Recycled baby hoodie

Twice a year, my mom and I hit the consignment sales for the girl's clothes for the next two seasons...I'd say it was completely out of frugality, but I have to admit that along with being able to clothe 3 girls for $150 dollars or so, it's one of the dizzingly happy perks of raising kids on a reasonable budget. :D I get a wonderful high out of it. My nerdy theory is that is hearkens back to my hunter/gatherer roots. (I'm envisioning some ancestor coming back into her family tent with a basket full of nuts and berries and roots on her head, silly with glee over the great bounty she found, with her husband nodding and grunting with a bemused glint in his eyes...but I digress.)





Anywho, I'm in the habit of looking over the sleeves and collar of baby items for stains, and tossing basic items into my bag if they're under a dollar, which is exactly what I did with this happy little mustard colored hoodie.



I failed to notice the spectacularly mass-produced look of the glittered rainbow/butterfly combo, and when I spotted it at home, I blinked in consternation. And then remembered some fabric I'd picked up at a secondhand store a month ago, and realized it would be a cute match. Whee! I spent the evening stitching and entertaining baby with left hand while watching Arrested Development.



Butterfly/rainbow glitter paint explosion:







With the panel of fabric sewed on:







and a crocheted flower

tada! B'Eva likes it.

So, recently, as I was laying down baby Eva for a nap, I heard the suspicious sound of sticky giggles floating down the hall from the kitchen.

It suddenly occurred to me that after a breakfast of waffles, I had forgotten to put away the bottle of maple syrup. Crud muffins. After a quick effort to quietly run down the hall, managing mostly to sound like a sneaky elephant, my suspicions were quickly confirmed. Big puddle of maple syrupy goodness, with my delighted little toddler dipping her fingers into the sparkling amber lake and licking the sticky trickles off arms happily.

I did what every good mommy would do to keep from completely losing her cool. I grabbed the camera and made a happy, gooey movie.

(she's saying..."I poured maple syrup on the floor, just for funsies!")




I'll be the first to admit that I wanted to say some choice words and react in anger, initially. It's adorable to read about, and even charming to write about, but in the moment,I was mightily tempted to blow a fuse. Maple syrup is an expensive treat that we use sparingly, it's a pain in the back end to clean up off the floor, and it was the third thing my 2.5 yo had dumped in the past few days. I wanted to grind my teeth and shout at her, and scare her to death, honestly.



As luck would have it, something she'd said earlier that day stopped me. She'd been watching a mild "bad guy" movie with us this weekend, and afterwards, while talking about it, she snuggled down on the couch and said contentedly:

"There are no bad guys in our house. Our home is a safe place. I love my home!"



That little statement really stuck with me. Home is a safe place. A simple observation that rings true on so many levels. A good home is safe for it's occupants. A place where it's OK to mess up, where it's alright to cry, where a person can try their wings and crash and get up and try once more. There's a marvelous shortage of bad guys who might tell you you're not capable, tear you down, or hurt you spitefully.

In light of this, I'm making an effort to help our children take responsibility for their mistakes, and to also make home a safe place to learn that lesson. Correcting without shame is a learned skill for most humans, I think, but I'm in the midst of trying to learn how. If I can make a habit of gently correcting without sarcasm, shaming or intimidation, I think I'll be thrilled to find that I've tapped into the heart of "home".

Undoubtedly, it's going to take some time to fully get there, but I do believe that eventually, one maple syrup success with follow another, and eventually, we'll have a string of successes consistently following another like a pearl necklace. The language and tone of gentleness with start to feel less like marbles in my mouth, and I'll learn to speak "good guy" quite fluently. Hopefully, as it becomes habit for mama and papa (well, especially mama...my spouse is already quite good at it), gentleness will be set as the default tone of the home. As a lovely ripple effect, I suspect that kindness and laughter will drizzle on down the ladder of authority like golden honey. Correction will become sweet, as rebukes are much more precious from the lips of a safe person.

It's a super cool thing to be able to say, "My house is safe. There are no bad guys here." I'm all for that. <3

Placenta....Not for the Sqeamish of Stomach

I'll warn you...unless you're committed to alternative birthy crunchiness, you might get a little ill over this one. :P I'm trying to spare you, so you can reconsider and not scroll down if you don't wanna. If placentaphagy gacks you out, turn away, dear reader. Laaaa dee da, dootie do: filling up the page so you can click away if you must...
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No? OK. Here we go.




