31 for 21 - Growing like a weed?

Here is a picture of our informal growth chart.  We measure all of the kids on the doorway between our onsuite bathroom & walk in closet.  It's a pretty sophisticated method which seems to work well for us:)

 

The other day I heard K in there & peeked in to see what she was doing.  K had the measuring tape & a marker in her hand & was attempting to measure herself.  I helped our & this is what I discovered:

 

 

Notice how much K grew in the last 6 weeks or so?  She just had quite a growth spurt & I guess kids do have them randomly but the thing that frustrates me is that I often hear parents say that their kids grew when they gave them this supplement or that vitamin. Maybe I shouldn't expect her growth to correlate with her vitamins, I know they should be for general, long term health but it sure would be nice! We were more sporadic than usual with K's vitamins towards the end of the summer as we got busy with several mini holidays.  Then in September I decided to give K a break from her vitamins altogether & to reintroduce them slowly to get a better idea of the effects.  I had only restarted K on any vitamins the day before I took this picture.

 

What are your thoughts & experiences on this?  Do you notice many specific changes when your kids are taking different supplements?

Fighting back against the winter cold & flu season

K is 4 now, & is finally (knock on wood) having a great year with only 2 mild colds that lasted about 4 days each.

For the last couple of years, to prevent or to help K recover from a cold, we have been using probiotics, fish oil, Nutrivene D vitamins on a regular basis, & add extra vitamin C, zinc, echinacea & elderberry when sick.  K has never been hospitalized for her colds, but they just seemed to drag on for most of the winter. This year, the only thing that I did differently, is when she is sick, I have been removing all sugar, wheat & dairy products from her diet.  I'm not sure if it is a coincidence or not, but I am thrilled that she isn't dealing with the constant colds this winter & will continue this if she gets any other colds.

UPDATE - I actually wrote this in early March, & K has had one more cold since then.  It started about 10 days ago, & we were away at a ski race for a few days at the time.  I find it a lot harder to provide a gluten, dairy & sugar free diet when we are packing lunches & eating at restaurants, so she did not have the benefit of a good diet this time - she is still fighting this cold:(  Bad mommy - I will have to try harder next time.

A Question About Naturally Better Kids

"I have another question...I noticed on your blog that you have a link to "Naturally Better Kids". I looked into it and have been reading the Kindle version of the book. It is very interesting. Would you mind sharing why you like this information, and what things that she recommends that you do with K, and what difference it has made."   Actually, when I first started reading that book, I thought "Wow, this is so familiar!"   We have done almost all of the same things.   We are careful about keeping K's diet natural most of the time, we use craniosacral therapy. use natural supplements, do a neurodevelopmental (ND) program, using natural health care providers, have extremely high expectations etc. Some of those things we have done a little differently though, such as a different ND program, as well as we have not done NAET, but all in all, our approaches have been very similar.