Let’s talk cloth: It’s real nappy week!

Have you ever considered using cloth nappies? Well you are in luck, as this week (Monday April 28th till Sunday May 4th) is Real Nappy Week!  All over the country there will be events organised to raise the awareness of real nappies and hopefully get those who are curious about cloth but wary, to give it a go.

I will be celebrating by starting this little series of posts I think I will name it ‘Let’s Talk Cloth’ all about my experiences of real nappies with my two youngest . Yes that’s right only my youngest, I confess, I was once a disposable user.

I had always planned on using cloth, I’d even bought some terry squares from Mothercare when I first found out I was pregnant. That was until I had my first scan and found out I was having twins. I chickened out.

Then when our next was born just two years later and with the thought of having three in nappies I baulked again.

Now if I’d have had the internet all those many moons ago giving me access to items other than thin terry squares, blunt pins and plastic pull-up pants I may have stuck to my guns. But the sadly the lure of disposables was too great.

So roll on another three years, yes we crazily had four children under five, and we now had a computer with internet and only the baby would be in nappies. This was going to be our last baby (until we decided to have O of course but that’s a different story!) I was experiencing quite a bad pregnancy(again a story for another time) so I spent a lot of time sitting trawling the internet to take my mind off it.

The whole world of cloth nappying (is that a word?) opened up in front of my eyes. Things like nappy nippers, fancy PUL wraps, wool covers and fleece liners.  I was sold, there was no way was I going back to disposables! And you know what? I loved it! From nervously wrapping that first muslin on my tiny newborn right through to wrangling the chunky unbleached terry squares on my big, fidgety toddler I truly loved it.

Choosing to use cloth nappies can be a scary and overwhelming experience but there’s so much information out there now. A quick internet search will bring up plenty of sites offering up this information but I recommend you go visit the Go Real website for all the advice you will need and more!

There are also plenty of savings to be had with many online retailers having special sales and offers just for this week.  I will be stocking up on some bamboo wetwipes and investing in some night nappies as O has decided he would like to become a heavy wetter, but only at night!

I’d love to hear from you if you use cloth, or have any questions about cloth. I will be writing more in this series soon, let me know what you want to read about.

How we found out our son is colourblind

As a toddler LV was never one to sit and colour. This came as a shock to me after having three girls who could be kept occupied for hours with a new colouring book. He enjoyed painting but looking back I think it was more the messiness rather than the result that attracted him. I never considered it an issue though. I just figured he was a boy so why wouldn’t he be different to the girls?

When it came to learning colours he was consistently getting them wrong. But being as he got some colours right I didn’t concern myself too much. I also thought that having to learn them in English and in Welsh may be why he was a little behind although he could spell his name and count to ten in both languages it was an obvious barrier. He was an August baby so was barely three when he went into full time school. I figured once he started it would all fall nicely into place so stopped badgering him about it. It was a relief for us both I think.

Once he started school and without him needing to kept occupied for all the hours that they girls were out of the house I didn’t really give it much more thought until it was nearing Christmas. One if the activities they had been doing was a colour table. Each morning all the children would bring in an item of that weeks colour. In return they would get the most prized possession for a three year old. A gold star!

I must admit when they were little school mornings were manic. There were four children aged three to seven who all needed help with something. I would often be sending him off to the toy box with one sister to grab something the right colour while I was strapping the other two into the car.  On more than one occasion I have seen me having to drive round the block to run in and get something if we had forgotten completely and there wasn’t anything the right colour on the floor of the car.

Nearing the end of term it was ‘purple week’.  Mornings were getting less stressful as we got used to the routine and I actually remembered to send him to get his item early. I had to send him back three times with blue toys. I kept repeating myself

‘This is blue, glas. We need purple, porffor!’ After the third failed attempt I said ‘Look, here’s a barney toy, why don’t you take that?’ But he refused,

‘Na Mami, I need porffor, Barney is glas!’

‘No love, Barney is purple, you need purple.’

Then everything changed, it was as if a cloud had been lifted and that big lightbulb over my head suddenly pinged on with the frustrated uttering of four little words from a confused three year old.

‘But purple is blue!’

