever, and swollen glands, oh and my voice has completely gone which is fab with 3 kids to direct about! Just like any flu I guess.

Now I just hope to be over this so we can make our October holiday but in the meantime it’s not that much to worry about apart from feeling bad. After all the hype, apparently there is that much of this in the general public ie flu, swine flu, and a gastric bug too at the moment that people just cannot be fully confined and they even say just to pop down to the local surgery for a checkup tomorrow just as normal. Will be pleased to get back to work in full but atleast I’ve had one positive move – I’ve updated my blog!

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We’re in the Glasgow Herald

Filed under: General Chit-Chat,News — Tags: glasgow herald, labels4kids, lunch boxes, name labels — Ann-Maree @ 2:52 pm

Labels4Kids is proud to have been written about in the Glasgow Herald on Tuesday 6th October about how we got started and how well we’re going. The article tells about how we set up and how we are growing internationally after starting out as an idea coming from lost school lunch boxes and growing into a worldwide seller of personalised name labels. We would like to thank Colin Cardwell of the Herald for his well written article!

P1020914 - glasgow herald article 061009