For a long time, K would just bring his toys and stuffed ani­mals (yes, trucks and trains, too) for me to nurse, but over the week­end he started nurs­ing them him­self. I still have to nurse some of his stuffed ani­mals, but some­times he can do it, too.

When he nurses, he says “Gock!” which is his word for milk, puts the stuffed animal’s head under his arm into his armpit and makes a click­ing sound. Then, he says, “Da done. Boowp him.” (All done. Burp him.) Then he walks around whack­ing the poor ani­mal on the back. He’s such a good daddy to his stuffed animals.

Some­thing I noticed dur­ing my preg­nan­cies and after hav­ing my boys is that there are def­i­nitely a lot more hor­ror sto­ries float­ing around out there than there are low-drama, no prob­lem, happy to be preg­nant, great labor stories.

Why is it that “they” and some­times “we” feel the need to scare women who are not yet moms or who are preg­nant and have not yet had their babies? It’s not like scar­ing them makes our expe­ri­ences more valid. When I tell peo­ple that I had pretty great preg­nan­cies and very, very fast labors, peo­ple look at me like I’m crazy not to have had some hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. I just don’t know what comes of scar­ing some­one like that. It just seems mean.

For me, it has made me blog reg­u­larly! It’s made me think about why I blog and who my tar­get audi­ence is. It has also made me look at other blogs for ideas.

I’m still work­ing on decid­ing who is my tar­get audi­ence. I seem to be blog­ging a lit­tle of this and a lit­tle of that. I sup­pose one thing that makes me a bit unusual is that I am a tan­dem nurser, but I’m not sure I have enough to say about that one topic to make it the sole pur­pose of my blog. I guess I’m still a work in progress.

Lately I’ve been think­ing a lot about aging, health, and lifestyle. I’ve been watch­ing Dr. Oz on Oprah lately, and I’ve started think­ing more and more that we could be doing a lot more to give our­selves and our kids a healthy future.

What I wanted to do was to purge our kitchen and pantry. I wanted to throw away any­thing that wasn’t good for me and start over in a utopia of fruit, veg­gies, and chick­peas. (I LOVE chick­peas!) Instead, what we are plan­ning to do is to make the change grad­u­ally. We’ll decide on a goal or two for the month, and then once we achieve that goal, we’ll move to our next goal(s).

This month, we will be doing a few things:
*Buy­ing whole grain rice instead of white rice
*Buy­ing wheat pasta instead of reg­u­lar pasta
*Buy­ing sun­but­ter instead of peanut but­ter
*NOT buy­ing any­thing with high fruc­tose corn syrup

I think the first two will be pretty easy tran­si­tions for us, since we do those at least to some degree now any­way. The third will be a mat­ter of get­ting used to a new taste/texture, but the last one will prob­a­bly be quite an adjust­ment for us. I think it will also take a while to get our shop­ping done if we’re read­ing every label of every prod­uct we put in the cart.

Does any­one have any sug­ges­tions for cook­books or web­sites to find good tast­ing, healthy recipes for supper?

Hop­ing for some NaBloPoMo inspi­ra­tion while I take a shower. You all deserve bet­ter than this!

If teething child = sad child

and sad child = short post

Then, teething child = short post.

K just turned 2 on Sat­ur­day. Two years! I can’t believe I have a two year old. Crazy. Some of our friends and fam­ily know this, and some don’t, but Kael is still nurs­ing, or STILL nurs­ing depend­ing on your perspective.

I know that peo­ple think if a child can ver­bal­ize their desire for mom’s milk, they don’t need it. I know that it’s def­i­nitely not the pop­u­lar thing to do. I know that some peo­ple think it’s weird. I know all that.

It’s still the right choice for me to con­tinue nurs­ing Kael though. Extended nurs­ing (past one year of age) has ben­e­fits for both mom and baby. Some ben­e­fits for the baby are the increased nutri­tion and fats that are in breast­milk com­pared to cow’s milk. Some of the ben­e­fits for mom are the decreased risks of sev­eral types of can­cer, osteoper­o­sis, and rheuma­toid arthritis.

