One of my friends posted on her Facebook page that she was looking for new kids music. And I told her what we like. But then I went to YouTube to see if there were any samples of it and guess what, there were... because there always is stuff like that on YouTube. So I wanted to put some of them here for you. Enjoy!
Tricycle by Frances England
also by F.E. Daddy-O one of our very favorites!
Lisa Lob and Elizabeth Mitchell (also check out Little Liza Jane by E.M totally wonderful song)
Katie Herzig sings Forevermore!
Feist sings on Sesame Street!
Of course our daughters current favorite is Wilco's Misunderstood! She sings the "nothin' at all" part at the top of her lungs, and can never get enough of it. The other day she announced she wanted to mail the band a letter to let them know how much she loved the song. I might make her type it on her typewriter if she's serious.
Thoughtful Parenting: A family resource that seeks to nurture flourishing in the family by encouraging more purposeful living in parenting and family life.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Babies, Painting, and THE Other Blog
Sorry I have done such a poor job at writing these days. We have been remodeling our house and its amazing how much time that takes. And it seems with kids you have to get the job done or else you never go back to it. Today we painted our dining room a really beautiful green (pictures soon to come) and are painting a new wall that our builder finished this week. It's also stressful to not have your home the way that feels comfortable. Finally, you all knew this was coming, I am of course worried about the environmental aspect of the different things we need. Like if I want something I have to check places that might have used things first, or for paints, low VOC's.
But I have been writing, just not here, I know I'm a cheater. My other job is at our church and I have been doing some posts on their blog. And I wanted to share one with you all. I know I don't normally do religious stuff here, but I want to share it, so enjoy:
But I have been writing, just not here, I know I'm a cheater. My other job is at our church and I have been doing some posts on their blog. And I wanted to share one with you all. I know I don't normally do religious stuff here, but I want to share it, so enjoy:
I love it when babies get baptized at our church. We have had both our babies baptized and it was a special event each time. Even though I was watching the Welcome Station today I just had to slip in the back and be a part of the baptisms. The third vow always gets me a bit choked up. Mostly because while I have made the vow myself, I have a hard time being willing to “unreservedly” give up of my child to anyone, including God. Even though I can read through the scriptures and understand this, and even though I trust God with my whole heart, I find that I must have a glitch in there somewhere when I am supposed to give my child “unreservedly” to someone other than myself. I am selfish, and want Marin and Owen to be just mine. But in my mind and heart I know that giving them to God is a better choice than keeping them to myself. I am then reminded of how God gave us his child, Jesus, “unreservedly”. That always makes it easier for me to say that vow and really mean it. I mean, God gave us His son so that we might have life, and of course I want my children to have that life too, so when I think about it like that, the choice is easy. And I am reminded to say, “Not only am I giving you my children, but also all of me too.”
After the third Parent Vow is the Community Vow, where we as a church, as Christ Community Church, vow together to be a part of supporting the baby’s parents in raising him or her. This is my favorite part of baby baptisms. That we as a community look at those parents holding their beautiful little baby, and make a commitment to walk alongside them, to support them, to love them and encourage them when times are tough and rejoice with them in accomplishments. I love it that we as a church make a commitment to love and support each other in caring for our children. A friend of mine sent me this prayer for baby baptisms and dedications and I wanted to share it with you, and we pray this for our two little babies who got baptized today, and for all our kids.
Dear Heavenly Father,
Together, we pray that
our children’s minds
will know Your wisdom.
Their eyes will see Your glory.
Their ears will hear Your words.
Their mouths will speak Your truth.
Their hearts will be Jesus’ home.
Their hands will do Your work.
That their knees would bow
only before You, the Lord Our God.
And that their feet would follow You
in the way of Jesus all the days
of their life.
Amen
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Co-Sleeping... is it dangerous?
People sometimes ask me if its dangerous to co-sleep
and I say, YES... if you sleep with an alligator that is!
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Homemade Stickers
Sunday, August 21, 2011
You Can
Just when you think you can kick your feet up and read a book...
Life throws a curve ball... or a broken tree your way...
and then a little bit of encouragement comes your way, and you realize, YOU CAN!
Our new college-renters moved in next door on Tuesday and that tree fell on their car on Wednesday. Bummer, right. Poor guys they are probably thinking this is a sign for a bad senior year. After leaving their yard and hearing the story of what happened we came home and the kids watched the utility company cut up the tree and put the wires back up. A few days before I had been fairly discouraged with some stuff in my job, just the things that were not getting accomplished. Between the tree next door putting things in perspective of how bad things could be I guess, and then this little note I found let on the table after Marin had been doing some art, I was feeling a little better. She had a whole bunch of words on a paper but these two got cut out together. YOU CAN.
