Update on various things! :)

What in the wide wiggly world am I doing up at 1.45am?!?! Tsk. Anyway, I AM up, and I've lately been desperate to update my diary, but I have had no time. So, I should close this down and go directly to bed without passing Go, but here I am anyway. I will be soooo tired in the morning. *sigh* But that's my own silly fault! ;)

Okay, I just have to sort of bullet point the "news" in case I don't get a chance to update properly for ages again. I really hope to though! It's driving me nuts not to get time.

* Thanks for all the lovely compliments on my hair!!! :) What a confidence boost - I'm really grateful! xxx

* Nathan is cruising the furniture and turning himself to face out into the room when he's standing at the sofa and other things. He seems reeeally eager to walk, which Matthew never was even though he was on the move early like Nathan is. He's 8 months old!!! Or 7, adjusting his age! I'm boggled! ;)

* Nathan's sleep has been just dreeaadful all of a sudden lately. He has been doing his usual 3-4 wakings at night (yes, still), but lately started staying awake at one or two of those, and walking around and around his cot, or pulling up on me if he was next to me at the time! It has been so hard to get him back to sleep, and I have just been knackered. His day naps have been just as bad. Normally he seems to be a naturally pretty good napper, which is wonderful! He naps 3x a day and the first one is around 9am for about an hour, then around noon for maybe 90 mins or so, and then another starting between 3.30 and 4.30pm, for about 30 minutes. He's usually cranky-ish after that nap till bedtime, but only mildly so, and he's easily distracted by an interesting brother or toys/things to chew on, etc.

Anyway, the trouble was that he suddenly began taking an HOUR to go to sleep at nap time, screaming the whole time. I have had some days where I haven't had the energy to pick-up/put-down or walk/jiggle/rock for ages, so have tried going in and out of the room and letting him cry for a bit. On Thursday I was feeling ill so for two of his naps he literally cried it out, which was HORRIBLE. He cried for the best part of an hour and that didn't even result in him sleeping. He just got gaspy and gaggy and chokey and I ended up breastfeeding him again, whereupon he fell into instant unconsciousness. Nathan is not a baby for whom Crying-It-Out works, I am sure of it. Thankfully! :) I hate CIO.

Sooo, on Friday he cried for ages for nap #1, and I breastfed him again in the end (he always starts with a breastfeed, short story, and I rock him while singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - that's his before-nap routine, and then I put him down and pat him for a bit, and then leave - that used to work! Lately he cries like he's anxious the moment I start singing, and pushes away looking at the door!). I noticed that he was pulling my top to his cheek as he breastfed, and then when I put him down in his cot, I noticed that he took hold of the corner of his flannelette sheet and held it to his cheek/lips as he fell asleep. Suddenly I had a lightbulb moment, and when it came time for his next nap, after the feed/story, I picked him up to rock him and sing to him, and gathered his soft sheet from the cot in my arms too. He instantly snuggled the corner of it to his face and lay his head against me! I sang the song, put him in the cot, and he was asleep in 3 minutes with no fuss!

I just got the feeling he was needing some form of comfort, but not me as such. He didn't want me right there in his face, but he didn't want the alternative I was offering him - to be left completely alone to sleep without any comfort. He has two little soft toys in his cot but he hasn't gravitated towards them. The sheet he likes is just a little one - moses basket size from Mothercare, too small for his cot, but it's an easy small cover to put on him if I notice he's a little chilly during his day naps.

Anyway. So it worked! I was so pleased to have figured it out! :) For his last nap of the day, I did the same thing, and he was asleep again within 5 minutes. At bedtime we usually have a little more difficulty settling him to sleep than for naps, but I tried cuddling him with the blankie sandwiched between us. He got cosy very quickly that way, and I put him in his cot. He stood up and cried for me so I went back in and picked him and his blankie up again, cuddled for a moment and put him down, and he went straight to sleep! Since then, over the weekend, it has been working well. Sometimes he likes to suck on the blankie just a little, so that he falls asleep with it at his lips. My insides turn to mush when I watch him sleeping with his lil blankie at his sweet relaxed lips like that.

Nathan is my first baby to have any specific comfort source (other than me!). So it's new territory for me! :)

* We got new windows fitted yesterday!! The sale of the end of our garden finally went through and we have a lot of money ready for the home improvements we need to do, to get ready for selling the house. Neil's wondering about finding a way to maybe rent out our home if we can't sell it, so we need to fix it up a bit anyway. The fitting was quick (8am till 4pm) but a bit of a nightmare with the kids. I stood on glass, ugh. And picked it out with finger and thumb. D'oh! The thumb wound has been more trouble than the foot, as there was a tiny sliver of glass left in it that I couldn't get out. The boys were terrified of the Very Loud Tool that was used to cut out our old windows! Poor boys! They shed many tears and wailed in terror! Neil had an MRI on his knee (he's limping a lot at the mo because he has really bad knees - lonnnng history) that morning, so we couldn't go anywhere till he got back. When he got back, we all got in the car and went to Tesco's (weyhey) and then to the library. Neil drove us around for an hour and we all napped for a bit (except poor Neil!) and then we went home to find our windows nearly done! :) It's so nice to SEE out of our windows, hehe! The old ones were awful and almost falling to bits.

