BeBa

This email just came in for my 8 year old from her best friend:

I know it’s not fair. I might get a DS for
X-Mas. Did you know Santa’s not real my
Mom and Dad were talking a bout him last
night.
From,
Paige

Even after that email – and you assume some discussion later that day at school – she is not questioning. We don’t even really promote Santa much these days. We do stockings, but nothing is ever labeled “from Santa,” we don’t do letters to Santa or sitting on Santa’s lap. No putting out milk and cookies. She just has decided to believe. I was the same. I remember sustaining some level of belief internally well until I was 11 or 12!

I remember riding around with my Grandma around our town on Christmas Eve when I was around that age, looking at Christmas lights (an annual tradition) and listening to Christmas music on the radio. Periodically the announcers would do the “Santa tracking” thing and I thought grown up adults wouldn’t go to such lengths if there was no Santa. Even though another part of my mind knew this just really didn’t work rationally.

I was the oldest sibling, though! It’s hard to imagine her more jaded older sibs haven’t spilled the beans, eh? I rather think they MUST have and she’s just persistent in her belief. The power of denial – and the power of believing what we WANT to believe just has to be true – even the most irrational, literal version of the myth.

WOW, I feel SO good about my accomplishment today!!!! Two problems have been driving me absolutely batshit.

1. Jake’s toys. We have a large bin in the family room that contains pretty much ALL of his toys. (What isn’t scattered randomly all throughout the house, that is.) And my SIL has donated a bunch of toys and puzzles that my niece has outgrown. Which is awesome, but they have too many pieces parts to be stored higgledy-piggledy in a bin. Consequently, we have a bunch of toys cluttering the house and Jake isn’t even really getting anything out of them.

2. Bailey’s homeschooling supplies. Out of control. I had stuff stacked on the dining room table in the living room area, stuff stacked high on my upstairs office desk, plus misc on kitchen counters and in various other places. Aside from the stressfulness of the clutter, Jake is also getting to the point where he can reach it and therefore destroy it.

Two other problems that are unrelated, but tied into the issue at hand:

3. Desktop computer (Windows) downstairs in corner of dining room SO junked up with malware that it wasn’t even useable. But last weekend, Scott reformatted the drive, installed linux and set up user accounts for all of the kids. Also added memory so it’s zippier than it used to be.

4. Bookshelf on the landing that was mostly empty and made me nervous. Even though it’s pretty much gated off from Jake right now, eventually he could figure out how to use it as a ladder to perch on the balcony wall, potentially falling to the hard tile below and killing himself. Yep, not comfortable with that location.

So today, it all just jelled. Since Scott fixed the downstairs computer, Bailey has been using it as much as possible for her school work. As a result, more of her materials were getting stacked up on the dining room table. I started thinking, man, I really need a book shelf there…. <light bulb>.

So Scott got the bookscase downstairs and anchored to the wall. I consolidated ALL of Bailey’s learning materials (and some of her sisters’, too) – as well as all the piano music that Jake can get into when it’s on the music rack – onto the bookcase. I also now have a place high up out of toddler reach to store the puzzles and sorting toys and all the other stuff with multiple, small pieces, so we can bring them down one at a time, play with them and then put them away. Huzzah! He still has a toy bin full of toys, but that’s mostly his trucks and cars and plush toys and various noisemakers, etc.

That just all worked out very nicely.

Note the toddler-proofing chairs barricading the computer. LOL Love this age.

Funny how that stuff that was taking up SO much surface space on tables and counters, hardly looks like *anything* when organized neatly on the bookcase. I even have extra space to expand into.

HM (age 11) wrote this spontaneously this afternoon (when she was supposed to be doing math homework).

No wonder it was taking so damn long to finish the assignment!

But I could hardly be frustrated with her when she wrote this awesome little baby book memento.

Jake rolled his toy eggshell, fascinated. Not for much longer, though. He soon walked over to his highchair, and played with the straps. Again, not for long. He soon decided that stretching out his onezie was much more interesting than the other two, but not for less than a minute.

Jackson, usually known as Jake was an often-distracted baby. Shoes, clothes, and toys fascinated him as far as inanimate objects. But when it came to family, Jake loved his whole family a lot. When it came to animals, Jake loved them all — at least the ones he could pet. Although he was small for his age of fifteen months, he could get into many places and make a mess anywhere, be it small or large.

Although it may seem that Jake can’t play with anyone or anything for less than a minute, this isn’t true. Jake will play with many things for quite a bit of time, until the person he was playing with left, or whatever he was playing with taken away; or he put, or threw, whatever it was into a hard-to-reach spot. And, of course, he became bored and wanted to play a different game.

After more playing and a little fussing, Jake was placed into his highchair with a graham cracker and his water. He crushed the graham cracker and threw the water on the floor. Then, he began to laugh. I guess that’s what babies do.

After making such a mess, I took him out of his highchair and he began to play again, zooming off with toys, wrestling with Bailey’s toy bear, things like that.

But, not only is Jake an active baby who loves his toys (he is digging in his toy box as I write this! ;P) he is a great listener. For example, when he threw his cup on the ground it went under the bench. A little while afterward, he wanted the cup. Mom told him to go look around his highchair. So he walked up to his highchair and began looking at it. I got his attention and pointed under the bench and told him his cup was under there. So he went under and grabbed it! I guess Jake knows more than we give him credit for. . .

Isn’t homeschooling fun? Cooking is part of Bailey’s curriculum, and today’s assignment was making Cake in a Mug! HM happened to have a half day of school today, so she joined in the fun.

It was a messy endeavor (since tweens were involved) and delicious. They made me a mug of cake, too. Homeschooling rocks!

Here’s all you do:

Microwave Cake in a Mug

adapted from Chocolate Cake in 5 Minutes

1. Assemble your ingredients:

4 Tablespoons flour
4 Tablespoons sugar
2 Tablespoons cocoa
1 Egg
3 Tablespoons milk
3 Tablespoons oil

2. Mix the dry ingredients in a mug: flour, sugar, cocoa.

3. Crack the egg into the bowl and mix it in.

4. Stir in the milk and oil

5. Microwave on high (1000 watts) for three minutes.

6. Dig in.

I had mine with some milk splashed in. A scoop of ice cream or dollop of fresh whipped cream would have been mighty fine, though. Mighty fine.

Here comes Halloween!

Oh a couple other tidbits about BFing (thank you for putting up with me – I’m working through the experience mentally and putting it all down in writing is soooooo therapeutic for me).

When I took him to the doctor on Tuesday, one of the assistants was watching me nurse him and you could see the gears grinding as she put two and two together… here’s a little 12 month old baby nursing right in front of her eyes! She just had to ask: “Has he ever had any solid foods??”

Then the GI doctor, the second day we saw him: “You understand that breastmilk alone is not enough nutrition for a baby over 9 months old, right?”

This AFTER I told him and his assistant AND the nutritionist AND the two different pediatricians in detail what his normal daily intake of solids/breastmilk was. I saw them all taking notes – does no one ever READ this stuff? No, they just look at me nursing him through a freaking illness and extrapolate that to well child care.

My god, the frustration. If I’d had another day there, I would have been saying, if you’re just going to breeze in here on your rounds, say stupid shit and leave, then don’t waste your time and MY MONEY. If you want to have a productive conversation with problem resolution and total health and wellness in mind, then grant me the courtesy of LISTENING to me when I talk, otherwise how in the hell can I take you seriously??

I despair of our health care system. Would socializing it make us even MORE powerless than we already are? That might be one for the debate thread LOL.

And on that note, I don’t even want to think about the bill we’ve incurred. <groan> So much for being out of debt….