Wordless. what co-sleeping really looks like

i spy bottle

i think you know of my love/even-more-love relationship i have with pintrest.  it's the dev-o.  there is so much there that it's hard not to feel a bit.... overwhelmed.  but if you can muddle through and organize enough, you can usually find the gems, the things that you can actually use in your real life.

one thing is the i spy bottle.

there are several versions on pintrest, and they are all flippin awesome.  and bubby is getting to the age where he likes to explore and tell you what he sees.  so it was time to make one myself.  here's a quick instructable.

first start with the following: a bottle with a cap, a funnel, a spoon, rice, and things to put in the bottle.

we of course used little star wars figures, pumpkins, and itty bitty pots and pans from a doll house.  oh and beer caps.  be sure to check the size of the objects.  Yoda didn't fit.  

spoon the rice into the bottle via the funnel,  when you've got a good layer, add in all the toys, then cover with more rice.  be sure to leave enough room at the top for the rice to be able to move around.  otherwise you just have a bottle of rice.  and that's not fun to play with.  

put the cap on the bottle and watch your little one have fun spying the different objects.  i plan on gluing the cap on after he goes to bed.  i can see rice all over the floor if i don't.

awesome, huh?

it's not you, it's me

i joined a gym yesterday.  and as i posted on twitter, once i'm under 200 for a week, i'm getting my wrist tattooed.  most likely by Jesse at Nuclear Ink. i went to college with him, and love his artwork.  these two things, along with a facebook comment about me not being ok with myself (ha!) has led me to feel i need to clarify something:

i'm not doing this for you.

i'm not loosing weight because i want you to think i'm hot.  i don't feel the need to fit myself into some ideal that i had no hand in creating.  i don't want to look like a particular person to make you like me more.  i'm already hot, i'm already ideal, and to be frank, i don't need you to like me if my outward appearance is the only thing you base friendship on.

i'm doing this for myself.  i'm selfish about my children.  see, i love them.  and i want to be there for as much of their life as possible.  and i also want them to be in my life for as long as they can.  and the ONE thing i can control in that is weight, both mine and theirs.  so by feeding them good healthy food and giving them a positive role model in exercise, i'm making sure that we stick together.

at over 200 and climbing (as my GYN felt the need to point out last week), i'm not going to be around for as long as i want.  so i'm fixing that.  i'm making better choices.  because it's my choices that got me here.  lets be honest, i make crap food choices.  even when i'm choosing not processed food, i'm eating pretty big quantities of the food i'm eating.  and it's not genetics that's doing this to me.  look at my kids. there both skinny, strong, and neither one of them have an ounce of fat on them if left to their own devices.  so it's not my genes, it's my choices.  so starting now, i'm going to make better choices in both quality/quantity of food and exercise.

and the tattoo is something i've wanted for a while.  it's a prize.  something to commemorate a pretty damn big deal.

not for you.  for me.  

Letter to Littles

I love this idea from TouchstoneZ about writing a letter to my children each month.  it's a beautiful idea, because they change daily.  i'd like to try to do this on the first of every month, but i'm not going to make it a hard and fast rule.  so here goes:

Princess,
   you are just two months shy of your birthday, and almost a teenager.  you're growing up so fast, and the world is throwing so much at you at once that i sometimes get scared for you.  i know you can handle anything that the universe throws at you, but i want to shield you from as much of the bad stuff as possible.  you're starting to flex your independent muscle and take control of your life.  i love that.  you make good decisions, and it thrills me to no end when you back those decisions up with reasoning.  you are awesome.  but you don't give yourself enough credit sometimes, and you're a hell of a lot smarter and more awesome than you think you are.  but that's part of being a teenager, the self doubt.  so don't let it get to you.  just remember that you rock.  and rock hard.
     oh, and i'm proud of you for finally playing left 4 dead with out having to have all the lights on in the house.  awesome.

Bubby,
   you're slightly over one and a half.  to be honest, i stopped counting the months at 12.  anything after that should be in year (or 'and a half') increments.  you explore your world more and more every day.  and unfortunately for me, have no fear.  what you do have is a nice collection of bruises and scrapes, and at the moment a pretty large goose egg from trying to bounce yourself off nana and papa's headboard.  but you are the happiest and smiley-ist baby that i know, and you don't let anything get you down for long.  you smile at everyone you meet.  everyone.  and they all smile back.  there is something about your loving and open smile that just makes people happy.  you love to cuddle, but can be stingy with the kisses, those are for special occasions only i guess.  your vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds, and so has your understanding of those words.  i can see sentences coming in the near future.  i can't wait for that.

i love you both.
momma

Hurry up and wait.

Ive been thinking a lot about homeschooling lately.  Like a lot a lot.  I know that bubby isn't even two yet, but I want to get everything all set up.  I'm that excited.  But I know realisticly that to even start a 'program' its going to be about 4 or 5 years away. Not that I'm even sure that a 'program' is what I want to do.  There's a big appeal to unschooling too.  But again, that's a few years away.

That being said, there are things I want him to know, not because they will be important for college (which I'm ehh on anyway, but that's another post) , but because they are important for life. 

