Parenting
Easy as 1-2-3
{A couple of weeks ago I wrote about everyone asking us how it’s going with three kids. Since that is THE question, the only thing people really want to know, I’m going to answer it, honestly. Not just with the “fine” that I tell people in real life. So, then Part 1: the good stuff.} In many ways, having three kids isn’t much different than having two. Our life was already pretty loud, chaotic and sleep challenged. It was already a gong show getting dressed and in the car to go anywhere. Silas doesn’t really change that much. In fact, on the whole he’s very quiet and easy to deal with. We’ve already raised two babies. Pretty much everything Silas does is old news to us. We know how to take care of him. We aren’t surprised by the lack of sleep or the inconsistency of newborn clothing sizes or meconium. We were even better prepared for dealing with the big siblings in the transition this time. We learned from the mistakes we made when Noa was born so that this time both of our bigger kids have adjusted to their new little brother much more easily than Rain adjusted when he became a big brother for the first time. The third time around, it seems that we more or less know what we’re doing. Finally! It’s mostly just a matter of integrating a new personality into the family and as far as that goes, it’s luck of the draw. If your first two babies were quiet easy babies and your third is high needs, you’re going to feel that the third time around was the hardest. For us, all three of our babies had more or less the same temperament and so we haven’t had to make huge adjustments in the way we parent our babies. Another little bonus is that once you have three kids, those times when you get to go run errands with just two of them suddenly seems totally doable, fun even. Truth be told, by the time you have a 5 year old and a 3 year old, you realize that babies are nothing compared to the sassy, mess-making, willfulness of preschoolers. So while I say babies are old news, I don’t mean for a moment that I don’t delight in our baby. Silas is my secret little joy right now. Thank goodness for him who brightens up my often frustrating, head/wall banging days. When the older two won’t listen, when they fight and scream, when they pee on the floor, when they refuse to pick up their toys, I breathe in extra deep to inhale the smell of the top of Silas’s head, squeeze him a little tighter and nurse just a little longer because he’s not big yet. There may always be some stress when you add to your family but for us, so far, it seems to get just a little easier every time. If you’re curious about the hard parts, stay tuned for Part 2. In the mean time, how have you found the transitions each time you added to your family? Did it get...
Read MoreThe Question of Three
“What’s it like, having three kids?” “How’s it going with three?” “How are you doing? With three kids, I mean.” That’s what everyone wants to know. The question is usually asked with a mixture of genuine curiosity, horror and pity. It’s like they are staring at a picture of a train wreck and asking a survivor how they managed to get out alive. They want to hear all about it but they can’t help but betray the better-you-than-me attitude. Our concerned friends—the ones who really care about us—seriously want to know how we’re managing because God, three kids (!), how does one manage? They want to know if we’re ok because well, they are scared for worried about us. They are checking in to see if everything is going well, or if we need help, but there is always that hint of a suggestion that three kids is just too much for two parents to handle these days. We also get this question from strangers and acquaintances: parents who kinda sorta wanted to have three but weren’t brave enough (or managed to get the vasectomy before there was an accident), parents who find one or two kids completely overwhelming and who think we are totally nuts, or people who secretly think we’re being greedy. These queries are actually in the hopes that we’ll tell them it really is as bad as they imagine, thereby affirming their own parenting decisions. Coincidentally, we asked this very question a lot after we found ourselves unexpectedly expecting a third. Every time we ran into someone with three kids or even heard of someone with three kids, we would ask this question without even attempting to hide our hopes. Our question was really more of a pleading to please, please, tell us it isn’t as hard as we fear it will be. Tell us that by the third time around, the kid just slots right into the family and no one even notices that it wasn’t there before. Raising young kids is hard physical work. It’s tiring and often kind of drudgerous. Discipline issues can be frustrating and mentally taxing. It really isn’t easy and with three kids, we’re outnumbered. Two parents, two hands. I can physically only hold onto two kids at a time. If they all run different directions, two parents can really only chase down two of them at any one time. It takes a different set of skills to manage three than it took to manage one. Fair enough. I totally get why people ask, why I asked and why I feared (heck, why I sometimes still fear) being a mom to three kids. But I do find it interesting that the idea of three children is so universally considered to be such a terrifying burden. It seems to be the absolute limit to how many children people can even try to imagine having. I bet you anything that by the time someone announces their 4th or 5th child people don’t even ask anymore. They just smile and nod. What do you think? Have you asked this or been asked...
