All weaned, nice and slowly

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Christy

On March 23 Lily feel asleep for her nap without nursing. She didn’t ask for it and I didn’t offer. That was the first time in 3 years, 3 months and a day that Lil hadn’t nursed to sleep, aside from the very occasional nap in the car

Most days nursing didn’t bother me, I didn’t think much about it. Lily’s nursing was a constant in our lives, it was a major help most of the time, but there were the occasional days when I wanted nothing more than to never let Lily anywhere near my chest quadrant. Those days were a rarity and that’s great because I was determined to let Lil self-wean at her pace, no matter how slow that was, to be reviewed again at a later date if necessary. I did have a small hand in the day time and middle of the night time weanings, but only in the slightest ways. With the daytime nursing, she was still nursing on demand (but almost excursively at home only for a long time now, but Lil’s choice) until she was about 2 1/2, then one day I started just not offering anymore and at first nothing changed and then slowly she started going longer and longer at a stretch. And on the days when she was just nursing too much or too long, I’d put a timer on so she knew how long it could last.

With the middle of the night nursing I just one day decided I needed more sleep. I slept topless and when Lil woke up in the middle of the night and crawled into our bed she would just snuggle up to me and nurse back to sleep. This arrangement worked most nights and was great because a lot of nights I slept right through it. But she had always used me as a human pacifier and night time was the worst. It got to the point where some nights she would just nurse for hours and I would doze, but not sleep really well. I couldn’t break the suction without waking her a lot of the times. Just a reminder, Lil has never, ever, ever been a good sleeper. Anyway, one day a couple of months ago I had just had enough and I needed more sleep so I put a shirt on. When Lil crawled in to bed the first night, she tugged at my shirt and asked about it. I told her that I’d let her nurse for a few minutes and then she was going to let go and go to sleep. I did that twice. It worked. I was ecstatic. I let her nurse a couple of time in the middle of the night because of a bad dream or something, but that was very rare.

Since I hadn’t been doing anything to encourage or discourage Lil’s going to sleep nursing I was shocked when she just stopped one day. I know I’ve read that over and over again on blogs and in articles about extended breastfeeding “Timmy just stopped one day, like I always knew he would”, but I had started to doubt that would be me and Lil, I was convinced for a while that she was going to nurse forever. When we lay down on her bed to go to sleep I’d kiss her goodnight and then she’d either ask to nurse or just start pulling up my shirt. I never told her no, but every once in a while I’d give her the ‘none of her cousins (her age and younger) still nurse, and it’s fine with me if she wanted to keep nursing, but I’d also be ok when she decided that she was done, after all, you’re getting so big’ speech. While she nursed I’d snuggle her and smell her hair and pat her back and read my book on my phone. It was relaxing for both of us, most of the time. So color me shocked when we go by the routine on 3/22 and then on 3/23 she never brings it up. I probably held my breath the whole time it took her to fall asleep. (It usually takes Lily about 30 minutes to fall asleep, how that does compare with your kids?) I went into Waldo’s office and told him “you are never going believe this, She feel asleep without nursing.” The same thing happened when we went to sleep that night. The next day was my 36th birthday, I feel like this was a great birthday present. She hasn’t even asked to nurse in the last month. Success.

And as every parent knows with every success comes some kind of new challenge. In the month since she weaned she has also given up her nap (I’m totally bummed about this for the work week, but excited for the weekends, now we have more flexibility) and we have had to figure out how to help her to fall asleep without boobs. The last has been the hardest, but honestly not a totally brutal as I was afraid it might be. It is once again taking her about 30 minutes to fall asleep at night, I can live with that.

When Kitchen Gadgets are lemons, Make Lemonaid

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Christy

I have a few recipes in my repertoire that require me to stand at the stove whisking a sauce or whatever for up to an hour or more. It is tiring and boring work, but luckily the results are worth it in the end. To make my life easier for these food items Waldo kept telling me he was going to buy me one of those self-stirring as-seen-on-TV things. We were walking around Fred Meyers one day and found the stirrer thing on the shelf for like $5.00. We tossed it in the cart and decided to make something with it the next week that would use it. I ended up making a tomato sauce and put the stirrer to the test. It flunked! It flunked like a frat boy that hasn’t been to class all semester and drank his brains out. It hardly moved around the pan and after about 7 minutes I took it out and finished stirring the sauce myself.

I knew this thing was never going to be used in the kitchen again so I decided to see what kind painting instrument it would make.

I started out by dropping globs of paint on a paper in a open cardboard box*.