I opened my mouth to say something but wasn’t sure what to say. I just hugged him, smiled and gave him back one of his blue blocks and drove them to school.  I sent him with his blue block to the colour table and watched him place it amongst all of the purple cars, blocks, bunches of plastic grapes and a myriad of other objects. He smiled proudly at himself and went to play.  I caught his teachers eye and asked for a word.

I explained the blue block and asked her please to give him a star even though it was the wrong colour.  As I talked it was as if her lightbulb had flickered on too.  She had noticed herself how he was still unsure of some colours, she told me not to worry and that she would do some little exercises with him.

By the end of the week I was handed a sheet of paper with all of these coloured squares.  The idea was that she had coloured in one square and he needed to pick the right crayon to colour the square below. No names of colours were mentioned at all. He had some right but there were definite issues with some colours.  I will try and dig out these sheets(he ended up doing a few that year)and show you all.

By the time they broke up for Christmas I was sure he was colour blind, or colour deficient to call it by it’s proper name.  I had to stop the girls pestering him to tell them the colour of things, even though I was fascinated myself. It was another six months before he was due to see the eye doctor for his glasses and they confirmed he probably was even though he was too young even for the children’s tests.

But he kept smiling though it all(by the way he thought his navy school jumper was black until he was six!)

A lot of Wenglish gets spoken in our house, this is a mixture of Welsh and English in the same sentence, sometimes even the same word! Just so you don’t think I’m typing gobbledegook in this post you will find three words na=no, glas=blue and porffor=purple.  Hey I bet you never thought you would learn some Welsh today did you!

I will be writing some more in depth posts in the future about life with a colour blind child, if you have any questions let me know below.  I’d love to hear from you also if you are colour blind or have a colour blind child too.

Word of the week 2/5/2014

I have really struggled to find a word that sums up our whole week. But one thing that all of my children have in common this week is:

I know ‘You’re grasping at straws there Katie’ I hear you exclaim, but bare with me. Almost each day this week has had a foot related issue!

On Sunday E and Ff reminded me, after more than a week off school, that they needed new school shoes as theirs were broken. This involved me arriving in Asda at 3.30 with announcements blaring over the tanoy that ‘The store will be closing in 30 minutes’ if you have never had the misfortune of clothes or shoe shopping with teenage girls I envy you. I had two 13 year olds who were insisting that there must be something better somewhere else. After 20 minutes I thrust the two pairs that they were least disgusted by at them and managed escape.  O had to go out with just socks on his feet and without his little soft leather shoes on as one had disappeared.

Monday LM played football. Okay that may not be a big deal for some, but LM suffers from a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome-Hypermobility Type.  This means that she is extremely flexible in pretty much all of her joints making them unstable. She can literally fall and twist her ankle whilst standing still! She also suffers a lot of pain due to this condition. I won’t go into the finer details in this post as I have some planned for the future but needless to say her exploits on the football field left us with a very sore and teary girl by bedtime. We found one little shoe in the toy box.

Tuesday her legs and feet were so painful that she had to miss a day of school, I kept her dosed up well with painkillers.  Tuesday was also the day that LV came to us at bedtime complaining that his foot hurt. When I looked at his big toe the edge of his nail had cracked and the skin was red and swollen. It took me 30 minutes to clean it up and to trim some of the nail that was sticking up and catching in his socks. The last thing he needed was to rip it out when he pulled hi socks off! We thought we had found the other shoe, alas, someone had merely moved the first one so O was still shoeless.

Wednesday. Hurrah! We finally found the other shoe and O’s little toes can stay warm outside again! It was slowly being eaten by the sofa so I’m pretty lucky that I lost those keys and was looking there! LM twisted her ankle coming down the stairs which led to another bout of tears and round of painkillers. I checked the boots that she has from the hospital and found that she has bent out the stiffners again, these are supposed to help keep her ankles straight, which might explain the extra fally downness(not the scientifically accepted term) she’s been experiencing lately.

Thursday, O really is finding his feet. He’s been pulling himself up and cruising the furniture for a while but in bounce and rhyme he was actually walking whilst holding my hands, he doesn’t have the balance for just one hand but he was really trying to march around saying hello to everyone and break my back in the process. I think he’d had enough by the time we’d gone into mothers and toddlers and was happy enough crawling at lightening speed everywhere (and I mean everywhere) again.

I am writing this on Thursday night but I have big ambitions for my feet tomorrow. I plan on putting them up for a rest. Of course O will probably have something different to say about that!