This weekend, I had several doula friends at my house, and, at my request, we all had some fun with the placenta from Eva's birth (which, until Sunday, had resided in my freezer). Wheeee!
;OP It was actually really cathartic for me to examine it and marvel at the miracle of life, after the whole retained placenta drama. A friend helped me examine it and try to find the spot where the retained piece had been, and then we dehydrated it for encapsulation.

my friend L helps unfold it, while Essie is very interested. She's striking a pose here...silly willy.

Essie's words were, "This is SO. COOL. I'm going to be a midwife or a SURGEON when I grow up, because I'm a *lover* for how the body works!" She asked us over and over to explain the order of how nutrition gets to the baby. Her original theory was that the placenta carried milk directly to baby's tummy, and when she found out that the nutrients and oxygen went from one bloodstream to another, she was over the moon. She asked us to draw us a diagram: mommy to placenta, placenta to cord, cord to baby's belly button.


We first thawed it with lukewarm water...you can see the cord (white) still attached

The water bag membrane was tough and wicked cool, if I do say so myself. :P All that vitamin C payed off, apparently, because it was beautifully flexible but super, super tough. It was so very smooth and supple, the perfect home for a tiny baby in utero. God's seriously smart. That bugger was STRONG. No wonder my water stayed intact until the pushing phase! That's the way mama likes it. ;oP


When it finally thawed and we could unfurl it completely, my friend Jen pointed out small patches of white calcification, on par for a 41 week baby. :O) Baby's side was smooth, while the side that had been attached to the uterine wall was wrinkled, and the wrinkles fit together like a puzzle piece. It was really amazing to see how functional, comfortable and miraculous this temporary organ was for my baby girl...her very first "home".
Jen shows me how the wrinkles line up. It look oddly pale after rinsing, as I'm used to seeing them very red right after birth.

There was literally an odd, small rip on the very edge of mine on the side where the piece had been retained, and it was exactly the length of the piece my midwife retrieved and showed me. Bingo! Little booger. That was the trouble maker. :P There was a bit of strangeness going on at the cord attachment site, AFA how the membranes were attached to it. I need a midwife opinion on that one.

The actual separating of the membrane and the placenta was the trickiest part of the whole deal, really. My friend J did that bit, and I'm forever grateful...it took quite a bit of doing. Then I (forgive the gory detail) chopped it into little chunks and we blended it to a pate consistency witha ridiculously funny shot taken by my Lindsay...placenta bead provided by another sweet, funny friend. Oddball humor abounds.

some ginger (ginger optional ), spread it thinly into dehydrating trays and dehydrated it. I left the dehydrator on 150 or so for probably 12 hours, and probably it would have been safe with less...but we went to bed.

(At this point in the process, I suggest cooking something that smells rather strong, or sticking the dehydrator on the porch. My dh made curry for us that evening, and the scent of the dehydrator was pretty much completely masked. No earthy icky weirdness, unless you just stuck your nose into it. MUCH better than I'd imagined.)

Me and baby Eva...cuter than her "wombmate", eh?

It's broken into dried wafers and stored in my fridge (sorry, dh).

I have some pics of the dehydrated bits for anyone who's interested...in fact I'll go ahead and commit to posted them later. This afternoon, I'll do the actual encapsulation and post that, too. :O) Thanks for looking, and HTH if you're intested in your own dehydration! It's much, much simpler than I'd originally supposed.

Alrighty then. :shifty: I've been doing some digging, and I actually got some really decent advice from some non-parents who share dd's personality type, by asking what they wished their folks had known about them. They provided some really helpful insight.

I pulled out my "Nurture by nature" book, and, as far as I can tell, in the Myers-Brigg personality theory , she's an ENTP "The Innovator". Obviously, this could evolve and change over time, and I don't want to pigeon hole her, but, for practical purposes, this is amazingly accurate assessment and info. On this site , ENTP children are described by this quote:

ENTPs are lively children who question established truths and norms, dream and scheme, and develop unusual ways of doing traditional childhood things. The ENTP child is oriented toward doing the unique, which may mean taking risks and outwitting parental, school, and societal authority. They enjoy creating projects and following interests that are unusual and different.

ENTP children enjoy inventing new toys, dances, and languages. Because they are outgoing in their personality style, they often engage other children in their projects and assign them particular roles to play. ENTPs rarely accept things just as they are. They like to test or explore to see new meanings and relationships. When things do not go as they want, they use their ingenuity and cleverness to bring people and situations around to their point of view.

