BakerBits

Kyle and I are up to our ears in house hunting. Then we noticed we were starting to see ants crawling in the house. That only means one thing. Time for the annual Baker Bug Bombing Bonanza!!! Almost as exciting as it sounds, this consists of our yearly annhilation of the winged and regular ants. The first year we lived here I think we did it three times before wiping out all of them. The second year we only had to bomb it once. Hopefully that will be the case this year as well. Because with each additional child, bug bombing gets successively more complicated.

Order of operation:

1. Remember to buy bug bombs from Walmart.

2. Find a free day (since this happens in spring normally spring break aids us beautifully in this)

3. Find a free day with nice weather (a bit more tricky, but this year everything lined up nicely.)

4. Straighten up the entire house so that all toys or things that go into baby’s mouth (read:everything) is gathered up, covered, etc, all at the same time. (getting this done while children are all present makes things like solving the Rubix cube seem straightforward and relaxing)

5. Pack food for five people for a day out (not too bad, except that it needs to occur without said children dragging out toys you put away in step 4.)

6. Find someplace to go with the children for four hours while poisons seep through your entire house. (umm, only one is potty trained, two need a nap at this time, one can’t walk and must be carried or hauled around in a stroller if you go anyplace, and only one has an attention span of any length.)  We decided to do the city park, and the kids loved it…for two hours. Then we were kinda like…ok now what? So we wound up driving around and around and around various small towns in our area stopping at real estate signs. You want to know what sticker shock is? Drive through the nicest subdivision in town and pick up a flyer from a for sale sign and compare it to your yearly income! It’s kinda funny!

7. Return to home and have poor hubby open up doors and windows and get a nasty headache from poison residue and play with children outside for a couple hours while the house airs out. (normally children love playing outside. However, they’ve been through hard playing at the park and a looonnngngggg time in the car and the two year old didn’t get his nap as normal…)

8. Return inside and attempt to vaccuum up dead bugs before nine-month old puts them all in her mouth while wrangling all three children and comforting hubby with headache.

9. Feed cranky picky children dinner and attempt to put them all in bed so that quiet may spread its comforting arms around the house once more.

10. Watch mouse run around the living room and realize that bug bombing has not ‘killed two birds with one stone’ as you had hoped it would, and prepare for another round of Pest Elimination in the Baker house.

I recently discovered PaperbackSwap.com. Ohhh la la. The part of me that loves to get lost in books rejoiced. Suddenly I was browsing through books that I had forgotten I’d loved as a child. This was followed by an awesome score at a thrift shop where I got 10 classic childrens novels at only fifty cents each. So I have been busy reading. The Jungle Book, The Last of the Really Great Wangdoodles, Holes, and some I discovered as an adult like Dune and Rebecca. I lurves reading, and I’m very fast at it. I can whip through 100 pages in less than an hour. I gobble up books like a madwoman. Then I discovered Karen Kingsbury writes some pretty fantastic Christian fiction, and I read the first in a series one Monday, and couldn’t wait to get back to church the next Sunday to check out the second in the series. The third Sunday I checked out the last three books in the series and read them in less than 48 hours. Sleep is sometimes just ignored for the sake of finishing. It’s just not that interesting sometimes. Anyway, if you are a bibliophile too, please feel free to recommend me your favorites. Cause I’ve been on a reading streak.

Children? I have children? Oh yeah, the little rugrats in the post below. I remember them now. For the busy mommy I am, I need to escape sometimes. And escaping can be very expensive or complicated, unless you can do it for free in your own home. Reading qualifies. And most of the stuff I’ve been collecting will be great to stock my bookshelves with for my own children to read when they no longer rip up half the stuff on their own bookshelves. My kids love books too. We don’t have a television set, so reading is our fun adventuring time. Toys can be outgrown, but you know what? I still love reading The Cat in the Hat and Skippyjon Jones and Little Critter and Richard Scarry. There is a certain appeal to a well-written book that transcends age.

And if you haven’t checked out Paperback Swap you should, and let me know if you do, because if you sign up and say I recommended you I will get some free books.   The way it works is that you swap books with people who list them on the website. You list books you  have available, somebody requests a book you have, you send it to them. You get two free credits for listing 10 books, and with each credit you can request a book from somebody else. So basically, it’s like getting books for the cost of shipping a book you have. I have been using it for a couple months and it’s a blast. Also a good way to clear out my bookshelf of books I am no longer interested in.  (Some books are just a once-through book, other books I read over and over and horde them and will maybe share with my kids if they are lucky!)

To quote a book I read recently with Todd,

“‘Here’s the secret!’ Sam decreed,

‘Readers win and winners read!’”

Peter’s shirt says, “Don’t blame me, I was born AWESOME!”

My tough little man. He keeps it cool.

NOM NOM NOM Nothing quite so delicious as Mommy’s necklace

It’s bean fun! These are dried kidney beans. It’s amazing how long toddlers can be occuppied pouring things from one container into another. Cheap fun!

