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If you ignore the near-constant sickness, August was a good month. We’ll especially ignore the end-of-month bonus we got Saturday in the form of a LONG day in Boston Children’s hospital for Johnny ending in an asthma diagnosis and the fact that Mike currently has bronchitis for the second time this year. I do want to know, can anyone tell me why the nurses at Boston Children’s thought it was a good idea to try to draw blood from the back of BOTH of Johnny’s hands before finally succeeding in the much-more-common inner elbow spot?
Back to reviewing August… I enjoyed the simplicity of life with two children for the few hours before I went to the hospital to have Lily. The kids got to go to TWO birthday parties August 1st, which would have been impossible with a newborn. Lily has been a joy to take care of, so enjoying having a newborn around has been a breeze. I LOVED having so much family around. It was wonderful to spend time with family members I rarely get to see. I thoroughly appreciated my mom’s cooking, and my siblings and parents spent a lot of time baking with Emma, wrestling Johnny, reading to Emma and Johnny, snuggling Lily, and helping to mow the lawn, paint the cathedral ceiling in our family room, and install a new ceiling fan in the same room. Our final visitor left August 27th, so we’re still adjusting to life as a family of five. Emma and Johnny are learning to share their parents with Lily, and Johnny is getting better at understanding just how gentle you need to be with a newborn. Emma has emerged this past week as an absolutely stellar big sister to both Johnny and Lily. She’s great at comforting both of the younger children and helping around the house.
As for annual goals:
- Find places to keep all those odds and ends that get stashed in random places: ignored, although I cleared out some old toys.
- Potty train Emma: Done. Johnny is still interested in using the potty and sits on it occasionally, but I’m honestly not terribly interested in having two potty-trained children at the moment. If Johnny chooses to train himself overnight, that’s great, but I’m not pushing it.
- Get Johnny to eat more solid food: we’re back to ground zero on this one since the trauma of Saturday. He drinks milk from a sippy cup and not much else. Any suggestions?
- Be more patient with cooking/baking that involves a rolling pin: My mom did this, but I don’t think she had my patience issues to start with.
- Take the kids outdoors more: They were outside most days, sometimes for hours on end. We kept them in most of the time for one particularly hot and muggy week.
- Get the kids to sleep through the night better: Another setback here, I’m guessing due to the combination of new baby and illness. Neither Emma or Johnny is sleeping through the night. They don’t stay awake long when they wake up, but it’s still disrupting everyone’s sleep.
September goals:
- Enjoy New England’s beautiful autumn weather by spending time outside and visiting a farm at least once this month.
- Visit a farmer’s market. My town runs one and there are several others in neighboring towns.
- Make sure all three kids get quality time with both parents. I was baking cookies with Emma last night and she said, “This is fun. I needed some Mama time.”
- Enjoy the return of play dates: we’ve been in self-imposed quarantine for the past month thanks to The Evil Virus That Took Forever to Go Away, so we’re all looking forward to visits with friends this month.
I’d love to get my sewing machine out, so we’ll set that as a bonus goal. I’m also excited about running a review and giveaway from All Modern this month, a store that specializes in contemporary furniture but offers some fun toys for babies and children as well.
What are your goals for this month?
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Emma at 27 days
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Lily at 25 days
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It’s been a month of not feeling great at our house. Nothing serious, just a rather miserable and long-lived virus making the rounds in our family (Lily, thankfully, seems to have been spared the experience). It has, however, gotten me thinking about ways to keep little ones as happy as possible when they feel anything but great. Here are a few quiet activities that have helped to distract from illness this month at our house:
- puzzles
- books (hooray for public libraries!)
- drawing
- coloring
- painting
- play dough
- sidewalk paint
- looking after baby dolls and stuffed animals
- building with blocks
- pattern blocks
- playing with fabric scraps
- playing “school”
I have resorted to television on occasion, but I try to stick to Signing Time DVDs (I did allow a handful of Bob the Builder and one or two Word World episodes). I watch with the kids so we can talk about what they see and to keep myself from using the television as a babysitter. Both my children and I have learned sign language vocabulary from Signing Time, and I learned about greywater purification systems from Bob the Builder. I even looked it up afterwards, and the description seemed reasonably accurate, at least according to Wikipedia…
How do you keep your young children happy when they don’t feel well?
