Stages of Life: Reading, Peeing, Sleeping

 

I don't have time for blogging, though there are so many thoughts in my head I'd love to get down "on paper."  I'd love to share about the struggles and triumphs of having three little ones ages four and under.  I'm dying to tell Hazel's birth story (like before the details start to leak out of my brain).  There are so many thoughts about our family dynamics, things I love about our new home, areas in which God has been growing me/teaching me over the past couple of years that I'm ready to share, and lots and lots of ponderings.  But I scarcely have time to solidify many of these things in my own mind, let alone share and record them. 

As I told my husband the other day, in a couple of months, we'll look back and feel a little bit wistful about how quickly these foggy newborn days have flown by...and how funny it is that we thought we might not survive them. 

If you think of me, please pray for continued health for our family this Winter.  We've been dropping like flies around here, and our little one-month-old is the most recent member to fall prey to this horrendous cold that was shared with us.  So far, she seems to be doing well enough that I haven't seen a need to rush off to the doctor, but we are keeping a very close eye on her.  However, that little baby cough is still a troublesome sound indeed. :-( 

Some other updates:

Hazy has been sleeping for longer stretches at night (5 hours two nights in a row!), and even slept through the whole night (10 p.m. - 5 a.m.) one fluke of a day last week.   I think it was a gift from God because that night came right after a particular grueling night of multiple night wakings from a sick Smooch.  Even though my courageous husband kept getting up with her so I didn't have to, I still woke up each time and was on the verge of tears the whole next day, so tired I was.  Yes, I think the Lord was looking out for this momma's sanity.  I felt like a new woman the next day.

Isn't she a pretty baby?  I know.  I'm so biased. 

In other baby news, I still can quite figure her out.  Is she easy-going or not?  Something she seems like a calm, easy baby, but then she randomly does this high-pitched screaming thing regarding things like, "You're hands are cold" or "You are taking too long to whip out your breast."  She's not my easiest baby (Smooch), but she's not my most demanding either (Princess).  I love to try to observe little budding personalities and such, but in this case my baby seems a bit...bipolar?   Things like her disdain for car seats and pacifiers and sleeping somewhere besides mommy's arms leave me scratching my head.  But oh my goodness is she a sweet little smiler.  She cooed at the me for the first time two days ago. :-)  She's so snuggly (but hates being swaddled), and she also has the most settled stomach of all my babies so far (I can eat anything it seems!).  Good grief do I love babies.

Smooch is almost 2 weeks into full-fledged potty training.  I'm a big fan of the bare bottom approach. She's been wearing underwear with great success for a full week already, and I'm quite proud of our big girl.  She is so motivated by attention, praise and high-fives, that she is doing every bit of it by herself (pulling up and down underwear too!) without so much as a piece of chocolate tantalizing her.  I would like to attribute much of her success to the fact that I was the smart, well-researched weird hippie mom who began to sit her on a little pink potty chair at 9 mos. old.  I set her there.  She went.  It was too easy, but is what Elimination Communication is largely based on:  the idea that babies are wayyy smarter than we realize.  While I didn't do anything except say, "Okay, let's go potty now!" with the sign for potty (whereas true EC-ers do things that I can't do with a straight face like make pssst noises to encourage baby along.  Apparently.), and set her on her little potty, she obliged more often than not.  We'd set her on the potty chair right before bed or bath or just whenever it was convenient, not even everyday. 

Because of this laid-back training over the course of a year and a half, when we began full-fledged potty training the Monday before last, Smooch already knew how to go "on command" and we didn't have to spend any effort in helping her learn through trial and error how to control particular muscles/increase awareness of sensations.  Nor did we have many accidents to clean up.  So, I'd like to take credit for this very successful experience.  However, if I take full credit here, I'm pretty sure to be fair I have to take responsibility for the full YEAR it took us of hard core training before we could confidently say, "Princess is potty trained." (It took me another year to recover from the trauma.) ;-)  So...maybe Smooch is just one of those "easy to potty train" kids that you hear about from time to time.   Or a little of both?  Whatever the case, I'll take it!

For not having time to blog, I sure am rambling on and one, aren't I?

Princess is learning to read!  She had been showing signs that she was ready to learn.  Don't ask me how I know, b/c I can't pinpoint it exactly.  I've just been around a lot of "learning to read" aged kids and my homeschooling mother I guess.  So I ordered a book that has been on my wish list for months, and we delved into it this week.  By lesson 3, Princess was anxious to begin sounding out real words (which was still a few lessons away), so I let her try.  And by golly she could do it!  So now she's reading simple three-letter words (with soft vowel sounds) to her heart's content and she's excited to learn to read big words.  We're still working through our daily lessons (but today we did 2 because she was ready to move on).  

The book we're using, should you care to know, is phonics based and came highly recommended from a fellow mom friend (Thanks Cami!).  It's called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", but it is not at all gimmicky like the title sounds. :-)  Having earned my Master's degree in Elementary Education and spending a brief period in the kindergarten classroom, I have to say that I am pretty impressed with the methods in this book.

We had a sweet moment in that first instance when she read her first little word.  I shouted, "You DID it!  You're READING!"  And Princess just about jumped out of her skin as she threw her arms around my neck in unbridled joy.  It was such a precious moment, and I realized one of the many draws of homeschooling is shared moments of victory such as that.  Did I ever mention that we're considering homeschooling?  At least for the ever-important, very brief formative years.  I could write a post on that alone.

I am so proud of my budding little reader, my big girl in her dry underwear, and my sweet little infant sleeper.  And that pretty much sums up each of the girls' stage of life at the moment.

As for me,  maybe I have time to blog after all?