Lil put the stirrer in the box and we turned it on.

It did the same thing in the box that it did in my sauce pan. It drifted to one corner and stayed there. I showed Lil how she could gently move it around.

I was pretty impressed with how the first one turned out, even if Lily’s paint choice wasn’t my favorite.

I didn’t like how all the paint got corralled in the middle because of the sweeper arm so I cut it off. I figured this thing was never going to by used for sauce so I didn’t need it.

* I use this box for a lot of different art and painting projects. It’s just a little bigger than 8×11, so paper fits great. Sometimes I use a little tape on the underside of the paper to keep it down, but it’s usually not necessary. It contains messes nicely, however marbles will still fly out of given enough shaking.

I cleaned the feet of the stirrer between every painting so the colors were clean.

The little stirrer vibrated crazy fast and the way the colors mixed was a surprise to me. I really like how these last turned out. They are the newest addition to the art wall.

My phone doesn’t do the colors justice.

I was so excited about this project, I thought Lil would love it, but sometimes you just can’t tell with her which way she’s going to go with something. So I so so relieved when she loved it. We give Robo-stir painting a 7 out of 10 crayon review.

Love is about the little things

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Christy

All day today my back has been bothering me. Nothing major, but occasionally I’ll bend wrong and my back with yell a little. This evening we were sitting around and Lily was playing with the tablet and totally engrossed in it. I moaned pretty much under my breath “Oh my back hurts” and within a heartbeat Lily appeared in front of me with a couch pillow and said “here mama, this will help your back”.

This kid is the epitome of love being about the little things.

I have heard on a number of occasions that she missed me sooooo much with a vice grip hug after being in the other room for a few moments.

Lil is a kitty more often than not these days and if I’m not happy about something or I get hurt she will come and purr at me to make me feel better. This is one of my favorites.

This girl keeps me on my toes and knocks me off my feet daily. This is what life is meant to be.

Happiness and love!

The pictures have nothing to do with the post at all. I just liked them and didn’t have any other use for them.

Sticky walls for Spring and Easter

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Christy

I found the idea to use contact paper (sticky side out) on a table on Pinterest and Lily loved it. I have since tried it on the wall and Lily loves it even more.

I had thought at first to buy Lil some pattern blocks because I saw on some blog that her kids had fun with it, but keep putting off actually buying them. One day I decided to see if Lily would even like it and took some craft foam sheets that I had bought but didn’t really have a use for and cut it into different shapes. Lil went crazy for it.

Since she like doing abstract shapes so much I thought I’d try using the craft foam to celebrate the seasons and holidays.

First up: Spring.

While Lil was downstairs playing with Waldo’s parents I started cutting foam sheets up into flowers and a sun and some clouds. Lil walked in and saw the stack of foam sheets and went straight to the drawer where I keep my exacto knife (well covered so the sharp end isn’t a danger) grabbed it and the cutting board it came with and proclaimed I needed to make her more shapes. First off I have to say that I didn’t know she even knew my knife was in the drawer of my craft dresser-thing and I’ve since moved it and secondly holy crap I guess she liked the sticky board even more than I though.

I showed her what I had already made her and asked what else she needed. Lily decided that we needed some red and orange clouds, a tree (which I thought was an awesome idea and couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it), a bird (see ‘a tree’), a butterfly and a snowflake (from a pre-cut winter foam sheet set we had).

The spring board was a huge hit and is still up on the wall.

*****

Second sticky board: Easter bunnies.

We aren’t religious people and do a very secular version of Christmas and Easter. It’s all about family, fun, crafts and being together. That’s just so you know why there are never any crosses in my art with Lily.

We stopped at Michaels last weekend so I could grab some pastel paint for our eggs. Let me just point out here that I found it very hard to get pastel paint anywhere, do you have a secret place you get it from? Anyway we were looking around and I grabbed some foam sheets cut like eggs and I figured I’d do another sticky wall with them or a mobile or something. I also grabbed a spring colored collection of foam sheets. The more I thought of the foam eggs the clearer a craft idea became. Of course in the end it only barely resembled the grand plan in my brain, but it was fun none the less.

Thursday I gave Lily the foam eggs and some puffy paint since she loved it so much last time and she went to town.

Decorating foam eggs for the sticky wall

I showed her how to make lines, she was one happy girl after that.

I know she looks really bored, but I checked and she's just concentrating.

The green is just craft glue that I added some green dye to for fun.

