Nursing Box Stage One

I haven't been blogging as much as usual lately, but seriously it's because we spend almost every second possible playing outside, because I know that in a few short weeks our available outside time is going to take a major hit, and my boys are probably going to have a mutiny, so I'm trying to make up for it before hand. (Don't worry, it probably won't work, more likely scenario is that they'll just be used to spending all day every day outside and then they'll be even more upset. Oh well. Can't blame a gal for trying.)

We have done a few projects though, so I'll post a couple of them here. First is our wind socks. We did these for craft day at the library. It was fun. And even Ivan could handle the coloring part.

They are pretty easy. All you need is an empty toilet paper roll, a piece of paper that fits around the toilet paper roll, streamers, small length of string, glue, and tape.

The kids colored the paper first. We wrote their names on it and all that fun stuff. When they were done with that, then you take the paper and glue it on around the toilet paper roll. Then you tape streamers to the bottom and a string to the top to hang it by. Done and done.

We hung ours up on the hooks in front of our apartment, so the boys can see them from the living room window, and anytime we get out of the car. They get super excited about it. Especially Lincoln, who has been missing his Octopus wind sock (that we made on O day) ever since the rain melted it to a pulp.

Something else we've been enjoying, although I don't have any pictures, is making birthday cards. Lincoln had been really in to cutting and glueing lately. So I let him pick a color of construction paper, then we use my cookie cutters to trace shapes on it. Then Linc gets to "cut out" the shapes. Very rarely does a shape come out whole, usually it's been snipped into 5 or so pieces by the time he's done, but oh well, we can work on that later. He puts all his shapes into a pile. When he's done cutting, I give him the glue stick and a folded piece of cardstock. He glues the shapes onto the cardstock in whatever pattern his little heart desires. He likes to put a little glue on the back, stick it to the cardstock, and then put a lot of glue on top of the shape to stick it down, just for good measure. I let him, because he's learning and because it keeps him occupied, and because glue sticks aren't that expensive. After the cardstock has dried, we color it with markers and make it into a birthday card to give away to whoevers birthday is coming up. I feel like that way the supplies we used doing the card don't go to waste. :) Or in the very least, that I don't have to be the one to throw them away. Haha!

Our latest project is called "The Nursing Box". Background behind it...I hate nursing. Some mothers love it and do it forever and feel an awesome emotional connection with their child. To those of you who this describes, I would just like you to know that I am jealous. So far both of my nursing experiences have been stressful, unfun, and definitely emotional but not in the connecting-with-your-child kind of way.

Maybe it's unfair to say that Lincoln is the cause of all my nursing anxiety, but it's pretty much true. When he was a baby he wouldn't nurse. I have no idea why, but he just wouldn't. He'd latch on and sit there for 20 minutes and not eat a thing. We even took him to a lactation consultant, and she said the same thing, "he's been latched on for half an hour and he hasn't gained an ounce!" translates into, he's not eating. So for him I pumped for three months and bottle fed him breast milk and then finally switched over to formula.

When Ivan was born, he was actually a fantastic nurser. I was so relieved...except that now all the sudden I was trying to nurse a baby and take care of an out of control 19 month old at the same time. And Lincoln knew that whenever I sat down to nurse that he pretty much had free reign of the house because I couldn't get up to stop him from doing the things that he shouldn't. And although Ivan was a good nurser, he took his sweet time about it...45 minutes or so each time. It was more stress than I could deal with, and I felt like I just sat Lincoln in front of a movie all day long so I could nurse in peace. I nursed Ivan for 3 months and then tried pumping for a little while, but was still having the same problem because pumping took a lot of time too, so I finally switched to formula.

But in theory I'd like to be able to nurse Adelia for longer.  And as always, I'd like to keep the kids' TV watching time to as close to zero as possible. I've heard of this idea from a couple different sources, and I very much hope that it works. So here's the game plan. I have a box that is called "The Nursing Box" and for the last couple months or so, I've been collecting things from dollar bins, or little things from around the house like laundry soap cups, and I made a bean bag snake out of one of Aaron's old ties, etc. and I'm going to put all those things in the box. Then I'll put the box somewhere where the kids can't get it, and I'll only pull it out when I'm nursing the baby. The kids can play with it all they want while I'm nursing. But when I'm done, we pick everything back up and put it away and don't get it out again until next feeding. Hopefully, they'll like it, and they'll be good so I can nurse the baby without so much stress.

Today for our project, we picked out a good sized cardboard box and I let the boys decorate it with crayons, markers, and paints. (Lincoln got to paint. Ivan still eats the paint, so he got to use markers and crayons.) I called it stage one in the title, because I'm going to try and drag this project out as much as possible. Once the paint dries we'll probably cut out some pictures from magazines and glue them on, and then another day we'll stick stickers to it. Mostly I just want it to look as fun and as inviting as possible.