Weight Check

Lydia has had an aching wrist for a week, so I took her into the doctor today. He thinks it is a soft tissue injury but just to be sure, she had an x-ray. No word on results, but I doubt it is a break. Still, I'd rather be safe than sorry so I'm glad we went in.

As long as we were at the doctor, I asked the nurse to pop Rose onto the scale. She had on a diaper and nothing else, and weighed in at a respectable 8 lb 3 oz!  So in 6 + weeks, she's 2 lbs over birthweight. You go, girl!

Now let me share about my OWN weight check.  I was about 170 lbs just before Rose was born.  I'm now hovering at around 152 lbs.

As I've shared before, I'm one of those annoying souls who is naturally thin, and I've always lost weight easily post partum. This time, I'm working hard to eat and drink enough in the hopes that I can maintain milk supply for Rose. So far so good.

I actually was a tad below 150 lbs a couple of weeks ago, and have since gained a couple of pounds.

And honestly, I'm struggling just a LITTLE bit with that weight gain. That is totally ridiculous and absurd.  I know from experience that when I'm done nursing, I'll easily lose weight. I'll probably lose weight before I'm done nursing.  And really, 150 lbs is a perfectly reasonable weight for a woman who is 5 ft. 8 lbs.

I have very rarely, maybe never, had serious worry about my weight.  It is one of my soapbox issues that as a culture, we are way obsessive about weight when we should be focused on HEALTH.

And yet, I guess I am affected just a bit by the cultural stupidity.  And I'm a little annoyed by my clothes not fitting.

So, I'm giving myself a talking to.  The best thing for Rose is that she can be nursed for at least 6 months (more would be great, but making it 6 months would be a huge blessing after Daniel only made it 3 months.) So I'm going to keep eating and eating and eating :-).

Rose: 6 weeks old

  Our little sweetie is 6 weeks old.

Last night she almost slept through the night, which is incredible.  I put her to bed around 11:30 p.m. and I woke her up at 6:15 a.m. I had a 7 a.m. blood draw at the doctor so needed to feed her before I left.  She has been awake and fussy in the evenings and is apparently wearing herself out because the previous 3 nights she slept at least 5 hours straight.

Not surprisingly, I am feeling better rested, though I still fall over around 10 p.m. every night.  One minor wrinkle is that my after lunch nap is often interrupted by Sarah screaming loudly. She is in a PHASE. And unfortunately, Daniel is learning the high pitched shrieking from her, so he has been screeching too.

Which is loud.

Speaking of Daniel, we had a rather amusing/irritating experience a few days ago.  We put him in the "study" (really more of a play room) when I was nursing Rose, and he was mad. He screamed and screeched. And when he came out, his glasses were missing.  I hunted around later and couldn't find them, so I asked him where they were.  He promptly walked over to a little fire truck we have (big enough to sit on) and pulled up the seat. Underneath the seat is a little compartment, which was full of torn up paper. He took out the paper and at the bottom were his glasses, with both lenses missing.  The lenses were next to the frames, and he handed them all to me.  Obviously, he deliberately removed the lenses and then hid frames and lenses in the fire truck while he was angry. At least he told us where they were. I never would have thought of the fire truck so they might have been missing forever.

Books...

I love to read.  It is my favorite hobby.  One nice thing about having a nursing baby is I have more built in time to read. Add a Kindle and a library card which allows me to check out e-books for free, and I'm a pretty happy mama (except for the persistent exhaustion, but that's the subject of another post).

Our older 5 children also like to read. But here is where things get interesting...they don't like the same kinds of books as each other!  They don't even like all the books I like.

That should not be a shock and indeed I'm used to the concept now, but I'll admit that many years ago, I fully expected the children to like the books I like and dislike the books I don't like.

Ha!

Each one is a unique human being, and not surprisingly, they have different interests.

The boys have been especially challenging to me in that many of the children's books I like so much are aimed more at girls, with female main characters. Naomi and Lydia, our first 2 kids, were happy with many of the books I suggested. Isaac, who learned to read later than his older 2 siblings, was NOT interested in many of the books I enjoyed.

I discovered that Isaac really liked graphic novels and comics.  I purchased the entire Bentley Boyd Chester Comix series, and Isaac (and then Joseph after him) read those happily.  Boyd's Chester Comix are history/social studies graphic books.

I also checked out a bazillion graphic novels from our library. Some were goofy fiction, but many were about science and medicine and history.  I'm delighted our library has those books.

I even relaxed my distaste for Garfield comics.  I try to be careful about what our kids read -- I AM careful about what our kids read -- but Garfield was a good bridge book for early readers.  Garfield is a turkey at times (well, he's a cat, but you know what I mean!) and Jon (his owner) is hapless, but the comics are clean and not grim.  I found my boys made significant reading progress by reading Garfield comics and Baby Blues and even Calvin and Hobbes.  The latter is a struggle for me and I still feel ambivalent, because Calvin is often not obedient and his parents are moderately ineffectual.  Many of the strips are totally charming in that they celebrate the imagination of a vibrant and vigorous boy.  The strips about school and babysitters tend to be more focused on Calvin's disobedience. Actually, the poor kid (if he really existed) would no doubt benefit from being homeschooled :-).

Isaac is now 11 and I've been encouraging him to read chapter books in the last couple of years.  Mostly he has obediently read books I gave him, but hasn't been very enthused.

Then Lydia handed him book 1 of a series of Christian fantasy by an author named Bill Myer.  The book is "The Portal".

