Why I Wish My Baby Wouldn't Sleep Through The Night

January 21st, 2010

Yes, check that again.  I said “wouldn’t”.  As in, please wake me up to nurse.  I am living in bizarro world.  Even for me.  I wait 8 years for a baby that will sleep from 8pm until 6am and then find myself trying to sabotage that just as soon as I get it.  Isn’t that just like me too?  But I have a good reason.  I promise.

With the last baby I nursed him until he was, like, 2.  The baby that never slept.  The baby that took co-sleeping to new levels in our house.  And remember when he was 18 months, when I googled (oh, I forgot, this post is not for boys – move on – that’s my disclaimer) why I wasn’t having a period yet.  I’d never gone that long without one, I mean don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, just wondering if it was okay, normal.  And it was.  Or so said forums on night nursing like these on the La Leche League’s site.  Which was eye-opening for me.  Really?  I had always wondered why my menses had started back so early with my first child (at 9 months post partum) meaning that I was still nursing and pregnant with my second at the same time.  Whereas with the next 2 children my period didn’t return until after I weaned them at 12 months and 13 months.  Then came BigMan, menses returned at 20 months post partum, and whom I nursed until he was 2 (meaning once again, I was nursing and pregnant at the same time).

And then TheFinalist was born.  And he started sleeping through the night really early on (on the nights I laid him in his bed to sleep until he wanted to nurse – at which point he would co-sleep with me the rest of the night).  Obviously really early, because he is only 3 months old and he’s sleeping from 8pm until 6:30am.  Once again, not my doing – just how God made this child.  Which was nice at first.  But then I started thinking.  Thinking things like, “Hmm, I haven’t had such a good sleeper in the house since TheOldest was this age.”  Oh.  OH.  Wait.  See, we practice Natural Family Planning.  We didn’t start out in search of that.  It just happened.  We aren’t comfortable with our birth control options.  We didn’t know what we did had a name or a following.  We just did what we did.  Now, before you start making really funny jokes about how we (and all our progeny) are living proof that NFP doesn’t work please realize that we intentionally tried for each of our children (after our first sweet surprise!).  We follow the ovulation method.  I’ve only had 6 periods in about 9 years (maybe that many).  One of our children was actually conceived before my period returned.  Because I knew what to look for.  So, really we have living proof that the ovulation method of Natural Family Planning works.  (Wanna know another little secret?  I’m not a smart woman.  I don’t study, I might have mentioned that before.  I just today found out what all these different methods are called.  One of the other natural family fertility methods is called the symptothermal method and yet another is called the rhythm method based on calendar calculations.  You can go to FamilyDoctor.org to see their definitions of each.  I know what we do – I just never knew there were names and whole sites dedicated to it!)

So, back to my sleeping habits.  I’m seriously debating co-sleeping more with him.  Because when I do he inevitably nurses more.  But when I lay him in his bed at 10pm and think, “Maybe he’ll wake me up in a couple of hours to eat.”  I look at the clock at 6am and think, “What happened?!”  I know, don’t hate me, we should all be so lucky.  But do you know how badly I do not want another period so soon?  If he is TheFinalist then I have to have them for the rest of my youthful years, right?  I don’t want that, people.  Who would sign up for that if they knew they could avoid it?  I mean really, now that I’m bed sharing with my baby it’s much easier to nurse and sleep and nurse and sleep and repeat.

So, tonight when I crawl into bed I may just bring that mega-sleeping little cuddle bug with me.  And maybe, just maybe, avoid the inevitable just a little longer.

I know, I’m a little bit crazy, right?

The Chalkboard Wall Success

January 19th, 2010

I decided not too long ago that I HAD to have a chalkboard wall.  Right in the middle of my dining room.  Hey, I’m embracing the learning happens everywhere philosophy.  We tried the school room approach: aschool nook first (which was great but not quite in the center of everything enough for me) and then into a separate school room (a converted bedroom) which was a complete disaster; it just never worked for us.  I even wrote a post for Heart of the Matter Online about how I homeschool with toddlers in the house.  Because with babies and toddlers life happens in the living areas and I need to be able to keep teaching in the midst of cooking, eating, feeding babies, changing diapers, and keeping an eye on little ones who happen to be learning from the Wonder Pets at the moment.

