annie

before i forget, i want to reply to your reply about the slings and such…..i LOVE my slings and my daughter and i grew semi-famous around our town because she was never caught out of the sling. also, we were pretty much the only sling-wearers in the area. but as she’s grown i’ve stopped with the sling and have expected her to walk. unless we’re at the farmer’s market or the mall or some other big, scary, populated place that doesn’t have a cart. so, i doubt we’ll be double-slinging it. also, it will be a little awkward with a toddler who is 25lbs and a newborn who is…not. i hope. newborns don’t start out 25lbs, usually. anyhow, i just wanted to say that i don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect your toddler to walk and stay near you when you’re at the doctor’s office or post office, or wherever you might want a stroller, and keep the newborn in the sling. just trying to take the pressure off you so you don’t think you need to be stressing over some major purchase that may not be absolutely necessary.

but, also, i’m a minimalist when it comes to baby and kid stuff. we skipped the toddler bed and put our toddler in a regular twin bed. she’s tall enough to get in and out of it herself and she doesn’t move too much in her sleep that we’re afraid of her rolling over the side (just in case, though, we wedge a pillow between the head of the bed and the bookcase next to it). she’s also not a big jumper-on-furniture kid, so we aren’t worried about that, either. i got a small selection of nursing bras from walmart or jc penney (which, actually, are not terrible…though not cute and sexy like the expensive ones) and two nursing tanks from target. they continue to last me, so i’m not buying any more until these wear out.

i tried cloth nursing pads and hated them. i had to double-layer them just to get them to absorb anything at all and i couldn’t ever get the milk-smell out of them so i felt like i was smelling like milk all day. maybe if you go the etsy route and get handmade cloth nursing pads they’ll be better. i just didn’t like the ones in the store. a couple moms from my la leche league group used menstrual pads cut in half and stuck them in their bras. they seemed to like them, but i never tried it. we use cloth wipes, but i made my own. i doubled up a flannel receiving blanket from the thrift store and cut it into squares and sewed up the sides. it was super-duper easy and cost me $1.50. i’ll probably make another round of them so i have enough for both kids.

which brings me to the potty training. MAN. we’ve been having the same experience. our daughter will sit on the potty ONLY with clothes on and ONLY if the lid is closed. she sits there while i go potty, when we’re running the water for her bath, when we’re brushing her teeth, etc. it’s become a regular chair for her, albeit one that doesn’t come out of the bathroom. or when i say it’s time to go pee-pee and we go into the bathroom, she sits down on her potty chair, pats the toilet and says, ‘mama! pee-pee!’ and then makes sure i go. she’s very concerned with my potty training, but not at all about her own. she’s shown all signs of readiness for potty training, without the actual training part. my mom said i potty trained myself around 2 – 2 1/2 when i saw other girls just slightly older than me using the toilet and watched her changed my brother’s diaper. evidently i did NOT want to be lumped in the ‘baby=diaper’ category and one day started using the toilet on my own. i’m hoping something similar happens with my daughter, though she’s not around similar-aged girls very often. i wonder if i could start a mom’s group of toddler girls for the purpose of getting my daughter potty trained? we could get together and have potty parties where all the older girls would go potty and my daughter would watch. sounds kind of creepy, but i think it’s the way it works with girls.

i love ina may. no mooing or raspberries, though, for us. lots of singing and chanting-like repetition of verses and prayers. we skipped the vitamin k shot. probably will with this one, too. no clotting disorders on either side of the family, nor any trauma durng birth to make us suspect brain bleeding. and she was born at home, so no suspection of disease contraction.

and today was a i-want-to-cry day for me, too. dumb hormones. my daughter likes to go through my old photo albums and she brought out one of my first year of college and all i could think of was how i never hear from anyone anymore and i have no friends and my husband works lame hours far away and why doesn’t he just come home already and why am i always so alone? yeah, it was obnoxious.

did you want someone to respond to your status update point-by-point? because i totally did. a lot resonated with me, i guess. hope you don’t mind.