I know that in the US, there are many women who set their breast­feed­ing goal for 12 months. For a while, that was my goal, too. Then, when K turned one, I real­ized that Novem­ber 4th wasn’t any dif­fer­ent than Novem­ber 3rd. Just because he was one and 1 day didn’t change any­thing for me or for him. I was still okay with breast­feed­ing, and he still wanted and needed it. He may have been able to drink cow’s milk instead of breast­milk for his liq­uid intake, but he has always been a child who needed his “mommy time.”

When he was young, he was eas­ily over­whelmed and over­stim­u­lated. Nurs­ing was one thing that would calm him down and some­times keep him from pro­gress­ing into a melt­down. As he grew older, he was more able to han­dle the stim­uli, but nurs­ing remained (and still remains) impor­tant to him. It’s a form of secu­rity and com­fort, and his need for those things is just as real and as impor­tant as his nutri­tional needs are.

My goal for nurs­ing him is to allow him to self-wean. If I were to become preg­nant before I weaned him, I might encour­age wean­ing, because I wouldn’t want to tan­dem nurse (nurse K & A) while preg­nant, but if that doesn’t hap­pen, we’ll con­tinue to go at his pace.

I need to know how to get my baby to go back to sleep after he wakes to nurse at 2am! He’s done this now off and on since he was a cou­ple weeks old. He’ll go to bed, sleep a few hours, and wake up to eat. I keep the light off, take him to the nurs­ing chair, nurse him with­out look­ing or talk­ing to him, don’t change his dia­per unless he’s dirty, and swad­dle him. Then, when he’s done nurs­ing he’s either happy as a clam and want­ing to hang out for a cou­ple hours, or he’s fussy and fight­ing sleep for a cou­ple hours (like last night).

He’s 3 1/2 months old, so I know he needs to wake and nurse, but I can’t fig­ure out what to do dif­fer­ently to show him that it’s night and he should be going back to sleep after he eats! It’s not every night, and as far as I can tell there are no indi­ca­tors ahead of time to tell me if he’ll go back down right away or not. He also don’t sleep well dur­ing the day. He takes 4ish 30–45 minute naps through­out the day. I don’t think that’s too much. There are some­times when I will lay down with him and he’ll sleep for 1 1/2 or 2 hours, but that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily help or hurt his night sleep­ing either.

Last night, I fed him, burped him, rocked him, swad­dled him, walked, bounced, and cried (yes, I cried, too). Finally after being up close to 2 hours, I got him to sleep, or so I though. I laid him down and he woke up imme­di­ately and started cry­ing. Jason got up with him and walked, cud­dled, rocked, shushed, and held him for about another 40 min­utes before he finally crashed. Poor baby.

Com­ments are open to any­one with any ideas!

Sleep­less in North Dakota.

First of all, I’m won­der­ing what admis­sion my hus­band is think­ing I’m going to make. Haha. Too bad that I can’t keep him in sus­pense while mak­ing the admis­sion to every­one else.

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s noth­ing too steamy. I decided that I am going to sign up to become a Dis­cov­ery Toys con­sul­tant. I went to a party in Feb­ru­ary, and I loved their toys. They were high qual­ity and good for kids, and they have a vari­ety that you don’t see at Tar­get or Toys R Us much of the time. We also have 7 nieces and nephews that we buy birth­day and/or Christ­mas presents for each year. Of those seven, 6 are 6 and younger. That’s not the admission.

Here it comes! Brace yourselves!

I told the woman who I signed up under that I wanted to be a con­sul­tant mostly to buy toys for my nieces and nephews and my two boys. The truth is that I wouldn’t mind mak­ing some money doing this, too. Whew. Why was that so hard? I sup­pose it’s because it means that I have to admit that we’re not liv­ing in the lap of lux­ury oth­er­wise. I mean, we’re doing fine, but a lit­tle extra income would be nice from time to time. There I got it out.

Then

Now

K is such a won­der­ful lit­tle boy. I can’t even begin to tell you all the ways that he has changed our lives in such an amaz­ing way.