I enjoyed this book. There were some dry moments and I skimmed the parts that didn’t really pertain to me right now…like busy school mornings and homework battles.
It is a lot about how you react to the issues that come up, the attitude you have and setting yourself up for success.
I am by no means perfect so I did learn a lot from this book hahaha. I still have days that are a struggle, I still lose my cool quicker than I want but I am trying and also trying to implement some strategies from this book and I think it’s helpful.
Friday – OFF baby had diarrhea all day with some blood, ended up in the ER with her
Saturday – baby sick and wanted mommy all day. No long run.
Thank goodness she seems to be on the mend. I was starting to get a little worried. Hopefully the upward trend continues and everything can get back to normal this coming week.
My kids sleep has been HORRIBLE the past 2 weeks and it is catching up with me. Almost every night I have been up between 2-4 hours with one or both my kids. We have had teething and sleep regressions and who knows what. And for half that time my husband was out of town. I stayed with my in-laws then my mom came to town to help but in the middle of the night it was all me. I am so tired and so frustrated. One day we will get back to normal…….I hope…….please.
I skipped through a lot of this book. Just sort of reading some of the section headings and a few sentences here and there. I thought it was pretty dry. But that could be because a lot of the information I feel like I already read in “There’s no such thing as bad weather”.
But there was a lot of good information and some very interesting things. I found it really interesting where they talked about how many teachers now have to tell kids no to so many things on the playground that they can’t do anything during recess. There was a teacher in New Zealand who decided to get rid of all the rules for recess and just let the kids go wild like they used to and they saw a bullying go down, concentration go up, etc
Another thing that was really interesting and I saw translated to our real life is talking about how kids used to play in the early 1900s and even late 90s and how strong the kids were because they weren’t restricted to what they could do on playgrounds or at recess and they were climbing on top of things, around things, swinging, and going crazy. I actually had a mom in my son’s gymnastics class, be somewhat amazed at how strong my son is. And how his gross motor skills are so well developed for a two and a half year old. And I think that’s because we don’t restrict his play. We let him climb on things we let him run around. We let him be crazy. We try and do it as safely as possible but we do not restrict or overly helicopter parent.
I do see how in America we have become more and more restrictive on what we deem safe for our children. And as a mom, I absolutely understand that it’s a balance between raining in my own fear and keeping them safe. We’ve also become a very litigious society which makes it so difficult for caregivers to give children that freedom to be children and run around and climb and jump and bounce and be crazy.
It’s overall I found it to be a very dry book and I skipped and jumped through a lot of it. But I think it’s definitely worth parents taking a peek at it and maybe doing the same kind of skipping, jumping, and stopping and reading where you are interested and skipping the parts that you find boring or redundant.
This is actually a few days worth of photos and happenings because my husband was gone for a week and my mom was here for a week and it was baby girls birthday party.
My baby slept through the night which was amazing. Toddler woke up at 545am looking for his moose. Got that for him and he dozed again for about an hour.
Baby got up at 615am. Fed her and she played a bit.
Coffee time
Toddler up just after 7am.
Nana is here visiting and he is soaking it upWe try to do a school activity each morningGet in a workout of some kind. After we finish either a walk or my run then we do some outside chores and unstructured play. This can last anywhere from 20min to almost an hour depending on how quickly we got out of the house and how long we were walking/running.
1130-1145am ish we sit down for lunch
We ate out a lot this week while my mom was in town
After lunch is nap time. This goes from 1230ish until 230-330 depending on when the kids wake up.
After nap time we try for a little more school
We got a butterfly grow kit and are enjoying watching them grow. We made rain clouds
After school we play outside more until dinner
Family dinner around 530pm then bath time!
The kids get to run around a bit then Ella goes to bed around 7pm, Robert runs around a bit longer than my husband puts him to bed around 8pm.
I clean up the kitchen then read until I go to bed around 10pm……. Though I should go to sleep around 9-930pm.
Yes, my favorite season in Fall for its beautiful colors and crisp weather.
However, as I now have a baby and and am growing food and raising chickens I find myself looking more and more forward to the end of fall and the beginning of winter.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I am so lucky to be able to grow food and raise chickens and feed my family good, whole food…..but from spring planting through to fall harvesting there aren’t many days where I don’t give up a minimum of 30 minutes to the yard. 30 minutes doesn’t seem like much but when you have a little one 30 minutes out of your day can be a lot.