* We're getting a new car!!!! Yay! Neil gets a generous car allowance at work, and he's allowed to use it for anything he wants! So we're using it to pay for a new-ish Citroen C8 over 3 years, and after that, Neil will switch the payments to go on a car that he wants to drive to work (something less transporting-the-masses oriented, hehe!). He's keeping the Ford Mondeo to drive to work right now, the one we got when Matthew was nearly due. The Chrysler Grand Voyager that we've been driving since Nathan arrived is off the road at the moment as it ran out of tax last month so it's living on our driveway! We're getting it picked up by a company who'll pay us a not-so-great amount for it, but it really isn't worth much, so I guess that's okay. I can't wait for our new car to arrive! The 3 kids will go across the middle row, and in the Chrysler we had the two little ones in the middle row (two captain's chairs there, not a bench of 3 seats), and then Arthur in the back row. He talks NON-STOP and it's so hard to hear him all the way from the back! So I am looking forward to having him in the middle row again. It is being delivered to us on Tuesday (or maybe tomorrow!!!). The boys are soooo excited! I can't wait to be able to get out and drive with them again. We have missed church for a few weeks due to no transport big enough to get us all there! And shopping couldn't be done, or trips far away from the house with the boys. Neil had a temporary car that fit us all in it over this weekend, because Citroen were meant to give us the car on Friday and they messed up so they gave him a temporary car till Tuesday.

* Matthew is talking such a lot! He can verbalise absolutely everything now, and talks in 5 word sentences a lot. He and Arthur chat continually as they play. Lately Matthew's verbal developments seem to have all been to do with intonations, casual phrases, and those little things in casual speech like ums and ers, "mmm-hmm?" type sounds, and sighs appropriate to what's being said, mannerisms to go with things he's saying, etc. His communication is generally becoming a lot more effortless and fluent. It's SO LOVELY to see and hear them chatting away as they play! They play together constantly. Along with child #2 newly learning to talk has come a certain amount of bickering and arguing, which we haven't had before! We've had the physical conflicts - never outright fighting yet, but frustrated headbutts aren't uncommon around here. *sigh* We're working on that.

They LOVE each other! It's so incredibly sweet to observe! Matthew is so sweet with his new ability to talk - he constantly praises his brothers. He'll tell Nathan, "Boob-boy, Ninny" (good boy!) when he gets down from standing safely without bashing himself on the head (we had a couple of weeks of that while he learned!), and also tells him "Care-coh, Ninny!" (careful) when Nathan is playing with something unstable or shaking a heavy toy about that could whack him in the head! When he and Arthur are doing school together, he will crane his neck to see Arthur's painting while he's doing his own, and gasp loudly and say, "Woooowww, Arshur! Pain-ping bwiwant!!" (that's "painting brilliant" by the way! ;) ). He's so excited with school. I'm so glad to have thought to shift the schedule about and include him.

* School is going great. We've now done "The Sea", "The Farm", and last week was "Harvest", which was actually a bit difficult to think of ideas to keep us going for the whole week. Their favourite activity was making combine harvesters out of kitchen roll tubes and boxes, and then painting them! I have never seen Matthew so focused and enthusiastic as when he was painting his combine harvester - much more so than Arthur was. We have a lot of their work displayed in the kitchen and he points it all out excitedly at most mealtimes, beaming away! So sweet :)

* This week coming, our school theme is "Autumn" - yay! I've been looking forward to this one. I have books from the library, a Tractor Tom DVD that's about Autumn at the farm, and a billion craft ideas up my sleeve. There's so much to LEARN too, and so many things to see outside. I have no idea how we'll fit it into one week! ;) Maybe we'll extend it to 2 weeks? I am planning to start a blogspot blog to chart my homeschooling progress, just for my own records, but also I guess for anybody who finds it helpful in their own homeschooling ventures, or just for ideas for activities for their little ones. I want to take photos of everything we do for school, and post each week with what we did for our theme, with photos. Then I will have no trouble finding it all again when I have preschoolers in the future after Arthur and Matthew have grown past that stage! It will be so helpful for me. I haven't got time at the moment, but it has been my plan to start a blogspot blog for that purpose for a while now. I'll let you know when it's set up! :)

* Did I ever get round to saying that Arthur is night-time potty trained? It's been 2 months maybe? I can't remember. He's totally dry day and night. He potty trained in the day within 5 days of starting, and I had no intention of trying him at night for a while because I'd heard that it would be a good while longer before he'd be ready for that. But after a few weeks of being day time potty trained, at bedtime one night, Arthur told me he wanted to try going to bed without a nappy! *I* was the one who ummed and uhhed and said that I wasn't sure about that, etc! I can't believe how there has been absolutely NO training required whatsoever with this boy! It's been GREAT! :)

Anyway so he was dry the next morning, and he hasn't worn a night nappy since. He has had 2 nights about 5 weeks apart when he wet the bed, and both times he woke Neil up and said his bed was wet. Both times he had been very restless during the night leading up to the wee and had had a bad dream one of the times too. BUT, he has also had about 4 or 5 nights over the weeks where he's woken Neil up in the night to tell him he needs to do a wee! He does it on the potty by the bed, and then goes back to sleep. I have also discovered that if he needs a wee while we're out, he can hold it till we get to a place where we can find a loo. He still does almost all of his stuff on the potty at home, as we're not working on transitioning to the loo yet - he can't do it independently because of all the stair gates in the way, etc. When we move, we are placing a high priority on having a downstairs toilet for that reason. We have many years of toilet training ahead of us yet! ;)

So Arthur is an absolute star with his potty training! :) I'm so proud of him! He never has accidents any more, and he also dresses and undresses himself every day - these two things combined make a MASSIVE difference in the job of getting everyone ready for the day. I now feel like I have two littlies to dress and change, and I can hand Arthur his clothes and know that he'll deal with the toilet side of things (with the exception of me having to empty whatever it is down the loo regularly! Not GREAT fun, but I'll stick with it for now!).

