Top 20 things I have found in my baby’s mouth

I wonder whats found it’s way in there this time!

Warning for all first time parents: If your child has gone quiet, your first thought should NEVER be ‘Oh aren’t they playing nicely’ it should always be, what are they doing/ breaking/eating/sticking up their nose or in their ear!

Having older kids with a crawling baby in the house can be a nightmare. No matter how much you baby proof, someone (and I’m not just blaming the kids here) will leave something laying around that is likely to end up in baby’s mouth. Obviously the more people in the house, the more likely this will happen. Add a seven year old boy into the mix and your problems treble!

Here are my top 20 things I have had to fish out of my son’s mouth over the last month or so, there are more but these things seem to find their way in there most often:

1. A googly eye
2. A pair of Lego figure legs
3. A shoelace
4. A Lego figure’s hair
5. Car keys
6. homework
7. The end of the phone charger, luckily not plugged in!
8. A piece of liquorice
9. A pebble from the beach
10. Batteries
11. k’nex pieces
12. a Lego figure
13. a rubber eyeball
14. an entire baby sock
15. hair bobbles
16. A Lego block
17. coins
18. mobile phones
19. rings
20. a nappy nippa

 

You might be seeing a slight trend in the Lego department. I can tell LV a million times a day to not bring his Lego downstairs but alas it always finds it way.  Although of course he never brings it, the Lego figures must magically come to life and carry the blocks downstairs before scattering themselves in pieces around the floor!

 

What things have you found your child eating that they shouldn’t? Or is yours one to stick things up their nose or in their ear? Let me know below.

 

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.

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!

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.

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?

 

 

Baby’s got bite

At the grand old age of (almost) nine months O finally has a tooth! The photo isn’t the best as I was trying to hold him and take it but you should just be able to see it.

Out of all of my babies he is the oldest to be getting his first tooth and you have even been able to see them inside his gums for weeks just hanging around, not in any rush to come through.

I should have realised something wasn’t quite right with him earlier in the week, he’s had slightly pink cheeks and has been chewing extra hard on his thumb. But he has been pretty good, and believe me I have had some horrendous teethers! E used to get a blood blister on her gum with every single new tooth that was about to pop out 😦

So fingers crossed, if this one is anything to go by , we shouldn’t have too bad a time at least with these first front ones anyway. Although by saying that I have now jinxed myself and he will scream for a week straight on the next one, guess I’d better get the cooling teething toys in the fridge pronto!

I have actually been dreading his teeth coming though. He isn’t the gentlest of feeders at the best of times and has often bitten my nipple with his gums hard enough to make me squeal, then him cry because I squealed. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he has gone past that stage, the last few days he has been blowing raspberries and trying to chat with the boob still in his mouth, very messy with the splashing milk but much less biting involved.

What ages have your babies had their first teeth? Or are you still waiting for them to arrive? Let me know your teething stories 🙂

The problem with having lots of kids

I had a commenter on my last post who coined some phrases that really got me thinking.
This is what the moon is a naked banana had to say:

Collective untruth is difficult to deal with. And that is one of the wonderful

things about siblings. It’s one in, all in.

and

 ‘Similar to collective persuasion, or collective bribery, or … or ….

You’re lost once you have more than 2 children!’

And honestly? I think they are right! As much as our four oldest bicker and squabble they do stand together against their father and I at least once or twice a day.  What am I supposed to say when they are all denying that they even took the milk out of the fridge let alone left it open and sitting on the work surface. Or when someone has tipped cereal all over the table and not cleaned it up, yet amazingly nobody tipped the cereal. Deny, deny, deny really does seem to be their mantra.

I hate to imagine how many times I have been bombarded with 4 separate but simultaneous conversations and then 5 minutes later when I’ve had time to process the situation find that I have agreed to something without even realising it! My reaction is usually wonder and awe at how they manage it rather than annoyance.

Then there are the times they ask me when I am obviously stressed or under pressure and agree just to get them to stop pestering! I often don’t realise of course until they feel that it is time to cash in on my promise of a trip somewhere, or ice cream, or whatever else took their fancy.  They can keep these promises quiet for months and spring them on me at any given moment that conversation usually goes a little like this:

Them: Mami, you remember you told us we could go to THAT PLACE?

Me: Ummm?*runs through every conversation we’ve had over the last two weeks*

Them: Well, Dadi said that we’re not doing anything tomorrow, and the weather is going to be nice.

Me: Right?

