Thanksgiving is behind us, Christmas looms large on the horizon. You’re already stressed, just like every year. But wait, does it have to be this way? Maybe not- have you heard about the Mother Letter Project? Very cool, very different…

Basically, a normal American family went to Africa at the end of last year, and it changed their lives. When confronted with the poverty there, they were overwhelmed with how much they had back at home.

Who of us hasn’t thought “life would be good if I had a little more (fill in the blank)”? Then something in the news reminds us that our self-pity is ridiculous when war, starvation, and more are a way of life for many other “normal” families in the world. Well, this family didn’t just think about it, they decided to do something practical. Instead of buying Christmas gifts for each other this year, they’re sending funds to that African village that they visited last year. Awesome!

That’s the first part of the story. Part two is that while they’re not spending money on gifts, they are making them. Dad’s gift to Mom is one of encouragement, and not just his own. He’s enlisting the help of anyone who will give it, to write a letter to his wife, the mother of their young children. This Mother Letter can be a story, a problem, words of wisdom, anything you want to share. Since the request was put out in October, the blogosphere has already generated hundreds of letters. This mom is going to be blown away to receive such an amazing gift on Christmas morning! Read the whole story here.

Need a little encouragement yourself, or know a mom who does? Everyone who submits a letter before Christmas 2008 can receive the complete works of the Mother Letter Project after it’s completed- details here. There are a few preview letters already on the site; check them out, but have a box of tissues handy!

Want to participate? Just email your letter to MotherLetter@gmail.com. Be creative, be funny, be a tear-jerker. Your experience as a mother has prepared you for all of the above! Even if you’re not a mom, you have a mom or know a mom. So get to work- write that Mother Letter!

Photo Courtesy:
pinksherbet

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Did you or someone you know just have a baby? There’s so much to be thankful for that you won’t even mind having hospital food for Thanksgiving dinner!

These Thanksgiving-themed birth announcements are so cute, your friends and family will just gobble them up! (sorry, couldn’t resist!) They can be ordered either as magnets or on linen cardstock. Just pick your favorite baby photo from the cornucopia that have been taken, and…okay, I’ll stop now. Happy Thanksgiving!!

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I’m getting bored with our toys. Tate hasn’t been complaining, but I’m definitely getting bored. With Christmas just around the corner, it seems silly to run out to the toy store. And why spend money at all, when there are certainly things around our house that would be fun and entertaining for him (and maybe for me too!). I remember when we were young, my mom would send us outside to “paint the house” with a bucket of water. Clever woman!

The iParenting site has some great ideas for both infants and older kids. I know the keyboard idea would be a big hit with my son- he’s always trying to hit keys when I’m typing. Honestly, with just a couple of swipes the other day, he changed my homepage from MSN to Google and added some kind of Google search box to my footer bar. Anyway, there are probably a couple of keyboards in our basement that could be dusted off and put into circulation in the toybox. Tate will be thrilled.

I love the idea of a homemade color book from Kim on the MommySavers site. She took pictures of her daughter wearing blue clothes and using a blue toothbrush, for example, and put them into an inexpensive photo album. We have a board book about colors, but it would be so fun to have one with pictures of Tate and other special people in his life. I already have a picture ready for the Orange page!

There are tons of crafty ideas at MakeBabyStuff.com. When I stumbled upon this page with “upcycled” baby blocks, I was reminded that when we were little, my parents made my brother and me a huge collection of blocks out of half-gallon cardboard milk cartons. Hmm, why am I bothering to search for this stuff on the internet? I should just call my mom for ideas! In the meantime, with the addition of wallpaper, these blocks are cute, and can be cleaned with a quick wipe-down. Amber gives really clear instructions, along with pictures, on her site. I’m going to start saving my cardboard boxes right now! I’ll get to have fun making toys, and he can have fun playing with them. Bye-bye, boring!

Photo Courtesy:
sfllaw
Amber Dusick

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Last year, my husband and I sent this card to our friends and family. I chose it because I loved the design, a modern take on snowflakes. The colors also worked since, procrastinator that I am, I didn’t finish writing our letter until after Christmas, and it became a Happy New Year card. Must have been busy picking baby names or something…

Our designer, Jen, adjusted the colors for us when these were ordered last year. But now, nearly every product on the website can be altered by you, the customer. Not just colors, but fonts and type size too. Within minutes, you’ll have a preview of your beautiful holiday card!