* Nathan is eating table food. We are so slack on starting him gradually, and often his naps have coincided with mealtimes. So finally we just started sitting him in his new booster seat at the table with the rest of us, and serving him what we're eating! He loves it. *I* love it. Baby-led weaning is the BEST! :) He's still at least 95% breastfed, and some days he really doesn't have solids as such because he sleeps at mealtimes or something. He loves to eat food though!

* He's babbling - ra-ra-ra-ra-ra, vwa-vwa-vwa-vwa, and (new!) ma-ma-ma-ma! Lots of babies his age are babbling lots more than that, or have been doing so for a while, but I don't expect him to be early OR average with speech. Both my older boys have been later than average, but caught up and overtaken shortly after they've started! ;) So I expect he'll get busy with walking in the next few months, and get around to talking around age 2, like Matthew did.

* Matthew has lately started to finally understand a few colours! He knows orange, black, yellow, and this week he told me that something was green when it WAS, and when he was painting he couldn't decide which colour to start with. He finally said, "Uhhhhmmm.... RED!" and stuck his paintbrush in the red paint enthusiastically and began to paint! I was ever so thrilled, because any of my boys could be colour-blind (red/green) and so it's a big relief when they first show me that they can tell the difference between red and green. Of course Matthew could still be colour-blind. I will have to wait till it's obvious he's telling subtle shades of red, green and brown apart. But I'm encouraged by his progress! :)

Okay now it's really late, and I've gone and written a proper diary entry! Tsk! ;) I wish I could post a photo, as I have about 200 on the camera, and a bunch on the computer, but it's too late to start fiddling with photos, so I can't! I have soooo many to post. Next time, I promise! :)

Started school this week!! Also new hair cut, and Nathan's little photo session...

Ohhh, I know I'm later than I said I would be, updating with photos of Nathan! :S The boys all caught a cold this week (Nathan first, he chewed every. single. toy. on the floor in the church creche last Sunday and naturally was miserable and snot-ridden in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.) and so far Neil and I have managed to avoid it. I know I am exposed to it because I figured I'd get it so I continued kissing drooly, snotty little faces, and I can't fathom how many times somebody's little sneeze sprayed me right in the face. So I am hoping my immune system keeps on trucking and that I don't get it! It's not a horrible cold, but the boys have been a bit miserable with it. Nathan is starting to turn the corner today, I think, so that's good!

I have so much that I want to write!!! I almost feel kind of weird and emotional about it because I really really doooo want to write so many things and they are all equally important to me, but I can't possibly even write about half of them. There's just not time! *sigh* But oh well. I'm feeling hormonal and weepy lately, so that doesn't help (update on its way SOON at my pregnancy diary, for anyone wondering about the gap of several weeks! I'm not pregnant though, just ovulating! :) ).

BIG EXCITING NEWS, though, which I was meaning to write about before, is that we're officially home-schooling!! Yay! I'm so excited. I switched our schedule around quite a bit and started Arthur AND Matthew at "pre-school" this week!! I know Matthew's only two, but I sorted out a curriculum for the entire academic year, starting this week, and when I reviewed it I realised how it was totally suitable for Matthew as well. We started on Tuesday, because I was still finalising the curriculum stuff on Monday. So we have now finished our first week, and it has gone really well! :)

I bought the book, Creative Activities for the Early Years (Brilliant Publications) about a year ago when I was starting to research and read up on things for starting homeschooling, or doing an early version of it. I got it out recently to look for an idea for making a fish (I'd seen one on a children's TV programme that has a craft section in it, and wondered about other ideas for fish-related crafts, to see if I could theme it with Arthur for a few days or something). I found what I wanted on the first page! The book has a different theme for each week (it's aimed at mother-and-toddler groups, playgroups, or nursery-age groups that meet once a week) and the first week's theme is "The Sea". I read the rest of the ideas for that theme, and then started to have one of those lovely moments where everything clicks into place in your head in quick succession - click click click! :)

Two days before, I had been praying about ideas for homeschooling, and for guidance, because I was feeling like I didn't know what to DO next, what was right and what was wrong, etc. I also felt that what Arthur and I were currently doing was going a bit stale. He wasn't too motivated to do anything, and we had no set thing going on. The time for school on our schedule was when Matthew had his nap, and so all sorts of things could influence that time and give us a good patch of time for school, or next to NO time. And he'd want to nurse and relax as well. Yes, he's STILL breastfeeding - didn't you see my blinkie?! ;) Yes, I know he'll be FOUR in a couple of months. Yes, I DO plan to wean him. I have loved our breastfeeding relationship sooooo much, and feel so proud of the aeons that I've breastfed him for, lol! But the happy-happy aspect is finally wearing thin for me. Arthur is in no way ready to wean, which is beginning to unnerve me (which is a strange thing to admit, for me!) given that he's nearly four already! He nurses 3x a day, and Matthew does the same. I tandem nurse them two of those times (first thing in the morning, and bedtime), and I nurse Matthew at nap time (sometimes right to sleep) and then when I come downstairs from doing that, I nurse Arthur on the armchair for our snuggle time. He looks forward to it every day.