Todd and Viv, notice the smear of green next to Todd’s eye, that was from some paint markers. I thought it was awfully thoughtful of him to coordinate his messiness with his shirt color.

This smile is the happy smile that comes from teething on your favorite sippy cup (sorry it’s blurry!):

Reading Dr. Suess with Papi, I think this one is Fox in Socks. Kyle and I compete with reading to see who can give characters the funniest voices. The only rule is that you can’t crack yourself up while reading, or it really loses the effect.

Last August Kyle and I started working on something rather big, owning a house. We finally got it all in order and got pre-approved for financing last week. So now we are on the hunt for a house.  The bottom line is, we want a four bedroom (or three BR with a fourth room that could be used as a bedroom) in the Lebanon area.  However, there is very little that is simple about buying a house, and even though we know the amount we have to work with, having it all come together becomes rather complicated with the options. For example, we are considering putting a manufactured home on a piece of property. Then we have to choose both property and home.  We’ve looked at properties and talked to people. It’s kind of an emotional roller coaster, getting excited about an option, then finding out for whatever reason it wouldn’t work.  And this is just week one. I’m sure it will all work out wonderfully in the end, even though it seems sometimes our options aren’t lining up the way we’d like them to. Please pray that we will use this process to bring glory to God’s kingdom, and remember that our true home is in heaven, anything we have here is just a waiting room.

I get all sorts of reactions when I tell people I have three children under four.  “You’ve got your hands full” being the most common. So when I’ve got my hands full, how do I manage to cook, clean, and otherwise do housewife actions? I free up my hands.

Attachment parenting says that baby is happiest when being held. Babies agree. Many babies believe this so strongly that they never want to be put down. But there are dishes to be washed, laundry to be folded, and other children who need to eat and have diapers changed (and about four million other things to do. Have you ever heard the expression, “A mother’s work is never done”? Well, it’s true). So how do I get anything done?

Kangaroos are amazing creatures. First of all, like most Australian creatures, they are weird looking. Instead of running on four legs, or climbing, or flying, this creature gets around by hopping. Perhaps the best thing about the kangaroo is its pouch. A baby kangaroo is born about the size of your average dried kidney bean. Teeny, and completely helpless. So the baby kangaroo’s first order of business after being born is to crawl inside it’s mothers pouch where her milk is and do nothing but eat and be carried around for nine months until making ventures outside the pouch.  Mother kangaroo, when needing to get around, simply does, popping her joey back in the pouch as necessary. Baby is worn rather than carried, and mama’s hands are free to do whatever she needs to do.

Babywearing can be done by human beings too! We have to use baby carriers of material, being not born with pouches as kangaroos are. When I had Todd I had no idea about the idea of babywearing. Somebody gave me a sling but it was incredible weird to wear and I just felt he was going to fall out of it. I had no resources to check and see that I was doing it incorrectly. I remember buying a Snugli secondhand and trying that out, but it had no greater strap support than the average purse and wearing a 14 pound infant was incredible uncomfortable about about 15 minutes. It was also vastly awkward to get the baby in and out of. So we used it a couple times and passed it on at a yard sale. However, when I had Peter, my second, I was suddenly faced with a baby that needed to be held all the time and much more work now that I had a toddler and a baby! I started looking on the internet and was amazed at all the choices. I bought a Moby wrap, which is a wrap made out of a t-shirt like material. The picture at left is Kyle wearing Peter in the Moby.

So that began my life as a babywearing mama. I am so glad I found this out, because it has saved my sanity and helped me bond with my babies. You can research benefits of wearing babies, but to sum it up in my life: Babies always want to be held, and wearing a baby lets you hold them in all sorts of circumstances. Babywearing has made me feel more connected and happier as a mother. Wearing my babies helps me keep them out of danger from their older siblings. Having my little one in a baby carrier helps me when baby is fussy and dinner needs to be made at the same time. Wearing my babies gives them a more interesting view of the world around them and gives me complete supervision of them. I can go shopping and not put my baby in a dirty shopping cart seat, and I can easily take baby where there are no shopping carts and wear bringing a stroller is not practical, like on the beach or in a thrift shop. I can handle multiple babies at once by having Peter in a simple umbrella stroller and Vivienne in the baby carrier. Babywearing frees up my hands to get work done and lets my baby relax in the comforting presence of mommy. There are many ways to wear babies, and many many different kinds of baby carriers. I’ll go over a few and show off some of the carriers I’ve used.