     I want him to know how to plant a garden, to grow his own food. 
     To know when foods are in season, what to eat and when.
     He should know basic medical concepts. How to splint a broken bone and stop bleeding.
     Basic laundry care.  How to use the washing machine and the dryer.  Ideally how to fold laundry (and not just because I hate folding)
     Cooking and cleaning.  He doesn't need to love it, but he needs to know how to do it.  I don't want him to go to college or his first apartment not knowing how to care for himself when he's on his own.
     Home maitnance.  I dont want him to have to run to a plumber or contractor at every little disaster.
     Appreciation for art. I don't care if he never picks up a brush himself, but I'd like him to understand what others can create.
     Kindness. I want him to be nice to the waiter.  ("The person that is nice to you, but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person" - I don't know who said it, but I love it)
     Other then those things, I just want the basics.  Reading, writing, and maths. 

I know that almost everything on that list I can start teaching him now.  And most likely I will start teaching him those things now.  In a compleetly unstructured 'lets make this fun' type of way. 

Oh wait, that is unschooling.

a tale of two doctors

bubby had his 18 month check up yesterday.  hubby and i (mainly me) decided that this would be a good time to switch doctors.  see, we never really LIKED his previous doc.  don't get me wrong, she was a nice person, very concerned with her patients, and a very very capable doctor.  she just wasn't...  us.  she was very caught up in 'milestones' and 'percentiles'.

with his previous doc each appointment was spent asking us if he could do certain things.  seriously, she asked us at his 9 month well baby check if he could (and this is a direct quote) 'put a cube in a cup'.  well, he's never really had the cube opportunity that apparently some babies have, but he has no problems putting a cup on his light saber to use it as a distance weapon.  does that count?  at his 15 month (his last with her) she spent the last portion of the appointment making me feel guilty because he was in the 20th percentile for weight.  "are you feeding him enough?"  "do you make sure he eats everything?"  seriously i don't think she has her own kids, because a) you try getting a toddler to eat when he doesn't want to and b) yeah i'm not going to force food down his mouth and give him 'issues' for the rest of his life.  and oh the passive-aggressive fliers.  every appointment was punctuated with a forest of dead trees in the form of the 'what your baby needs to be doing' fliers.  oh how i hated those.

but the worst was the formula.

you see, i had every intention of breast feeding.  i wanted to breast feed.  i NEEDED to breast feed.  i needed that bond, that 'grrrrrrrrrrl' moment of being able to feed my son with nothing but what i came into the world with.  i mean common, i'm so crafty I MAKE FOOD WITH MY BODY!!!! that's how i wanted to be.  but about 7 years ago i got tired of constant back pain, never standing up strait, and migraines.  so i had a breast reduction.  at the time, i had no intention of ever having children, so the 50/50 chance of not being able to breast feed didnt' concern me.  well, long story short, i'm the 50% that makes the successful 50% so awesome.  i felt like a failure.  but i have an incredible husband who held me through the tears and helped me get through it.

then bubby had feeding issues.  first they thought he may be allergic to milk (not so), then they weren't sure, but the soy formula seemed to work.  she finally determined that it was colic, which was what i'd been telling her the entire time.  but at every appointment she would hand us a couple of cans of formula.

it was like a little knife in my heart, punctuating my failure as a mother.

i know she didn't mean it that way.  and to be honest, we were grateful for them.  we never budgeted for formula (intended to breast feed, remember?) and that stuff is expensive. even buying the generic stuff was costing us a couple hundred dollars a month.

so obviously that doctors ideals weren't in line with ours.  so we switched.  we saw Dr Finley at the Bellevue medical center yesterday.  he was wonderful.  great bedside manner, he allayed my fears about a specific medical condition i was very concerned about, and his style seemed very very in line with my parenting philosophy (especially in the area of 'not forcing him to eat' (and according to Dr F, Bubby's weight is just fine)).  he even had someone come in and tell me that he was running late when he wasn't in the room at 2 on the dot.  i was in awe.

and the best part?  no passive-aggressive fliers or cans of formula on the way out.

things i never thought i'd say until i became a mother

we all have it.  the list of things we never thought would come out of our mouths.  things that were so far fetched that there was no way we'd ever say.  yep.  you know you have one too.  here's mine:

hold on a second, i have to flush your poop.

get your finger out of my nose.

don't hit the cat with the light saber.

no, you cannot have my sniper rifle.  your revolver is right there, use that. (nerf)

the fish do not eat peanut butter!

do we need to change the butt?

poo-splosion!!!!

put that back please (ok, yes, i would probably say that anyway, just not EIGHTY BAJILLION TIMES)

once upon a time, there was a mom, her name was missus taranadon......

that was not nice.  say i'm sorry to the kitty!

get your butt out of my face please.

you already have shoes on.  

why are you licking my leg?

and my personal favorite.....

DON'T TOUCH THE POOP!!!!

Wordless Wednsday - things that happen when im at work

but mostly 

its been a year

a year ago today (from right now till nearly 2am) i:

realized that my water broke. really, really slowly.

had a nurse whisper to me to hit a drive thru on the way to the hospital because i was in labor and wouldnt be able to eat till the baby arrived.

picked my daughter up in the middle of the school day.

text messaged people with two words... "it's time"

i freaked out a doc by telling him which vertibre he was pumping the epidural into (thank you yoga)

realized i hated the on call ob more than ive ever hated another person in my life. she threatened me with a c section if i didnt push harder.

my hubby whispered "you can do this" in my ear. fell even more in love with him at that moment.

attempted to kick said ob in the face when she cut me instead of letting me tear. that was against my birth plan and EVERYTHING i told her and the nurses.

decided to never set foot in Methodist Hospital again.

held my sweet boy for the first time. and everything was ok again.

by noon (a year ago tomorrow) i watched my baby girl hold her brother for the first time. and everything was so much better than ok.

it was awesome.