Formula vs the Real Deal

Formula poop IS different than breast-milk poop.

It's stinkier. It's stickier.

But the alternative is bloody nipples, so . . . yeah.

#4: Your Child’s Wardrobe

Number four of 101 Things Parents Can Do to Help Children is: Analyze your child's wardrobe and build a wardrobe aimed at freedom of movement, independence, and freedom from distraction.

My children’s wardrobes were free. I’m not going to analyze that too much because truthfully, the free part has been awesome.

Okay, free is an exaggeration, but we’ve probably only spent $300 on clothes in the last three years. How, you ask? Gifts, of course, are part of it. The other part of it is that a friend of ours has two boys who are older than our two boys, and we get all of her hand-me-downs. And she’s a shopaholic so we get garbage bags full of clothes on a regular basis. I haven’t even opened the last bag, and according to our friend most of this bunch still has tags on it…

Firstly, THANK YOU!!! We appreciate her gifts so much!

You’d think that by the time two to three boys have gone through a wardrobe it would be totally worn out, and I’m sure some of it is (feet poking through holes in the sleepers? Why, just cut the feet right off! (Of the sleepers!!) They’re now just open-toed sleepers, which are very cute), but most of it is still in good shape. Or, at least, it’s in good enough shape. It helps, I think, that there are so many items. I especially appreciate the volume when he goes outside a couple of times a day to play in his dirt-box; I can actually wait for an entire week before having to do laundry.

I’m also really not that picky at this point (my mom would have something to say about that, but she’s my mom, so it’s not surprising). The really ratty clothes are worn to play outside, and the nicer ones are reserved for public appearances.

As happy as I am with my kids’ wardrobes, can it provide more freedom of movement, independence, and freedom from distraction?

I’m happy to say that all of the big-boy clothes allow for freedom of movement, no questions asked. They mostly consist of sweat-pants and comfy jeans, comfy t-shirts and cozy sweaters. The only time they hinder movement is if the pants are too big and they keep falling down, or if they’re too small; I now have bins marked “Too Big” and “Too Small” and as we find these items, they get set aside for later or for Kid #2, respectively.

As for kid #2, he’s starting to crawl, and sometimes his legs get jammed up in the sleeper; when that happens we change him into pants and a shirt, and his freedom of movement is back.

I’m guessing that by independence they mean that the kids should be able to dress themselves. Socks on by himself: check. Pants on by himself: check (he’ll swear he needs your help, but with the right motivation, like my saying “you can’t go outside until your pants are on”, he can do it. Oh sure, he tries to tell you the next day that no, he can’t, but you just look at him and say, “Buddy, you whipped those pants up so fast yesterday, so I know you can”). Shirts on by himself: check-ish. We still have to hold the shirt in position, but once his arms are in he can pull it down over his head. Jackets: he still doesn’t believe you when you tell him which arm goes in which sleeve—it’s opposite of what he thinks it should be when he’s facing the jacket. Shoes: check 90% of the time!

Independence for baby #2: yeah, his view on that is struggle vigorously while you try to dress him because “MOM! I said I want to roll OVER! LET ME GO!!!” He’s only just starting to get the hang of pushing his own arm through a sleeve, but he still doesn’t tuck his thumb in, so it can be a bit tricky, especially when he’s vigorously struggling… We’ll wait a bit before we require him to dress himself.

Do my kids find their clothes distracting? Only when they hinder their movements in their quests to covertly get into trouble do they raise a fuss. (I guess that little girls in pretty little dresses might find it distracting to try and keep their dresses pretty while playing in the park. Mind you, I saw a teenaged girl in a pretty dress playing tag with her friends at a big playground—the jungle-gym posed no problem for her; her dad may’ve flipped a bird if he’d seen her acrobatics, though.)

