Sept. 3: Last night I downloaded 650 photos from my week in DC. It took a while to weed through them all, pick the best ones, put them in albums, upload them, caption them, and sort them. But it’s done. And I plan to soon do several posts describing our fun times during our trip, but for those of you who would like to see some sneak-peek pics, here’s the link to our DC album. Enjoy!
We’re home!
Sept. 2: After being in Washington DC for ten days, we’re all back home again. It was a positively wonderful vacation. Kacy’s wedding was just beautiful. And the first anniversary of Mom’s departure is behind us.
I have loads of photos to download, edit, upload, and post about. Stay tuned!
National Zoo
Aug. 27: It’s late and I should really get myself to bed. But I’m checking up on the computer instead. We’re enjoying ourselves here in DC. We spent the day hanging out with Heather and Evelyn. Took a walk again to a playground and spent the afternoon at the National Zoo whilst Heather worked. Lots of people thought I had twins (one in the Ergo and one in a stroller), and I was happy to tell them that I was helping a friend! Andrew loved seeing the Asian elephants, the pandas, a HUGE hippo, an elephant shrew, prairie dogs, and meerkats. He’s animal-crazy, that kid:)
I’d think of something else to say about our day, but my brain has ceased to think, so instead I’ll say goodnight and head to bed. I’m sleeping with Andrew, and he’s decided to sleep perpendicular to me. Fortunately he doesn’t seem to kick much!
One year ago…
Aug. 27: I don’t even want to think about it.
Sarah and Wes have had their baby!
Its a boy!
Sarah and Wes welcomed little Charles Lambert Bramhall
to the world on Monday, August 18, 2008, 3:23 a.m.
He weighed 7 lbs. 7 oz., measured 19.5″ long, and is just as beatific and perfect as can be.
Hey hey from DC
Aug. 25: Greetings from Washington DC! The kids and I arrived on Saturday, and we spent a nice weekend with Grace and Tim and John. We all had a fun afternoon at the Wheaton Park playground and botanical gardens, and on Sunday, Grace and I went to a pottery studio that I have long-admired. Then today (Monday), Grace, Tim, and John drove to New York for a week-long vacation, and I took their car (thanks!) and went to stay at Heather, Michael, and Evelyn’s for the week. We’ve got fun activities planned, but for today I just enjoyed getting to know sweet four-month baby Evie.
And now there are no more Olympics, and I am off to bed.
Last week of summer = vacation
Aug. 22: Last night I went to American Players Theater with Jessica’s family and with Terry. Both had invited me to go with them, so I picnicked with Jessica and watched the show with Terry. Bryan was home alone with the kids all evening long (5pm until 11pm), and it sounds like they did really well. What a guy!
Andrew, Sylvia, and I are flying out to DC tomorrow to visit Heather, Michael, and Evelyn and Grace, Tim,and John. We’re staying with Grace this weekend and next weekend and with Heather through the week. Next Saturday my friend Kacy is getting married, so it should be a really fun vacation and wedding! This will be my first flight solo with both kids. They’re good fliers, and it’s a direct flight, so I’m not particularly worried.
Bryan will be home alone for the week, and as a fun surprise, Bryan’s dad was able to get tickets to come up and spend the weekend here. Bryan got Brewers tickets, and I am so very, very glad that he and his dad will have the opportunity to spend one-on-one time togehter. We both really wish that we lived closer to Bryan’s family. I know that Bryan would love to be able to just hang out with his parents more often. So this should be a real treat.
Sylvia just woke from her morning nap. It’s been about an hour. She’s crying hard, and I’d like her to wake happy…indicating that she’s had enough sleep and not just somehow woken up. Hmmm. How to know whether to go get her.
Andrew and I watched some video this morning of him when he was Sylvia’s age. Gosh was he cute. As he watched the video, Andrew was saying, “I love my sweet little hands! I love my cute little mouth!”
Tonight we’re going to a baby shower for one of Bryan’s co-workers. Should be fun! I’ll be back on Sept. 2, so ta-ta until then!
Getting kinda hard core about needing naps
Aug. 21: Sylvia is working on her second nap of the day. Which is a really good thing because I was getting desperate about having her nap. After teething and being sick, she somehow got herself to a place where she was only napping once…maybe twice in the morning for an hour or so. By the evening, she’s been an exhausted mess. And even when I work all afternoon to get her to fall asleep, I really haven’t been that successful.
