Little Wet Feet

 

 

 

(And then I have to show off my cutie posing for the camera):

Those are words I just never thought I’d have to say today.  Or ever.

We had planned on heading up to Berlin, Ohio, and the surrounding Amish communities over the weekend, but it rained miserably on Saturday – so instead, we headed up on Sunday, in absolutely beautiful weather.  The downfall?  Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – is closed in Amish country on Sundays!  I managed to get a couple of good images, but for the two hour drive up and the two hour drive back, it was not the amount I had planned.  That being said, we finished the day at a small park with water play, and the three children (and Daddy!) had a great time splashing and getting wet.  The day could be summed up as quite wonderful, even though we didn’t get to shop for Amish handcrafted items or eat at a wonderful restaurant…  We’re planning a trip back up when the season changes this fall – should make for gorgeous pics!

Just wanted to show a few…

Hat tip to Kimberly Spencer, CPM, for this information!

I can honestly say I have only two regrets in my experiences as a mother.  I regret weaning (from breastfeeding) any of my children before the age of at least two years old; and I regret ever wasting the gas to drive to a worthless hospital to have my babies.  Granted, I managed to have intervention-free natural childbirths, but it’s simply not the same.  And paying someone $5,000 for the use of a room and a set of sheets for a whopping four hours is ridiculous.

If God were, by some glorious wonderful miracle, grant me baby #5 (which hubby says won’t happen, and I’m having a very hard time dealing with that!), there is no way, no how I will leave the safety of my home.  I will have an unassisted homebirth or there may be a slight chance of having a midwife here.  I really really regret not experiencing a lovely, calm, beautiful birth safe and sound in my own environment with my family beside me.

http://www.nashvillemidwife.com/safety.html

 

Image courtesy of “Journey to a Birth” – click picture to view blog.

We love BFD (Breakfast For Dinner) in our house, and one of our favs is Breakfast Pizza.

I gather and cook up meats like bacon and sausage, vegetables like onions and peppers, and cheeses like American and Cheddar. 

Scramble some eggs…

Fry up some flour tortillas in just a touch of olive oil…

Then add whatever you like!  We make them one at a time so that each person can decide what they want to put on top… we add the toppings while the tortilla is still browning in the skillet so the cheese melts:

YUMMY and SO fast… Enjoy!

The helicopter parents, that is.  Do they wear earplugs or does the WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH of the blades not disturb them?

Do their children not have to wear sunscreen because of the shadow of their mothers?

My kids have no idea how lucky they are.  I think I will remind them tonight when they come home – oh, from wherever they are playing at, which is – um, dunno.  But they’re safe, and they’ll be home in one piece later.

Autumn got her “big girl bike” last week, and after only an hour on it, she was a pro.  And we can’t get her off of it!

She could’ve gotten it last summer, but she was so attached to her Dora Bike (okay, it’s a regular tricycle that she put Dora stickers allllllllll over) that she didn’t want a big bike… but we had an opportunity to get a great hand-me-down from a friend and convinced her that she’d love it.  And we were right.  We “girlied” it up with a Princess basket and tassles and a pink bell, and Autumn is going to hunt for Princess stickers to put on it.  She’s growing up too fast!

 

Showing her little sister how it works:

And really, what’s more fun than chasing your friends through the neighbor’s sprinkler??

And Ayla was enjoying the “rain” too… but she stopped to take a break:

 

Ah, isn’t summertime grand?

I found this heartwrenching and heartwarming at the same time.  I love those seven words, they hold more meaning than any words I’ve read in a very long time.

 

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-whole-heart-is-in-that-incubator.html

“My whole heart is in that incubator”

The Motherwear Breastfeeding blog recently featured a fantastic guest post by a woman whose son was born 3 months early and weighed less than 3 pounds. She writes about how breastfeeding was her and her son’s lifeline. Here is an excerpt from her post, My whole heart is in that incubator:

I was 37 years old. I thought I knew what love was. I thought I knew. But I have never loved anyone, anything, so fiercely, so terribly, so wonderfully, so achingly, as I did my little son, my only child, struggling in that incubator….

I loved and still love that boy with all I have. Because I couldn’t hold him much, and felt terrible guilt for not being able to ‘hold him in’ for the entire 9 months he deserved, I was determined to breastfeed. I pumped every 3 hours for weeks on end. That pump and the milk that came out of me was my lifeline. It was somehow the way I was going to make it up to him for giving him such a lousy start in this world. So when I read stuff like “The Case against Breastfeeding” I get so angry. I believe that my breastmilk, and the good care we got at BC Children’s, saved my child’s life. It saved my life. If there is anything in this crazy, crazy world that is really is a gift from God it is the babies we can create and the milk that comes from our bodies.

If anything is pure and natural, and real and true, it’s breastmilk. It made me feel like a mother when my baby was all alone inside a machine when he should have been inside me.

Anyone who dismisses breastfeeding so casually, or by their attitude or indifference creates an environment that doesn’t hold up and encourage and cheerlead a new mom into a successful breastfeeding relationship, has lost touch with something. They’ve lost touch with a sense of what it means to be a mother, what feeding a baby is all about, what it means to nurture, how significant that breastfeeding can be to both mother and child.