Or, in this case, could they mean that the appearance of the clothes is distracting. IE, are the kids being overly concerned with labels and style (something I was never a slave to in high school, but I do understand the need to fit in)? At this point my kids are three and younger, so no. Kid #1 has even picked out his own outfits, and if he thinks he looks good in green and red in the middle of summer, who am I to shoot down his happy-balloon? My hope is less towards teaching him how to perfectly coordinate (like I’d know how to do that anyway), and more towards teaching him to have his own style (but to have a style and not just look like a bum), and to be strong enough to stand up for it by the time that it matters to other kids. I guess at that point, if the freebies aren’t their own style, I’ll have to start buying them their own choices (within monetary reason; they can spend their allowance on ridiculously priced items!).

But until then, I think that if the clothes are comfortable, allow my kids to move around however they want to and aren’t bugging them, and are easy to put on, what they have is just perfect. 

How Do You Have Sex after Kids?

(And, your mom lives in the basement. And, she shares your kitchen.)

Answer: With Great Difficulty!

(Language Warning)

Is this a topic that people are too afraid to talk about? There just isn’t much to find online. It’s not like I’m looking for details or anything. Just ideas. Really. That’s all!

This is usually how it goes for us (some background info: Hubby works at 4am so is up at 3; I haven’t gone back to work yet, but kid #2 doesn’t quite sleep through the night yet…):

It’s 8pm, and the kids are actually in bed. Oh, wait, baby peed. Change his diaper. Give him some more bottle, and when he’s back to sleep, put him back to bed. It’s 8:30 or 9:00.

Me: Wanna have sex?

Hubby: (looking exhausted and slightly comatose) You probably need to sleep.

Me: Apparently I look exhausted and comatose, too, and maybe I’ve been a bit cranky. But I want to.

H: Uh huh.

M: No, really, I do. I want you to fuck me. Just lube me and do me. It’ll feel really good!

Hubby then answers with either an “Okay”, or he tells me yet again that I need some sleep and then proceeds to snore.

Sometimes the kids are at daycare for the afternoon, and when Hubby gets home after lunch, my mom isn’t home:

Me: You wanna get frisky?

Hubby: Okay. When does your mom get home?

Me: I don’t know. We might have half an hour. We might have three.

H: K. I just have to wash up.

This is usually followed by either a quickie, or some actual love-making. Usually it’s the former. And, more often than not, we’re just getting going/I’m about to get loud, and my mom drives up. Now we have to finish quickly and quietly, and hope that she thinks we’re napping.

Yeah, we try to nap as much as possible. (It helps with the comatose thing.)

Sometimes on Hubby's days off we try to get jiggy in the morning before the kids wake up. Or, before my mom comes up to make her breakfast (we really need to get a kitchen put in downstairs).

This usually starts out with good intentions, but sometimes ends up with me “napping" solo for a while after Daddy gets up (he had time to finish) to deal with morning potty breaks, wet diapers, and Cheerios.

I do have to admit that Sex After Kids has been more possible lately, but it can still be tricky trying to find some alone time where you have enough time and enough privacy—and enough energy—to get the job done with great satisfaction. “Satisfaction” is a relative term. Sometimes “satisfaction” means a good, hard, fast quickie, and sometimes you’re so tired that an hour of effort on everybody’s part produces only a mediocre result, and you wouldn’t normally call that satisfied, but at this point, it’s been a while, and you got some, so you’ll take it.

And then try again the next time the house is empty/everyone else is asleep.

How do you find the opportunity for some good alone-time?

We Are the Millers

I needed to laugh yesterday, so I picked "We Are the Millers" over "City of Bones". (My husband's probably thanking me, even if he said it didn't matter.)

Sure, there were a few holes in the plot (such as, what kind of DEA Agent can't smell a "pot baby"?), but we did laugh out loud. A lot. I just hope that my husband never feels the need to describe his haircut the same way that Dave does.

Just as funny, if not even funnier than the movie? The outtakes.

What movies made you laugh lately?