Yesterday afternoon I went over to day-care Karen’s house to help her by watching her kids for the afternoon while she moved her mom into a nursing home. Before leaving, Karen put the two little boys down for a nap. She did it by picking them up, walking them upstairs to their cribs, saying goodnight, laying them down with their pacifiers and blankets, and walking away. There was no fussing or crying. And the boys both slept for two and a half hours. It made me feel like something in my world needs to change!
Karen and I didn’t always see eye to eye on child-raising techniques. She organizes the kids in a very structured way. They seem to thrive on the consistency, but I never found it practical to be all that scheduled and organized at home. Karen really wanted me to track how often I was feeding Andrew, to space out his feedings, to not nurse him to sleep, to let him cry himself back to sleep when he woke from a nap too early, to not ever skip naps because we were out, to only use the pacifier when he was sleeping, etc.
I didn’t necessarily appreciate Karen’s advice. I think that I was happy to work with her, but I didn’t really like feeling like she was telling me how to raise my child. Especially when the advice she was giving me sometimes felt like it was designed to make her life easier at the expense of Andrew’s happiness (don’t hold him all the time, let him cry sometimes, don’t nurse him whenever he wants…).
Karen had encouraged me to read a book called Babywise by Gary Ezzo, which is sort of the antithesis of attachment parenting. The goals seems to be to get your child to sleep through the night, which always seemed to me to be a sort of silly goal. My ultimate goal is to have children who feel loved and content. Who are happy and healthy and who have a strong sense that the world is a warm and loving place. If that meant waking up in the night to feed or comfort them, that’s just fine with me! Dr. Sears and Dr. Brazelton are two of the attachment parenting gurus whom I most identify with. I found them both myself, and Mom later told me that they were two of the parenting resources that she also admired. Attachment parenting includes child-led breastfeeding, lots of baby-wearing, co-sleeping, and generally being very attuned to your baby’s needs. It’s an approach that for the most part, feels very right to me.
Now that Sylvia is six-months-old, I find myself expecting a little more out of her than I did when she was a newborn. She can self-soothe, and her needs aren’t as raw as they were. In fact, “need” is shifting to “want” in a lot of cases. So I’m feeling more confident about pushing her a little to help her gain some independence.
So while I was at Karen’s yesterday, I re-read the somewhat abhorred Babywise. And while I really, really don’t like the fact that he is promoting the strict scheduling of itty-bitty babies, I did find wisdom in his suggestions of how organizing feeding time, wake time and nap time into 3-4 hour repeating segments can work well for babies and parents. So here are some things I’ve decided to try:
- I’m going to work to organize Sylvia’s eating, wake, and nap times more. I generally just follow her cues, but the last few weeks, that hasn’t been leading to good naps. Plus she’s recently up for hours in the night too! So for the most part, I plan to feed her after she wakes up and then wait 2-3 hours before feeding her again. I’m also planning to not nurse her before bed to see if that helps her be able to fall back asleep better.
- I’ve decided (with some trepidation) to let Sylvia cry herself to sleep if necessary. I’ve only let her cry for about 5 minutes or maybe 10, and she’s never fallen asleep…I go in after a while and nurse her down. I let her cry for both naps so far today. I set the timer for 15 minutes and gritted my teeth. The first nap she cried for about 20 minutes, but after the timer went off at 15 minutes, she sounded like she was heading toward sleep so I didn’t go in. Then for this second nap, she cried for about 10 minutes. It wasn’t so bad.
- I’m going to wait until she wakes up happy to go in to get her. Sylvia often wakes up crying after 45 minutes-one hour of napping. From experience with Andrew, I know that a baby who wakes crying probably wasn’t ready to get up, but with Sylvia, once I go in to soothe her, she makes it very clear that she’s wide awake and is not going to return to napping anytime soon. So in order to encourage longer naps, I’m going to let her cry herself back to sleep. [There’s always the chance that she’ll have a poopy diaper or something, so I’ll have to figure out how to manage this one.] Oh, how odd…she just woke up crying. Hmmm… To check on her or not to check. It’s so hard when she’s calling for me and expects me to come. But she needs to sleep more. Sleep is very important for babies. Hey, she just stopped. My hope is that she’ll wake up coo-ing when she wakes rested. urg. she’s crying again.
