31 Days of Stories: When Bedtime Takes Forever

Tonight, Ava wore herself down by running and jumping on her beanbag chair. She finally got tired and we headed upstairs to start our bedtime routine. Overnight diaper, pjs, a little goofing with Daddy, all the stuffed animals, the blankie, and finally laying down with Mama for nursing and sleeping.

It started well.

Then she got a second wind.

"What's that, honey? Mama, what's that? I rub your back Mama?"

Well, I wasn't going to object to that one. She happily rubbed my back for 10 seconds, lost interest, and started bouncing. She stopped, rubbed my back again, petted my hair, and flopped back down. The next thing I knew I hear,

"Hold on Teddy!"

She put Teddy on her back and went on all fours like she was giving a horsey back ride to Teddy the way Daddy does for her. Teddy fell off and Ava fell over giggling. There's not much point getting frustrated when she's being this cute.

"DADDY!! Where are you?!"

"Honey, Daddy is downstairs."

"Ah go downstairs?"

"No, it's bedtime right now. Time to sleep."

Instant tears. She slid off my bed and sadly stood by the bedroom door yelling for Daddy. A quick distraction with the "buffalo game" (an animal sounds app on my phone) got her back into bed and starting to act sleepy again. She clicked through all her favorite animals on the app, and then handed me the phone.

"Mama, NUM!"

Finally! I laid down next to her again, and she cuddled in. Within five minutes there was nothing but the sound of slowed breathing, and within ten minutes I was able to sneak downstairs leaving a peacefully sleeping toddler behind me.

31 Days of Stories: This Second Pregnancy

We started trying for a second baby very soon after Ava was born. We thought we were ready for another then, but thankfully God knew better. This next baby is due in late February, so our kids will be exactly 2 years apart and I am so excited about that spacing.

The crazy thing about this second pregnancy is that I'm so busy keeping up with Ava and our household that I don't have as much time to dwell on the time passing as I did with my first pregnancy. As a result time is flying by; I can't quite believe that I am already 20 weeks along! Sometimes it won't be on my mind and the baby will turn or kick and I think "WHOA what was that?! Oh yeah, there's a baby in there."

This pregnancy has been SO very different from my first. I'm not sure if the differences are brought about by my more active lifestyle these days, better nutrition, or as everyone keeps telling me, maybe it's a boy this time. Regardless of why, this has been a breeze of a pregnancy so far. I have not thrown up at all, which was a huge improvement over the at least once a day puking that I dealt with when I was pregnant with Ava. My energy levels have been better too, and I haven't been as much of a zombie as I was when I was pregnant before.

This is going to sound weird, but with this pregnancy I am actually really excited about labor. With Ava I didn't know what to expect, and labor was rough. This time, I know what it will be like and I am confident that it will at least be shorter than 36 hours! I've also been watching some birth videos and have gleaned some new pointers on keeping everything relaxed during labor that I think will be key for me to power through this time. I'm feeling very empowered this time and I'm excited to get to experience a labor again.

One silly difference this time is that I'm feeling really angsty about names. With Ava, we had names picked out before I was even pregnant so for the whole pregnancy I knew what the options were going to be. This time? We have a girl name picked out (and one for a third daughter if we ever get there!) but as for a boy name..... nothing. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal to choose a name, but man. I guess Ben and I are very picky about boy names.

31 Days of Stories: A New Coat and Shoes

I got home and started sorting through my Mom2Mom sale loot. Ava came over to see what I had and I asked if she would like to try on her new coat. She gasped with excitement.

"Coat on mama!"

Then she saw the shoes...

"Mama shoes on please?!"

After I had obliged on both counts, Ava proudly tromped into the kitchen, twirled a bit and ran back to me. 

"Mama! All ready for snow!"

I don't know where she gets these things! Hopefully she won't have to wait too long this winter for snow. In the meantime, she'll be cheerfully running around the house in a winter coat yelling to the world that she is ready for snow. 

31 Days of Stories: Toby

Toby was our first dog. He is a large black lab mix of some sort: a lot of people have guessed he is part Great Dane due to his long legs, but his face almost seems setter like sometimes. Regardless of the breed, he's big and kind of dumb, let's be honest. Despite that, he is a very lovey dog... in a desperately needy way.

