Mommy Monday: Weaning Update

Thanks for such a kind response to my last breastfeeding post ~ it was great to hear your supportive comments. In case you missed them ~ here are a few of my favorite thoughts from both the blog and facebook...

Enjoy every moment of it! ♥

19 months... time you will never get back. precious time that you could not have spent better.

and now for an update... I am still breastfeeding... maybe a little less than I was two weeks ago.

Here is what I have admitted to myself over the past two weeks.
We are not completely ready to stop breastfeeding.

Here is what I am working on to decrease feedings.
I am trying to have a little more control of times and places of breastfeeding ~ I quickly offer Addie a glass of milk or water if it is not the right time and/or place & guess what?? sometimes she is just thirsty and it works!

I am trying to increase the "other types" of quality time that I have with my baby girl ~ like reading, singing, playing and not only feeding.

and guess what? It is working for today...

playing outside with my sweet baby girl

Special Guest Sunday: Single Dad Laughing

Have you checked out this website?

http://www.danoah.com/

Single Dad Laughing isn't about maternity, labor, birth, or breastfeeding. It is about parenting. It is a wonderfully written blog with hilarious and very important posts. It is the real deal. He speaks of bullying, he speaks of adoption, he speaks of how he and his son LOVE M&Ms.

He talks a lot about the importance of respecting women. Women respecting themselves and how men need to respect them as well.

Check it out, he touches on some very important and sensitive subjects that are worth your while.

Fashion Friday: Spring Time!

Out here in Phoenix it feels like SPRING!

To celebrate I thought I would post one of my favorite SPRING dresses from Motherhood Maternity... found HERE

And for those of you who are still in the dead of WINTER, here is my favorite WINTER dress from Motherhood Maternity... found HERE

Sorry to rub it in about the fabulous weather... I won't be singing such a merry tune when it is May and over 105 degrees.

Thankful Thursday: Bum Genius Diapers

I am thankful for cloth diapers... seriously.

According to the Bum Genius website at http://www.bumgenius.com/

buying cloth diapers saves up to $1,200

and

prevent up to 1 ton of landfill waste.

As promoted on their website:

bumGenius cloth diapers are designed to make
cloth diapering easy for every-day people. We believe
that cloth diapering should be as inexpensive and as
easy as using disposables. Using bumGenius, it is!
Seriously, Bum Genius diapers are as easy as disposables. I used them for my daughter and I loved every minute of them. No dunking, rinsing, and even my daycare found them easy to use!

Not to mention they are pretty cute.

Thank you Bum Genius diapers and all you did to help save me money and the environment!

*** Be calm poster found on etsy HERE***

Wild Wednesday: Grandmother carries Daughter's Baby

What a neat story. We hear of surrogates, and even watch movies about them, but what LOVE this grandmother must have for her grandson. They share a unique and special bond that not many people can say they have with their grandma.


http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/surrogate-grandmother-woman-birth-grandson-61/story?id=12912270

Labor of Love: Woman Carries Her Daughter's Baby
Grandma, 61, Serves as Surrogate for Her Own Grandson

By COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit
Feb. 15, 2011


A mother's love takes many forms. For Kristine Casey, 61, it meant giving the gift of motherhood o her infertile daughter by carrying and giving birth to her own grandson.
With the help of hormone supplementation, Casey, who had gone through menopause 10 years earlier, became pregnant during her second round of in vitro fertilization, the Chicago Tribune reported.
She carries full term and gave birth via Cesarean section to Finnean, her first grandchild, last week at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. Although Casey's daughter, Sara Connell, 35, had been unable to carry a pregnancy to term, her egg and her husband Bill's sperm were used in the procedure, making the couple Finnean's biological parents.

Trusting Tuesday: Inductions part 1

I am not a big fan of elective inductions.

Meaning- there isn't a medical reason to do the induction.

So why would I do a "Trusting Tuesday" post about them.

Well, actually I am doing a whole series of posts about inductions.

In order to trust something, you should be educated, you should be informed. Unfortunately in, in our world today women often have a skewed view of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.

I once had a mom say, "I just want this (pregnancy) to be over with so I can start sleeping through the night again."

Yes, it was quite a shock at 38 weeks pregnant when I looked her in the eye and said, "You do know you won't be sleeping through the night for about another 6 months??"

*snicker giggle snicker laugh*

I promise I didn't laugh right away, I actually felt really bad for this mom who hadn't put the two together... reminds me of the Friends episode about Rachel's baby shower... anyone know what I am talking about?

Okay, back to inductions. In our world today we are all about convenience. We text, email, tweet, facebook, and check in from our cell phones. We blog and have access to information all at the tips of our fingers. Our online community of mommies tells us different ways to start labor "naturally" but then there is always that mom who writes about going to get induced tomorrow. And then everyone is jealous.

We know deep down that we should let our body go into labor on its own. But we are so impatient. We want to see and touch and feel our little one. We want that day to be now. We are full term, so, if the baby will be healthy, then why wait?

Guess what? Even if you are full term your baby might not be ready, but another thing we don't look at is if our BODY is ready!

How do we know if our body is "ready" for labor? I found an awesome article that points out some important things about inductions HERE and I am going to pull some of that information out and show it to you in the table below.

A Bishop score is a way of measuring how ready your cervix is for labor. This doesn't mean you will have an easy or hard labor, and it also doesn't give us an indication of when your body will go into labor spontaneously. It just gives us a good indication of how well your body will respond to an induction. **mind you this doesn't mean how well the baby will respond to an induction either**

Hopefully this is some new information that you can look at to learn more about inductions. In order to trust something and not jump into it blindly, we need to know as much as we can before we proceed. Educate yourself and you will help you and your baby out in the long run.

Special Guest Sunday: Mothering.com

image from Mothering.com

The very first time I visited Mothering.com it was sort of an accident. I was very new pregnant and hadn't started midwifery school yet. I hadn't thought of cloth diapers, going green, baby wearing, nursing, or natural childbirth. To be honest some of the site sort of freaked me out.

I didn't go back to the site until after my first daughter was born. Here is when I soaked up all the deliciously written articles. They are humorous, attention grabbing, and everything my blog is not... :) They have produced a magazine for 35 years!! I never subscribed and unfortunately, because of people like me, they have stopped printing the magazine and are now only online.

But guess what? I LIKE ONLINE BETTER! Sure it is killing my eyes, but no need to waste trees flipping through pages of ads and skipping past articles I don't want to read. Online gets me right to the good stuff. I can skip the newborn section for now, but I can still recommend the newborn section to a dear friend with thrush issues with her newborn.

Reading some of the articles still catch me by surprise. Just yesterday I read an article about a mother who is still nursing her 5 year old. Once I get over the fact that I am surprised I realize how ignorant I am when I start to judge someone and their parenting techniques. This site is really all about letting parents be parents, with helpful tips and information along the way. We all want what is best for our family and our children. With that being said there are situations where this is not the case with abuse and neglect.... but if the child is healthy and happy and parents are nourishing and enriching their lives, who are we to judge how they do it?

It is a very natural-minded parenting website. There are great articles on going green, attachment parenting, recipes for baby food, and more. One of my favorite sections today is under education and ways of learning. I am busy trying to teach my 4 year old how to love to learn. But she doesn't always want structured learning. She wants to sing and to dance to have me tell her stories. This site has given me a lot of ideas on how to incorporate all of that so I can be the one to help her learn.