Autumn so wanted to plant a flower garden… so we gutted the old big sandbox and filled it with topsoil and let her shop for flowers.  She’s completely obsessed… she checks their growth on the hour, every hour.  There are wilflower seeds planted in the middle of the big area, and she checks several times a day to see if they’re growing yet.  I think she’s going to get frustrated very quickly at this rate!  She’s lovin’ it – Grandma and Grandpa have promised to go get some flowers for her to plant at their house too.  Martha Stewart in the making, maybe?

Yes, that’s a lovely area of dead grass where the broken lid was left laying all spring… guess I’ll be shopping for grass seed soon too!

Visiting Grandma’s house, finding an interesting thing trying to hide from us:

That’s a teeny frog balanced one of the chairs:

And why oh why do I like pictures of them walking away so much?  It’s so… “me and my shadow”!

sans mantle.  I don’t know why I don’t have a mantle.  I built the house and didn’t include one.  11 years later I still don’t have one.  I don’t know why.  I guess the benefit is it’s one less thing to dust.  But I digress…

… or should I say “Rainy Day Mess?”

And for the perfect end to playtime, we looked out the back window and saw this!

We had a glorious Saturday enjoying a picnic in our local park.  Grandma and Grandpa came to enjoy it with us, and we took some pics and watched the kids play.  Our park has a water area, so the kids can fill up their waterguns and get everyone wet – including bystanders! 

There’s nothing better than eating outside in the warm spring weather, laughing and being together with family.  We are so blessed, and I thank God every day for that.

‘

After we got back home and it got dark, we lit up the firepit and had roasted marshmallows.  Is there a better way to end a perfect day?

http://mothering.com/guest_editors/quiet_place/quiet_place.html

God bless Peggy O’Mara, for articulating and researching what we already knew, that Rosin is just wrong:

In her article, Rosin describes her cursory review of the medical literature on breastfeeding to shore up her personal decision to possibly forgo it, and concludes that all the talk about the benefits of breastfeeding is just “magical thinking.” But it’s irresponsible to imply that such a brief and biased analysis of the medical literature could somehow trump the conclusions of the world’s leading health organizations and medical authorities. By now, the superiority of breastmilk to formula is axiomatic.

Peggy asks us:

This is no time to waver: Powerful economic and political forces are continually undermining breastfeeding progress. Surely, we need state and federal protections for breastfeeding—that’s a given. To achieve our national health goals, we—like our sisters around the world—also need guaranteed health care, paid family leaves, and caregiving credits. Bottle-feeding is an old-school feminist solution to inequality. The equal-rights arena of today is breastfeeding.

Read the article – it’s fantastic.

I had intended on keeping up a series about this great book by Meredith F. Small, Our Babies, Ourselves, but got a little sidetracked!  Here’s the first “installment” that I did a few months ago.  I really highly recommend this book to anyone with children or planning to have children.  Great read!

I was reading the chapter on the San, or “bushman” as we may call them.  Here was an interesting blurb from that chapter (bold emphasis is mine):

…Women often give birth in the bush alone, witch is considered a sign of strength and achievement.  Babies are never left at home when mothers go out to gather, an odd fact in that there is always someone at camp who could babysit.  But the mother-infant relationship is considered sacrosant, so babies stay with their mothers at all times.  Women wear a large multipupose animal-skin garment, the kaross, which functions as both a cover-up and a holding device.  Babies sit in a special sling within the kaross, a soft palate lined with grass. This sling is nonrestictive and allows the baby to wiggle around, moving its arms and legs at will.  It also assumes constant mother-infant contact; anthorpologist Melvin Konner found that San infants have more than twice the amount of passive contact with their mothers than do babies in industrialized societies.  The sling is hung on the mother’s hip, not on her back, and so the baby has good access to the breast and sees everything from the same vantage point as its mother.  …

Although San babies cry, they do not do so for long, and none of them cries excessively or inconsolably; more than 90 percent of their total crying events during the first nine months last less than thirty seconds.  Babies are fed when they cry and often when they do not cry.  San breasts are long and flexible, and it is up to the baby to manage its feeding by holding on to the breast and sucking whenever it is hungry – called “continuous feeding” by Melvin Konner.  Interestingly, we in the West call this kind of feeding “on demand”, but in fact there is no demand being placed here.  As soon as possible, babies control their own feeding and there is no conflict between mother and child over the time or amount of milk allowed, until weaning, which occurs at almost four years of age.

The chapter goes on to reiterate that Sans babies surpass their Eurpoean peers in motor skills.  Babies are never placed on their backs and allowed to “flail about” – they feel the constant vertical position encourages these motor skills.

I think we have a lot to learn from the San.  Now, I certainly understand that in our society, women have careers outside of the home and other obligations that would make such constant contact impossible.  But clearly there is some middle ground that can be met here.  Our industrialized society focuses too much on “independence” and “structural learning” that we have lost sight of the basics, which are even more crucial to the healthy development of our babies.  Our society likes to call it “spoiling” when a mother immediately tends to a child’s cry.  Our culture believes a child will “never” leave a parents bed if they lovingly, naturally co-sleep.  We are such a narrow minded society, thinking about nothing but trying to mold babies, from birth, into adults.  Mozart in the womb, Baby Einstein CDs, preschool at age 2.  All these babies really need is love, and a chance to be babies.

We need to get back to basics.  We must, or our society will degenerate more than it already has.  A child raised with as much mother-baby contact as is humanly possible, fed “on demand”, has it’s ever single need tended to as soon as possible, and is never left to cry – ever, will grow up to be a better adult.  And a better parent.

We parent the way we are parented.  Let’s help continue the cycle of attachment and love.

 

I got a neat idea the other day, and realized how simple and inexpensive it actually will turn out to be.  I probably should wait until I’ve actually completed it to blog about it, but I wanted to show off pics so I’m posting prematurely.

Anyways, I picked up a couple of packages of teeny magnets (about 1/4″ diameter round) at Michael’s Craft Store the other day.  They came in packages of 6 for about $2.00.  Then I picked up some heavy gauge jewelry wire for about another dollar.  The magnets are much more powerful than they seem, and they stick to the wire like, well, a magnet. 

So I did a shoot last night with my four kids, and wanted to get a series of five shots of each of them with different expressions and looks.  Now I’m going to print the pics up as 5″x5″ squares, laminate them, and attach them to the wires with the magnets.  I’ll string the wire taut vertically, one right above the other, with about a 7″ gap.  It should make for a very interesting “work of art” and conversation piece, especially with the fun pics!  So I wanted to share the pics, and as soon as the project is done I’ll be sure to post the final result.  I’m very excited to get started.

I’ve posted my favorites, the ones that show the personality the most, in “large” format.  I put the other in a gallery, if you’re interested in looking!

 

 

 

 

and counting… I didn’t think we would go this long, but we’re going strong!

with family!

First, a long nap on the swing in the late morning:

Then cooking some hot dogs over the fire pit:

Ayla was a big helper with her hot dog stick:

Sitting outside and eating is FUN!
 

Then onto some roasted marshmallows cooked over the fire!!!!  Gooey Yummy!

Then Ayla had some fun with big brother on the trampoline:

While Daddy giggled with Autumn on the swing:

Ah.  I love springtime – and family.

About a foot with no body.

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