I'm amazed to hear myself say/think, "I want to wean!" I have never weaned my own baby/child before, even though I have 3 of them! ;) I never wanted to wean, ever. I wanted THEM to do the weaning. But I am so ready to stop breastfeeding Arthur. I feel a twinge of guilt and sadness for Arthur when I think like that - he'd be so sad if he knew I felt that way. But it's time. I am not sure how to do it (it HAS to be gentle - I have already talked to him about the idea and he was so so sad.), or when. I am thinking around or after his 4th birthday - what a thing to breastfeed my baby till he's four years old!!! I'm so proud! :) I still remember his first week or two when he would not take the breast and it was so heartbreaking and horrible and difficult, and I questioned my ability so many times and wondered if he'd ever breastfeed at all! Now look at us! :)

I could wean Matthew as well, since there are altogether too many people clamouring for my milk all day long (again, new feeling for me, and it seems a bit weird and not-like-me-ish), and he's already nursed to the age of 2. BUT, I really don't want to wean Matthew. I still enjoy nursing him. I don't enjoy nursing Arthur - maybe the odd occasion when I'm feeling particularly "Ohhhh, my baaybeee!" towards him, but otherwise not. And Nathan still nurses on demand day and night (he's 8 months old - EIGHT MONTHS!!!). He wakes 3-4 times to nurse at night, yup he does. And probably goes anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 hours in the day between feeds. He isn't really taking much in terms of solids, but we're not intending him to have much of that yet. His intake should be 95% breastmilk till he turns one, seriously. So we're not stressing with the solids. And those he does eat, are big ole hunks of real food that he picks up himself and gnaws at (aka Baby-Led Weaning, which went so wonderfully when we did it with Matthew!).

I know I'm getting off track here, but I'm glad to have finally written about these things all the same! I am sort of anticipating a maybe-possibly pregnancy soonish (I appear to be fertile and my cycles have normalised much sooner than after my other babies, and we're not using birth control, remember? We will see what God chooses for us! Yay!), so when that happens I want Nathan to have ALL the milk that I produce, because it will diminish anyway before he's 12 months old (probably). Still, I don't want to wean Matthew... But my personal preference would be to just be nursing one little one while pregnant with the next.

Anyway! Where was I before the breastfeeding?

Homeschooling! So I started to think how I could pad out the stuff in the book and make a great thing out of the Theme Per Week idea, but do it every day for a week rather than just once a week. I love how the book is based on themes that are popular with young children. I could vary it depending on what I want to achieve. It's very art/music/discussion/story based, which I love, and I think it's perfect for their age levels. But I know I can introduce learning more "schooly" things with it. This week Arthur learned to read (or recognise) the word "fish", because I wrote it up big in thick black lettering on a piece of paper attached to the mirror in the living room, and the letter "f" at the beginning is in red. It's easy to incorporate counting or first maths with each of them as their age level allows, with pretty much anything we're doing. I'm teaching Matthew his colours as we do the crafts and things. He knows yellow, black, blue and orange, but only orange and black consistently. He totally DOES NOT GET the other colours. His default is "blue?" :) It's different for me because Arthur was not like that. Arthur knew 11 colours consistently at 19 months old, and all the colours I can think of before he was two. He is not colour blind. My mum is a colour blindness carrier. My brother is colour blind. I have a 50% chance of being a carrier, and if I am, then any of my SONS have a 50% chance of being colour blind. Sooo, I know Matthew's not Arthur, and that he's still young for learning colours really. But I get nervous! What if he can't seem to grasp them because he is colour blind? I guess only time will tell. I soooo hope he's not! :S

So, anyway, there's lots of scope, and flexibility, and I like that! Every Monday (it was Tuesday this week though), we go to the library (gasp! We've never been before this week!!) and take out as many books as we can for little ones about the Theme of the Week, and then read them all week, and return them the next Monday when we pick out the next week's theme stuff. I was pleasantly surprised by the library trip! I was nervous in case the boys didn't behave, but they were really good, and the children's area was full of toys and even had music playing when we arrived! My sweet little boys said, "Wow!" when we walked in and they saw allll the books (they LOVE books), and they both went straight to the bookshelves, and each picked out a book, sat down somewhere comfy (not next to each other) and turned the pages quietly, looking at the pictures. When they finished their books, they went back for another, and made a pile of the ones they'd read next to them! They did this for ages. We stayed over an hour, and they had the best time. Arthur said that was the best part of his first day of school and he can't wait to go back to the library again on Monday.

We took out 10 books - stories, picture books, and early years science books, about the sea and the creatures that live in it. I can incorporate Christian teaching, so to speak, into any of the themes, because God made the sea and everything in it, and we can thank him for that, read about it in the Bible, and so on. We can also read other sea-related stuff from the Bible together, like Jonah and the whale. Every day before the craft time (which is now replacing Table Time after Matthew's nap), we read 2 of the books together, sing songs ("One Two Three Four Five, Once I caught a fish alive", "Down at the bottom of the deep blue sea", "A sailor went to sea-sea-sea", "Bobby Shaftoe", etc), and then we watch a quick YouTube video that I have scouted out beforehand. We saw some amazing videos of exhibits at aquariums this week, and also some diving videos of coral reefs and things. It's so easy to find quick videos that are relevant there, and I can browse them to find the most appropriate ones beforehand.

Anyway, I'm so excited about it! The book also happens to have a theme for each week, grouped into three school terms, starting in September! So it was a perfect answer to prayer at the perfect time (thank you Lord!). Next week's theme is The Farm. The boys are so excited about that one! Then it's "Harvest", and then "Autumn". I am excited about Autumn. And the THREE weeks in a row of Christmas themes later on, wheee! :) We will not be doing "Halloween" or "Magic", and we probably won't do "Chinese New Year". As a family, we do not plan to associate with the first two in any case, much less have lessons about it with our very little children! And Chinese New Year... we may do it. But it seems not that culturally relevant for them right now and they're only very little yet.