In my pre-baby days, with what I now realize was lots of free time, I hand-wrote the addresses on envelopes (with an aqua fine-tip Sharpie, just because it’s fun), but you could easily put them through your home printer and do a mail merge too. With the matching return address labels and seals, the envelopes looked great! I felt like each one was a little present for our friends and family, a personal touch in the midst of the catalogs and junk mail that fill up mailboxes this time of year.

I’m hoping that this year, the extra motivation of showing off a baby photo will be enough that we can send an on-time, true-blue Christmas card, in red and green! Maybe one of these…

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After getting the okay from our pediatrician, Tate started eating solid foods (i.e. very watered-down rice cereal) at four months. At six months, I gradually started other grains, avocados, bananas, sweet potatoes, etc.

My main reference book has been Super Baby Food, by Ruth Yaron. I totally recommend it. She teaches you how to prepare healthful foods for your baby, introducing new items each month as appropriate for their developing digestive system. At Tate’s age, the core elements are Super Porridge (you grind grains in your blender, then boil them with water to make cereal- picture the “bowl full of mush” from Goodnight Moon) and food cubes (you mash or puree fruits & vegetables, then put them into ice cube trays to be frozen for future use).

We were moving along well for several months, finding out what he liked and didn’t like. This could vary on any given day, mind you. I hadn’t done much with finger foods, but they gave him Cheerios in the church nursery and he loved them. So Cheerios (or their organic, store-brand cousin to be exact) entered the mix at home too.

Then Tate stopped eating his healthy, whole-grain goodness-with-extra-love-added-by-Mom, Super Porridge. We were back to processed, store-bought cereal flakes, but that was just the beginning. Within a couple of weeks, he absolutely refused any food given to him on a spoon.

So now it’s a whole new adventure, trying to discover finger foods that are okay for him to eat at this age. He’d eat bananas & avocados for every meal if I’d let him. Little pieces of cheese are a big hit, sometimes he’ll do sweet potatoes or squash. Our biggest struggle is green veges. Ruth Yaron raves about pureed kale and spinach, but I’m sure the whole leaves would be a choking hazard. I thought he’d love green beans and peas, but no (and they don’t have that much nutritional value anyway- who knew?!). Send me your ideas…please!!

In the meantime, I have 2 containers full of frozen fruit and vegie cubes, and enough ground millet, rice, barley & oats to feed a small army, provided said army doesn’t mind having mush 3 meals a day. Send me ideas for using those up too, while you’re at it!

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As Tate approaches the 9-month mark, I’m thinking about the fact that this is how long I was pregnant, and remembering those early days of pregnancy…

We were leaving the next day for a weekend trip to Chicago, so I had stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work to pick up some snacks and a magazine. Having a slight suspicion, I also decided to pick up a pregnancy test. Eyeing the shelf with the EPT brand tests and also the store brand version, I thought, “What kind of person trusts something this important to a generic product?!” Then I saw the prices – $23 vs. $8 and thought “I’m that kind of person!”.

Not mine, but another person was also a little skeptical at first!

(Side note: A month before I had taken a home test, but didn’t read the instructions the first time and did it wrong. Honestly, if you can’t pee on a stick correctly, are you really smart enough to be a parent?! Luckily that test (the 2nd one in the box) was negative, so I had a month to wise up!) So anyway, I played it cool back at home and didn’t mention anything to my husband. After dinner I took the test and was shocked to see a the positive sign pop up immediately. Daddy-to-be was equally surprised.

As we drove down to Chicago, I was suddenly feeling nauseous. Although I had just enjoyed a cup of coffee the day before, the thought of it suddenly turned my stomach. While the seemingly pyschosomatic nature of my symptoms made me a little skeptical, my husband was definitely in denial that I was truly pregnant. While he coached his volleyball team in their tournament (the reason for our trip), I popped into a bookstore to pick up a copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, then to CVS to get some prenatal vitamins.