Do you have one simple word that sums up your entire week? Pop on over to The Reading Residence every weekend and join in with this great linky!

Easter Bonnets

So yeah, I was meant to post this last week but with the run up to the girls’ birthday and Ff being poorly I didn’t get the chance. But the two L’s worked so hard on them I wanted to show them off anyway!  Of course we did them very last minute so we had a costume change into jammies midway through while they were waiting for turns and the photos are a bit scarce as I was trying to do about 137 things at once!

We started off with some really stiff paper plates, not the cheap budget ones, these cost more than I would have liked but it’s my own fault for leaving it till last minute! We then got one of our bowls, which we checked fit over their heads, and drew a circle to cut out. The plates were so stiff neither got very far without me thinking they would slip and chop off a digit so I did this bit of cutting.

LM needed hers yellow so she painted hers, (she has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Hypermobility Type and struggles to hold pens or pencils hence the odd way she’s holding her brush)

We had cut some A4 card lengthways into strips and *very carefully* using the glue gun stuck them together. We used one of the pieces of the plates to protect the table, I’m sure you could find something much better than this though!

 

 

I tried to tell him he just needed to decorate it, but he wasn’t having any of it so I guessed we should finish it properly! We pulled the plate over the top and bent the edges up.  We then glued these ends down. It was a bit fiddly but once they were all bent into place it was easier to work on the ones closest to the plate and work your way to the outer ones.

Poor LM gave up waiting for hers to dry so she brought out the big guns, fair play it did the trick.

I had some foam sheets and glitter glue pens so using some cookie cutters they pressed the shapes of an egg and a chick (we also had a bunny) into the foam, cut them out and decorated.  They stuck a few fluffy chicks around and we also had some other bits to stick on.  Can you tell what their hats are meant to be? These were two very proud but very tired hatmakers!

Here’s a close up. I think we should have let the glitter glue dry a little as we had a few drips but they were soon remedied with a cottonbud.

I wasn’t sure how the strips of card would look but I liked how they turned out.  You could use these as a base for any type of hat, you could even weave things like patterned paper and ribbon around the strips of card. Or even make the strips themselves out of material I guess. I can write a proper tutorial with better pictures for the hat if anyone would like me to.

 

Did you make any Easter bonnets this year? I hope you were a bit more prepared than I was. Let me know

Why I don’t like disposables

This weekend O has been wearing disposable nappies/diapers.  I now remember why I hate them.

Let me first explain why he was wearing them.  With Ff being really poorly and developing this rash over her face I thought it best to be prepared for the worst and buy some disposables on Saturday morning just so I knew no matter where O was and who he was with there would be something clean for him to wear, specially as we were on wash day and there were barely any clean nappies left.

It took me ages to figure out what brand and size to buy, I settled on the Pampers size 4. Of course I also bought some wetwipes too, these were Pampers sensitive.  I know I was buying from a local shop but the prices just made me want to cry and I almost didn’t get them at all.

I put him in one before I left for the hospital and the first thing I didn’t like was how skinny he looked! He is on the small side still, barely creeping his way up to the 25th centile line in his charts.  Also the only trousers he owns, apart from wool longies,  are leggings and they are all really loose on him.  There’s no big butt to make him feel solid to hold onto and to keep him in the sling, it kept sliding up over his bum.  Maybe this is why some mums don’t get on with ringslings if they don’t use cloth?  Maybe just those with slimmer babies? I’ve never really thought of it before.

So I took him with us, obviously he’s still breastfed so there was no other option.  By the time we got there I took him out of the carseat and all I could smell was urine mixed with chemicals.  This was after 20 minutes. He isn’t a heavy wetter and you couldn’t even tell he had peed, the nappy was still bone dry and didn’t even feel like it had absorbed any liquid. In all it took us 2 hours to get home and I changed him as soon as we got here.  The smell of the chemicals was quite bad by this point.  Then I cracked open the wetwipes.  I remember wetwipes smelling clean and fresh but these ones don’t. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s almost as if they have taken out the fragrance to make them ‘sensitive’ but left them smelling rather unpleasant.