A few quotes from Nurture by Nature (Paul & Barbara Tieger) describe preschool ENTP children thusly:

ENTPs are also not as motivated to comply with orders simply because they are told to ir in order to please...adults. Even as small children, they have the courage to stabd up to adults and will challenge their parents whenever they see fit. Since youn ENTPs actually derive great energy from arguing, it is usually better for parents to decide on what their position is, [b]state the reasons behind their limits..clearly and logically[/b], and then stick to it.

(It goes on to suggest entering respectful bargaining, but only on strategically chosen points.)

Becoming gentle or nurturing is a learned skill for young ENTPs...As (they) begin to learn that feelings are the logical and natural effects of actions, they will better understand and even be able to predict what effect their behavior will have on others (pg 140)

That's my daughter to a "t".

Here are some (paraphrased) thoughts from adult ENTJs I've conversed with:

"I hated it when my parents tried to force me to be "nice" like everyone else. They always seemed convinced that I lacked something emotionally that others had, like I didn't have a soul."

"I wish they (parents) would have taken the time to explain things to me, rather than getting angry whenever I broke their rules. All I wanted was to know why."

"I hate feeling that my opinion didn't matter."

"I felt demonized."

Many have mentioned, even as adults, sadness for being rejected because they don't follow rules for the sake of rules. :o/


Stepping back and thinking about it, in many ways, dd is a very, very reasonable little girl. If you take the time to explain things to her, 9/10, she'll cooperate with you. It's the taking time to explain WHY it's not OK to do something to the length she'd like to take the conversation that gets me running screaming for the hills. (I'm more of an INFJ)

Dh shares some of her personality traits, and suggested this script for moments when I absolutely *can't* take the time to explain: "You're a very smart girl, and I think you'd understand most of my reason if I could tell you. Right now, I can't do that, and I need you to trust that I want the best for you." Very wise.

Someone else suggested identifying the source of their struggle (wanting to create something, needing to feel capable, needing independence, etc) and then helping work a solution together that speaks to that. Very gentle discipline. Rock On.

For an ENTP, that sort of empowering and confidence building might look like: DD takes my chapstick to create a robot. I point out that she's taken it without asking, explain how that effects me, and involve HER in problem solving-what might be acceptable for robot material, and how to work to pay restitution for the chapstick.



Here's a couple more quotes I found helpful from Nurture by Nature and You Can't Make Me, But I can be Persuaded (Cynthia Tobias):

Real and lasting self-esteem for ENTPs comes from seeing themselves as the creative, competent, and resourceful people they are. (Nurture by Nature, pg 148)

Standing firmly behind ENTPs in all their high energy and flamboyance communicates a lasting appreciation for the bright and fresh originals they are.

SWC's (strong willed children) would rather have a compelling problem to solve than just a list of chores to do. Try soliciting my input regarding the chores. (Cynthia Tobias, "You Can't Make Me", pg 50)

The more I hear from these personality types, the more I realize that, mostly, they want to be treated with respect. Not just non- punitive (though many of them have pointed out to me that corporal punishment was an especially embittering violation of their person ), but actually valued for their ideas and capabilities. If a parent of a willful, creative thinker has even a *shred* of the "I'm the parent and you will follow me blindly because you're a mere CHILD" paradigm in their thinking, they're going to attack the problem from a totally wrong angle and make life a living hell for both themselves and the child, and likely destroy lifelong relationship in the process. :(

I think, for me the biggest obstacles to overcome have been (and continue to be):

-Loss of the "small child" ideal. From the moment she was born, she was like a critical, observant, opinionated *adult*. Rather than the usual childhood stuff, I find myself answering questions about the function of white blood cells (and the white/red ratio), the laws of entropy, and the concept of alliteration. She'll even argue whether my explanation is accurate. :rolleyes I feel rather intruded upon intellectually...for the next. 14. years....nothing gets by her undetected.

- My own intuitive introversion. I'd rather spend most of my time in my own head, and trying to constantly train an extroverted problem solver is exhausting for me. It's a prolonged daily foray into the "outside" world, and that is VERY counter intuitive for me to have to describe my thought process out loud while simultaneously trying to stay two mental steps ahead of her (and parent two other unique children).

-Defeating my own "children should be subservient" background, and combating that attitude from others for my child.


May post more later...those are my general thoughts for now.