Little bits of encouragement take a mom a long way.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Making Babies
While we are waiting for Todd's yearly posting about raising girls, I am going to move forward with another post. After reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, I rushed out to the library to pick up one of her earlier books. Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of two continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother.
The title alone makes you want to read the book. I zipped through it in just a few nights (leaving bedtime up to Todd because I just had to keep reading), its a quick read, which was good for my participation in bed time. The title tells you what its about, infertility of course. But even as some one who has not dealt personally with infertility it was still very revealing about the inside workings of the infertility world. But even more than that, the human desire to create life.
Peggy tells us a common story of a woman who is told by her culture, her community and family that she must be successful. She is on the cusp of "making it" as a writer in her late twenties and early thirties. By her mid-thirties, she has published a book (and getting calls from the likes of NPR) and is a regular writer for a major publication. While she and her husband had thought about having children, there was this push to get to a designated point in her career before allowing children to enter the picture, before letting them interrupt her momentum forward. In her world this is normal. In many worlds this is normal. In fact most of us today could say, "My mom had me 10 years earlier than when I had my kids." This is our current timeline for having children. However there is one big problem, evolution is not catching up with this career minded ideal. Check out Egg Banking here.
Here's how this works, every single female mammal on the planet is born with all of her "eggs". Its a number that is determined while this little female is still in the womb. Obviously there is some developing that must take place in the female body before these "eggs" start to travel in a direction of getting fertilized. You know how this works, I'm not going to explain the birds and the bees to you all. But the point is that women have a number of eggs that we are born with and around the age of 34 they start their gradual decline. The gradual decline turns steeper and steeper as we approach 40 years of age, and by 42 the majority of women have run out of "eggs" all together. So if our mothers had us when they were 24, and we begin having our babies at 34 we are already at risk for infertility.
Let me pause here and say, this is not a "scare" you blog post, its just some interesting stuff from a book I just read, and I'm trying to get to the point.
Let me also pause here and say, this is not just an "aging woman" story, while men make sperm their whole life and do not have a predetermined number of little swimmers, the older they get the lower the quality of them. Meaning you get a lot of broken heads and tails (but for men this happens closer to the 50's and 60's).
Okay where was I? Oh yeah, Peggy Orenstein, just like many other women, waited until her late thirties to start trying to have a baby. Thus begins her story. What happens is this: after trying for a few months on their own, because of her age, her OB told her to start taking Clomid, which she calls "the gateway drug". Once she began that each doctor she saw after made a great argument for why she should try then next treatment towards pregnancy. Each doctor made numbers like, "thirty percent" sound really high, while surrounding the patients with pictures of mom's holding babies. So of course it was going to work. And after a fifteen thousand dollar procedure that fails you are reminded, it was "only 30 percent". The ethics of this business get fuzzy as the science and research is always so new there are no "rules" established as of yet. And each step up the ladder of infertility treatments you make is one more chance of getting that baby in your arms, you hope. And what choice do couples have, if you tried one thing that didn't work, and the next might than if you say no, you will always wonder, "would that have worked?" Its a trap of some sorts, you want a baby, the vast majority of the women needing infertility treatments are around the same age--and feeling guilty for having waited so long (because fertility doctors like to point out that your eggs are old and hard to work with). They are told, "your body might just need to be jump started" and so what choice do you have?
Orenstein and her husband do try adoption, and actually have a baby in their arms for three days, but because of all the legal hoops they have to jump through that route also becomes very complicated, almost impossible for their situation.
I think outside of the interest I always have in the topics of, infertility, adoption, the process of making babies and how our bodies work, I was also struck by the desire she describes. The desire to have a baby. How does that work? I mean its how life works, reproduction. Bugs, lizards, goats, rabbits, bird and bees yes, all have this drive to reproduce. Humans have it too, and yet humans are probably the only one's who are conscious of wanting to have babies. All the rest of the animals out there make babies because their instincts to do so kick in at some point in their "youth" and they hop off and mate like rabbits. But out in the wild there is not this consciousness of "when do you choose to have babies". Or like one popular book says, "Taking Charge of Your Fertility", as though we set a date on the calendar and just make a baby human. This is actually how it does work for some people.