Chester the Molester

Sometime in my early twenties, which was also sometime in the nineties, I got a job as a First Aid Attendant in what’s known as The Oil Patch. I mostly worked on drilling rigs, but I occasionally did some pipeline and plant work, and once some seismic.

Drilling rigs were nice because they were 24/7 jobs, so I usually had my own shack, or at least half of one, whereas the other jobs were day jobs (AKA Truck Jobs), and I usually had to sit in my truck for twelve plus hours. Because I could never master the art of wearing sunglasses while “reading” an opened newspaper (a friend of mine could do this; said one guy, “I can never tell if you’re sleeping or not.” She usually was, but she could wake up before they got too close), it wasn’t that much fun.

Sure I got to read lots, and sometimes the road-radio chatter was amusing, but truck jobs didn’t usually come equipped with toilet facilities of any kind, unless you counted the trees. Have you ever seen the forest in the muskeg? A wheat field in the spring would provide better cover. Anyway, I digress, and this topic could be a whole other story, so I’ll leave it for now.

Back to the drilling rigs.

My second job ever was on a Bach-Camp job. In other words, the guys could stay in a nearby hotel (which was in the middle of nowhere on the Alaska Highway, north of Fort St John), but I had to stay on site in a shack 24/7. It was me, the Consultant for the Oil Company, the Tool Push (Rig Manager) for the Drilling Company, and a Geologist. I was the only woman.

I had my own shack, which was nice. I had to cook my own food, which was really nice because at that time I was a vegan, and camp food sucked—all salads came with ham or bacon.

I had a TV, but I didn’t have my own satellite receiver; I was tied in to the Consultant’s receiver, so I had to watch whatever he watched. His name was Chester, and I secretly called him Chester the Molester. Before you panic, let me clarify that he never molested me. I just called him that because he was always winking at me, which, when you’re the only girl around for miles on a rig staffed by men that are called Rig Pigs for a reason, makes you a little nervous. I was extra wary at all times.

Conversations with him would go something like, wink “Hi Spinny” wink. “I saw you out walking” wink today.” Wink “Where did” wink “you go?” wink. Chester’s winks didn’t occur fast enough to be mistaken as facial tics, but he winked a lot.

Anyway, I had to watch what Lester did, or more accurately, whatever he left on while he wasn’t watching. There were four options: movies (the rarest of them all); The Golf Network; a news network from somewhere that had NOTHING whatsoever to do with our region (or country, for that matter) and that looped the exact same half-hour newscast ALL DAY; and porn. Porn was the most frequent option, so I didn’t watch a lot of TV.

One day I had the TV on for background noise because it was golf or news, but it definitely wasn’t porn for once. I was carrying on with my day, and I happened to look outside at just the right moment to see Chester the Molester walking from the rig to his shack. He went in, closed his blinds, and within one minute, porn was on my TV.

How is a shy, nervous, never-makes-waves, young girl to handle such a situation? Well, it was the end of the month, so I waited a few minutes, and then, playing ignorant, I took an invoice over for him to sign. ;)

I let him keep the pen.

I Preview Samples on my Kindle and I Still End up with Crap

Does someone sit around at Kindle and decide where exactly to end a sample so that it hooks you in and hides how hideous the writing is beyond this point?

Do they contact the authors and say, "Yeah, hey, so you know that book you just wrote? Do you think you could rewrite the first five pages, maybe take out the comma faults, and try to make the heroine not seem so much like a wishy-washy, simpering idiot? Just for the sample section though. That'll make it good enough that people who want to be interested and insist on good writing before actually purchasing the book will do so.

"No worries about the stupid, simpering-idiot heroine who spends the next fifteen chapters going back and forth about the hero and about how much she hates and loves him at the same time (run, daisies, run!)--sure, she needs therapy (if you're doing a sequel, get her some fricking therapy), but so long as you make her seem like a strong, I'll-avoid-abusive/toxic-relationships kind of girl in the sample section, people will still buy your book."

Argh. Sometimes it's really easy to spot the crap, but lately I've ended up with some really stinky stuff. At least it's been cheap!