Even though Ff was home she was still very ill and being as we had these nappies open I decided it was easier to use them for a few days(dh doesn’t like my Disana tie on nappies and all the pockets had been used already) plus it meant I could give the nappies an extra good wash and an extra vinegar/bicarbonate of soda wash too. Over only three days using disposable nappies we have had:

• One case of poo up the back and getting on his vest resulting in a two man job to remove said vest without smearing it everywhere.
• One case of poo leaking out the leg hole and down the inside of his trousers, I hadn’t realised when I pulled them down and managed to get it over his legs and socks, and all over me!
• Two cases of dampness by the leg holes.
• Numerous attempts to pull the nappy off
• a bin full of stinky nappies, even though they were tied up in scented bags(even more icky chemical smells!)

In all I am so glad I use cloth. I use wool covers exclusively and I haven’t had a leak or a blow out since he was tiny and exclusively breastfed, not even had so much as a case of compression wicking.  I used disposables on my first three and I can honestly say I would never go back to using them daily, but I am grateful to know I can just pick up a pack in an emergency, even if they seem like more work lol.

Do you use cloth or disposables, or maybe a bit of both? Let me know how you get on with them.

The Twins Turn Thirteen

So I was supposed to be writing today about the wonderful time my twin daughters had on their 13th birthday yesterday.  Unfortunately one of my daughters got to lunchtime and started to feel unwell.  Over the course of the afternoon she developed nausea a headache and an extremely high temperature, she woke at 5.30 this morning vomiting.  I was quite concerned about her as she had a pin prick rash over her face and called the out of hours doctor for an appointment.

The poor thing has a nasty urine infection so is now on antibiotics.  The rash is apparently from the strain of vomiting and should subside in a few days. Fingers crossed the medicine will kick in quickly and she will be able to have the cake I have put in the freezer for her.  I had surprised them by baking a swirly coloured cake and hidden it under vanilla frosting.  I hope it survives as I have never had cake in the house long enough to freeze before!

Luckily their birthday celebrations started early this year so she did manage to have some fun before she got unwell.

On Wednesday the two L’s were still in school but E&Ff had an inset day.  They have been desperate for clothes for ages as they have grown out of pretty much everything they own(thank goodness for school uniform and dark winter afternoons) so I thought it would be nice to spoil them by buying a whole new wardrobe each for them.  We spent hours trawling round Primark and managed to spend quite a fortune, I haven’t actually told dh the full total!  At 5′ 4″ and skinny as rakes they have the best of both worlds.  They are able to fit into the largest kids clothes (12-13)  and also into a size 6 in the ladies section.

On Thursday they spend the afternoon at a shopping outlet with a group of friends from school and watched the Muppets most wanted movie.  In the evening we went to a local Chinese restaurant. My parents tagged along and a friend of the girls came too.  This is a restaurant that my mum and dad go to at least once a month so all the staff know them and they even get a free bottle of wine from the owner who often sits and chats with them at the end of the night.  The kids said they were like celebrities with everyone talking to them and even knowing their names lol.

We had loads of food and everyone enjoyed, even LM who is the pickiest of eaters learnt that she likes honey glazed ribs!  I’d bought a One Direction cake which they brought out at the end and the pianist (yes a REAL pianist!) played happy birthday.  They were all fascinated by the pond in the middle of the restaurant with Koi carp in and a little bridge going over.

So we finally come to their actual birthday.  The Two L’s wanted to give them breakfast in bed and insisted that I make them pancakes. They actually sat in our bed and enjoyed American pancakes with syrup, strawberries and whipped cream which they thought was fab being as they are not allowed to eat upstairs lol.

Then they opened their gifts.  There was just a few token things being as they had all their new clothes but they were still just as excited to open their presents!

The only thing they wanted to do for their birthday was visit a small castle nearby that is close to the beach and has stepping stones going across the river. They had fun wandering around all the rooms and playing football in the moat! It was at this point Ff developed a slight headache and even though we went to the beach we didn’t stay long. I did manage to get a couple of pictures though.

Our kids usually get chose one activity that they would like to do for their birthday, this was obviously a special day as they were turning 13. How do you celebrate birthdays in your house?

Word of the Week

This is the first time that I am linking up with the ‘Word of the Week’ linky over at The Reading Residence.  I found it a few weeks ago but this is the first week I have really had a word that sums up my entire week, apart from exhausted that is! That word is:

 

Today is a bittersweet day for me.  My darling twin baby girls have turned 13 and we have officially been thrown into the world of teens, times two!

