kim through
   the looking glass

So you know how I wrote a while back about being so disappointed in not being able to find a used Phil & Teds buggy?

Shortly after that post I noticed an aquaintence had an almost three-year-old and a Phil & Teds. So, being the crazy kook I am, I straight up asked if they were almost done with it and would they be willing to sell it to me?

They decided that they weren’t quite ready to live without a stroller as their daughter wasn’t terribly interested in walking everywhere and she accompanied them daily to drop their oldest at school.

So, after a good friend was able to trade her UPPAbaby Vista for a Phil & Teds for the upcoming arrival of her second baby, I thought to myself …

“Hmmm … I’ve got a Bertini in my basement that I was going to sell on Kijiji to put toward my Phil & Ted fund. Maybe I could offer to trade them?”

Followed closely by …

“Good gracious, my grandmother would have no idea what I meant with that sentence.”

So, I put the question out to them, brought the buggy over for them to view and it was a done deal!

Tonight, I became the proud (and terribly excited owner!) of an Apple Green Phil & Teds E3 Sport Buggy with storm cover and doubles kit.

YAY! I’m so excited, I want to go wake Gwen up and take her for a ride! Or maybe not! I think I can wait until morning I’ll take some pictures tomorrow.

I’ve been doing some reading on co-sleeping and found a great article called “The Con of Controlled Crying”. Here’s an excerpt:

Controlled crying and other similar regimes may indeed work to produce a self-soothing, solitary sleeping infant. However, the trade-off could be an anxious, clingy or hyper-vigilant child or even worse, a child whose trust is broken. Unfortunately, we can’t measure attributes such as trust and empathy which are the basic skills for forming all relationships. We can’t, for instance, give a child a trust quotient like we can give him an intelligence quotient. One of the saddest emails I have received was from a mother who did controlled crying with her one-year-old toddler.

After a week of controlled crying he slept, but he stopped talking (he was saying single words). For the past year, he has refused all physical contact from me. If he hurts himself, he goes to his older brother (a preschooler) for comfort. I feel devastated that I have betrayed my child. - Sonia

Can you imagine? I can’t. I’m so glad that I read this article - on the nights when it’s the hardest, I’ll be able to remember that quote.

For more articles on baby sleep, co-sleeping, baby training, etc. check out this page. Enjoy!

Gwen tries to mimic everything. But she’s got quite the little vocabulary of words she actually uses correctly! Here are her newest words.

• elbow
• light
• up
• outside
• ears
• glasses
• apple
• hat

My favourite is when she tries to say ‘architecture’, as it comes out ‘akipoo’. And glasses sounded like ‘asses’, which is also very entertaining.

MISSING:

Infant. Named Gwen. All I have is this toddler …

And I’m not sure where she came from …

I know, I know. It’s been a LOOOOOONG time since I’ve gotten to update you all on Gwen via pictures. Since the beginning of July, actually! I totally lost my camera cord and couldn’t even find the memory card/USB reader we bought a couple of years ago so I could NOT get my pictures off my camera! But, thankfully, I found both the card reader AND the camera cord and now we’re up and running again. I figured I’d shoot some pics up here and show you how much she’s grown in the past month! Read the rest of this entry »

I have spoken to enough moms about this subject to know that in mommy-land, I am playing with fire. Please, if you are going to leave a comment disagreeing with my position, I am happy to read it and have a discussion about the subject. Please keep in mind that just because we have chosen a different parenting style does NOT mean that I think you’re a bad parent. If any nasty/derogatory/flaming comments are posted, I will not respond, and I will delete them. Let’s be courteous everyone - thanks!

A couple of weeks ago I was at the park and met up with some friends. One asked me how Gwen was sleeping and I replied with a “Oh, the same … she still wakes up really frequently.” After a bit more chit-chat, she asked why we didn’t let her cry-it-out (CIO) so we could all get some sleep. I’m afraid my answer was woefully inadequate to convey why we are not advocates of the CIO method.

I thought about her question some more once I got home and came up with some better reasons than just “studies show it’s bad for babies’ brains” and “it just doesn’t feel right”. I thought I’d write them down here so I won’t be tempted to forget next time Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Tammy is hosting a Mom 2 Mom Carnival on encouraging our kids’ relationship with Jesus.

If I’m going to be brutally honest, I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to go about helping our kids build a relationship with God!