Here's the point, our culture is telling us one thing, "Success is the most important thing." Maybe even more than love, success comes first, but our instincts say something else, reproduce! But a marriage between the two does not always make since inside out heads, like, you have to find the right person to make a baby with, or like the author its not the right time in your career, or you don't feel ready to take on the responsibility, or you don't have enough money, there are lots of reasons people wait to have babies. Along with her career, Orenstein also grapples with the question, "do I even want to be a parent?" But what becomes clear in her story, and many other stories like her's, the mythological "biological clock" does exist and when it starts ticking loudly letting a woman know her time is almost up, the desire to reproduce is very real. Its mixed with a shift in hormones and possibly the climax of her career. I feel like we as humans are scared to think about our animal nature, we want to be in control of ever aspect of our lives, birth has turned from a natural event in our lives to scheduled around birthdays and holidays, death can be prolonged way past the time in which our bodies say "I'm done" and making babies can now happen in a glass dish-sex not included. I'm not against medical advancements, they do save a lot of lives. But what I think has happened is that we as mammal humans forget that we too are part of nature, that we are connected to a world that is much bigger than our jobs and press-board homes.
I think what a book like this does for us is makes us conscious of the non-natural parts of our lives. For example there are no studies on the long term affect of taking synthetic hormones for birth control, not that I am against birth control, but how does that pill affect our number of eggs for future fertilization? What about added estrogen in cows milk? Should little girls drink milk with so much estrogen in it? Are added hormones to our foods the reason girls start their periods at 9 and not 15? The person adding these synthetic hormones to our daughters lives are thinking about profit and production, not her future ability to hold a child in her arms. If I push my daughter to be successful, to fulfill some sort of an American dream does that dream become a nightmare when she tries to have babies later? Does female success equate with infertility? How do we come to make sense of these questions? How do we understand our bodies in a way that allows for us to have a career and children at the same time? How do we talk to our children about this topic?
There are so many questions that can come from a single story, but whatever your answers are for your life, for your family, I think it is important to understand and make peace with our animal selves and know that they do have limits, despite what medical science might tell us. And to acknowledge the desire to create life.
The title alone makes you want to read the book. I zipped through it in just a few nights (leaving bedtime up to Todd because I just had to keep reading), its a quick read, which was good for my participation in bed time. The title tells you what its about, infertility of course. But even as some one who has not dealt personally with infertility it was still very revealing about the inside workings of the infertility world. But even more than that, the human desire to create life.
Peggy tells us a common story of a woman who is told by her culture, her community and family that she must be successful. She is on the cusp of "making it" as a writer in her late twenties and early thirties. By her mid-thirties, she has published a book (and getting calls from the likes of NPR) and is a regular writer for a major publication. While she and her husband had thought about having children, there was this push to get to a designated point in her career before allowing children to enter the picture, before letting them interrupt her momentum forward. In her world this is normal. In many worlds this is normal. In fact most of us today could say, "My mom had me 10 years earlier than when I had my kids." This is our current timeline for having children. However there is one big problem, evolution is not catching up with this career minded ideal. Check out Egg Banking here.
Here's how this works, every single female mammal on the planet is born with all of her "eggs". Its a number that is determined while this little female is still in the womb. Obviously there is some developing that must take place in the female body before these "eggs" start to travel in a direction of getting fertilized. You know how this works, I'm not going to explain the birds and the bees to you all. But the point is that women have a number of eggs that we are born with and around the age of 34 they start their gradual decline. The gradual decline turns steeper and steeper as we approach 40 years of age, and by 42 the majority of women have run out of "eggs" all together. So if our mothers had us when they were 24, and we begin having our babies at 34 we are already at risk for infertility.
Let me pause here and say, this is not a "scare" you blog post, its just some interesting stuff from a book I just read, and I'm trying to get to the point.
Let me also pause here and say, this is not just an "aging woman" story, while men make sperm their whole life and do not have a predetermined number of little swimmers, the older they get the lower the quality of them. Meaning you get a lot of broken heads and tails (but for men this happens closer to the 50's and 60's).