I wasn’t sure how long the huge globs of puffy paint was going to take to dry so I planned to do the rest of the sticky wall on Saturday instead of Friday. I’m really glad I did, the largest globs weren’t dry till Saturday morning.

After I put Lily to bed Friday night I started getting everything ready for Saturday morning. I put a new piece of contact paper up on a free space of wall (I’m running out of free wall space in the family room very quickly) and figured out how to make a very simple basket. I normally would let Lily put everything up on the sticky wall, but I wanted a few things “just so” on this particular wall so I did a few of the items.

I put a little easter grass in the basket and set to work on making my bunnies. I honestly had no idea how I was going to make them when I started looking around the family room for inspiration. I initially thought they’d be pretty small, but ended up using one of the foam eggs as a template for the belly portion so they are bigger than the eggs and that worked out just fine, thankfully. After cutting two body portions out of craft foam I grabbed one of Lil’s tiny tea cups and used it to trace a circle for the head. I free-handed the ears and then decided that they needed some additional dimension and added a little almost round piece to the belly, a muzzle on the face and inner ear colors. I loved my little bunnies. I took them in and showed Waldo, who tried really hard to not roll his eyes too much. I then decided they needed arms and legs and this was almost the end of my cute bunnies. The arms and legs got very cartoonish and long and at first I hated it, but Lil ended up using only the arms and it worked out great. I know that I’m the only one that the arms and legs being weird would bother, but I worked hard on my little ~~buddies~~ bunnies and wanted perfection.

I put the bunny parts together and just placed the eyes on the tray so Lil would be able to see what they were, but would be able to customize. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she put them all together just about exactly how I had them laid out. I mean Mr. Potato Head has only one suitable configuration, oh well. I stayed up very late to get my bunnies all finished and make sure everything was ready for when Lil woke up in the morning. I find it funny that most Mom’s would stay up late on Saturday night to make it look like the Easter bunny had been busy with baskets and eggs for Easter. I stay up late Friday night so that Lil can do a fun easter craft instead.

Saturday morning bright and early Lil woke up and we started our day. She didn’t disappoint me with her reaction to my bunny craft. We spent a little time gluing the eyes on and then she got to work.

I love that she used poof balls for feet, unfortunately poof balls don't stick to contact paper very well.

The bunnies got moved around a bit before Lil was totally satisfied, but once she was it was all perfect.

I love making sticky walls for Lily with craft foam shapes and other items we find around the house and craft closet. She has a lot of fun with it and learns along the way too. Most of the time the foam sheets are repositionable, but sometimes they get totally stuck and you can’t move it without ripping. Such is life I guess and we all move on. I have a sticky wall idea that’s forming involving fish, I can’t wait to see how it works out.

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Butterflies for Spring

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Christy

I bought a pack of 10 foam butterflies from the dollar section of Target on a whim. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but that is how it is with about half of the art stuff I buy. I always come up with something really fun for Lil either from Pinterest, blogs or my old preschool teacher memories. This butterfly craft was just something I pulled out of my… head one day.

I wanted to make a butterfly mobile for Spring. I gave Lil 6 of the butterflies to paint and decorate and then I was going to find some way to make a mobile out of them.

First Lily painted them with glitter glue.

This is my secret to using glitter. We love how glitter sparkles and is so much fun, but I hate how spreads so I put a bunch of glue on a plate and dump a lot of glitter on top and stir it up. After the glue dries you have your glitter sparkles with so much less of a mess. It’s true that you don’t get the coverage you get with just dumping the glitter directly on the piece of art, but this is better in my opinion.

5 butterflies painted with glitter glue and one covered with tissue paper.

Here’s where I have a problem, I don’t know when to stop when it comes to art. After the glue was dry I gave her a few bottles of puffy paint, poof balls and feathers.

This was the first time she’s ever used puffy paint and loved squeezing the bottle and making big pools of puffy paint.

So proud of herself.

The next morning when they were dry (well mostly dry, some of those big pools of puffy paint were still a bit tacky) Lil helped me punch holes in the butterflies and we laced plastic twine in the holes and taped them to the ceiling.

I had wanted them all hung on a twig or something cute, but by the next morning I was totally over them and gave up on trying to figure out how to hang them up. I just put them at different lengths and called it cute.

Lil loved talking about the butterflies and decorating them. She doesn’t quite get the whole season thing, but we are working on that.

Jinxyisms

Taking life one day at a time.

All weaned, nice and slowly

When Kitchen Gadgets are lemons, Make Lemonaid

Love is about the little things

Sticky walls for Spring and Easter

Butterflies for Spring