One thing we currently do is pray before dinner each night. We try to pray for specific things and for specific people instead of saying a generic prayer. One thing I remember about growing up is that we generally only saud prayers by rote (ie. “Now I lay me down to sleep …”) so I was very uncomfortable actually praying out loud around other people since I’d had so little practice. I want to give Gwen the opportunity to pray out loud her own prayers in our home so that she becomes used to using her own words to express herself to God.

Another thing we hope to do is family Bible reading. I don’t yet know how best to do this and not make it a chore and boring, though, as that was most of Brad’s experience regarding family devotions as a kid!

I hope, also, to expose our kids to other Christian adults. Living in an intentional community in which we have deep relationships and intentional get-togethers (ie. weekly potlucks and weekly morning prayer) is a wonderful way to show our children the love of God through others. I think having positive adult role models who talk about their faith, their relationship with God and their walk with God is an awesome thing for kids to have!

All in all, I think the number one thing to do to encourage kids to have a relationship with God is walk with God yourself. Kids learn the most from what they see, and if all they ever see is a ‘Sunday Christian’, how can we ever expect them to move beyond that? That means that both Brad and I have a lot of work to do in how we live our lives and ‘walk the walk’. I hope, and pray, that we can rise to the occasion.

Welcome Carnival of Breastfeeding readers! This month’s carnival is about nursing in public. Please go check out the other posts in the carnival (links at the bottom of this post)!

I was a week and a half postpartum. My mom was staying with my husband and I, keeping me well fed and watered while I adjusted to life with a newborn. I’d had a quick, uneventful homebirth followed by a tumultuous first week including supplementation for “too much” weight loss, two blood clots, and a very fussy baby.

On this particular day, my mom and I had been up quite a bit the previous night and both of us were tired. She offered to treat us to dinner and suggested an upscale joint where we could get delicious gourmet hamburgers. I was in (Guacamole and salsa on a hamburger? Can life get any better?) and we were joined by my husband and dad.

We sat down, ordered our food, and were waiting for our salads when my newborn daughter, sleeping peacefully in the carseat next to me, began to awaken.

And fuss.

And demand to be fed.

I had prepared by wearing a nursing bra and nursing shirt and decided that if I hoped to be comfortable nursing her in public when she was older that I had better start now.

I cradled my daughter next to my breast, jiggling her to keep her calm while I prepared to feed her. I looked up to say something to my husband, felt something funny, and looked back down.

My hungry daughter had latched herself onto my breast through the shirt! The look of confusion on her face was priceless and I burst into laughter.

My family, when they realized what was happening, joined in, and the server arrived with our salads just in time for me to pull my daughter off my shirt, leaving behind a sticky circle of saliva. Shortly afterward, I was nursing my 10-day-old daughter in a booth at a restaurant attempting to eat with one hand.

I never thought I would be so bold.

Check out these other posts on nursing in public! All posts will be up by the end of the day on June 22, so keep checking to make sure you get to read them all!

• (Boobs) Out and Proud - Lucy & Ethel Have a Baby
• Would you, could you nurse in public? - PhD in Parenting
• Talents - I haz it - Dirty Diaper Laundry
• Nursing in a room full of people you know - GrudgeMom
• Aww, is he sleeping? - MomUnplugged
• Chinatown, the Subway, the Vatican, and More - Christina from Massachusetts Friends of Midwives
• June Carnival: Breastfeeding in Public - Mother Mary’s Soapbox
• Nursing in Public as an Immigrant - Tiny Grass
• Breastfeeding in Public - Mommy News & Views
• To Cover or Not To Cover - Angela from Breastfeeding 1-2-3
• Little Old Men … & Nursing in Public - Stork Stories
• Why Worry about Nursing in Public? - Chronicles of a Nursing Mom
• Breastfeeding and the Summertime - Warm Hearts, Happy Family
• Thank You for Nursing in Public - Blacktating
• NIP, no tuck - Musings on Mamahood
• Get Kicked Off a Bus for Nursing in Public? Here’s How to Respond! - The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog
• Products That Can Help You Nurse in Public - Mama Knows Breast
• A Wee NIP in the Park - babyREADY
• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles … We’ve Breastfed in Them All! - Tales of life with a girl on the go
• Breastfeeding Hats? YES! Nursing Covers? Uh … Not So Much. - Never a Dull Moment
• Nursing in Public: What’s a Breastfeeding Mother To Do? - Breastfeeding Mums Blog
• A Fresh Perspective on Nurse-Ins - Breastfeeding Mums Unite
• Easy, discreet way to breastfeed a toddler in public - Hobo Mama
  

My Darling Gwendolyn,

I can’t believe it’s been a full year since you were born. After a relatively easy labour, you were born at home, on Mommy and Daddy’s bed, and weighed 5lb 15oz and were 19.5 inches long - a tiny girl!