We adopted Toby from the local humane society when he was 7 months old. He had been picked up off the streets at 4 months old, and so had been at the shelter for almost half of his short life. I remember seeing him for the first time there: he just sat quietly and looked at us with those big brown eyes, and we knew we couldn't leave him there. 

Toby is one of those dogs that probably should have been an "only child." He gets along great with our other dogs and Ava, but his attention needs are ri.di.cu.lous. He has gone through many phases of panic attacks, severe separation anxiety, and weird OCD habits over the years. His obsessive licking and nail biting seem to be triggered by allergies, but figuring out a dog's allergy? Good luck! 

Despite (or maybe because of?) all his strange quirks, he still is our sweet first puppy. I often have to remind myself of this when he is having yet another panic attack or is desperately begging for all my attention all the time! 

31 Days of Stories: Escape Goats

Last year I considered doing a 31 Days series, but never quite found the motivation to do it. This year I have decided to do 31 Days of stories: stories of memories, Ava, our mini-farm, our animals, family... Whatever "the muse" dictates.

Today is one I've been meaning to blog for a while now: the story of our first few days with our (escape)goats. 

We brought our goats home on a Saturday to their lovely new stall in our log barn and its attached pen made from reclaimed pallets. Little did we know that our pen was not goat proof. On Sunday I was home by myself with Ava and since she was being horribly stubborn about napping, we went down to the living room and I turned on some cartoons so that I could have a short break. As I sat down on the couch to check Facebook, I looked out the window and saw our new goats happily trotting down our neighbor's driveway! I grabbed a huge handful of treats to lure them to me and ran outside. I wound up following them across the road and through three backyards before I managed to head them off and snag Leia's collar. Unfortunately Chewy didn't have a collar yet, so I had to carry a 40 lb goat while dragging another all the way back to our house. 

Later as we discussed how they could have gotten out, we realized that Chewy was just small enough to fit through a gap in a pallet so we added chicken wire around the outside of the fence and figured we must be goat proof now. The next morning however, I found Leia out in our corn patch happily munching away. I locked the goats in their stall and headed out for more chicken wire. Once we had installed an upper level of chicken wire, I figured my worries were over: Chewy could no longer go through the fence and Leia couldn't go over it. 

On Tuesday my family stopped by to see the goats and we all headed back to the barn. As we got close though we saw Leia ON THE ROOF. Apparently the old picnic table we had given them to play on was close enough that she decided to hop onto the roof of the barn to escape. After more bribing with treats she eventually fell/jumped off the roof and we moved on to what she really wanted: getting milked. Thankfully now that the picnic table is in a better location there have been no more escape attempts, and my anxiety about escape goats is no more. 

Flats Challenge Day 7: What Did I Learn?

Today was the seventh day of the Dirty Diaper Laundry Flats and Handwashing Challenge. The challenge officially ends for the participants when we change our babies into their nighttime diaper. Ava is now down to sleep in her normal non-flats-challenge nighttime diaper and the last load of handwash flats and covers are hanging on the drying rack, so we have officially completed the 2013 Flats Challenge. This post is a recap of sorts, to look at what I learned from the challenge and think about flats as a diapering option.

Last flat of the challenge: a Rebourne Clothing birdseye flat folded in an Ava Fold.

The Flats Challenge seemed to go by really quickly for me. I felt like it made my week very busy, though that was more from blogging every day than from handwashing every day to be honest. I did a total of seven loads of handwashed diapers this past week, not counting wool wraps. By the third day of handwashing I felt like it had become more of a habit and less of a chore. There was something calming about taking that half an hour a day to wash diapers in the camp washer. It gave me a chance to think and zone out a little. I really liked the feeling of connection to my ancestors that I felt while handwashing. Even though it was hard work each and every time, and my hands and back are certainly sore, it is cool to know that if my family needed it I could do this to save us money. 

The last load in the camp washer.

 Learning to handwash flats gave me an opportunity to rethink both my cloth diaper stash and the way I wash them. After finding out how simple flats can be, I am going to be destashing most of my all-in-ones and pockets and using mainly prefolds and flats from now on. I also thought through how my diapers are washed in the wash machine and realized that if I switch completely to flats and prefolds I should be able to cut back quite a bit on the water and time that my washing machine uses to do a load of diapers. 