To my astonishment, Isaac DEVOURED the first book. He loved it.  It is a weird book (though good) and I was taken aback by his enthusiasm.  He loved it so much he asked me to get the rest in the series, and thankfully I was able to find them cheap on abebooks.com.

Then I handed Isaac a "Jungle Doctor" book by Paul White, who was an Australian medical missionary to Africa.  White went back to Australia when his wife's health failed, and wrote a series of fictional missionary stories about a jungle doctor.  I bought 7 of them a few years ago (there are a couple dozen in the series) and neither of my girls was very excited about them though I loved them. I really enjoy missionary books.

Anyway, Isaac loved these too!  He has read almost all the ones we own and I bought a few more from (you guessed it) abebooks.com this week.

I realize not everyone enjoys reading for fun and that is fine, but I find reading to be a wonderful way to expand one's horizons.  Plus reading is fun.  And with Kindles, ooh ah, you can have hundreds of books with you all the time. It is fabulous.

And more and more, I'm seeing part of my "homeschooling mama" role to be finding good books for the kids.  They can learn so much from fictional and non-fictional books about history. They can expand their imagination by reading crazy books about dragons and portals.

Now I'll say again, I am cautious about what the kids are allowed to read.  I don't like books with disobedient kids and hapless or evil parents.  I don't like books where adults are totally ineffective and kids have to save the day.  I don't like books that are too intensely grim, at least not for the younger children. I don't like books which celebrate unhealthy romantic relationships.

But even with those caveats, there are so many glorious books out there.

Cute Pictures

Brains Are Amazing

I know, that is a fairly random blog title.

So in the last couple of weeks, I read 2 books about individuals who were injured and suffered brain damage.  The first is "Heaven Hears", written by Lindy Boone Michaelis.  Lindy is the daughter of Pat Boone, a famous singer.  Lindy's son, Ryan, fell through a skylight at age 24 and did serious damage to his body and brain. Ryan wasn't expected to live, but through the power of the Lord and his own hard work, plus the diligent toil by many medical professionals and family, he did survive and came back from a deep coma to a fairly functional lifestyle.  He sustained significant brain damage but is now able to talk and function moderately well...however, he will never be the person he was before the accident.  He can't work, likely will never marry, and does "odd" things sometimes.  The one that really stuck out to me is that when Ryan is frightened, he'll lash out by cursing people -- which doesn't go over too well obviously!

The second book is "Over My Head", written by a physician who was brain damaged when she was hit by a car while she was biking.  This was back in the 1980's when people usually didn't wear helmets while riding, and she landed on her head and had a closed  brain injury.  She was no longer able to practice medicine and while she IS able to talk and write a book (no mean feat!) she has significant short term memory loss.  As an example, she has to write down detailed instructions when going somewhere because, like Dory in "Finding Nemo", she'll forget where she is going every few minutes and has to refer to her instructions or she winds up in the wrong place.  She also can't follow complex conversations and gets exhausted easily when processing lots of visual data.

We have kids who don't think like Kevin and me.  None of them have been in serious accidents or sustained trauma at birth or had a  very difficult early childhood -- none are "brain damaged", praise God!  But reading about people who really have sustained serious head trauma made me realize that some things I "take for granted" aren't true of everyone. These 2 precious people in the books are not able to do things that most people can do easily.  They have significant deficits that prevent them from living "normally."

Well you know, there are things I can do, that Kevin can do, that maybe not everyone can do. Both Kevin and I are engineers who are able to think analytically and in an organized way. I'm able to keep many "balls in the air" at home with comparative ease -- though admittedly I'm not doing as well in that area now because I am so tired.  It may be some of our children have gifts I don't have (anything artistic is beyond me, for example!) but they may struggle with organization and will need some assistance to compensate for challenges in the area of organization.

Just made me think...brains are amazing.  A normal brain working normally is amazing.  But not all brains are the same and it may be that what seems "easy" to me is incredibly hard or impossible for someone who thinks differently.  I need to accept that, just like my kids need to accept that I'm not artistic.

Update

Ugh, I am so tired today. I hope I don't have a minor virus or something. I have an aching shoulder and like I said, feel ready to fall over. Today I have a follow up doctor appointment with my OB so may not get a nap, which is intimidating, but I'll survive.  Better yet, I can come home and plonk kids in front of a video and sleep...THAT sounds good :-).

Baby Rose is almost a month old and doing very well. She is so cute!  I find it amusing that some of her biggest accomplishments (from my perspective) have to do with digestion.  She is eating well. Check. She usually passes gas well, which is important to keep her comfortable.  She has a bowel movement many times a day.  That is also helpful in showing me she is eating well, plus she is happier when she "gets it out."  One funny thing is that most of my babies go from lots of BM's a day, to less than one a day, at a couple of months of age.  Some of my kids have gone 4 or 5 days without a BM and then...well, you can imagine the mess when finally it all lets loose.  It is perfectly healthy in a breastfed baby, and a sign of a maturing digestive system. I guess.

We had a death in my extended family this week.  My great-uncle Francis, who lived for 98 years, died a few days ago.  He was the last of his siblings to die.  He obviously lived a good, long life but it is still hard to say good-bye to a loved one. His wife is now a widow, and I am grieved for her.  Francis was a kind, gentle man and he will be greatly missed.

I was sad I couldn't go to his memorial service.  It was held about 7 hours drive from here and since I'm a month out from the C-section, I just couldn't make the drive.  My brother, my parents, and all my father's cousins were there.  So that was good.

I think that about updates our lives.

Our cute kids...

I finally managed to get pictures of the children in their outfits made by my mother.

Sarah was uncooperative so it was rather a struggle...but that's life with 9 kids, 3 of whom are quite small!