I thoroughly appreciated this article and this one. Thought provoking stuff...really, you should read them. **nodding fervently**

Not reading them yet? ;OP I'll summarize. The new parenting trend, especially for mothers, leans heavily on applauding one's self and others for being a "bad" parent, in reaction to past generations' push to both be and present one's self as the perfect parent.

I love how Heather points out the subtle nuances of parenting differences, and how those nuances can make a huge difference. Being an "attached" parent doesn't make one a hovercraft. A desire to impart morals doesn't make a parent free from wildness and whimsical magic. I appreciate someone articulating that idea so clearly. :) Every parent has their own unique manifesto.





I breastfeed my two year old. I also let that same two year old climb trees unassisted, rock walls and have free reign of our big backyard. (Mostly because she has the skill and will to do so) Two of our children still sleep in our room. And two of them are allowed to make and clean up their own lunch on a fairly regular basis. I don't spank my children. And I expect them to help out with the laundry and let my 4yo make pancakes. They watch some tv.

And, when the weather's nice, they're outside catching bugs and eating blackberries several hours a day. They listen to me pray honestly for patience and curse when I'm really, really mad. We're choosing to school at home for now, and we also enjoy *gasp* Harry Potter. **dun, dun, dunn*


I refuse to be called "good" or "bad". Those terms fall in and out of vogue so darned easily. I've never been much good at towing the party line, anyway. How about loving and available? I like that much better.

My two month old daughter and I love to talk with each other. With this being my third baby, I've been amazed at how much more I understand what she's saying to me than I did with my firstborn. After the crazy struggles we went through with our firstborn, who was a high-needs child, I greatly credit learning about attachment parenting for my growth as a parent. I can easily tell what my squirming infant needs 98% of the time, to my great surprise and delight. Going down the usual checklist of changing, feeding and checking for itchy clothing tags is no longer a constant necessity.

Connection certainly wasn't a perfect science when we first started out. It took practice, and lots of it. Babies, I found, take effort and getting to know, just like every other person in the world. I'm not the perfect mother by any stretch of the imagination. I think I'm just a normal mama who was lucky enough to have been made aware that babies really are miniature little people with relational capabilities and very real emotional needs.

It astounds me how many of her cues I'd likely not even be aware of if she'd been left repeatedly to cry until she falls asleep, or if I had let her become completely distraught before responding to her every time she needed something. I used to view infants, to my embarrassment, as cute but rather vacant vegetables who cried mysteriously from time to time. Now I know better. Learning to watch her carefully before she began to wail like a hot tea kettle taught me a great deal about miniature humans.

She tells me things with her face, the nuances of her body language and tone of voice. She mimics my faces, and I mirror hers. She gets excited and pumps her legs and grins when I ask her, "Hungry?" When I can tell she's overheated in the damp, southern summer air by her serious baby grunts, I strip her extra clothing and she grins with gummy relief. She gurgles at me flirtatiously with raised eyebrows, asking me to echo her favorite noise, and squeals with pleasure when I indulge her. My daughter talks to me. I'm so thrilled to not have missed it.

Edible necklaces, chocolate banana bread, bookshelves

Can it get any better than necklace beads made from fruity cheerios? They don't think so. I had one, too, but I ate mine before the photo op, lol. :oP I was surprised at how long it held their attention. N did hers all by herself! And, somehow, rare fruity cereal gets cleaned up (*cough* eaten *cough*) off the table and floor better than their usual wooden beads. I wonder why....

Speaking of "fruit" cereal: I thought this was an amusing article.

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Noni helped me bake wheat banana nut chocolate bread today (what a mouthful, in more than one way), while we all watched the Philosopher's Stone. The bread was seriously delicious, hence the link (only modified by using whole wheat flour, which didn't detract from the taste at all, in my humble opinion).

licking the bowl

It was a well deserved treat after everyone working so hard doing the weekly cleaning of the playroom. It was scary in there. :P Supervising children cleaning is much harder than doing it one's self, in my thinking. Two year olds in particular have an extraordinary ability to stray from
any given task, a fact I always forget about once they get older.

The playroom was extra messy this morning because *drumroll*:

Nate build their bookshelves into the wall cubby! I'm pleased with the result. He's so cool that way. They fit there nicely, I think.

There's one big box left in the garage with the rest of their books..they have far more books than toys, methinks.

We'll paint them evetually, but for now, they're storing all the kid's books au naturale. :D