Here are a couple of pictures of some of their craft work this week. They did tissue paper rainbow fish on Tuesday, and shiny fish on Wednesday. We did painting with (homemade - I'm cheap, haha!) stencils of sea creatures and boats (they loved that!) on Thursday, and then jellyfish yesterday. We don't do school at the weekend now that we've started this, though Arthur is disappointed about that!

The fish - Arthur's are the bottom two, and Matthew's the top two:

The jellyfish - Matthew's is pink and Arthur painted his blue:

Matthew's attention span is waaaay shorter than Arthur's, but that's to be expected - he's only 2! He still starts off eagerly, but usually gets down after a bit to busy himself around the kitchen or run back and forth in the living room (they both do this a lot - BOUNDLESS energy!), and then comes back to do a bit more. This is good because he needs a lot more hands-on help than Arthur does, and although Arthur is fiercely independent with what he's doing, he does like my attention all the time to SEE what he's doing! So I can give him that when Matthew dips out of the "lesson" for a while.

Ahhh this is getting too long-winded!! It's also really late and I'm exhausted suddenly, so I must go to bed. I wanted to post two other things this entry, so I'll try to bash that off now!

I got my hair cut today!!! First time in.... 16 months, I think? And that was the first time in about 18 months. I just grow it till it annoys me with its length, and then get it cut to just below my shoulders, grow it out, get it cut, grow it out, etc. It's all the same length. The thing that bugs me about my hair after I have a baby, is that it falls out in HANDFULS after about 4 months postpartum. I know that's pretty much universal and completely normal with the hormones settling and that, but I hate showers once my hair is at that stage. And the LONG hairs strewn about the place, in my baby's little fists/mouth/clothing, etc. Yuck! Also I have been tying my long hair back and unless it's just pulled to the nape of my neck, it's heavy enough to give me a headache after a full day, and it feels like it's pulling on my scalp.

I also dislike the REGROWTH of hair postpartum! About 5 months PP, I get new thick growth of hair all over my head at the same time. This makes for a really yeurghy crew-cut looking thing making its way down my forehead (painfully slowly) over the months, and since I don't have a fringe and my hair is dark, it's really visible. I really don't like it! But it's only juuuust starting to be long enough to tuck behind my ears when I give birth to another baby, and thus begins another cycle of it!

So since I get RARE hair cuts, we thought it would be okay for me to treat myself to a swishy salon instead of my frugal dry-cut hairdresser down the road! I was nervous in case I went in and they descended on me and I came out with multicoloured hair standing stiffly 10 inches above my head, haha! Fashionably speaking, of course! ;)

But it was GREAT! Such bliss to be pampered! I had iced drinks, and chocolate toffees, and got to talk to the stylist about my hair - she has an 8-month-old baby too! And she said the secret to hiding the regrowth of hair is changing your parting (mine has always been a centre parting). So she gave me a side parting, and it hides it waaaay better, yay! She rolled her eyes when I said I use a 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner, and told me off for it! Honestly, I would LOVE to shampoo twice, towel dry, condition and rinse, blow dry in a downward direction and then apply serum, but one quick wash with a 2-in-1 shampoo is a luxury in itself some weeks - it's usually achieved in a hurry while Nathan takes his first nap of the day and the boys do all manner of things downstairs (granted, they often just play nicely, but there can also be full-potty-tipping and snack-crumbling into the sofas and TV/DVD/CD player-fiddling, headbutting, or shouting at each other enough to wake Nathan back up while I'm still rinsing carelessly squirted 2-in-1 shampoo out of my eye!). Boy would I LOVE to follow the stylist's advice every other day! If only it were that simple! ;)

Anyway, I then had a complimentary head and neck massage - ohhhhhh! And got my hair luxuriously washed in niiiice smelling stuff. And then had like 8-10 inches cut off my hair, and she blow dried it and put some serum on (my hair can be frizzy sometimes), and chatted about my little ones the whole time! *contented sigh*

Weird thing that bothered me throughout: I felt strangely emotional, and I was anxious about it. I kept feeling at each stage of the appointment, as though I could start to cry at any moment, and not be able to stop! What is up with that?! I was actually nervous about it because I felt so on-the-edge-of-tears some of the time and I was anxious about having a sob-fest right there in the swishy salon full of teenage assistants with highlighted hair, and women with heads full of foil reading magazines! NOT a comfortable thought. I don't cry in front of anyone as it is, for some reason. It makes me uncomfortable. But yeah, it was a weird feeling. I don't even know why it was there. Maybe I have been needing to feel pampered for such a long time, or maybe it was just the joy of a real luxurious treat just for me, I don't know. When the lady started the head massage, my chest automatically swelled up into a sob, and I had to shove it back down. When I sank back into the hair-washing chair and felt the lovely water on my head and heard a voice ask me, "Is that temperature alright for you? Do you want it a bit warmer?" the same thing happened. It bothered me throughout because I couldn't shake it, and I felt so unstable! It was weird. I generally feel kind of weepy at little things at the moment, so maybe it's just random hormones or something? Anyway. Weird.

Neil took some photos of my hair! My mum INSISTED on photographic evidence, haha! So I thought I would post it here too (eep!). Here's my hair this morning, before it was cut:

And after - sorry about the rubbish lighting, it was evening and the flash made things look weird, but hey ho.