So that’s my plan. I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully longer, more consistent naps will make for a happier Sylvia and a calmer Mom. Wish us luck!
This makes me want to do something
Aug. 19: Bryan and I support a variety of charitable organizations. Since I was about eight, I’ve been giving money to environmental groups – the Natural Wildlife Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Federation, the Humane Society. I’ve also supported animal therapy groups like Paws for a Cause. In times of crisis (9/11, Katrina), we support the Red Cross or the United Way. We support Wisconsin-based environmental groups like Gathering Waters. We give to Carleton, and when Wisconsin’s ban on gay marriages was on the ballot, we gave significant donations to Fair Wisconsin. We’re also starting a small endowment at the Madison Community Foundation in order to cement our family’s charitable giving tradition.
But I’ve never been that inclined to support organizations that help people in need. I’m not sure exactly why, but it hasn’t been my focus. However, after reading this article, I feel pretty moved to do something…either financial or personal…to help the women in the Congo. This article moved me profoundly. I also watched a show on PBS called A Walk to Beautiful about doctors who are helping Ethiopian women with heartbreaking childbirth injuries. I’m thinking about supporting the Fistula Foundation.
I think that being a mother of two kids makes me feel some kinship with these African woman. Living such a comfortable life, having had good labors and healthy kids makes my heart goes out to them and to want to help them with their sorrows and celebrate their strength. I want to help make life a little bit more OK for these people who could, I’m sure, be my friends…
Thoughts this Tuesday morning
Aug. 19: Sylvia is taking a nap. Ahh, relaxing one-child home. Andrew woke up around 5 this morning and wanted breakfast. I was dimly aware of Bryan emphatically informing Andrew that it wasn’t time to be out of his bed yet. Andrew’s been pretty interested in learning to tell time. He doesn’t get the whole big/little hand thing, but he likes to look to see when it is snack time (10am and 4pm). Just now he looked at the clock in his room and told me that it is 9am. It’s neat to watch him learn!
I’ve been loving watching the Olympics every night. I really, really like the Olympics. It’ll be a little sad when they are over…
On Saturday, Joe and I hung out and went shopping for new shoes for him for the fall. I love spending time with my siblings:) He leaves for Bowdoin on Friday. Egad! Becky is starting school at Williams this fall in Massachusetts. I’m really proud of her…for those of you unfamiliar with small liberal arts colleges, Williams is regularly ranked #1.
Dad came over for lunch on Sunday, and we had a brat and hot-dog picnic. Dad had some fun Sylvie and Andrew time, and Andrew again requested that he be able to “go to Grandpa’s house with no Mommy and no Daddy.” We could drive him there “and then leave.”
I went through all Sylvia’s clothes on Sunday and pulled out outgrown ones and added in the six-month-sized ones. This was pretty exciting for me because a) I LOVE baby clothes and b) because my favoritest clothes that I got for Sylvie before she was born were of the 6 month variety. See her for a sample. Oh, I love baby clothes! When Maretta was in town, the two of us went through four boxes of children’s clothes from Dana and my mom to identify clothes we thought we’d use. I then compiled those clothes with the bags upon bags of clothes that my friend Pam had passed on to me, the items I’ve received from Kathy, and the items I’ve purchased myself or been given as gifts. My basement shelves of children’s things have now transitioned from a complete disaster to a harmonious, well-labeled piece art. (well, maybe that’s overstating things slightly).
Yesterday the kids and I hung out with Jessica, Eli, and Celia for the morning. It was so nice to see them again! I think it’s been almost a month! Then I braved both the post-office and Woodmans (I now have several gray hairs and wrinkles forming), and my car overheated. So it’s in the shop. Terry came over for supper.
Andrew’s begging for a snack. He no longer likes to eat food at meal time and is constantly asking for snacks (than he then doesn’t tend to eat).
Me: “Andrew, is there anything you would like me to write for you?”
Andrew: “Noooooooo!!!” (runs away)
OK, that’s it from us today! Joe and Becky are coming over to play, so we’re looking forward to spending time with them!
Ta ta!