Making Your Home Non Smoking
February 4th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
If you smoke, the places where you can freely smoke are not as numerous as they once were. Thirty or more years ago, you may have seen people walking through the grocery store with a cigarette, but today there are few public places where smoking is welcome. You may or may not agree with that policy, but that is how things are going. You may soon find that you do not want to smoke in your home, even if you continue to smoke or know people who do. If you want to make your home non smoking, you and your family will breathe easier. There are a few steps to take to make your home more pleasurable for everyone.
First, designate somewhere outside for smoking for yourself or your company. This should be an area away from where people walk (like sidewalks) and where you or your guests can smoke in peace. Somewhere in the back is great if you can do that. Have something outside where cigarette butts can be put so they are not thrown out in your lawn. You can also make non smoking signs for the outside if this is something new to your friends and family. Most people respect a non smoking sign so place them on all of your home entryways.
Once everyone is aware of your new policy, you have to get use to it as well. You may know that you have decided to smoke outside, but that does not mean you can shake old habits as quickly as you can put up a non smoking sign. You may find that you absently light up while in the house. Get rid of all of your ashtrays and put all lighters or other smoking items that you use in a box near the door so you do not have access to them unless you are going outside to smoke. That will help you get use to smoking outside rather than in.
You may also find that once you enact your non smoking policy and it goes on a for a few weeks, you are going to notice the smoke smell in your home is going away, but it is still in some places that do not clear out so quickly. You may have to take some time to wash your walls if they have taken on a yellowish tint, and your furniture is also going to be of some concern. Wash what you can, including your drapes, and see what you can do to get rid of the smell. You will be happy you did. You don’t have to give up smoking to enjoy a non smoking home.
You can, of course, still smoke in your own home if you wish, but you may find that you enjoy your clothing and other items being free of the smell when you leave the house. If you make your home non smoking and you smoke outside, you can still get some on your smoke odor clothing, but it will not be anything like what happens to your clothes and other possessions when smoke is present all of the time. Not only will the air be cleaner, but your family and pets will live longer and more healthy lives as well. Not bad for a little inconvenience.
Tags: non smoking
Smoking and Breastfeeding
February 2nd, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
Well, New Year’s is around the corner, and you can count on it that a lot of people are going to want to get on the wagon - quit smoking. And a large part of that audience is likely to be women - for various reasons. Most of them have to do with how women are somewhat better equipped to have children than men. For instance, smoking (or any kind of nicotine, actually) does not go with oral contraceptives, it brings on menopause more quickly, makes women infertile, makes their periods more troublesome, and makes breast cancer a more threatening possibility. Women can still learn to live with these risks for the most part, if it weren’t for the problem of pregnancy. Breastfeeding and smoking alongside hardly makes anyone feel good, least of all the baby. Of course there is a lot of sanctimonious preaching out there that you could read up any time you want to be lectured, but let’s have some practical thoughts in this area. As hard as they try, some women just can’t quit. How does it help to just make them feel bad about themselves?
We could just, instead, talk about how to minimize the effects on the baby of smoking and breast-feeding at the same time. To begin with, it isn’t a good idea to just stay away from breast-feeding if you wish to smoke after childbirth. Nicotine in the milk is not an ideal situation of course, but the nutrition and the resistance to disease that it helps the baby with, are certainly noted to bring on greater benefits than risks. If anything should make a nursing mother guilty, it should be quitting nursing, and not smoking alongside of it. Of course, when you are smoking and breast-feeding at the same time, the quantity of milk produced can tend towards the lower side; the quality of the milk tends to change too. Breast milk in smoking mothers tends to have less iodine, and less prolactin, a hormone that the baby needs to digest the milk properly. Lactation also tends to stop earlier.
So how do you minimize whatever risk that smoking and breastfeeding together bring? To begin with, you need to at least cut down. The smaller the smoking habit, the smaller the risk to your baby. Smoking right before breast-feeding or during it can actually be dangerous to your baby - can put a lot of nicotine in your milk. A good rule of thumb is to wait about two hours between smoke and a breast-feeding round. That’s as long as it takes for the body to get rid of all the nicotine. But if you think about it, it just happens to be an unpleasant truth that recreational drugs, marijuana and the like are not to be ruled out as possibilities for breast-feeding mothers either. Among poorer mothers, this just happens to be a fact of life, whether or not we like it (actually, they say one in five pregnant women use it, how’s that?). These drugs are really addictive, and they say that it can actually change the shape of the baby’s brain. If a mother is able to be sober enough to observe proper cleanliness when mixing formula for the baby, that is far better than breast-feeding. Well this is what they call a dilemma - being in a position where he has to make a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives. But that is life, isn’t it?
Tags: smoking and breasfeeding, smoking
Technorati Tags: smoking and breasfeeding
Related Tags: No Tags