Them: And you did promise, so can we go? Please? Huh? Pleeeeaaase?

Me: When did I promise? I don’t think I remember saying that.

Them: Yes, you remember that time when the dinner was burning, and the baby was screaming, and you were helping LV make that school project, while juggling.

Okay, I might have exaggerated there a bit but you get the picture. The planning they put into these conversations is fantastic they manage to ask only for things that are suitable for a  given day, for example the local country park on a warm day or an indoor activity on rainy days.  They even manage to play us off against each other. Plus they never, ever forget! I have been reminded of these promises I apparently made years and years earlier!

My husband and I often find ourselves looking at four pairs of puppy eyes asking for something, the ‘oh please Mami, we promise ….(insert any good deed imaginable) if you give/let us…’  When we send them away with a resounding ‘No!’ We will eventually get them trickling back one after the other over the next few hours, or days with their individual pleas.

There are even times that they know when to pull out the big guns. What is this secret weapon you ask? It is none other than the baby brother!

For almost seven years, until O was born, LV was the baby. If there was some stubborn situations that hubby and I refused to budge on he would be the one sent down with his quivery bottom lip and big brown eyes.  Softly whimpering things like ‘but I think I would have really liked to go there’ or ‘I really do like ice cream Mami!’

Luckily for me he has had a bit if a growth spurt, and a big boy haircut, over the last 6 months and of course he is now no longer the baby so his effect is waning but I’m sure they will all train O well, in the ways if parental wrangling. They have had a trial run with LV so they will now know all the best tricks and I’m sure he will be a formidable ally for them.

Now don’t think we are push overs. Yes our children outnumber us but they rarely actually get their own way on things we don’t want to do or give them anyway.  But these kids really do have some power of persuasion in their little gang.  And that is great!But it seems their loyalties only run so deep.  They will defend each other to the last, unless of course they have actually been caught out doing something then they will instantly try and blame it on someone else.  Also, I actually brought this subject up with them the other day and E said that, one day they should all claim it was them, just as a change, they them all looked at each other and decided that was a bad idea as what if they said it first and no one else did too, so I feel there may be chance for me to use a little reverse psychology in the future!

So how about you? Do you often find yourselves being outwitted by your children? Do they use their collective powers to persuade, or even trick, you into doing or giving them something? I’d love to know we are not alone! Let me know in the comments.

 

I am linking up this post with @twinmumanddad’s binkylinky.  This is a great linky for those who have been blogging for less than a year.

Waiting For Spring to Set Us Free

Over the winter our house can get a little stressful, a lot messy and really, really noisy with our four older children stuck in close confinement for months on end. Lot’s of games are played, books read and TV is watched. Teasing is rife and levels of sarcasm are at their highest.

Come this time of year we are all so grateful for the first signs of spring and the weather staying dry for more than five minutes at a time. They are always rubbing each other up the wrong way and even the nicest of games often end in tears and they are bursting to get out of the house to run free and visit their friends.

This year has been even harder having a young baby in the house. We have been less able to just get out of the house whenever, even to go for a simple walk. Just seeing daylight has been a luxury, they go to school and it’s dark, they come home from school and it’s dark. The weekends always seem to have the worst weather making it impossible to find somewhere suitable for all of them without spending a fortune.

Over the years we have learnt to let the noise drown into the background. So much so that it has gotten to the point that the kids have to make sure I’m actually looking at them know I have heard them 100%. I know, bad, bad mami. But seriously,  have you ever sat in a room filled with kids trying to be quiet? The room is far from silent. One child is quiet, the sniffing is almost inaudible, as is the pencil on paper, the turning of pages, the whispering under their breath as they read. Times that by four and you get a hell of a noisy room. One will start tapping their pencil on the table or humming a song and within moments we are having a full blown rendition of the Frozen soundtrack, or the latest One Direction song.

Its lucky we have never been the type of family to be overly quiet when a baby is asleep.  Yes we try to avoid loud bangs and shouting but if they happen its not normally an issue.  The best thing to be in this house is a heavy sleeper, we have one light sleeper and she rarely gets a decent night poor thing!

So now we wait for spring.  Our spring cleaning has started, we are decorating and we wait to throw open the windows and let all the mustiness out and the fresh air in.  We wait to be able to go out and enjoy the beautiful nature that we are so lucky to be surrounded by and introduce it all to the newest member of our family.

Mostly we wait for the chance to be more than six feet from another human being.

How about you? Have you about had enough of winter now and are excited for spring to arrive?  Let me know below.