Playground Love

Ever since New Years ended, A has been busily working on Valentine’s crafts. This has not been inspired by me, so it’s curious to see where this has come from.

The Heart day projects that she has been working on are as follows:

A Valentine's Crown!

A Heart pop-out card

Printmaking valentines for pre-school friends

I wanted to share the picture below because we had a really cute morning one day last week. A came out of her room, fully dressed and with a story already concocted. She was a cowgirl and the rocking moose was her horse dusty. She was going on an adventure with a map to find treasure. This continued all day long- even to the park where she made friends with a little boy who tried to steal her had. So totally wonderful and creative, my little star.

Happy New Year!

I for one, have been looking forward to January 1, 2012 for quite some time. Although 2011 was filled with blessings and joy, it also held a lot of upheaval, change, general malaise, lethargy and grumpiness. (I’m talking about me, folks). I know that these fine character traits are (mostly) sleep-deprivation related, so at the end of my wits, I decided to hire a sleep consultant just before Christmas. Once the sleep plan was delivered to us,  C decided to deliver one last twist of the knife and was sick with croup. The sickest baby you have ever seen! A seemed to weather the croup storm better, although had a few days of lackluster activity. So  once everyone was healthy (thankfully in time for Christmas), the sleep plan was put into place with near miraculous results.

Sleepdreams was a god-send. As a plus, because they are registered occupational therapists, you can claim a portion of the cost under extended health care benefits.

I enjoyed 8 hours of sleep last night. It wasn’t continuous, although it will come- C is slightly underweight at the moment, so our goal is to get him to wake up only once a night to nurse. It works. It really, really works. He slept from 6:45-9:15 (I dream fed him) and then until 1:45. From 2-7 am was one continuous stretch of FIVE HOURS. My goodness. The boy is napping properly and now sleeping. Just for the record, he woke up anywhere from 2-8 times a night. Not always to nurse, but always we had to go into the room to calm him. Now he does it himself. Am still in shock- but wow- I thought he was a happy baby before. The kid is now insane with happiness- which makes me all warm and fuzzy with joy too.

So anyhow- back to the new start. I have been wanting a new start for quite some time. With sleep finding its way back to my system for a physical re-charge and the mental turning over of a new year- this seems like an auspicious time to turn over a new leaf. I feel like a tonne of bricks has been lifted off of me. I am so relieved and happy that our family can have a fresh start. No more grumpy mommy. A  mommy with energy and vim! A mommy with an apron, roller-curled hair, a clean countertop with cookies in the oven- well- ok- let’s not loose sight of who I really am! I think the whole family is breathing a collective sigh of relief. Hello 2012.

In other home-related goings-on- I decided to rearrange A’s room around. As we have many small toy parts (playmobil not the least of them), it was becoming obvious that we needed more room for A to spread out and play with her small toys in a safe and baby-free space. We bought some small Malm dressers from Ikea to fit into the closet (one for A and one for C). I am still amazed that we can fit so much in them. Maybe it’s because I’ve been really strict about clothes buying- we just don’t have the space to house a tonne of clothes. It also helps that we have three drawers under A’s bed to store dress up stuff, summer stuff and stuff of C’s that is too big right now. We also have 3 tubs in the crawl space of donated boys clothes for C!

We moved the big dresser out of the room and that gave us so much more room to play with. We pushed her bed up against the far wall and she now has a bigger rectangle of play space to use. This will be good for play dates as well- as the room only really worked with one kid in it before.

So besides the two small dressers, the only other thing purchased was this cool white ottoman cube that you can sit on and open up to store things. I got this at staples for $15.

The fabric tree that I made A months ago has seen better days as she’d de-foliated most of the leaves that were within her reach. She has promised to stop picking them off if I re-do it, so I may decide to tackle that shortly. The only space I’m not sure what to do with is the wall above her pillow. Should I leave it blank? Add something? Any ideas or suggestions? I don’t want to put anything that can be knocked down in the event of an earthquake so no shelves. I’ll sit on it for a while, I guess and see what inspiration comes.

Check out the rest of the photos below.

Happy 2012!

xok