Okay where was I? Oh yeah, Peggy Orenstein, just like many other women, waited until her late thirties to start trying to have a baby. Thus begins her story. What happens is this: after trying for a few months on their own, because of her age, her OB told her to start taking Clomid, which she calls "the gateway drug". Once she began that each doctor she saw after made a great argument for why she should try then next treatment towards pregnancy. Each doctor made numbers like, "thirty percent" sound really high, while surrounding the patients with pictures of mom's holding babies. So of course it was going to work. And after a fifteen thousand dollar procedure that fails you are reminded, it was "only 30 percent". The ethics of this business get fuzzy as the science and research is always so new there are no "rules" established as of yet. And each step up the ladder of infertility treatments you make is one more chance of getting that baby in your arms, you hope. And what choice do couples have, if you tried one thing that didn't work, and the next might than if you say no, you will always wonder, "would that have worked?" Its a trap of some sorts, you want a baby, the vast majority of the women needing infertility treatments are around the same age--and feeling guilty for having waited so long (because fertility doctors like to point out that your eggs are old and hard to work with). They are told, "your body might just need to be jump started" and so what choice do you have?
Orenstein and her husband do try adoption, and actually have a baby in their arms for three days, but because of all the legal hoops they have to jump through that route also becomes very complicated, almost impossible for their situation.
I think outside of the interest I always have in the topics of, infertility, adoption, the process of making babies and how our bodies work, I was also struck by the desire she describes. The desire to have a baby. How does that work? I mean its how life works, reproduction. Bugs, lizards, goats, rabbits, bird and bees yes, all have this drive to reproduce. Humans have it too, and yet humans are probably the only one's who are conscious of wanting to have babies. All the rest of the animals out there make babies because their instincts to do so kick in at some point in their "youth" and they hop off and mate like rabbits. But out in the wild there is not this consciousness of "when do you choose to have babies". Or like one popular book says, "Taking Charge of Your Fertility", as though we set a date on the calendar and just make a baby human. This is actually how it does work for some people.
Here's the point, our culture is telling us one thing, "Success is the most important thing." Maybe even more than love, success comes first, but our instincts say something else, reproduce! But a marriage between the two does not always make since inside out heads, like, you have to find the right person to make a baby with, or like the author its not the right time in your career, or you don't feel ready to take on the responsibility, or you don't have enough money, there are lots of reasons people wait to have babies. Along with her career, Orenstein also grapples with the question, "do I even want to be a parent?" But what becomes clear in her story, and many other stories like her's, the mythological "biological clock" does exist and when it starts ticking loudly letting a woman know her time is almost up, the desire to reproduce is very real. Its mixed with a shift in hormones and possibly the climax of her career. I feel like we as humans are scared to think about our animal nature, we want to be in control of ever aspect of our lives, birth has turned from a natural event in our lives to scheduled around birthdays and holidays, death can be prolonged way past the time in which our bodies say "I'm done" and making babies can now happen in a glass dish-sex not included. I'm not against medical advancements, they do save a lot of lives. But what I think has happened is that we as mammal humans forget that we too are part of nature, that we are connected to a world that is much bigger than our jobs and press-board homes.
I think what a book like this does for us is makes us conscious of the non-natural parts of our lives. For example there are no studies on the long term affect of taking synthetic hormones for birth control, not that I am against birth control, but how does that pill affect our number of eggs for future fertilization? What about added estrogen in cows milk? Should little girls drink milk with so much estrogen in it? Are added hormones to our foods the reason girls start their periods at 9 and not 15? The person adding these synthetic hormones to our daughters lives are thinking about profit and production, not her future ability to hold a child in her arms. If I push my daughter to be successful, to fulfill some sort of an American dream does that dream become a nightmare when she tries to have babies later? Does female success equate with infertility? How do we come to make sense of these questions? How do we understand our bodies in a way that allows for us to have a career and children at the same time? How do we talk to our children about this topic?
There are so many questions that can come from a single story, but whatever your answers are for your life, for your family, I think it is important to understand and make peace with our animal selves and know that they do have limits, despite what medical science might tell us. And to acknowledge the desire to create life.
Friday, August 5, 2011
A New Book
Todd and I are in the middle of reading this book. Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein. I wish I could write a review of every chapter, its been such a good book. By good I mean eye-opening to the new world of girls.
Here is the premise of the book; in the past women and men, mothers and fathers and society worked really hard to get the message out there to girls, "You can become anything you want." And girls really believed it and became anything they wanted. The message today is still the same, but with an added part; "You can be anything you want, as long as you are HOT while you are doing it." This is the new message our daughters are getting from toys to movies, commercials and beauty products that are marketed to younger and younger ages.
The author, Peggy Orenstein, has spent her whole career studying girls in our society, but it was only until she had her own daughter that she began to see this new message they are receiving from our culture.
We have one chapter left and then we can begin to await our yearly posting by Todd.
Until then I leave you with this: When did baby dolls changed from looking like this...
To looking like this?
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