“The important thingYou can’t quite talk.
You can’t quite walk.
You’ve found your nose
and discovered your toes.
You’ve seen the moon and felt the sun.
But the most important thing about being One is that life has just begun.”
Taken from Another Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown.
The B will be a year old in just a few days. She is sweet and soft and squishy. But I’m feeling a little nostalgic for the teeny baby days.
Our family is enjoying General Conference this weekend. What a blessing it is to be able to hear the inspired words of a living prophet and living apostles.
To keep things a little more calm and focused on Conference and things of the Spirit, I put together a packet of activities for the Ant Bug to do during the sessions. Thanks to Sugardoodle.net, I had a wealth of resources available to select from.
Sugardoodle.net is the LDS woman’s dream website (especially if you have children or a calling in the Primary or Nursery or Young Women or Enrichment Committee or…). Basically it is an online file folder of any kind of helpful LDS resource you can imagine, with countless contributors. You can find me visiting the site every few days.
If you’re looking for General Conference packets and resources to use with your children, I saw somewhere around 9 or 10 different links posted in the last two weeks. Just start working your way down the list on the first page and you’ll find them.
My favorites are the Apostle Cards, and the General Conference Coloring Book. The Ultimate General Conference Packet looks excellent also, but some of the activities are a little beyond the reach of my nearly four year old. But the Friend Coloring Book will be making an appearance in our home on a Sabbath day soon to come.
To all the wonderful contributors on Sugardoodle.net, thanks so much for sharing your work and ideas with us!
One of my favorite blogs to visit is She Does Hair. Blackeyedsue has wonderful ideas for styling girls hair. I’ve been having fun in the last few months experimenting with the Ant Bug’s hair.
The first one we tried was the Puffy Braid.
One of our favorite styles is Smocking. Here is one variation that we tried.
Last Sunday we went with the Loop-de-loop. Sorry about the less than great pictures, but that’s what we have.
This morning before Joy School we had a few extra minutes for hair, so the Ant Bug ended up with Lattice Ponytails. Unfortunately, she ran out the door before I took a picture, so I’ll try to get one this afternoon and post it later.
Of course, the B always looks adorable with her Antennae Style bug ponytails.
Luckily, the Ant Bug is usually pretty patient with my styling endeavors. She does have her days of simple one or two ponytails on top, or just down with a clip. Next up I’m going to start experimenting with Knots.
It’s true.
In the last few months as we have adjusted to the sweet addition to our family, my life has fallen into a nice rhythm where Monday’s usually turn out great. Here’s why:
Monday is my “recover from the weekend and put the house back in order and clean the house as much as possible” day. I don’t know about you, but after a Saturday and a Sunday where we break from our daily routine, my house is usually a disaster that needs some serious recovery. To ensure this recovery, I plan to stay home on Monday. Wherever possible I avoid scheduling appointments or play dates or any place I have to be.
Monday is my laundry day. I don’t have a set day for washing whites or colors (I just wash them as needed), but I always know that on Mondays I am washing sheets and towels and dishrags–basically all of my linens. I get started right after breakfast. I wash the sheets first so I can get them back on the beds before the day is too late. I always just put the same set of sheets back on the beds, because I detest folding fitted sheets (mine always end up in an awkward, lumpy, somewhat resemblance of a square).
I’m not one of those women who clean house after the children are in bed, minimizing interruptions. Minimizing interruptions might would be nice, but kid sleep time equals my time, and I don’t want to spend it cleaning. The one exception to this is mopping my tile floor–I don’t try to do that with a crawling baby in the room, since the poor B slips and slides all over the wet floor. Consequently, I clean during the daytime and the Ant Bug cleans with me. Or, she dances and sings and runs circles around me while I clean. But that is fine with me. For some reason, Monday’s are magical because her patience for cleaning on that day is much greater than any other day of the week. Maybe it’s because she loves routine as much as I do and is happy to be at home and doing normal things after our sometimes irregular weekend?
The B usually does her part by napping extra long after a fatiguing Sunday at church with missed naps. Today she napped a total of over three and a half hours!
So what did we get done today? 2 loads of laundry, vacuumed downstairs and up, made two loaves of Friendship bread, put toys and clothes and papers in their place, and made a quick trip to the store. The Ant Bug and I even had time to do some building with Jenga blocks and made some paper farm tools for the “pretend Farmer Brown and Mrs. Farmer Brown”. She was very diligent in feeding and watering the pretend cow and horse and pig and duck.
The girls and I usually do end up leaving the house at some point, usually just a quick trip to the store or a walk around the neighborhood, because who likes to be cooped up inside all day?
And then after dinner we spend time as a family in Family Home Evening. With young children, our lessons are pretty brief. Tonight we used this activity from The Friend, and were surprised at how many animals are mentioned in the Book of Mormon.
At the end of the day, I curl up in my comfy bed with clean smelling sheets. That’s where I’m headed right now.
Happy Monday to you.
A slice of our dinner conversation at our home last night.
Ant Bug: “Dad, you’re the best dad ever. And mom, you’re the best mom ever.”
It was a nice moment. Parenting does have its rewards!
I just discovered that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has released a new manual to be used in the nursery. The manual is geared toward teaching children ages 18 months to 3 years.
It is beautiful! I am so excited to use this resource in my family. It almost makes me want to be a nursery worker again.
You can view the manual and download the lessons here.
I recently discovered the Simple Mom blogger, and I am loving her. She thinks like I do, or actually, like I aspire to think. Many of her posts have really hit home with me and have inspired me to better: better mom, better wife, better organizer.
I read all about her Home Management Notebooks and have started my own. Isn’t it a pretty green?
Here is a snapshot of my to-do list, which was embellished by the Ant Bug.
It feels great to have a functional to-do list again, but I do have to control myself to make sure that the list doesn’t get out of hand. So this post by Simple Mom is a great reminder for me.
She says “My main job is to parent, not to get my to-do list done. Remind yourself today that there are more important things in life than getting things done.”
One tradition I have wanted to adopt for my children is their own special snuggly blanket. The only problem is that I am not much of a sewer, so taking on a project like sewing a quilt is a little bit daunting. Thankfully, when the Ant Bug was about 6 months old, my talented sister-in-law walked me through the process of making a baby quilt. Here is the finished product:
The Ant Bug has loved it, and she still sleeps with it every night. In her words, this is how she feels about her special blanket: “gdnbvcnvhvlffgfkkfjfmfmjff,jfmj,,gh,h’;jj;h;h’h;j”H’j;j’hljkjkhgkjhjgkjgjghjhghjghjkhjhgyth;hg;h.lhglhlhlhlhlhlghl./
dnmbdndnmfnmfghfgbfhfjghjgjhmfggmgjjgghhjhjkgnmm;kklolhkhghkj”
Now that we live in Florida, I knew I was on my own to make a quilt for the B. Using the previous quilt as my pattern, and thanks to my good friend who loaned me her sewing machine, I was able to make a quilt. Now, I am really not a seamstress, and I wouldn’t want anyone to look too closely at my stitches, but it turned out decently well.