All of a sudden, everything was different! I couldn’t think about anything else. There was a life growing inside of me, for which I was responsible. The journey had begun…

Photo Courtesy:
jhayworth

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All the stores are blaring the news…it’s out with the pumpkins, in with the presents! (or prezzies as my Canadian friend says) Poor little Thanksgiving gets mostly passed over in retail-land, for the big dog that’s now less than 45 days away. And it’s not just presents, but decorations, baking and yes, Christmas cards!

If you’ve got a new little one in your family, you’re probably excited to send out photo cards this year. Okay, let’s be honest, if you have any kids in your family, you love to send an updated photo each year. And your friends and family love to receive them!

Most people I know fill their fridge door (or sometimes that metal door to the garage) with holiday cards. Wouldn’t it be fun if they received your card and it was already a magnet? That’s right- our magnet cards are all designed and ready for your best family photo from 2008. View the complete gallery at MagnetStreet Baby… There’s a lot to do before the holidays arrive; check the cards off your list early!

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…continued from Our Sleep Journey and Our Sleep Journey, Part 2

Okay, so to recap, eight is enough! Eight months without good sleep, that is… My husband and I had tried the advice of 2 different books and our own strategy too, attempting to train Tate to sleep through the night. Instead of getting better, things were getting worse. I’d read enough and heard enough stories from friends to know that he probably wouldn’t outgrow this, and I really didn’t want to be working on this when he’s in a real bed. At least in the crib, we have a small element of control.

Then my former boss, a father of four, loaned me a copy of Sleeping Through The Night, by Jodi Mindell. By this time, I could skip past the parts explaining sleep cycles (everyone wakes up during the night; babies just don’t know how to get back to sleep like we do), and recommending a consistent nighttime routine (we were already doing that). Chapter 6 held the key for me…I realized that we had just replaced one sleep association (nursing) with another (pacifier and comfort). We still hadn’t allowed Tate to learn how to get himself to sleep! Mindell instructs parents to put the child to bed (after completing the normal bedtime routine) and simply leave. Then you return to the room for a quick “check”- pat on the back, verbal reassurance, but no picking up or cuddling. The checks get further apart (e.g. 5 minutes, 5, 10, 10, 15, etc.) until the child falls asleep. She suggests that on average, it takes 45 minutes of tears on the first night, an hour on the second night (they’re testing to see if you’re serious about this new system), then 20 minutes or less on the third night.

Mindell advises starting at nighttime, but I decided to try it during a nap instead, when I had more energy and resolve. Indeed, it took about 45 minutes for Tate to fall asleep. That night, however, it was less than 10 minutes, and he slept from 8pm to 5:30 am, then I nursed him and he slept until 7. We thought maybe it was a fluke, but he’s been sleeping consistently ever since. He falls asleep after five minutes or so of crying, but sometimes none, occasionally wakes up during the night, but is able to settle himself back to sleep without intervention from mom or dad. It feels like a miracle, after 8 months of struggle, to be getting full nights of rest.

A side bonus: before we went to the cry-it-out method, Tate began to associate the pacifier with being put down to bed and vigorously refused it when offered. This held true at other non sleep-times as well; he just has no interest in it. Now we won’t have to worry about weaning him off of it at some future point- hurray!

My husband and I still go back and forth on how we’ll approach sleep with our next child. I feel like I’ve learned so much that I’d never make the same mistakes again. Yet something tells me that a different child, with a different temperament, will present a whole new set of issues. Not to mention that there will be a big brother with his own sleep schedule to work around.

And honestly, I couldn’t have started off at the point that I’ve ended up. I still hate hearing him cry, but I’ve gotten to the point where a few tears are worth the reward of good sleep, both for him and for his dad and me. While I feel that we’ve given our son a valuable skill in getting himself to sleep, re-reading the no-cry books makes me feel guilty all over again. So I guess I’ll still be losing sleep, as I worry about the sleep I’ve gained…aaargh!

