Out of Your Life

When I read Homeschooling our Children, Unschooling Ourselves, sometimes little ideas would speak to me, not necessarily about homeschooling. One was about keeping our children in our lives. The author met a homeschooling family who was explaining their transition to homeschooling.

When Mary's children had been in school, she had never felt inclined to include them in the everyday tasks she had to perform as a parent. When she sent them out the door to school, she "sent them out of her life...." After making the decision to homeschool, Mary's attitude toward them changed. When they complained about having to tag along on errands, or demanded attention as she tried to prepare mals, she reconsidered their situation....Now Mary realized that she had to offer them more opportunities to join with her in the day's activities. (page 51)

I go through phases of this. I was really good about involving Margaret in my day at one point, but I've recently been in a "I'll just wait until her nap" phase. And then when her nap comes around, I have quite the list and since a lot of my knitting has due dates (Christmas is coming up!) I do knitting and get nothing else done. Knitting or chores? Is that really a difficult choice?

I involve her a lot on errands. In stores I talk to her a lot: "Should we get this? Or this? What do you want for dinner? The blue one looks nice, right?" But at home, she plays (which is what she's supposed to do) and I don't do anything.

So I've been including her again since reading that section. She helped me wipe down the fronts of the cabinets the other day. I gave her a washcloth and sprayed the cabinets down with some human-friendly vinegar and water. She loved being a part of it and by the end of it was trying to drink the cleaner from the spray bottle.

I just needed the reminder. I'll probably need this reminder a few weeks from now too.

Holiday Weaning

What is holiday weaning?
From here, which is taken from here:

Holiday weaning is when a baby weans due to the distraction and celebration of a holiday or other special event. There may be visitors from out of town or maybe you and your family are on vacation. Either way, there’s plenty of people, attention, and distraction to keep mother and baby apart. Next thing you know, baby hasn’t breastfed all day or maybe even all weekend....Holiday weaning can happen on vacation, around birthdays or other special events, and even when you’re moving.... Any time baby and mother are busy and distracted, holiday weaning may occur.

According to this month's New Beginnings magazine, small babies are particularly prone to this. I'm probably supposed to look at Margaret and see a child who probably won't fall victim to this, but I don't.

A week ago, we went to a baby blessing for our nephew. Margaret nursed fine during church; it's an environment she's used to nursing in. However at the gathering afterward, she was just too busy to nurse. She didn't want to stop playing and so I got a little bit engorged. This has happened before on outings. When I went to the Great Basin Fiber Arts Festival with her, she barely nursed all day. She makes up for it at night, and I don't normally have supply issues, but the idea of longer trips where she'll be distracted all the time concerns me.

Will Margaret be too distracted to remember to nurse? How will I deal with the engorgement by the end of the day?

When I discussed it with one of my friends who is also an LLL leader, she asked me, "Are you going to be bedsharing on your trips?" Yes, bedsharing has made it really easy to travel with her. She'll probably end up forgetting to nurse in the day and making up for it at night. I keep telling myself that's what'll happen and it'll be ok. I don't want to wean her yet. She's still too small and this isn't exactly the best time of year to wean; she needs the antibodies as cold and flu season rages on. In fact, I had a terrible cold all this weekend and Margaret has shown no signs of it (thank goodness!). Go go gadget magical breast antibodies!

On the LLL of Sandy link, they list a lot of things you can do to prevent holiday weaning. Essentially: don't do too much, ask for help with planning parties and doing decorations and cooking, be with your baby as much as possible. Good ideas. And I think just being aware of the idea of holiday weaning can help you be more aware of how often you're nursing. If you do start to notice your baby going on a holiday nursing strike, try enticing your baby back to the breast as you would with any nursing strike: skin to skin contact, warm baths, taking a vacation from everything else and being with your baby, etc (see the link for more ideas).

Inquistion Monday: Regrets

Heatherlady asked, "Have you ever written a post that you regretted? One that you wish you could take back or that was written a while ago and you've since changed your mind? Just curious."

In short, no. On one level I see my blog like a journal. I grow and change, but what I wrote was a part of me and how I thought at the time I wrote it. It's kind of like my how I'm married now and I no longer have the same crushes I had when I was 12, but I'm not going to take back or re-write my junior high journals just because I've moved on and changed. It's a part of my 12 year old self, you know?

I trust my readers to understand that I'm a growing and learning person. I've not always been the most tactful, but I'm working on it and learning to be. I trust that other people understand that life is a changing thing and so my blog will be a changing thing.

Then there are the blog posts I still stand behind 100%. An example of this is my Modesty and Breastfeeding post. After talking to someone about how seeing breastfeeding actually helped him fight a pornography problem, I wanted to write another post about the topic. But I went back and re-read that post from January and realized everything I wanted to say I already said. Breastfeeding is not immodest, it's not pornographic, no matter how much breast is exposed while breastfeeding. There is a great difference between using your body for nurturing your child and using your body to arouse and stimulate.

So how, as readers, are you supposed to tell what posts I'm still behind 100% and which ones I'd like a little mercy about? I don't know. Guess? Inquisition Mondays? Ooh ooh! Become pyschic! I'm sure there're some radioactive spiders or beetles or giraffes around here...

I think the thing I most regret is how I've handled some comments. When a comment discussion gets particularly argumentative or sensitive, I often just shut down and stop paying attention to it because it gets stressful for me. I really shouldn't do that. I have high esteem for bloggers who can handle angry comments with grace and I'm still working on doing that.

