Monkey See, Monkey Do…You will love our new Plush Monkeys that match our Monkey Boy and Monkey Girl baby shower themes!!

Eva’s always been very specific about where she keeps her belongings and exactly how they should be organized…but having her brother (whom we lovingly refer to as The Wrecking Ball) around has driven those tendencies to new heights.

Case in point: the other day, as I was changing my son’s (poopy) diaper, I noticed something bright pink and shiny…um…mixed in. I did a huge double-take, and then discovered that he’d apparently found a sequin on the floor at some point. (Yummy.) I laughed out loud, which caught Eva’s attention, and she came running into the room to find out what was so funny. When I told her about the sequin, she giggled, but then got very concerned about why I wasn’t digging it out of his diaper.

She wanted to keep it. Because it was, after all, hers.

I think this may become a problem.

How do I explain to a three year old that there are certain material possessions you REALLY need to let go of?

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

Two months later, when the pregnancy test came back positive, I realized I wasn’t ready. My knees buckled. I couldn’t speak and cried when I handed the results to my husband.

Now, almost 8 months after that momentous day, I feel more confident but no more prepared. I laid in bed last night counting Braxton-Hicks contractions and thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve gone into per-term labor and I don’t have a bag packed.” (I hadn’t, of course; I only had two contractions in 30 minutes.)

What I’m worried about isn’t my ability to raise a little girl (yes, we’re having a girl!). I’m not worried about my husband’s ability to play dolls with her, teach her to throw a softball, or scare away unwholesome teenage boys. I’m worried that we’ll bring her home from the hospital and be missing something vitally important—that there won’t be enough onesies, that the breast pump won’t work, that our savings account will run dry and we’ll end up on the streets. I’m worried we’ll run out of diapers at 2am. I’m worried the synthetic dye in our rugs or the chemicals in our walls’ paint will send her into fits of epilepsy. I worry over whether I’m supposed to put a bib on her when she breastfeeds. I worry that not having a wipe warmer means I’m a bad mother.

But ultimately, our little girl will arrive. And ultimately, we will meet her needs and she will turn out just fine. Because ultimately, I know that we are responsible, mature adults with hearts so full of love that we needed to create another person just to keep from bursting.

Posted by Stacy, a Dot-arilla Blogger

I was recently introduced to a website that takes delivering meals to a whole new level. Food Tidings is a wonderful resource that allows you to coordinate an entire food-bearing army to deliver meals to anyone in need. You can create an online schedule for meal delivery, and friends and family of the parents-to-be can view the entire schedule online and sign up to deliver a meal on a specific date.

What a perfect idea for a baby shower! You could collect email addresses from shower guests, and, when the baby is born, simply invite those interested in providing a meal to sign up on a schedule you’ve created at Food Tidings. The new parents will feel so loved, and most likely relieved to know that the cooking is done…leaving more time for new-baby snuggling.

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

Lately, my daughter’s really ramped up her interest in stickers. She’s always loved them, of course, but lately she’s discovered the joys of sticker story books where she can create a scene with stickers—and then re-create and re-create and re-create the scene until her stickers aren’t so sticky anymore.

Although I’m sure she wishes she could have a new sticker book every single day, our budget doesn’t exactly include a sticker column…so I have to get creative.

I save any stickers I come across: stickers we get from the bank, decals from organizations, address labels I receive as “free gifts” in the mail—even the occasional fruit sticker. I keep them in a pile for her, and she raids the stack frequently for her various decorative needs (my husband and I receive the BEST birthday cards.)

Both sets of my children’s grandparents live about two hours away from us, so we’re often in the car for long periods…and that stack of stickers regularly saves the day! Before we leave, I stock my daughter’s “car bag” with a handful of sticker sheets and some sort of book—a used pocket calendar, an old address book, or even a used check register. She spends most of the trip happily placing her “stickers” into her “book” to make her own story. And I think in the end the little sticker book kits I cobble together are way more engaging for her…even if they look a little funny to the rest of us!

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

Now, I took that radio program and that story (cute as it was) with a grain of salt because I really believe that whatever innate gender characteristics we possess are ultimately hugely affected by our individual experiences. In my opinion, there are as many kinds of people as…there are people.

That said, I have to tell you that my newest little kid is proving to be about as “Boy” as an 8-month-old boy can be.

His sister was a very low-key baby. She was barely crawling before she turned one—she seemed to embrace the attitude of “Why am I going to crawl when I can just sit here and let people bring me things?” And once she finally learned to crawl, she did it very conscientiously: if I told her “no” a couple times, she somehow seemed to understand. The fact that we never quite got all the drawer locks installed was a non-issue.

Essentially, she gave me absolutely no experience whatsoever in dealing with a mobile infant…and that’s exactly what her brother has turned out to be: Mobile. With a capital M.

He crawls. (Quickly.) He climbs. (Incessantly.) He does not walk. (Yet.) But just the other day he jumped. (JUMPED!) He pulled himself up on the coffee table and jumped straight up in the air like he’d been doing it all his life. He does a pretty accurate imitation of a spider monkey, and we’ve begun having to double-team him for diaper changes.

“He’s all boy,” people keep saying to me…and I’m suddenly, surprisingly inclined to agree. At any rate, we’ll be putting in the rest of those drawer locks very, very soon.

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

When I became pregnant with our second child, I knew things would change. Obviously, there would be physical hurdles, changes to our daily routine—I couldn’t always do the things I could before I had a giant baby belly to cart around. And my daughter (Eva) and I seemed to enjoy many, many more snack times throughout the day. There were emotional changes too—weepy pregnancy hormones to explain to my daughter (and husband!). Feelings of guilt and worry over the effects a new baby would have on Eva—and on my very close, very treasured relationship with her.

But for the most part, I was looking forward to adding a new little one to our family. I could almost feel the empty spaces the new baby would fill up—opportune times for cozy nursing sessions, or another little giggle in chorus with Eva’s. There was room in our routine, our rhythm, for another child, and I couldn’t wait for that day to arrive. We were ready!

Except that it wasn’t that easy.

My son is now seven months old, and I’m just now feeling like I’ve reclaimed a bit of that old peaceful ease in our days. For months, I was ending my days frustrated because I couldn’t seem to get a handle on things. It seemed I could either have happy children or a happy mama—one or the other. Not both. I felt like I was racing around, constantly playing catch up. There was always something to do, someone to feed, something to wash, someone to snuggle.

What had happened to those pockets of empty space the baby was going to fill in so perfectly? Where had our easy, comfortable days gone? I’d had it all figured out, why wasn’t it working??

The answer turned out to be very simple: in the back of my mind, I was holding out for our old, “normal” rhythm. Unconsciously, I was trying to fit our new Family of Four into our old Family of Three mold, and I was getting very, very frustrated that it wasn’t working. We didn’t fit. Shouldn’t fit, in fact—we were a whole new family with new dynamics. We had all changed, for the better I think, and the normal I was holding out for, striving for, just didn’t make sense anymore.

It took me seven months of driving myself crazy, but I’ve finally, finally realized that “normal” was here all along…I simply didn’t recognize it. And as I’ve begun to let go of my old securities a bit and embrace our new rhythm, I’m rediscovering those comfortable pockets of space that we’ll all fit into eventually. And somehow, all this “new” feels…familiar. Content. Peaceful.

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

Learn more about Jessi’s experience of being a new mother by checking out her baby story:
http://blog.simplybabystuff.com/2009/12/baby-story-of-the-week-tucker-michael-lindstrom/

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