You can do a lot of changing in 10 years.

Ten years ago I had just had Zach. I didn’t put much thought at all into parenting stuff, and I didn’t put any thought at all into labor. I didn’t put thought into breastfeeding or circumcision or vaccinations or co-sleeping or, well, anything. I had just been trying to get through my junior year of high school and praying that he stayed in until I was done with the school year and that, please Lord, my water wouldn’t break while I was at school.

After he was born we did breastfeeding and bed sharing. Zach was such a sweet and easy baby and he made my first year as a mom such a breeze. I never put thought into if were going to be breastfeeding or not. I was raised seeing my mom breastfeed my younger siblings and my aunt breastfeed my cousins; it’s what moms did, so, I did. He was exclusively breastfed until I returned to school in the fall, and continued breastfeeding until he was about one. My favorite time of the day was coming home from school and nursing him. It wasn’t until years and years later that someone pointed out how odd it was for a 17 year old high school student to go into breastfeeding so unquestionably and continue doing it for a year. He also continued to sleep in my bed until right before Ryan was born.

Four months away.

I've had breaks from the blog before - generally brought on by not having internet for a weeks or a month. However, I do believe, actually I know, that this is honestly the first time that I have ever been away from the blog for roughly four months.

It isn't like I woke up one morning and decided, "Hey, I don't want to blog. I have nothing to write about." No, it's more like I woke up one morning, days before the boys got out of school, and I no longer had internet (or cable, but I can honestly make due without that most of the time). It was supposed to be a short break, I was promised a week, maybe two. Somehow that week or two has turned into four months. FOUR MONTHS. I die a little each time I think about that. The problem is, for some reason, the company that we go through is expecting us to pay a bit over $500 to get it back on and even paying a little on it at a time (and a few big amounts) we still haven't been able to pay it all down to get it back on. And of course that isn't even the only big huge bulk thing we're paying on. We're also working on paying down the labor/delivery cost for our doctor, paying him for the regular visits, and all of the testing that for some reason our insurance is paying zero to zilch on. Lets just say that right now internet is not the priority.

(No matter how much I wish it was.)

Wordless Wednesday–Our Morning

What are your mornings like?

Flats and Handwashing Challenge–So you failed it.

I have to tell you, as much as I hated handwashing the diapers last year, I loved the flats and handwashing challenge. I loved using the flats, but most of all I loved the feeling of accomplishment when I finished it and could say “Hey, I did that, and it wasn’t that bad.” All year long I looked forward to doing it again this year. I still had most of our flats (John took a liking to the red ones for kitchen towels) and I even went and picked up a new package of white ones. I had the fold that works best for Mason perfected since flats were my go to diapers during the summer last year for playing in the hose and on diaper laundry day (so that they could just be handwashed the next day so that I didn’t get stuck with a dirty diaper sitting around until the next wash day).

The only way that I can keep a secret.

I hate secrets. Really. It may be something small and silly that I wouldn’t normally even give two thoughts to, but if you tell me that I can’t talk about it it will be all that I can think about. Big secrets? They KILL me.

One of the things that I have noticed is that when I have something big going on in my own life, and it isn’t something that I can really blog about, it is all that I then want to blog about. I can’t get inspired or motivated to blog about anything else. Thus, I tend to just not blog so that I don’t have to worry about it. As you might have noticed, I haven’t been blogging.

And this is why.

February 2014 Project Life Pages

I’ve been done with February’s pages for weeks, but just never got around to blogging them. Actually, I’m almost done with March’s now too!

For February, like January, I used Traci Reed’s Pocket Life collection to make my pages. I also use her Stitched Grids and Libby Pritchett’s 2014 Calendar 3x4 card templates to create the calendar cards for each month.

Oh, the 2013 Project Life tab at the top of the blog has been replaced with one for this year. If you want to look through my pages for last year there is an icon on the side of the blog that says “2013 Project Life Pages” it takes you to the same place the old tab did.

Now… for the pages!

The Mason Sleep Journals–Nights 1&2

Remember when I said that my goal was to get Mason sleeping through the night, without nursing and in his own bed before he turned two? Yeah… that never happened. I started working on it, but then he decided to cut in all of those pesky eye teeth and, well, it ended up not happening. On his birthday we decided that it was time. It’s time to try this for real – no excuses – and get him out of our bed. Step one is getting him to sleep through the night without nursing. I figure if we take care of that first we’ll have better luck getting him to sleep in a room (or bed) without me.