And from the front - so so so VERY not comfortable with posting a photo with my face in it on the internet! But never mind. It's to show that the side parting does an okay job of hiding the new hair growing up the top there, and also the fact that the stylist sort of layered my hair near my face so that it has a softer effect or something. I have only ever had all my hair the same length, or else a fringe when I was young, so this is really different for me! It's curling up more than it was earlier after my appointment, because my hair does that, but never mind. It won't all go in a ponytail, but I can tuck the hanging bits behind an ear, and I like that :)

I'm really happy with it! I was surprised at how much happier and more confident I felt walking through town after leaving the salon. I do not really put any focus on how I look in terms of my self-esteem. I have pretty good self-esteem, or at least I thought I did. So I was surprised by how different I felt after the hair appointment. I wanted to smile for no reason, and my step felt light. I held myself more confidently as I walked, which surprised me one time when I glimpsed my reflection in a shop window. I realised I was happy for everyone to see me, whereas sometimes I am glad to have a bunch of small children with me to soak up any attention that comes our way! I feel like I look nicer than I did before, which probably isn't true, but my perception of myself feels different.

So, that was nice! :) I was not at home when it came time for Matthew's nap though, and he apparently cried for FIFTY MINUTES straight, sobbing and saying, "Niddi (need) Mummy, niddi Mummy..." over and over and over again as he cried. It about broke my heart when I got home to hear about that! He had a nap in the end though, and was up again and cheerful when I returned. Nathan was ravenous and I noticed I was engorged and leaking by the time I nursed him! He only had a 4-hour gap! Which is LONG for him though, so that's probably why. But still, he's 8 months old. I am leaking much less in general, as I usually am by this stage, but still have a random let-down sometimes and leak a little. I rarely wear breastpads now - only when we got out somewhere.

In town, I also treated myself to a sandwich for lunch and sat in a pretty garden to eat it. I went to the Christian bookshop and browsed children's Bibles, because we only have The Toddler Bible and it's temporarily missing for some reason. Arthur is ready for longer Bible stories and other things. So I browsed, but didn't find the perfect Bible, so I left. Before I went back to the car, I bought myself a 99 Flake ice-cream cone from an ice-cream van!!!!! I have not had one of those in about a decade, and it was pure, blissful, totally-about-ME indulgence!! I had that weird aaargh-I-might-cry thing then as well. I do not know what gives with that.

The other thing I wanted to post were the photos I made reference to last entry - the little session I had with Nathan on the sofa with Monkey a week or so ago. Remember this photo of Arthur at 6 months old?

Or this one of Matthew at 5 months old?

Arthur's was a one-off, but Matthew's was part of a similar "photo session" to Nathan's. You can see the rest of Matthew's pictures here if you're interested in comparing (scroll all the way to the bottom of the uncharacteristically long-winded entry, haha!)!

Here are the new photos of my sweet little Nathey, at 7.5 months old (6.5 months adjusted age, so similar to Arthur's age in his photo). Be warned, there are lots! And some of them are samey, but I don't care! :)

This next one is my favourite - it's a serious expression, but this is Nathan. I am thrilled that I somehow just happened to capture his features and expression and direct gaze very clearly in this photo. I am in love with his little cleft chin and the shape of his mouth and nose. And the way his eyes see right into me. And his sweet new hair growing in dark dark dark. And his blue blue eyes. These soft, soulful expressions are what I try to drink up visually, every time I see them. This is an image of a very intimate part of my relationship with my baby son, and so it's a precious photo to me!

Quite the opposite, hehe! He is always laughing and smiling, even though you see him so serious in the picture above:

My sweet baby boy! They all still look really different from each other, but I hear WAY more from other people about how much Nathan is so much like Matthew. Two people at church have told me they have mistaken him for Matthew in my arms and then had to shake themselves and realise that Matthew is two now, of course! I don't think he's THAT like Matthew, though he seems to resemble him more than he resembles Arthur. I have been looking at the photos of Arthur at 7 months old, and some of those are UNCANNY in how much he and Nathan look alike. They have different head/face shapes (Arthur seems quite unique so far, hehe!) but otherwise very similar eyes and mouths (and thus smiles), and expressions and mannerisms. And they have dark hair which makes them SEEM more alike. Different eyes though :)

Okay, it's so crazy late. I am going to bed! Back as soon as I can. I have stuff to write about moving house (we're not yet, but EXCITING news - Neil is going to view a house near his workplace on Monday. It sounds like exactly what we asked God for (yes we really did reel off a list, and we do have faith that he will bless us with what we asked for - I want to write more specifically about that soon, and of course about the house Neil sees on Monday!), and about changing our car AGAIN! ;) And various boy news and photos galore as always. Thanks so much for the comments on my last entry! Siobhan, I'm so excited (for some reason!) that your little brother, Nathan, was also called Ninny!! :) Thanks for all the sweet comments about Nathan's pics and his new milestones! :) He pulled up to stand in his cot today, so I have to lower the mattress to its lowest setting tomorrow (I can't reach to kiss him when it's right down low, waaaahhh!), and I'd only just put it to the middle setting a month or so ago! He is also standing and banging toy cars together at the sofas with his brothers (sooooo cute to watch!!) and "walking" on his knees when he pulls up to kneel at a toy with wheels and it sets off with him still leaning! Hehe!

MUST GO TO BED!

Several milestones for Nathan (again!) and loooads of photos

Thank you so much for the sweet messages after my last entry with the video clips! :) And also the positive thoughts about homeschooling! Congratulations to Robbi on starting homeschooling at last! :) I'm excited for you, but how are THREE of your kids school age?!?!