We have already had at least a year of build up to this with the tween stage, filled with the burden of impending hormones, boyfriends, hormones, girlfriends and let me tell you the girl friendships are much more complicated than any other relationship, more hormones, I think you get the picture about the hormones?

But even though we have been dealing with all the You hate me don’t you’s and But that’s not fair’s and the crying, eye rolling and sighing I fear the worst is yet to come! Any of you fellow Brits should know of Harry Enfield’s ‘Kevin’ character? Well we didn’t wake up to that this morning, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time. Before I know it, I will have two sullen faced teens, with bizarre dress senses who are incapable of rising from bed until 3pm can’t possibly be expected to do chores and who find it impossible to be polite to us.

Until that angst ridden pair arrive I will savour the moments with my, more often than not, sweet girls.  Who still have the ability to think rationally, sometimes, are often silly and gossipy and will still hold my hand and give me a kiss in public.

It is strange to think that 13 years ago I was a nervous 18 year old trying to figure out how to hold two tiny floppy babies at once and now I’m a mother of teenagers who are just creeping past me in height and shoe size and haven’t stopped yet!  But they will always be my little girls, even when they are 23, or even 53!

Do you get a little sad even though you are excited when your children reach certain milestones? Like reaching a special age, 1, 13, 18 etc? Or on the first day of primary school, secondary school, college? Let me know.

Such an annoying question!

Now before I get flack for dissing formula feeding mothers let me just make a few things clear. I have no issues with how a mother feeds their child. I have had to formula feed 3 of my children from different ages and for various reasons, which I will go into more detail at a later date.  I fully understand and support that some women choose to bottle feed from the start, that is their right. Nobody should ever be shamed or made to feel guilty for not wanting to breastfeed, or wanting to for that matter!  Okay enough of my disclaimer and onto the actual post

One of the most annoying questions I seem to be getting a lot at the moment, actually since O was born is:

‘Is he sleeping through the night yet?’

Why are people so obsessed with if my child is sleeping 12 solid hours at night? But it isn’t even the question that annoys me the most. It is the fact that when I say he wakes a couple of times to feed people automatically feel the right to presume that it is because I am still breastfeeding and if I gave him formula milk he would sleep.

Yes he probably would, but they never seem to realise that they also ask this same question to bottle feeding mothers and their only reply to if their child still wakes is usually something along the lines of:

‘Well… it will come eventually’

or

‘It’s just one of those things’

I have even heard the same woman who, a few weeks earlier had advised that I switched to bottle feeding, then have complete sympathy with a sleep deprived formula feeding mother of a 6 month old and stating that their own child still wakes up at 5am every morning for a bottle and refused to go back to sleep at the age of two!

What they don’t seem to realise (and mostly don’t give me chance to explain)  is that yes, my nine month old child wakes at 1am then again at between 4 and 5am. But he also goes straight back to sleep. I don’t mean I feed him, then we go back to sleep. I mean I pop a boob in his mouth and within a minute we are both flat out again.  In the early morning I can usually lull him back to sleep till after 7am by keeping him snuggled up close to me, feeding if he wants.

I don’t have to wake up fully, get out of bed, make a bottle, give that bottle, burp baby then try and go back to sleep.  If he is already in bed with me I don’t even have to sit up. Just turn over with him on my tummy then pop him on the other side.  Obviously if he is in his cot I have to sit up and he has stirred more but he still goes off easily.

We have our bad nights of course, as does everyone else, but I actually feel that I have the better end of the deal!

In fact, far from looking down on bottle feeding mothers, I pity them having to go down to the freezing cold kitchen to make up a bottle.  I applaud them for being sleep deprived yet managing to get on with their day even after being woken at 3am but not able to go back to sleep until 5.30am knowing that baby will probably be awake again at 6am.

To all those formula feeding mothers who wish to suggest that I, or anyone else, stop breastfeeding just to get a full nights sleep, how about you don’t? If you would still like to know if my child wakes at night ask away but please, unless you have breastfed a baby yourself, don’t offer me advice, just give me the same sympathy as you would have liked to be given yourself.

Do/did you get asked this question a lot?  Did you also get the same advice as me or similar? Or maybe you’ve had your own annoying questions or advice? I’d love to know.