#5: Make sure your child gets sufficient sleep.

I whole-heartedly agree with this one. Well, I do in theory, anyway.

I’d like to know, though, if there’s a list somewhere called “101 Things Children Can Do to Help Their Parents?” If there is, somewhere on it is “Make sure that you let Mommy get enough sleep; she’ll be in a much better mood for when you do things that you categorize as fun but that she categorizes as ‘Really?’ or ‘Oh for Crying out Loud’ (often followed by actual crying).” 

Because let me tell you, I could use “sufficient” sleep. What would Sufficient Sleep be? Ideally, eight hours. Pipe Dream, I know. Okay, okay, sufficient would be getting to bed at a reasonable hour, followed by four to five straight hours of uninterrupted sleep with a short break for a diaper change/potty break, quick drink and a quick cuddle before quickly falling back to sleep, followed by another two to four hours of sound sleep before having to get up for the day. Oh heck, I’d be happy with just “more” sleep!

I don’t think that getting your child to sleep through the night is quite what they mean, however, although that would probably help.

I think what Eva probably means is that we should put our children to bed early enough so that when they awaken from a steady slumber in time to get on with their day they’ve slept for as many hours as recommended by people like these guys. And if not, we should provide our children with opportunities for naps (which, I’ve been told (by my mom) should be on a regular schedule and shouldn’t be prevented or interrupted by “errands” etc.

Okay, that gives me: 1. sleeping through the night, 2. going to bed early enough, and 3. naps.

1. Let me start with sleeping through the night. My first child did as a baby, and he’s really good at it now. It took a year and a half, though, to move his chosen bedtime of two a.m. (want to know how many TV shows I watched on DVD while we did four+ hour breastfeeding marathons? A few. And Yay for the DVR) to nine p.m. He’s now three and we are just getting him in bed and to sleep (not always the same thing!) by eight p.m., sometimes earlier. No matter when he falls asleep, he sleeps until seven on average, which has been awesome.

Enter child number two. He’s now almost a year. He goes to sleep for the night much earlier that his big brother, but it’s an anomaly for him to sleep for more than three hours at a time (it used to be one to two hours, so there has been some improvement). Until very recently, a night typically went like this: nurse for an hour to fall asleep; if it’s before eight, pee my diaper within an hour of being put in the crib; nurse some more to fall asleep again; sleep for two to three hours before peeing my diaper at about eleven or twelve; so that I don’t wake up my older brother by screaming through the diaper change, bring me to bed with you so that I can nurse for two hours while you “sleep” and then change my diaper and put me back in my crib; sleep for two to three hours before peeing my diaper at about three; so that I don’t wake up my older brother by screaming through the diaper change, bring me to bed with you so that I can nurse for two hours while you “sleep” and then change my diaper and put me back in my crib; if it’s before four, sleep until four and bring me to bed to nurse while you “sleep” until it’s time to get up (I might go back to my crib for an hour, but good luck with that); if it’s after four, I might go back to my crib for an hour, but it’s not recommended to try.

Recently, I’ve been putting up with a lot of biting in the hopes that it’s just a once-in-awhile thing like it was with child number one, but he finally drew blood the other day and I just can’t nurse anymore. So now I’m expressing, and he can bite all he wants (poor bottle nipple). Now a typical night goes like this: a bottle? Really? Sigh. Suck back the meagre amount that you managed to squeeze out earlier, and let you sing and cuddle me to sleep (and after the first night, I won’t scream that much); you can express some more at this point; sleep for a couple hours until I pee my diaper; this time I guess it’s okay for you to change my diaper first; suck back a bit of milk from the bottle, but let me tell you, I’m pissed off about the change in delivery modes; cuddle me back to sleep and I’ll sleep for a couple of hours until I pee my pants etc. etc. etc.; oh wait—it’s four and you just couldn’t stay awake after I fell asleep last time, so instead of expressed breast milk you’re giving me formula? Wtf, lady. Sigh. I guess I’ll drink some, but I’m going to be talking to my union rep about this when he wakes up (Mom in: I’m assuming he means his big brother. Or, maybe his father); I’ll go back to sleep, but only until six, whereupon you will give me the rest of the formula while I pretend to drink it while snuggling in bed with you in your hopes of my falling asleep again. Ha ha, joke’s on you! Get up lady!