Posted by Rixa at Thursday, May 28, 2009  

Hallelujah and thank God!

Read about it here on Dr. Sears’ Site!

All of our letters and prayers were answered.  Thanks to all the concerned parents and physicians that rallied to have these shots available again!!

Our alternative vax schedule is here.  When Merck decided not to make the separate MMR shots, we decided to wait until Ayla is four to get her the big one – she will be almost four when these vaxes are reintroduced, and that’s okay with me.

I was biting it so hard this past weekend.

WARNING – RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD.  I mean a BIG RANT ahead!

Okay, you were very warned.

So a gentleman came by to purchase some baby items we had for sale.  He had a new 7 week old baby at home, a precious little girl.  His first.   New parents are just the cutest things, aren’t they??

As this very nice gentleman started regaling us with the stories of his wife’s pregnancy, childbirth, and the baby’s first few weeks of life, as well as his observations of other parents and their children now that he is a daddy, I glanced over and watched my husband prepare… waiting for me to start correcting and educating this poor unsuspecting man.  I found it funny – my hubby knows me all too well.  And I behaved and didn’t say a word.  Rather proud of myself, and if I could, I would pat my own back.

The point of this story is that I am increasingly shocked at the poor information out there.  This man said his wife was a doctor.  Now, he didn’t say what KIND of doctor, and I didn’t ask.  So she could’ve been a veterinarian for all I know.  But he began by saying that when her water broke, she knew, as a doctor and based on her doctor’s instructions, they must Immediately Rush, Without Hesitation, Without Finishing Packing The Bag, To The Hospital… because it’s absolutely urgent that she lay down in bed right that second and start being monitored.  Just because her water broke.

I hate this myth.  But I hate it more because this is coming from a doctor.  This was her first baby, she probably could’ve labored at home for hours and hours and hours before she went to the hospital and started letting doctors interfere with nature.

But I forget – she IS a doctor, so she is going to believe 100% of everything her doctors tell her, no questions asked.

And I didn’t utter a word.  I’m still beaming with pride that I didn’t let a rant go right then and there.  Of course, I didn’t have his money in my hands yet, I wasn’t about to blow a $100.00 sale because I wanted to scream that his wife and her lousy doctors were WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!

I didn’t even rant at the woman who called me and asked if I had a child leash for sale.  Well, lady, I have some for my dogs, because dogs belong on leashes… but that’s another blog altogether, isn’t it???

But then he made a comment about driving through a neighborhood and seeing children playing in their front yards alone.  ALONE??? GASP!!  THE HORROR, I was thinking!  He just couldn’t understand how any responsible parent could possibly let their children play outside without being within 32 inches of them At All Times!  I mean, if it happens on CSI Every Single Week, it must happen in your suburban neighborhood every single week too!!!

People really need to quit living in the land of make believe when it comes to their children and their safety.  I asked my husband how many scaremongering news stories we’ve heard in the past year or so about a child abduction that wasn’t committed by a mom or dad or their Uncle Bob.  We could only think of one off the top of our heads (and I’m not interested in being corrected – there hasn’t been hundreds or even dozens or even tens) and one we weren’t sure of the result of.  And the one we could think of was actually the child’s teacher or someone she knew, so still not a real stranger abduction.  But since two or three happen Every Night in prime time, people really get the lines blurred between reality and complete fiction.

I was even getting well-meaning but very ill-informed advice in another blog post about letting my children eat raw cookie and cake dough.  The chance of my kids killing themselves in a bathtub is about 60 times higher than dying from raw eggs.  More people die from venomous spider bites than eating cookie dough.  Licking the beaters is a rite of childhood, in my opinion.  Since walking across the floor and falling to their death has about a 1 in 6,000 risk, I’m not going to fret a 1 in 50,000,000 risk.  Yes, 50 million.  You’ve not even looked into the stats, or really researched the odds, have you?  Even without looking it up, I knew the odds were pathetically low and I was always a-okay with my choice.

But the naysayers are shaking their heads and shrugging “no no no – kids get killed daily by strangers and men in vans take girls from the schools weekly and it’s a bad dangerous terrible world out there”.  They look at their neighborhood map online with the sexual predators – so many then-18 year olds having sex with their 17 year old girlfriends and being on the list forever, to name a few things that totally discredit that list, IMO.  And of course, if it’s an old man, he’s waiting on his front porch with a bowl of candy, waiting to lure your children into the bowels of his vinyl siding home to do God-Knows-What to.  NO HE’S NOT!  It’s NOT a bad world!  You’re doing a horrible disservice to your kids sheltering them so.  They won’t know how to prepare for the world, because you won’t be there hovering over them.

You have to let them go.  You have to let them have their childhoods.  It’s not fair to them or you, it’s not beneficial, and it’s sad when I hear about a friend of my 11 year old son that doesn’t know how to navigate the neighborhood on his bike – he should’ve been riding in that neighborhood for years by now!  I’m so glad our kids are so safe in today’s world.

I warned you it was a rant.  I feel much better now!

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