The last load of the flats challenge hung up to dry.

I do think that using flats and covers is a very viable option for anyone who is struggling to diaper their child. Every baby deserves clean diapers and if cost is the struggle for a family, then cloth diapers just might be the solution. A family without a washing machine and without the finances for disposables could benefit hugely from information about using flats and handwashing them. I know it is work, but for us it really only added about 30-45 minutes of work to my day. If I ever found myself in a situation where handwashing was my only choice, I would do it gladly. Just knowing that my hard work would show up so tangibly as extra money in our budget would be the best motivation for me. 

I think the thing to keep in mind with the different options for diapering is that your life and situation is unique to you. Your hard is hard. Whether you are saving your family money via a cloth stash of all-in-ones, or whether you find yourself needing to handwash a small stash of upcycled flats, we are all doing the best for our children and families. The important thing to take away from this week is that the option of cloth diapers CAN truly work for any family. We just need to advocate and get the information out there to the families who can be helped the most from it. Knowledge truly is power, and families can be freed from the burden of diaper need if they just have the right information and support.

Flats Challenge Day 6: The Ava Fold

Today was Day 6 of the Dirty Diaper Laundry Flats Challenge. I can't believe how fast this challenge has gone by! I told Ben today that I feel like I'm used to the hand washing routine now and if I needed to, I could totally hand wash on a permanent basis. Yes, it is hard work and it takes a half an hour of my day, but once you're used to the routine it is kind of a calming task. Today is an open topic day for the bloggers of the Flats Challenge, so I thought I would present a photo tutorial of a flat fold that I have created this week!

I really like most of the folds I have tried so far with Ava, but I have found that spraying poop off of most flat folds is a little annoying. A lot of the folds end up with fabric edges in the inside middle of the diaper, so when you have to spray off poop it is tricky to figure out where to hold the diaper to get the best spray angle. So when I started trying to design a fold I had two requirements: first, I wanted the section where poop will hit to be one smooth piece of fabric, and second I wanted to have some way of keeping poop inside the diaper so that I don't have to wash the cover every time Ava has a poopy diaper. After a lot of trial and error tonight, I came up with this fold that I think is a total winner! I hope others like it as much as I do. Let me know in the comments if anything is confusing and I will tweak the tutorial as needed.

The Ava Fold

First, start by making sure your flat is a square. Mine here is an Imagine Printed Flat and is slightly longer than it is wide, so I needed to fold down one end to get a square shape.

Next we are going to fold one corner in to the middle of the square. Before I started the Ava Fold, I folded this flat into fourths and pressed down to leave some crease marks as guidelines to help me find the middle.

In this next picture you can see some crease marks on each side of the corner that we just folded up. The sides are going to fold towards the center on these lines.

If you look at the bottom of the flat you can see that the crease is about halfway between the left side of the folded corner and the midpoint of the folded corner.

Fold the side over as shown in this next picture. The new fold line will angle out toward the top slightly.

Now fold the other side in towards the middle in the same way. You can see we've created a small triangle shape at the bottom, and the sides angle out toward the top. If you need to adjust the width of the diaper, just fold the sides in slightly more or slightly less.

Now fold the top point of the diaper down to almost meet the triangle space at the bottom. How far down you fold the top point will determine the rise of the diaper so just tweak this to fit your child.

When you first fold down the top point there will be an extra corner sticking out from the side of the diaper.

I just tucked this under to make the whole side a smooth line.

Now fold the sides in again and fan out the sides in the back. I had the sides meet in the middle to create another triangle shape, but you could overlap them if you prefer.

Then you place your baby on the flat and fold up the front of the diaper. You can see in this picture that the folded in sides have created a gusset to contain poop. When I put it on Ava I also folded the back down just a tiny bit to help with poop containment in the back also.

Then just wrap the wings around baby and fasten with a Snappi, Boingo, or pins and voila! You've folded the Ava Fold!

Here is a side shot to show how nice and trim this fold ended up being.

And a blurry back fold. It's hard to get a clear shot when your toddler won't stop dancing!

Here is the Ava Fold underneath a Blueberry Coverall.

And the side view with the Coverall on.

And that's the Ava Fold!