A happy kitchen accident

Today I had one of those days where most things went wrong or didn’t quite go according to plan. Not to the point where I want to curl up and cry with a bucket of melted chocolate and a spoon (admit it, you would!) No, today was filled with mini annoyances like not being able to find even one pair of trousers in the shop that wasn’t too long, or O falling asleep 15 minutes before it was time to leave to pick the kids up from school.

I also had a kitchen disaster which I managed to turn around into something, actually two things, which were much more exciting than the original item!

I have been trying to save a bit of money this week and empty our cupboards at the same time by using mostly only things that we already had in the house. So after entering a few random ingredients into Google (my favourite recipe book!) I came across this recipe for chocolate cornbread.

I expect if you follow the recipe properly it would turn out lovely but I wanted to make muffins so I had something easier to pack in lunchboxes tomorrow and I had seen a few cornbread muffin recipes(not chocolate) so I figured it was doable.

Maybe the muffins would have turned out great if I hadn’t used a mini muffin tray, without cases.

And maybe they wouldn’t have stuck to the tray (and risen) if I had added the sugar and didn’t have to take the mixture back out of the pan to add the forgotten ingredient.

I may or may not have added too much sugar in my attempt at pouring into the measuring cup over the mixing bowl.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have missed out the sugar if I didn’t have a grumpy, clingy baby and rowdy kids hitting a balloon around in the background.

But hey these things happened and I still managed to make these:

and these:

So what did I do? After I got over the disappointment of flat muffins that were completely stuck to the pan and had a few quiet minutes while the kids were watching Glee, with the baby, I had an idea.

I sliced off the top of each muffin putting them on a cooling rack. I then spooned out what was left over into a bowl.

After they had all cooled, about the time it takes to feed a baby, I rummaged around for some extra ingredients:

White chocolate and Betty Crocker Vanilla Icing

They were both left over from the cakes E&Ff made for O’s christening a few weeks ago.

I spooned some of the icing into the cake crumbs mixing it all in well(it didn’t take much icing at all) and formed into truffle sized balls.  I then dipped each one into some cooled melted chocolate and put each one onto a mini muffin case to set.

With the lids I just spread one half with some of the icing and sandwiched them together. They had dried quite crispy so held their shape perfectly.

In all I am very pleased with what we eventually got. The cake balls especially, are really scrummy! I may even consider making these again on purpose, perhaps in different flavours!

I will definitely be making the chocolate cornbread again too.  It tasted really nice and the texture was lovely. I added white chocolate chips just to give it that bit of an edge but it didn’t need it. I would also make it in a baking dish and follow the recipe to the letter lol.

Do you have any funny kitchen disaster stories? What would you have done with some destroyed muffins? Let me know below 🙂

Making birthday cards with baby

Saturday was my mother’s birthday.  She has been really unwell with a nasty kidney infection and only just got out of hospital on Thursday after spending Mother’s day there. I knew just the thing that would cheer her up, homemade cards!

The kids usually make cards every year but this would be the first time O would get to make one for her 🙂

Now this isn’t his first attempt at becoming an artist, we have done finger painting and handprints before now. But the kids had already been using the watercolours to paint theirs so figured we would give it a try and not worry about dragging more stuff out of the cupboard.

Just so there was a little something extra on the card I wrote Nain on it, which is Welsh for Grandmother. At first I tried to paint his hand but he was more interested in grabbing the brush so I let him use it himself and just loaded it up with paint.

Each time I loaded the brush I put it down on the card so he would make some marks while he tried to pick it up and give him some idea of what it does.

Of course he also wanted to make himself a little more colourful!

I was lucky to have E&Ff sitting either side of him giving him a little help, lots of encouragement and plenty of praise, also to grab him when he made a beeline for the water glass while I had my hands full of camera! Seriously, if you ever want to do an in action photo shoot with babies get yourself a set of teenage twin girls as assistants!(I have a set who would gladly work for tea and cake)

In all I think it worked out quite well, we managed to get more paint on the card than the child which is always a bonus, plus he had a great time 🙂

Here he is showing off his creation

And here are all of their cards together

Needless to say my mother loved them all and they really did cheer her up. We even got to visit for a while which she hasn’t had the energy for, for a few weeks which was nice.

Do your kids like making birthday cards for family?