It is amazing to look back at how much you have changed this first year of life. You have gone from a helpless newborn to a vibrant and energetic little girl who keeps me on my toes all day! Although your naps were short and infrequent as a newborn (and always taken in my arms!), when you were around 8 months old, you began to take two naps a day, sleeping for normally around 1.5 - 2 hours in the morning and another 45 minutes - 1 hour in the afternoon. The past week or so, Daddy and I have realized you don’t need quite that much sleep during the day and we’ve been working on transitioning to one afternoon nap. We spend our days together going for walks, buying groceries, playing at the park with all our friends, attending Baby Time at the Locke Street Library, reading board books, and playing with your toys. More often than not, I’m wearing you in the sling or mei tai, although I do take the stroller when we go to the park to carry all your stuff! While I make dinner, you love to pull all our plastic containers out of the cabinet and bang measuring spoons and cups. You love pulling up on my legs while I’m busy cooking and I often burst into frustrated laughter since I can’t move anywhere with you holding onto me!

You continue to nurse often during the day and we both enjoy these quiet times spent together. One of my favourite times is when you nurse during the late afternoon, as you enjoying staying latched on for quite a while and I can often get a smile and giggle out of you. It’s so nice to be snuggled up to you so often during the day when you don’t want to be held so much at other times. I don’t count how many times you nurse throughout the day, but I would guess that you’re nursing at least 7 or 8 times - including overnight, when you nurse twice or three times. Nighttime sleep is still a luxury for Mommy and Daddy - you wake up quite frequently but we are coping! You start the night off in your crib after a sometimes easy, sometimes difficult bedtime, but come into bed with us in the wee hours. We nurse and snuggle until you wake up for the day, which is anytime between 6:30 and 7:30 right now. Both Daddy and I love waking up to you in the morning - you sit up in bed smiling and chatter away to us for a few moments before crawling around and pulling up on the headboard and siderail. You also enjoy poking us, slapping our tummies, and drooling on us It literally seems like you are never still.

You love the foods you love! Your favourites are cheese, yogurt, avocado, pears, kiwi, and blueberries. You are still eating baby oatmeal, but also enjoy breads, pasta, pitas, and whole wheat crackers. We have as yet been unsuccessful at coaxing you to eat any meat but you have, on occasion, eaten a few veggies. We continue to offer you whatever Mommy and Daddy are eating in the hopes that soon you’ll enjoy a wide variety of foods like we do.

The past few weeks, you’ve been babbling up a storm and, to my utter delight, have realized that “MumMumMum” means Mama! You often crawl toward me saying “MumMumMum” and reach up for me to take you into my arms. It’s very rare that I won’t indulge you! In the past week or so, you’ve been letting go of whatever you’re holding onto and balancing for longer and longer and a few days ago, you even let go and took one step forward! It’s only a matter of time until you’re a walking baby.

My sweet little girl, I love you more than words can express and I can’t imagine my life without you. Although I can count on my fingers the number of times you’ve let Daddy and I sleep for 6 or more hours in a row, I can’t possibly count the number of times I’ve nursed you; the number of beautiful smiles you’ve bestowed on us, the number of snuggles we’ve shared, and the number of times we’ve been in absolute awe of your beauty and the love we feel for you.

I so look forward to the next year with you - I can’t wait to discover more about you!

I love you more than you’ll ever know, my Gwen!

Love,
Mama

On Sunday, I was lucky enough to meet two of my online friends in real life! In my town! Yay!

Kara was making a trip to Ikea (Burlington) and was therefore happy to stop in Hamilton at Tim Horton’s on the way home. Steph was crazy enough to make the trek from the other side of Toronto.

This was the first time I’ve met anyone from online in person. It was lots of fun. Really weird, but lots of fun! It’s so interesting to know so much about people you’ve never *really* met.

I think Gwen and Zaphyn enjoyed meeting each other and playing with each other’s toys.

Babies! Break rank and attack!

My only regret is that we neglected to get a picture with the three of us together. GAH!

Hey all you toy junkies! I’m so excited for this store it’s a bit ridiculous. Check out their blog for more info! Me? I’m hoping to get in for a sneak peek today!