Here is our before wall.  Cute and all, but c’mon the word “melanin” barely fits on my wobbly chalkboard.

And here is our after.

My wonderful hubby painted this space with magnetic wall paint first.  This did not work so much for us.  We did only use two coats because that’s all we had.  And at $21.00 a little can, that’s all we were gonna do.  Not as important to me as the chalkboard.  If you do this, and it is important to you, maybe you could use many more coats and it would work for you.  I don’t know.

Then he put a couple of coats of the black chalkboard paint up and we waited 24 hours.  That was it.  One day later and I was teaching away!  I love instant gratification. 

If I had advice on this part though, we discussed that next time we’ll sand the wall down a bit and then lay a smoothing primer and then chalkboard paint it.  When I write it’s rather rough.  Which is fine for now, but we’ll know better next time.

Oh, and we extended it so low so that even the toddlers could write on the wall while I’m teaching.  The olders love playing hangman, tic-tac-toe, and just writing their names.  And I’m all for fitting in writing skills wherever I can!  Plus, you get to say things like, “No, BigMan, you can only write on the wall.”  And how fun is that?!

Creativity Is Creeping In

January 15th, 2010

I lamented a few months ago about my being a very boring homeschooler.  And wondered aloud if I would ever get back to who I was.  Well, I haven’t, in most respects.  But I looked around the other day and realized our home was adorned with proof that I actually do teach.  It’s so much more me than those boring worksheets I talked about not too long ago.  I can’t ever stick with anything, y’all know that.  I do what works.  And then when it doesn’t I’m real good at quitting.  Mid-stream. 

It’s mid-stream.  And it never did really work.  Not with TheOldest.  I hate teeth-pulling.

We’re doing more combined learning.  We’ve been learning the families of musical instruments and then having free play with all our own instruments. 

We’ve been reading The Secret Garden and I’ve been having the kids draw a picture for each chapter.  Some great stuff with that!

Our family tree that all 3 bigger kids contributed drawings to.  We used this to study family relations, spanish words for family members, art work, and handwriting.  Look at that paci in TheFinalist’s mouth!  And my hair, oh my, that hair.  And look at Daddy’s goatee!  This tree cracks me up!

And then my marvelous non-homeschooling-for-right-now ;) friend gave me gobs of homeschool stuff.  Oh.my.goodness.  I was in love. 

And then I decided I just had to have a chalkboard wall.  (Yes, that post is coming soon.  I promise!)  So, we’ve been working math problems and diagramming sentences together on the board.

We’ve been looking at Toulouse-Lautrec’s work and finding France on the map and discussing his life.  Ties into that family tree lesson, right?!  And then we moved onto Rembrandt and discussed differences in their works.

We’ve been watching The Nativity Story again.  Wow.  It’s like a week long event when we do, but I love it.  I pause about every other word and answer the multitude of questions they have.  History, Bible, Faith, Oh MY.  Wonderful.

Speaking of history, I’ve been reading aloud from some silly Social Studies books.  But they are silly.  To the point, that TheOldest said today, “That sounds like Junie B. Jones wrote those!”  And they aren’t trying to be silly.  I just have high standards.  Now I know what twaddle is.  I’m dreaming of The Mystery of History.  Still.  Some day.  But for now, we get history in everything.  Everything has a history to it – you just have to go far enough back, be willing to answer (and look up!) a million and one questions, and explore. 

And lapbooks are back!  I love lapbooks, have I mentioned that before?  ThePrincess is doing insects, TheMiddlest is working on meerkats, and TheOldest chose weather.

We’re doing a human body unit study.  These were our people that we made “joints” for.  That’s funny to me every time I say it!  But just look at these.  That’s Leia down there on the end – complete with the hair-do and high heels, of course.  Then ThePrincess helped BigMan make a “daddy”.  And TheMiddlest said his was him as a teenager – he better have that same smile when he actually gets to be that age.  And then look all the way to the left – that would be TheOldest’s Han Solo.  With the jacket and gun how could you not tell?!

And we are off and running with a new year and new excitement.  I hope your new start to your school year is going just as swimmingly!