You can check out our updated! Fall Wardrobe Essentials here, and here are 17 spring time essentials to add to them. Mix in a few trendy items (maybe a few spring color or print items) that catch your eye during the season, and you’ll have yourself a closet full of quality, versatile items.
Confession: I hate Dr. Seuss books.
Okay, maybe not all of them, but most of them. They’re just too full of nonsense for kids to really understand and they’re annoying to read! In general, I’m not a huge fan of picture books that are written in longer rhyming verse. Sometimes, I feel like they just rhyme for the sake of rhyming and it turns the word choice into something really difficult for children to understand, which then makes the overall story hard to understand and follow.
But, there are many rhyming books that really get it right — the rhyme becomes the rhythm of the story and because the story is simple and short, many of the rhymes are also predictable. I find rhyming books are also fantastic for infants young toddlers, because while they might not be able to understand all of the words, they can definitely connect with the cadence of the rhymes.
Here are some of my favorite rhyming books for you and your little one(s) to enjoy…some of them are also listed on some of my other book recommendation posts, but they’re so good, they’re worth repeating!
For Jacobi’s first birthday, we had a marvelous party and I don’t regret it one bit; it was a very special event for our family. I am a birthday person and highly value celebrating people, so I knew I wanted to make his second birthday special, but with limited time due to a full course and work schedule, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything too magnificent.
I decided to focus on what J loves, and plan his party around that. Well, he adores balloons – give this kid a balloon and he will be happy for the next two hours. And people — he adores his “Boppa” (grandpa), “Maca” (grandma), “Ona” (Aunt Norah) and other aunts, uncles and cousins – that was a definite given. Oh and berries, he loves berries.
My darling son began rolling to sleep on his stomach when he was four months old. Since he could get there on his own and roll back to his back without any trouble, I have been totally fine just rolling with that. However, laying on his tummy through the night combined with a penchant for a full bedtime bottle led to some consistent issues with overnight diaper leaks. I swear, it seems like he produces a gallon of pee overnight. Over the course of the many months that followed, we have experimented with all sorts of remedies for providing extra absorbency to keep Colin dry and comfortable overnight (and of course, to keep mom and dad from dealing with the excessive laundry that the leaky diapers caused).
- Moving up a size in diapers for overnight: In the beginning, just moving up into regular Pampers, one size ahead of what C was wearing, solved the problem without much fuss. Sadly this tactic only lasted for a month or two.
- “Point Mr. Penguin down”: This advice on a Facebook mom’s group had me giggling, but it is totally true. With little boys, it’s important at bedtime (and really all the time, but most important at bed time) to make sure the penis is pointed downward so that the stream of pee points into the diaper, instead of up and out.
- Adding a cloth prefold inside the sized up diaper: This solution wasn’t a great fit for us, as I was never personally destined to do well with anything cloth diaper related. Using just one cloth diaper a day made orchestrating laundry difficult, since my loads were few and far between. Plus using a cotton prefold left C’s tushie in a less-than-desirable state. We tried this for a week and a half before scrapping the plan for something else. (Cloth diapering experts can probably give much better insight on this, as I have read all sorts of different solutions for those who use cloth. I rolled with what I already owned and failed, but I would love to hear if anyone has faced this as a cloth diaper user, I’m sure that readers would appreciate any insight you can share.)
It’s that good. Seriously. Get the ingredients and make this immediately. The boys wouldn’t eat more than a few bites, but they’re on strike from all meat, so the fact that they actually ate more than one bite is a pretty glowing recommendation. I’m pretty sure if we hadn’t finally cut ourselves off, Mr. Blue and I would have eaten ourselves right into a case of the meat sweats.
Nursing is a large commitment and though I think it is relaxing, I was worried about what I could do with Gemma while nursing her younger sister. I talked to a few moms about this and researched a little bit, but ultimately it took just living through these past few months to figure out what activities were good ones for Gemma. While I was pregnant with Summer, I organized a little basket to hold “nursing activities” so that I would be ready at the drop of a hat with some good activities. Here is a list of 15 things that have been working.
Below is a selection of books my parent-baby hospital classes recommended picking up for starting solids. I’ve had a flip through Child of Mine (apparently my attention span isn’t what it used to be), picked out a few favorite recipes from Feeding the Whole Family, and read Baby-led Weaning and Hungry Monkey from cover to cover. The basic premise of Child of Mine is to prepare good, healthy food for your child, but let your child decide if and how much she wants to eat. Feeding the Whole Family encourages you to cook with real foods, and it is the first recipe book I’ve come across that strongly encourages you to stock sea vegetables, or at least give them a try. Whenever there was a recipe with an ingredient I did not recognize, in other books it was usually an obscure grain, legume, or spice, but in this book it was probably a sea vegetable like arame, dulse, dulse flakes, hijiki, kombu, nori, and wakame.
I’ll get into Baby-led Weaning a bit later, but I thought I’d jot my thoughts down about Hungry Monkey. I was drawn to it because of the subtitle: “A Food Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater;” I was hoping to take away some tidbits to help avoid bringing up a child that was as picky as I was. I borrowed it from my local library on my Kindle app for the iPad, and it was a great to read over a couple weeks during breastfeeding sessions. I was surprised to find a very large portion of the book available online as a sampler here, so I definitely recommend checking that out.
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