Read MoreNavigating Sleep with a Third Child
{This is a follow-up to my January post Reconsidering Co-sleeping where at 35 weeks pregnant I revealed that after 2 kids and 5.5 years of co-sleeping I was considering a crib for my third child.} I had this idea back in January that I wanted to write a post that would realistically present the nuances of co-sleeping, that would argue that Attachment Parenting is not a set of cult rules but rather a complex personal philosophy that shifts from family to family, from child to child, and over time. By highlighting my own sleep struggles and divided mind on the issue of co-sleeping, I wanted to show that you can still be an attachment parent even while you decide not to embrace all elements of the philosophy…because you are making the best decisions for your family in the spirit of striving for balance in personal and family life. I believed that my post was balanced in that I could be honest about my struggles while remaining incredibly supportive of co-sleeping (from personal experience not just a theoretical standpoint). Some commenters correctly pointed out that there is a difference between co-sleeping and bed-sharing. Dr. William Sears, a well-known pediatrician and author of many parenting books, defines co-sleeping as sleeping within arm’s reach of the baby. Bed-sharing on the other hand is actually sleeping on the same surface, in the same bed, as the child. Having slept with both of my kids since 2005, I know that distinction, and yet, for some reason, I seem to continually use the two terms interchangeably. To be honest, I find that many people do this on a regular basis and while I find the distinction can be important, I also feel comfortable with my use of co-sleeping to encompass all the ways that parents share sleep with their children. I really enjoyed all the commenters who shared their personal stories, experience and tips. I appreciated the tips and atmosphere of support though as a long-time co-sleeper and supporter of the practice, most of the ideas were ones that I had entertained and discarded as not working for us in our 800 square foot, 2 bedroom house. No chance of a mattress beside our King size bed that took up our whole room. No chance of a double bed in the kids room that already housed a loft bed, toddler bed and all of their clothes and toys. Nevertheless, I really appreciated the helpfulness and understanding. However, there were also comments (notably in response to a re-posting on the Natural Parents Network facebook page) along the lines of “every child deserves to be co-slept with” and “I co-slept with all 4 of my children and wouldn’t have it any other way.” I regretted that I had somehow given the impression that: I was planning to stick the baby from Day 1 in a crib in a room down the hall, I had no intention of being sensitive and responsive to the individual needs of this particular baby, I was absolutely, certainly never going to sleep with this baby at all, I no longer supported co-sleeping, My mind was made up. My intention from the day of that post was to start with a bassinet beside the bed and move after a couple of months to a crib in our room, a few feet away from our bed. This way I could still hear the baby easily and respond before baby cried but I would have a little more physical space so that I would not jump to attention every time baby stirred and so that baby wouldn’t get in the habit of nursing every hour. As a mother of two other children, I was also well aware that even our best intentions are at the mercy of our individual babies. I was prepared for the fact that this baby might not want to sleep anywhere other than on my body. As an ardent supporter of co-sleeping for its benefits, I was also prepared to share my bed with the baby whenever necessary, if we were...