Well, as usual, it's already late. I have a scary amount of photos to post - I kid you not! I just uploaded FIFTY (ish) to my photobucket, and those are just of Nathan!! They're the ones I chose from the bunch of photos I had on my camera. I cannot fathom how I'll manage to show you all the photos I've been taking lately. *sigh* Somehow I must!! I really want to get all the photos that are important to me on here. This is my back-up memory bank! I should get gold membership for a bit again so I can back up my diary. Sometiems I think of switching it ALL to Blogger or something, because every other bloggy place is making Diaryland seem teeny-tinier than ever before, even though I think Diaryland was one of the first places to keep an online diary. So I wonder whether it will eventually get eclipsed completely? I know they say it won't "go under", but I get nervous these days, with 7 (SEVEN!) years of precious memories stored here. Should I move it all over? Is it more secure there? Hmmm, thoughts....

Anyway, that is not what I wanted to write about! I have soooooooo much on my mind (not much of it particularly exciting, just flotsam mainly) that I have really been wanting to write about here, but I just don't seem to get chance! Well, I DO, but I prioritise other things sometimes. Like I will just read a TON of blogs (I am behind on those in general lately so have been starting to try and catch up) for a whole evening (or two!), or I'll read the Bible - I am really eager to read my Bible lately. I started Cover to Cover - Through the Bible in a Year for the 2nd time, on August 17th. I'm on Day 26 so I'm a bit ahead. I would really like to read it in half the time if I possibly can. I read it through last time in about 2 years, during pretty much the entire time I was housebound with M.E. I love that this book takes you through it in chronological order (which is NOT necessarily the order the books are arranged in!). I just finished Genesis, woohoo!! :) I'm reeeally enjoying it!

Okay, I must get on with what I came to write about!! It's Monday tomorrow, so I don't want a crazy late night to start the week!

Nathan has had a BUSY week! He's teething, but still no sign of that first toothie yet. The main thing is (Milestone #1!!), he is now crawling properly. He started on Thursday evening - he did five "knees", as my mum and I call it, haha! As in, knee-knee-hand-hand-knee. Not much of a crawl, but a definite first start! Then he flopped and did the rest as usual on his tummy with his elbows and toes! He practised the short crawl a few times on Friday, and then on Saturday he really started doing longer crawls. He still prefers his old army crawl because it is less wobbly and gets him there faster if it's across an entire room or something. He already seems stronger crawling on hands and knees today, so I'm sure he'll lose the army crawl fairly soon. For my records, he was 7 months and 3 weeks old when he started crawling. His developmental milestones are adjusted by a month because of his early arrival, so it's the equivalent of 6 months and 3 weeks. Which is EXACTLY the age that Matthew started crawling! But he never did any army crawling of any sort before he set off properly. He just stayed stock still on his hands and knees, rocking and rocking in frustration, hehe!

I have got a tiny video of him crawling but it's soooo tiny and short, and I haven't got around to uploading it. Plus I'm sure I will have more impressive footage over the course of the week!

Milestone #2 is that he's stopping at toys and propping himself up with one arm in a sort of "half-sit" to look at the toys and play with them a bit. He still isn't sitting unsupported much yet, only very occasionally and for a few seconds (read: less than 10!) at a time. I always have to really encourage him to do it, and most of the time he just refuses and pushes back to lying down, or tries to stand up and walk! So, he'll sit when he's ready. He's by far the latest of my babies to sit unaided. Here he is doing the pause-at-a-toy "sit" (and then another one of him playing from that position):

Milestone #3: Nathan is suddenly really interested in one of the dolls we got for the boys last Christmas! It's the big "boy" doll (in the photos above), the one that only a few months ago I used to confuse for Nathan all the time when it was lying on the carpet, hehe! I would glance quickly across the room as I walked to get something, and freeze for a second in horror as my foot nearly stumped into MY BABY BOY! But wait, no, just a doll - phew! ;) They were the same size for ages, and some of Nathan's outfits were rather similar! Anyway, he suddenly seems really interested in it, and crawls to it if he catches a glimpse of it, even trying to pull it out of the toy basket (which is too high for him to reach up to right now).

I was watching him play with it this week and realised that he was actually giving it kisses! He has recently started to give open-mouthed kisses to us. It was hard to tell at first if they were kisses or not, because he always BEAMS with joy when we kiss him (he's so precious!!) and his big beaming smiles are wide-open-mouthed. But he is definitely trying to kiss now :) And he was working really hard trying to kiss the doll's nose/mouth, which I thought was so sweet! I took photos of course! :)

Milestone #4: Nathan started pulling to kneel up at things on Friday, the day after he started crawling. This is RIGHT in keeping with his brothers - they all seemed to do several big milestones in a bunch around this age. I think one of those big milestones for the other boys was a first tooth (Arthur for sure) so I'm wondering all the more about Nathan's first toothie! It can't be that far off now! :)

Anyway, he pulled up to kneel against me when I was sitting on the floor, which was exciting, and he was so pleased with himself! Arthur and I clapped him (Matthew was napping) and he loved that!

Milestone #5: Within a few hours he had discovered that pulling to kneeling makes it much easier to pull to standing!! Here he is kneeling at the jigsaw puzzle box on Friday, during Matthew's nap time, and then attempting to stand! The box edge was too low to the ground, but he was definitely trying!

