Beckham and Catwoman

Last Thursday my 3 year old started soccer. For those who don't know. They don't play games at this age they just work on skills. Well, to start the practice off we have a coach who has only taught 3 and 4 year olds one other time before (that we know of). She acted like she had never taught them before and asked them questions that they had no idea what the answer would be or what she was talking about. Then he got tired not even halfway through and instead of daddy running the drills with him (he has played soccer). C wanted mommy to run the drills with him (i have never played soccer). So there I was in t-shirt, jeans, and flip flops running up and down a soccer field. This was supposed to be a father son activity but boy was I wrong. Then the week before that I learned that my 5 month old daughter could hold her own. A friend at playgroup was holding her, when her 2 year old son came over to see what his mom was doing. Now at 5 months she does not have great control over her arms. So as he was looking at her she flailed her arm and poked him in the eye. Well, as the playgroup progressed his got worse and worse until his mom took him to the doctor that night. The next day I got a txt message that was a picture of him with an eye patch and tape on his face and eye. E the cat woman scratched the boys cornea. Can you believe it? I couldn't. I was completely shocked and I felt horrible that this happened, but the little boys mom said the only reason he was wearing the patch was because he could not leave it alone and it healed over night. Phew! That was the first time one of my children have sent another child to the doctor and will hopefully be the last, but I am not going to hold my breath. So watch out boys, E can handle herself just fine. She is cute but apparently dangerous if you don't watch out. Hope you enjoyed a slice of our interesting lives.

Cloth diapers?!

There are quite a few things I said I would never do. One of them is use cloth diapers. Now we all know we should not say "I never will ...", but I did it anyway and I am now eating my words. We have been currently cloth diapering Elli for about 2 months now and I love it. We don't use the traditional cloth diapers with the pins and diaper covers. We are quite modern and use a fully adjustable pocket diaper called bumgenious. They are so cute and come in adorable colors. They have a microfiber insert and Velcro closers. If you want to see what they look like you can go to http://www.kellyscloset.com/. That is where my diapers came from.

The reason we are cloth diapering is not because we are trying to be all "green" even though it does help. We are not doing it because she is allergic to disposable diapers. Although it looked like she was headed in that direction. We are doing it for the purely selfish reason of saving money. I know that is not selfish, but those other two reasons can sound a whole lot better.

Now I get asked a lot of questions about these diapers so here I go to answer them. The start up cost can be a lot, but a wonderful bestest friend of mine (you know who you are) who believes in cloth diapering (just as much as I do now) bought the diapers for Elli. We have 12 diapers which cost about $220 or a little less. If you shop around you can get free shipping. 12 diapers allows me to do diaper laundry every other day. I wash the diapers with borax and strip them of build up with oxiclean once a week. What about the poop? We use rice paper liners to catch the poop. It really just helps keep it off the diaper as much. The liner is flushable and 100% biodegradable. No, you do not have to dunk the diaper in the toilet to get the poop off. If you do the diaper will become extremely heavy because the microfiber insert will soak up a bunch of water. If there is excess poop. Just wipe it off or take out the insert and rinse off the diaper. No, the diapers do not stain or smell. I can't even tell which diapers she pooped on because the poop stain is gone. Which still amazes me every time. She has only leaked one time because she went to bed, woke up, and had a bottle feeding without a diaper change. Any disposable diaper would have leaked too. These diaper hold an amazing amount. We only change her every 3 &1/2 to 4 hours unless she is poopy.

So, to wrap up I love these diapers and wish I had used them with my first, but I will say that cloth diapering is not for everyone. It was just right for me because we save money at the grocery store, and doing one more load of laundry is no big deal (it is just 12 little diapers). So, that is my cloth diaper experience so far. Many people have said I needed to write about this and I finally have. I am open to answer any more questions that come. I really do love the decision we made to switch and we are not going back. Sometime I will post a cutie diaper picture. Cloth diapering and loving it!

Happy First Day of School!!

Today was our first day of home preschool. I am so excited! We are using a great free curriculum written by a homeschool mom. The curriculum can be found at www.letteroftheweek.com and is worth checking out if you have prescool aged children at home or teach them. She also has stuff for pre-k and kindergarten. It is great stuff. Right now we are doing the prepatory curriculum to get C ready for sound of the week and story of the week. It did not take us long to do our school work and he had lots of fun doing it. We have a theme, shape/color, number, vocab. word, letter, and nursery rhyme for the week. All of that is added one at a time and we do all kinds of activities that go along with the lesson. In these pics C is coloring a cow which is our theme for the week. He also got tired of his pic being taken which prompted the "no more pictures" shot. He is so cute! This is just something fun for us to do during the day and it keeps him a little busy and he feels so proud when he accomplishes something. We don't have a strict schedule we just do stuff when we can. Feel free to ask me any questions. So far I love the material and am really excited about it. I will keep you posted on how it goes during the year.