Sometimes when I've "shut down," it stays with me and works in me until months later, I'll post a comment that I should have back when the post was fresh. I did this recently for my Bleeding in the Background post. I wanted to clarify that I don't believe I had postpartum depression, but when Margaret was 1 month old, another blogger attacked the way I handled the birth. I started getting upset emails from all across the country as a result. Part of my worry and anxiety that I was being judged by my ward for my UC and for staying home so long stemmed from receiving many judgmental emails and comments. Had that blogger never posted that post, my postpartum time would have been much less stressful and less burdened with anxiety. I didn't post about that in my Bleeding in the Background post, but I've been feeling like I should clarify that, so I did.

So, in the end, I expect you all to be psychic about what posts represent my current views. Are there some posts that could have been worded differently? Some I don't fully put my weight behind any more? Sure. Am I going to go through every blog post I've ever written and rewrite them? No. I do have to spend some time away from the computer.

WRI Petition

If you'd like to see and sign the petition to support the Women's Research Institute at BYU, head on over to SupportWRI.org

Please sign it. It's important that women's research at BYU be visible and united under a central organization.

Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves

When I checked this book out from the library I wasn't really expecting an "unschooling" book. I know that sounds silly since "unschooling" is in the title, but our library doesn't particularly have a huge array of homeschooling books, so I didn't trust they'd have such a radical book. I checked it out, but didn't start reading it until a few days before it was due because I wasn't sure it was something I was going to be interested in.

I was wrong. It is a wonderful book. Alison McKee wrote her story of how they found homeschooling, their choice to unschool, and their thoughts. She was a teacher/tutor for the blind and worked with various children who have vision impairments. Through her experiences with one student in particular, Germain, she saw first-hand how the school system destroyed his love for learning and eventually segregated him from his classmates being labeled as a "behavior problem" due to his reactions to a school system that didn't meet his needs. Because of this, when McKee saw the same inquisitiveness Germain once had in her own son, she started to question if sending him to school would also kill his love for learning. They decide to try homeschooling and unschooling for both their son and daughter. The book follows their learning until their son goes to college.

For a lot of the book, McKee reflects on the aspect of trusting their children to learn everything they should. I think that is a concern for a lot of parents considering homeschooling. I went to school from age 5 until 21 and then I spent the majority of the next school year as an instructor at an elementary school. The culture of school is definitely imprinted on my brain as it is a lot of people's. To go outside our own experience is scary. McKee talks about the journey in learning how to trust her children and says it best when she says, "Here we were trying to create something, which we had never experienced - by relying on our past experience! Such a premise was flawed from the start. We realized that the only possible way to rectify our situation was to rely even more heavily on our children to show us the way (HOCUO, 63)."

This is something McKay and I have discussed many times, "How can we be sure our kids will learn everything they need?" Of course, the opposite is a valid question too, "How can we be sure that state regulated curriculum will be everything they need?" Our doubts in our children's ability to learn came from years of being told by our school system, "We won't learn anything unless we're forced to," and then at some point we start to believe that. Even in college when I took classes for the major I chose to study because I found it interesting, grades were a constant reminder that I wasn't trusted to learn the material without an incentive or threat of a bad grade.

This book gave me a lot to think about, and I'll do another blog post about more thoughts related to it. In the mean time, I'd recommend going over to Alison McKee's website. She has some interseting essays there that promise to be good reads.

Tarn and Tissues

(cross-posted at Infiknity)

In our attempt to waste less, I've been cutting T-shirts up into yarn, or "tarn." I don't increase my yarn stash without a project in mind, so it will definitely become something in the (hopefully near) future.

On the left and in back, you can see cakes of tarn. The orange tarn isn't wound yet.

When making tarn, you don't use the yoke and sleeves of the shirt. I cut the unused yokes and sleeves into "squares" of tissue. That blue bag is actually a tissue box cover that my high school AP chemistry teacher made for her students as a "going away to college" present. Instead of using boxes of tissues, I'm stuffing the new cloth tissues into it.

While I'm not "looking forward" to the next time a cold runs through the house, I'm excited to use our tissues. They are fairly soft, won't fall apart, and are reusable! Plus it'll be cheaper than buying tissues. Yes, we'll have to wash them, but I can sanitize them with the diapers and they won't take up that much space in the wash.

This is part of my ultimate plan to switch to family cloth. Slowly and surely we will get there.

Hellfire Heartburn Chickpea Soup

Another recipe from AntiCraft.

2-1/2 cups dry chickpeas
6 cups water
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1/2 green pepper, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 can tomato paste
2 links chorizo
1 potato, cut into 1" pieces
Seasonings*

*The recipe called for an envelope of "Vigo Flavoring and Coloring." Upon looking it up, I decided against using it and used my own seasonings.

Soak chickpeas overnight in cold water. Discard the water the next day. Combine chickpeas, water, salt, pepper, seasonings, green pepper, garlic, and tomato paste. Boil and reduce to a simmer. Fry chorizo in a small pan until fully cooked. Drain and let cool. Slice into rounds. Add to pot. Simmer on low for 4 hours or until chickpeas are tender. Add potato and simmer for 15 more minutes.

Garbanzo beans are high up on Margaret's "love to eat" list, so this was a toddler pleaser. McKay also liked it. I thought it wasn't spicy enough. Either I'm no good at seasoning or the chorizo wasn't spicy enough. With a name like "Hellfire Heartburn..." I expected a little more oomph. It would be better named "Barely in the First Circle of Hell" or even "Purgatory Chickpea Soup". If I make it again, I'll add more cayenne.

I was glad to get the experience of soaking the beans. Since canned food often has BPA in it, it's nice to know how to prepare dried beans. We didn't eat many beans growing up, so it's been fun learning how to prepare them.