That 30 minutes doesn’t include the days that I am actually preparing beds, planting, harvesting and preserving; that is just daily maintenance. That takes up a lot more time.
Again, I love pulling out homemade and homegrown food in the middle of winter and early spring when everything in the grocery store is shipped from who knows where and harvested who knows when; so, I am most definitely not complaining, but the slow season of winter is absolutely calling me.
I love watching the rain fall while I drink a cup of coffee before everyone else wakes up. Make it snowfall and I love it even more.
Reality vs. fantasy: Fantasy (or should I say my pre-baby reality) in the slow winter months I read more, slept in more, relaxed more and sort of hibernated. My new reality: I am guessing winter will also have its challenges such as where do I put the baby when it is raining out and I need to change the chickens food and water? What do I do when the baby is grumpy and its raining and this is when we normally go for a walk to settle him down? We live in the Pacific Northwest so rain is a big factor for us in the winter hahahahaha.
We will see how reality and fantasy hammer out this winter.
We started off with this documentary while we did his bottle and played a little. Then we read one BOB book (we have already been doing this for a few weeks) and we read this book about ocean animalsOn our walk we (and by we I mean I talked and pointed things out to him hahahah) talked about seeds (each of those brown things are the seed from a tree) and how they grt knocked off the tree and can fly away and make new trees
I also pointed our blackberries and talked about how they also have seeds that help them grow after they drop to the ground.
Lastly, we read a poem from a book called Songs of the seasons which has about 60 poems going through the seasons of the year.
Tuesday
We had the same basic morning. Finished the oceans documentary and read the ocean life book and the next in our BOB book set.
In the afternoon I tried a simple sensory bin with things around the house……he hated it hahahahahahaha. He was angry that I wouldn’t let him eat the beads.
We also looked at this weeks suggested painting from our exploring nature course.
Wednesday
We started drain the seas on national geographic and read the next BOB book. In the afternoon we practiced our ABCs
Thursday
Same morning routine. Then in the afternoon we went to a new park for a playdate.
We were also supposed to read a Magic Treehouse book about Pirates but Amazon had delayed it indefinitely.
Friday
We watched drain the seas and took 2 walks and practiced counting from 1-10.
Our public library was closed for renovations and was supposed to reopen on Tuesday but due to the increase in the delta varient they did not. They just announced that they will be starting curbside pickup again so i am going to try and get that set up for us to do.
Saturday
We are finishing the week by reading the poem from our exploring nature course.
On a side note i started the movie Finding Nemo and turned it off within 15 min. I HATED it. First the mom and all the siblings die then Nemo gets kidnapped!!! Sorry if that was a spoiler. I know I watched this movie years ago but clearly that was before I was a mother.
So that was our very basic first week. We haven’t perfected this by any means. I’ll bring you along for another week next month.
Hi everyone!! So I have somewhat of a dilemma, I love doing this blog and connecting with you guys and sharing my journey with you but I have hit the space limit on this blog. I currently pay $100/year for this blog, which i don’t mind since I love doing it. But since I have now hit the GB limit and it doesn’t increase each year when I pay I can either stop uploading pictures and videos (which yea right, we all love the visual stuff), i can go delete old pictures from some of the first posts i did but i will have to slowly keep deleting old things to make room for new things ( I don’t really like this idea either) or I can move to a different platform. I have been slowly moving some of my videos to YouTube and copying the link on here already. Would you guys be interested in subscribing to my YouTube instead and I go to all videos? To keep going as I am now on here, it would cost me $300 a year which I can’t really justify since I am just doing this for fun and not making any money off of it.
I am recovering from the weekend lol. I had my bachelorette spa day which turned into a night out. I was still home by 9 and in bed by 10 but I’m still exhausted and was dehydrated afterwards bahahahahaha! That tells you how little I party these days.
I will show you some pics of Wednesday and tell you all about it but I will leave you with this tidbit…..I fit into a small tanktop!!!! and actually felt good in it!!! What??!!
14 lbs down!!!!
When I lose another 15lbs I get to buy more stitchfix!!!!!
Trailing the blonde 