I know that there’s a book out there on how the French mommies get their kids to eat veggies and sleep through the night (one woman was embarrassed that it took her baby until three-months-old to sleep through the night), and during one brutal night I did an internet search for books on getting babies to sleep. I found this so I thought, “Never mind,” and I’ve been making enough progress to make me think that one day I’ll look back on all of this and laugh. Someday.

2. Going to bed early enough: sleep training does work—you just have to be consistent and stronger willed than the child. Lol.

To get child number one to sleep before two, and then before eleven, and then at around nine, without having to nurse/rock/swing and sing, I followed the advice given to me by a daycare operator (I was preparing to go back to work and therefore was shopping around for childcare).

She suggested putting the child to bed at bedtime. Let him cry. After five minutes, go in and check his diaper; change it if necessary. Do not engage with the child—IE don’t talk to the child other than maybe a quick hug, I love you and/or good night. Let him cry. Go back in after ten minutes and repeat the diaper check etc. Go back in after fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty minutes and so on. The first night took three hours or more before he fell to sleep. But I got a LOT of housework done in between checks. The second night took an hour and a half. The third night was less than thirty minutes. After that it only took ten (until toddlerhood).

As a toddler, we’ve managed to get his bedtime to an even earlier hour by following several steps: I set an alarm for starting supper so that we eat by six or so instead of “Oh! It’s seven? When did that happen? What does everyone want for dinner?” I also have two alarms half an hour apart that say “Snack or Bath-time” (depending on when supper ended determines the order of snack and bath-time). Snack Time is important because it prevents the “Mommy, I’m Hungries” five minutes after going to bed. Actually, they’ll still try it, but now you can legitimately say “I don’t believe you. Go to bed.” Then I have the “Bedtime” alarm which means brush your teeth, get a story, and get to bed. I’m not super rigid with the alarms (life does happen), but it does help me keep on track a little better, and later on I’ll be able to teach my kids a useful tool for taking over bedtime as their own responsibility. There are still nights where he cries (self-soothes) or plays, and we did have a few months of having to tie his door shut so that he couldn’t escape (we tried a baby gate but he just camped out by his door which was not conducive to sleep), but it usually only takes a few minutes for things to get quiet.

We are working on all of this with baby number two. He naturally goes to bed earlier on his own than his brother did, but he does not like to sleep through the night. (See (1) above.)

3. Providing naps. I’ve met people who are housebound at specific times of the day so that their children can nap. Kudos!

Child One’s naps have always been random, and now if they happen, they happen so late in the afternoon that I’m up until eleven with him, so I just deal with a couple hours of evening crankiness and make him wait until bedtime.

Child Two regularly gets sleepy at eleven-ish, one-ish, and five-ish. I like to take the boys to Strong Start which happens from nine to noon. Sometimes I have to be out in the afternoon or evening. Therefore, naptime sometimes gets pushed back a bit. My nephew must nap at ten, so he doesn’t get to go to Strong Start. I’ve found that eventually Child Two gets tired enough to fall asleep at Strong Start (even during noisy Gym Time), while out shopping, in the car, or while visiting. And if he doesn’t, he’ll fall asleep on the way home. I do make sure that if we have a couple of busy days in a row and that if he seems extra tired, we’ll stay home and have a quiet day (Child One appreciates this, too).

So, in the grand scheme of things, I try my best to make sure that my children get sufficient sleep, but life is life, and my kids are who they are, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over any lack of sleep because eventually it all balances out in the end. At least, I think it does. I’m pretty tired, so math is a bit difficult.