Easy breezy days

I used to hate schedule, because I think we should react with our children's desires, for example, feeing on demand or when they're interested in exploring the stones, we should go along with it. It just makes sense. However, I've gone too far, from child focus, to child-centred, which makes my family life a chaos! I've just realised this has not done my children any good, as I've always mad! Mad at why the house is always a mess, mad when I'm hungry and I don't want to cook macaroni cheese again!

So gradually we got a part time cleaner to help with household chores, and have a schedule on 'roughly' how the day would go. Very young children actually need routines to feel secure. So here I am have a daily routine and a meal plan for 1 week in advance so I can shop the right amount of food we need to prepare a fresh meal and don't need to throw away 'been in the fridge for 2 weeks' veggies.

Tools I found that makes it a no-brainer:

For my schedule, I take reference from http://www.adaycare.com/ourday.html, and change a bit for my baby & toddler's sleep time and their interests.

For Easy meal preparation
http://www.earlychildhoodlearnings.com/go/kidsmeals/

An interesting article on including your children to do household chores:
http://www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/klocekchores.pdf

Around 8:30 - 9am, we have a little music and movement section to encourage more physical movement, and movement that helps to develop the left & the right brain.


My playlist for my baby:



For my 3 year old that likes to jump and hop and turn around, Stay and Play and Feeling the beat has a good choice of action songs.





More about movement and development of the brain at brainwave:
http://brainwave.org.nz/995/#more-995

Boy/Girl ??

Just revisiting some interesting sites to predict the sex of the baby, but just for fun. The Chinese calendar was quite accurate for all our babies, although we didn't plan it on purpose.

Chinese Calendar

Boy or Girl Quiz (old wives)

Baby gender prediction

Baby Gender Prediction

Sex Selection Techniques - before Pregnancy

Planing for a baby boy or baby girl

Some highly recommended books for getting pregnant and on choosing the sex of baby:


Taking Charge of Your Fertility



How to choose the sex of your baby

Exercise

I was watching Move and Groove with my daughters, and we were doing some exercises. This is a good DVD as it includes some easy move, stretches and drinking water after each song. Jas copied the children drinking water and she can almost remember the lyrics. She had fun jumping, turning around with me, couldn't quite run on the spot yet, but she'll learn it soon, I'm sure. It's fun watching her learn how to tap her feet, and learning all the action words.

My 1 year old just moved from side to side and crawl around, and drinking too! She's not into dancing as much as my eldest.

Sleeping problems & illness due to temperature change

Because of teething and the heat, or temperature change between day and night, my toddler starts waking more often at night, and has a runny nose. It might be the flu, or hayfever, we're not quite sure, but the doctor has prescribed something for hayfever, and it seems to ease a bit after the medication. We also give her the welda teething powder and it seems to help. My husband prefers the powder over the gel as he says the gel has alcohol in it.

She seems to be going to bed later and later, 2 weeks ago, she went to bed 9pm sharp and woke up around 6am every day. But now she'll cry really loud when we put her to bed, and keep playing until 10 or 11pm, and afternoon nap is behind schedule for some reason. My strategy is from today, since she's quite an energetic child, I'll give her more physical challenge, more crawling, jumping...etc late afternoon so she'd be tired enough to go to bed.

One thing I found that's not working by the babysitting at afternoon nap is putting toys on her bed and let her play. The other thing is giving her eye contact when she put my toddler to bed, this will make her think it's 'playtime' as well. Then she'd associate play to bed. But our toddler should learn that bed is only for sleeping, nothing else. That's when they'll sleep in bed alone.


Merry Christmas!!

Busy days

Busy busy, it's all I can say about my lifestyle now. With 3 children under 3 really makes a big difference to my lifestyle, but it's all worth it when I see them giggle and play with each other, taking care of each other. Watching how they interact with each other, sometimes it's heartwarming, sometimes it's fun and sometimes make me so mad when they all cry at the same time.

The favorite word for my eldest 2 and a half is still 'no', my toddler starts to walk and explore everything, and my sweet baby who only sleeps, feeds and smiles. I think this baby is the luckiest as I've had the experience, I pretty much know or guess why he cries and respond to it. For babies up to 3 months, it's usually one of the 4 things: hungry, wind, tired or uncomfortable (wet/dirty nappy, too hot/cold)

Christmas is coming, Merry Christmas and blessings to all the parents in the world, you make the world so wonderful with your lovely baby.

Telling my toddlers about the new baby

At my 26 weeks pregnancy, I'm starting to tell my toddler about the new baby arriving, as with my second child, I told her she'll have another baby to play with her. I'm still preparing myself for the challenge of caring for 3 babies + toddler combination. Friends ask me to have more rest now as it'll be hard work later. It's quite hard now as I'm pregnant and tired. I think once the baby is born, I'll start my intense exercise program to build up my energy level and keep listening to holosync to keep me calm to face problems. Also helps me to have better sleeps (or sleep state) whenever I want to, as the main program induces delta brain wave which is the most relaxed state, just like having a dreamless sleep. I think I'll need to be able to sleep whenever I could grab some time, as I get grumpy if I don't have enough sleep, and I'll feel guilty if I'm mad at my children.

What's better than telling her a story about the new baby and she'll be a big sister soon!








Also started doing baby yoga with my 8 months old, as they said it'll help relieve colic and wind. She had a constipation after changing formula to the next step. That night really gave me a fright, she had been having fever for the past two days, and she refuse to take any milk that day (seems like she knew it's the milk that gave her constipation) and was crying for almost 1 hour, we tried everything but doesn't work. Then we took her to the night clinic, they checked everything and found out she might be constipated. They gave some pedialvte solution and later she pass poo with a bit of strength.

So I came across Baby Bliss and started doing the routine with her every day. I certainly felt more connected to my baby, and it's quite cute doing her the half lotus position! The DVD also has a routine for stimulating the digestive system and helps bowel motion that my baby enjoy doing.

Baby yoga & massage

Children's behaviour & discipline

Just came across some good DVD's about children behaviours and how it has changed over the years. It's interesting to discover that as Nigel Latta (Politically Incorrect Parenting Show) said the word punishment has vanished from our vocabulary. Academics will frown at the word 'time out', most would disagree on smacking, this is something quite common growing up in my generation. Carrot and sticks always work in training animals, humans are fundamentally animals too, rewards will encourage our behaviours, and pain will put us off from certain behaviours. But wait, we don't treat our children like animals! Funny thing is sometimes we treat animals like our children.

As parents, I think we try our best not to encourage certain bad behaviours/ habits in our children. I think I try to avoid doing things to my children that I didn't like my parents did on me while growing up.

The method learned from Toddler Taming is to ignore bad behaviours as best we possibly can, in other words, do not give attention for bad behaviour. Dr. Christopher Green also recommends time out, as long as it's done with reasons and not too much. After viewing those 2 DVDs, I think toddlers behave like us too, when we don't get what we want, we'd be unhappy, but instead of throwing tantrum, we act differently. And when we're angry or upset, we need sometime to cool off too, I think this is how I see time out now.

One chapter I particular like is the 'Discipline - Putting Parents in Charge" from Toddler Taming as sometimes I felt like my toddler is in charge of me. From now on, I'll try to ignore whenever my toddler is throwing a tantrum, with a bit of explanation as of why as well, and maybe asking her to join back when she's less upset.