My stash, from left to right, top to bottom:
- Lily’s small-size Huggabuns diapers (this particular version is no longer made) with liners underneath
- Bumgenius 3.0 snapped to fit Lily with liners (also snapped to fit Lily) underneath
- Johnny’s medium-size Huggabuns diapers (also no longer sold in this incarnation) with liners underneath
- Imse Vimse training pants for Johnny with home-sewn cloth wipes (see this post for instructions) underneath
- Lily’s home-sewn newborn cloth diaper covers (see this post). We used wipes as inserts for these, and she already outgrew them being the fast-growing child that she is…
The Bumgenius 3.0s are my favorites, but I only have three. They also don’t really fit Johnny at 20 months and 26lbs, so they aren’t the ideal one-size diaper in my mind. I would love to try out some one-size FuzziBunz or Smartipants but we have a decent stash of sized diapers that work just fine so I can’t justify the expense. Thirsties diaper covers also look lovely, although I always prefer snaps over velcro (ironic given that I put velcro on the diapers I made, I realize, but I didn’t have any of those fancy diaper snaps). I also want to try my hand at sewing an RRP diaper and one of Katrina’s fleece soakers – once I figure out how to use my sewing machine with three children in tow, that is!
And while we’re on the topic of sewing, if you’ve always wanted to learn but didn’t get the chance, consider joining Valerie from the Frugal Family Fun Blog’s FREE sewing workshop here – you have until August 31st to sign up!
 I don’t send Emma to preschool, but I’m hesitant to say I homeschool her, because I don’t have defined learning objectives or a curriculum I use. Emma loves to play school, though, and she often requests specific things she wants to do for school. She’s been interested in writing lately, so yesterday I found these fun handwriting readiness worksheets via this blog post. Emma LOVED doing these worksheets, and she was not stressed about her inability to draw perfectly straight lines the way she has been when doing alphabet-based worksheets. She also wrote her name for the first time yesterday and was so pleased with herself that she wrote it again about twenty times – with varying numbers of horizontal lines for the “E” each time!
 I have blogged about my children’s enjoyment of pattern block templates before, but they get at least as much enjoyment out of pattern block free play. I love the thicker wooden pattern blocks for this activity since they allow for the building of towers and other 3D structures.
Pattern block templates are fun to do and allow children to learn about things like one-to-one correspondence and shape recognition, but there are at least as many lessons to be learned (and as much fun to be had) through free play. Free play provides excellent opportunities for learning about fractions (Emma has figured out that three blue diamonds equal one yellow hexagon), pattern exploration, shape recognition, textures, colors, and how different pieces fit together. Building towers (as Johnny is doing in this picture with the square pieces) teaches about balance and builds coordination.
If you are looking for more pattern block templates, there are some cute ones here in addition to those referenced in my previous pattern block post – thank you again Sandra for the link to this site!
MATERIALS:
- Large sheet of paper
- Desktop protector
- Markers or crayons
We hadn’t made a play mat in a while, so it was the perfect activity for our first day home without relatives to help entertain yesterday. Johnny got this car/boat/plane set from a friend as a big brother gift, so we made a town to go with it. I accidentally cut the paper a little bigger than the mat. We’ll either cut it down for future play or let this one wear out and make the next one fit.
The kids pulled out the peg dolls Emma decorated to use as townspeople.
I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the day went caring for three children on my own. The kids are maybe starting to feel better, and I think that helped. They both ate properly for the first time since Lily was born, and that went a long way towards the day going well.
See other play mats we’ve made here.
When my oldest daughter Emma was born, a couple of my friends were trying to use cloth diapers with their babies. I admired their eco-friendliness but stuck with disposables. We were living in a tiny (under 400 square feet) apartment. We had a washer but no dryer, and I couldn’t face the idea of having stacks of cloth diapers hanging to dry along with all the rest of our clothes. Seeing my friends’ diapers did clear up a couple misconceptions I had, though. I learned that cloth diapers can be adorable, and that you no longer have to rinse them out in the toilet.
When we moved back to the US and into a much larger apartment with a washer AND dryer, I started thinking about trying cloth. Emma’s disposables were always leaking, we were going through tons of disposables, and she kept getting diaper rashes. When I found a good deal on user-friendly pocket diapers we took the plunge and bought a dozen. To my surprise, they leaked less frequently than Emma’s disposables and her diaper rash disappeared. They were more bulky than disposables, but since Emma was a thin baby this was a good thing – her pants would finally stay up! Three years and two babies later, we’re still using the same cloth diapers, although I’ve added more over time and am finally learning the art of making my own cloth diapers.
I’m not a perfect cloth diapering mom. We still buy disposables, just in much smaller quantities. I use them at night (I have found a non-leaking solution with cloth diapers, but not a version that keeps my kids asleep through the night), and if we’re going to be out for long periods of time. But the rest of the time my kids wear fluffy cloth diapers. We have a big enough diaper stash that I only wash diapers 2-3 times per week, and Emma gets to practice her folding skills with our cloth wipes. I’d like to try my hand at making fleece soakers – anyone have a pattern they recommend?
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