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…continued from Our Sleep Journey

By the time Tate was about 5 months old, I decided to try something else. A friend said they’d had success with the Baby Whisperer system, so I checked it out at the library. The official, very promising title, is The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems by Tracy Hogg. A former nurse, Hogg advocates the EASY system, putting children into a routine of Eat-Sleep-Activity-time for You. I was finally ready to concede that my habitual nursing him to sleep wasn’t helping the larger goal of consistent sleep, so this made sense to me. If changing to the EASY routine isn’t successful on its own, Hogg details the “Pick Up-Put Down” method, in which you pick your child up as needed to comfort him, but then lay him right back down into bed.“The idea behind this is that you’re giving him comfort and security and letting him have the emotion.” (p. 222)

Again, I was sold, excited to have found another method that didn’t make me feel like I was abandoning my child, ignoring his needs. I appreciated her perspective, which approaches issues from the child’s point of view. Her wisdom was acquired by personally helping thousands of parents work through their childrens’ sleep and other problems, right in their homes. I secretly hoped that she’d come to Minnesota to “solve all my problems”, and was crushed to find out that she had actually passed away in 2004.

In implementing the technique, I realized very quickly that picking up my nearly 20-pound son repeatedly was way too hard on my back. During the training period, Hogg says that the average is 20 rounds of pick up-put down, but that she had sometimes done as many as a hundred! 

We finally decided to compromise by allowing Tate to cry, but my husband or I would stay in the room with him until he fell asleep, picking him up for comfort periodically. Then one day, while I was sitting with him before naptime, Tate suddenly pulled himself up to standing in the crib! He was so proud (and so was I) that it was hard not to cheer along with him every time. But he obviously wasn’t going to fall asleep in a standing position. And because he was already tired, and new to the skill, he’d fall down a lot and get even more upset.

I also wondered whether our presence was comforting or confusing to him. It seemed like it was almost more for me than for him- I didn’t feel as guilty about him crying if I was there in the same room. His look, though, said, “you’re right there, you must see me and hear me, why aren’t you picking me up?!”

After a few weeks, we decided to leave the room after putting him down. He would jump up to stand and there would be tears for a few minutes, then I would lay him back down, put his pacifier in, and rub his back or head. After a few rounds of this, he’d be asleep. He was still waking up once at 10 or 11, and once at around 3, and would need the laydown/pacifier/backrub repeated. 

Then he began to refuse the pacifier, and screamed even louder when I tried to put it in. He would only be comforted by my nursing or holding him, and was waking up every couple of hours. Unfortunately for me, this happened during a 2-week period when my husband was out of town and we were at grandma’s. I hoped that being back in his own crib, or maybe having dad act as the enforcer, would help him return to his old ways. Alas, this was not the case…

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In my old life, this daylight saving time was the good one- “fall back” and get a luxurious extra hour of sleep! Oh no, Mommy, not any more!!

All day on Sunday I was having trouble figuring out Tate’s naptimes in my head. We’re not really scheduled nap people (e.g. naps at 10, 2 and 4 every day), but generally he’s up for 2-3 hours between each one. So I kept trying to remember, did he get up at 7:30 regular time or was that after I set the clock back? Had I already changed the clock in my bedroom when I put him down at “10″?

Then this morning, the real bomb hit…I’m thinking, why is he waking up at 4:30? Ah, yes, he thinks it’s 5:30. Obviously, my body hasn’t transitioned to the time change yet either, but my brain sees a “4″ on the alarm clock and yells: Go Back To SLEEP! I guess my baby couldn’t hear the yelling.

My sister-in-law’s Facebook status says: “we’re skipping swimming lessons because our naps are all messed up – stupid daylight savings!” Aha, so we’re not the only ones having problems. So, what to do?

I found a great site with helpful information on all kinds of baby sleeping challenges. It’s called Pick Nick’s Brain and there are several different suggestions for helping your kids adjust to daylight saving time. We’re more or less using the 3rd option that “Nick” (for Nicole, I think) lists, gradually pushing bedtime as late as Tate will tolerate.

This daylight saving event sort of blindsided me; next time I’d like to prepare a little better and do a gradual adjustment, a few days before and after the time change. What’s worked (or not) for all of you out there?

Photo Courtesy:
laffy4k