Like I said, the first we used was the Moby wrap. A wrap is basically a big long piece of material. The way it holds a baby is you tie it around you and insert the baby inbetween the fabric and yourself. Learning to wrap a baby was as easy as learning to tie a shoe, and with some practice Peter became my little kangaroo baby. Even Kyle could and did do it. The wrap distributed his weight evenly and no more achy shoulders! I found the website thebabywearer with details of all sorts of babywearing and suggestions from experienced moms.  Eventually he got heavier and the stretchier material stretched too much, so I bought a mei tai, pictured above in front of our Christmas tree.  A mei tai is a rectangle of material with four straps sewn, one to each corner. Two tie around your waist and two tie around your shoulders and the baby. The mei tai was easier to use and allowed me to wear Peter on my back as well as my front. Peter loved being worn and I could get things done! It was amazing. The picture to the right is me wearing Peter on my back while pregnant with Vivienne. Somebody gave me a ring sling (left) and that worked great for when I was just popping in and out of the store, Peter could just pop into the carrier and ride on my hip. It consists of a long piece of material gathered in one place by a ring. The ring sling is adjustable, but also very quick to use. Babies can be worn lying down to sleep or upright as you see Peter.

In late pregnancy I had done more research and wanted to try out a couple more different carriers. I decided to try a pouch sling, which is a very basic, easy to use, and  preferred favorite among those who love to wear their newborn babes. It is a single size, usually non-adjustable piece of material that is used much like a ring sling. Vivienne, upon turning two months old, really preferred to be worn upright, but since I had lost weight the mei tai, which normally worked great with Peter, was too wide in the shoulders for me and uncomfortable to wear Viv on my front. So I found a place running a sale on soft structured carriers and I got my Beco Butterfly. A soft structured carrier is like a professional hiker’s backpack compared to a fanny pack. It’s very comfortable, ergonomically contoured, and holds weight so well I can still wear Peter in it comfortably even though he is around 30 pounds now. It is a rectangular piece of material like the mei tai with padded straps that buckle around the waist and strollers, fantastic at distributing the weight on the wearer’s body so that any one area doesn’t feel too much strain. Vivienne faces almost all of life outside the home from the Beco, which can be worn on front or on the back. It was definitely the most expensive of the carriers, but it gets the most use by far. It worked when she was 10 pounds and works now when she is closer to 20, and as I said earlier it works with 30 pound Peter.

Now that Vivienne is almost 9 months old, she is getting around on the floor like a little crawling machine and learning to pull up on things. I don’t wear her around the house as much because she wants to conquer the world herself, but there are still times she is fussy when I need to clean, or she wants a good veiw when I vacuum, and she winds up in the carrier again. However, when we go out I use the pouch sling or the Beco a ton still. She rides on my back in Walmart and together we can go just about anywhere.

Peter on my back in the Beco:

Multitasking at its cutest:

Vivienne in an adjustable pouch sling:

Vivienne on my back in the Beco

\

Extra thanks to Miss Stacy who took a lot of the Peter birthday shots whilst Mommy wrangled the cake, candles and implements of ignition…

The Cake: there is a story here. It was supposed to be a much grander effect. Do not decorate cakes while watching Jim Carrey. I think it’s bad luck. Kyle and I were watching A Series of Unfortunate Events. Bad juju! I could not get the icing the lovely dark green I wanted, it turned out more ‘Shrek’ green. Then the chocolate crumbs were everywhere, surging through the icing and causing mayhem everywhere. I didn’t have enough icing to do the cool leaves and all I wanted to with my jungle theme. Kyle wound up doing the base  icing and I just felt like a creative flop. So I added the zoo creatures on top and was very grateful that Peter is not a cake critic. It tasted much better than it looks, trust me.

The Presentation: Peter was actually much more interested in coloring his gigantic new color book than eating, but he obliged us because he’s a sweetie like that. Hee hee. Peter loves singing Happy Birthday and has been practicing for weeks, but when everyone sang he was very quiet, listening, and happy.

Que Merda! The Bolivian tradition at birthdays is that the birthday person must take the first bite of cake. It never fails that some mischievous relative appears behind them at the last minute and ‘helps’ them take a bite, and the birthday person usually winds up with a great deal of frosting and cake in their face crevices. With Peter, being his first time biting the cake, we did a cupcake not to be too overwhelming. Todd and Papi helped him and Peter was  a great sport.

In other Baker adventures:

Todd and Peter thought it would be fantastic to pile up all the toys in one big pile near the window:

Vivienne is learning to pull up and practiced on her carseat. She managed to pull all the way to standing holding on to the top handle.

And she loves loves loves to splash in the bathtub. Look at that lovely chubbiness! Her brothers love to splash so much it would be a hazard to bathe all three children in the same place. So we have a girl bath and a boy bath, Papi does the boys bath, and prepares for the hurricane weather it entails. I get to stay dry and bathe the girl.

I love messy high chair baby shots! On the menu: Sweet Tender Golden Potatoes.

And here is what happens when the camera has been in a cold room and you bring it into a warm room, frosted lens and an interesting effect:

Finally, some frogs, who all came in a package together like so: It seems they are portraying a family here with big green frog being the daddy and the little frogs being the children, but there are two mommies? Kyle suggested it was meant to be Jacob with Rachel and Leah, but Rachel only had two of her own and the two concubines helping make more offspring are not included in the package. So anyway, not your typical American family, but they sure are cute!