Read MoreReconsidering Co-sleeping
As we wait for this baby to arrive, I find myself seriously considering a crib. This may not seem very inflammatory. After all, for the vast majority a crib isn’t even a consideration; it’s a necessary purchase that requires no thought beyond what sheets to choose. However, we co-slept (or bed-shared) with our two older children. A crib feels like venturing into strange territory. In fact, it even feels like a bit of a betrayal. Not that I have a problem with OTHER people using cribs at all. It’s just for me, it feels like denying this baby some of the wonderful things we were able to give our older kids. Furthermore, it goes against my personal instincts and parenting philosophies about keeping our kids close. In a lot of ways I love co-sleeping. I love the extra snuggles in the night. I love the extra hours of closeness with my children. I love being able to hear, see and feel that they are safe. I love waking up together. I love the early morning cuddles and giggles. I love that co-sleeping makes it easier for Aaron to be involved in night-time parenting. I love looking over and seeing one of my children cradled in Aaron’s arms. There are more practical benefits to co-sleeping beyond all that lovey-dovey stuff though. Many people, including Dr. James McKenna from University of Notre Dame, claim benefits to co-sleeping like the ease of maintaining the breastfeeding relationship and the increased sleep for mom. Long-term effects also suggested include higher self-esteem in adults who co-slept as children and a new book by Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, “says the practice makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.” There are even studies that say that practiced safely, co-sleeping decreases the incidence of SIDS. In my own experience, I saw first hand the ways that co-sleeping made breastfeeding easier. I could just roll over and nurse a baby while half asleep, without having to get up, walk down the hall, nurse in a chair and then carefully try to get baby back in the crib (without rousing her and having to start over). We learned quite quickly to disturb our babies as little as possible in the night if we wanted to maximize our sleep. A baby that falls asleep nursing in a side-lying position is much easier to keep asleep than one who needs to be moved and placed back into a crib. Plus, because I wasn’t getting up, walking around and turning on lights, it was easier for me to go back to sleep after a feed too. The problem is I’m beginning to feel that some of those gains in the early days set me up for some challenges later on. Some examples: 1. Eventually I began to dread climbing into bed at night. I would be tired (from a long day with a toddler who usually went to bed at the same time as us) and ready to sleep but as soon as I jostled the bed or baby smelled me beside her, it would be mean another feed before I could go to sleep. Whether it was 8:30, or 9:00, or 10:00, or midnight. I could not get into bed and just go to sleep. Even if baby had only nursed an hour ago, I was in for another feed before I could punch out. 2. Increased Night Wakings. Both of my kids spent their early days in a little bassinet type bed beside our bed and only moved into our bed when they outgrew their first bed, around 4 or 5 months old. Around this time, we noticed that they were developing skills for soothing themselves back to sleep. We would hear them rustle, re-settle, perhaps suck a finger or thumb and then go back to sleep. Around this time, hours of consecutive sleep were increasing from 2 (with a newborn) to 4 or 5. By the time both children were a year old, they were waking...
Read MoreWordless Wednesday
This is my 2 year old daughter nursing after a late afternoon swim in Klein Lake on the Sunshine Coast this summer. I am now pregnant with our third child and Noa weaned a few months after this photo was taken. This is the last photo we have of her nursing.
Read MoreStocking Stuffer Idea
I have to preface this by saying that I do not represent Usborne and I did not receive free product or compensation in return for this review. If you’re looking for a last minute stocking stuffer for the 5 year old in your life, I highly recommend Usborne’s 100 Things for Little Children to do on a Journey. My son received this as an early Christmas gift from his grandparents and we love it! This little gem consists of 50 double-sided activity cards and a pen. The cards are laminated so the marker wipes off and the activities can be done over and over again (move over colouring/activity books!). When the pen runs out, any old dry erase pen works just as good and the cards are easily wiped clean with a tissue or paper towel. There are a whole series of these activity cards and I’m sure the other sets are just as fun. Some of the other sets are more clearly geared towards travel, with activities like spotting things out the window, or older kids like the brain teaser set. Though this particular set is supposed to be things to do on a journey, there’s nothing about it that makes it only a travel game. In fact, we haven’t been on a journey yet and our cards are getting heavy use at home every afternoon. This lovely portable little box has also been brought along every time we’ve eaten out at a restaurant since we received them. The cards themselves have a range of activities with everything from drawing prompts (similar to the Taro Gomi colouring/drawing books which we also love, by the way) to simple crossword puzzles. Because Rain is pre-literate right now that means the cards will have longevity. It should be quite a while before the cards are too simple for him. Other activities include mazes, spotting the errors in a picture, connect-the-dots and more. Even our 2 year old loves them. We call them black out cards because she loves to colour every item on the card until it’s completely blacked out and then wipe the card clean and start again. She will do this for sometimes half an hour at a time! I’ve seen these cards for between $10 and $12 CAD everywhere from amazon.ca to Costco to our local toy store. They shouldn’t be hard to find near...
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