On Saturday I took him up to bed for one of his naps, nursed him on the bed, and SUDDENLY he was wide awake and super excited about the cot bars that are up against the side of my bed. He kept trying to clamber over me to get to them, so I sat by him to watch what he wanted to do. He crawled up to the side of his cot, and started to grapple at the bars like he was trying to pull up and kneel there. He was almost frenzied in his eagerness, hehe! He made such cute little heh-heh-heh enthusiastic breathing noises, and had his tiny little pointy tongue sticking out with concentration. I nearly interrupted his efforts to eat him whole, but decided it was only fair to let him continue. ;) He pulled up to kneel at the cot bars eventually, and clung on with one hand while he batted the cot side with his other hand (in glee!):

He seemed REALLY happy and satisfied with that for quite a bit, and then suddenly got that focused look and the frenzied heh-heh-heh thing started again. I wish I could describe to you exactly what he was like as he did this. He worked so hard with his little leggies and arms that weren't used to that kind of activity! Eventually he managed this:

But the frenzy did not stop until he was triumphantly doing this!!....

Neil's eyes nearly popped out of his head when I showed him the photo, hehe! So that was Saturday (yesterday). Today Nathan has been working very hard at the Fisher Price Ball Blast toy (he has been interested in that for a while, frequently "asking" me to hold him near it so he can pretend to stand or sit at it and play with it!). He pulled up and knelt at it after a bit of effort this afternoon, and then let go and did not realise that if he lets go, he falls down rather heavily in a random direction! I need to stay closer to him when he's trying new things, I know :( I am not sure if I can always be there to do that though. Poor sweetie, he has a few bumps and bruises coming his way with this new stage he's entered.

Anyway, he went right back to try again, and I got the camera out this time:

He moved round the the other side to try again, and seemed a little unsteady so I sat near him and put my hand out to steady him, and he instantly used it as a helpful "pull up" aid, and stood up! He clung on tightly and eagerly pressed buttons and things on the top of the toy, and I took some photos. He looks so steady and grown-up here, I can't believe it.

Nathan seems to have become a lot older in such a short space of time, all of a sudden. I suppose it's just the fact that he's hit a few milestones that take him into "older baby" category or something. He has also had a growth spurt, and his head has grown like crazy recently too! His hairline seems more receding than ever, haha! And the sort of "male pattern baldness" area above his forehead has quite a pale, veiny effect at the moment, as though there has been fast growth there. It almost seems stretched! But I'm sure it can't really be. Anyway, his head has recently grown fast. Maybe that makes sense anyway, that he must have had some recent rapid brain growth to lead to the milestones he's hitting - and the increased social skills and communication too.

He's beginning to show a really playful cheeky personality (help! hehe!), very similar to Matthew's at this age. Matthew was actually more playful though, and by 8 months of age was initiating games with Arthur more than the other way around. Nathan likes to go for things that are a bit monkeyish, like a box of hankies on the bed (to pull out all the hankies), and he KNOWS that it's a monkey thing to do. He finishes nursing, gets a sudden undeniable twinkle in his eye, then flips over and starts to army crawl his way to the pillows at the top of the bed (where I keep a box of tissues). The whole way, he has his cheeky little pointy tongue out and he tosses glances over his shoulder with the MOST sparkly mischievous eyes. He makes his eager breathing noises as he goes, (heh-heh-heee) which sound more like "thhh-theee-heh-theh" with his sweet little tongue in the way there :) I honestly could eat that boy right up. He's so scrumptious!

Then, I wait till he's almost at the pillows, increasing his speed and starting to stretch out his little hand for the tissue box, and I say in my best fake stern tone, "Na-than?" He stops straight away and sort of half-twists onto his back (legs still front down, back twisting so his head is lying back to look at me), and gives me the most cheeky look! He beams and his eyes sparkle so much. You can tell he is having so much fun playing at being a monkey-boy, and then he does a sharp intake of air which is almost a squeal, such is his excitement, turns back and reaches the tissue box. He LOVES it when I then pounce on him and swing him away from the hankies.

Good golly, I love that baby boy soooooooooo much. My chest is sort of aching just writing that stuff. I think I might pop. Ah my sweet lovey boy bean!

Nathan's cringeworthy nicknames continue. There really is no hope for any of my children. It's an affliction of mine. ;)

He has a LOT of nicknames, many of which would probably nauseate the non-cutesy of you. Quite a few of his nicknames seem to be food-related. He's my Pea. Also my Bean-Pea. And my Bean-Pea-Pickle. Or even my Bean-Pea-Pickle-Pea. It can get worse! ;) The more squish-him-up-to-nothingness-because-I-cannot-bear-how-much-I-love-him I'm feeling, the longer the chain of names, hehe! He is also my lil Muffin, and my Waffle. Now, any of the food related nicknames can be finished with a "Bean" or a "Pea". There are some crazy combinations out there, haha!

Okay, now we get off the food-related nicknames and onto the even more embarrassing ones. Muffin has various additions: Muffin-Woo, for example. Also, somehow another word has combined with muffin to produce Fluffin. The poor child is often Fluff for short, or in one of the aforementioned "squidgy-hearted" moments: Fluffsy-Woo-Wee-Waffle-Woo. Yes, I am blushing. I know there are people feeling distinctly queasy right now. But I want it recorded! I know one day I might forget which child had which overly cutesy nicknames, and I want to remember clearly, because it's part of my very fondest, loveliest memories of their babyhoods.

The one I'm using most at the moment (though I use LOTS all the time) for Nathan is P. Fluffin. I don't know why! He just is. Mr. P. Fluffin. Or Little P. Fluffin. Oh my goodness, I squeeze him up so tight to my chest when I call him that. Again, the WHY escapes me, but there you go.

Also, with Matthew pronouncing his name, "Ninny", that has worked its way into lots of the things I call him too. Ninny-noodle (which is shortened to Ninny-noods, or lately just "nood" (poor, poor baby love)), Ninny-noo-nobblet, Ninny-knees (which has become just "knee-caps" for some reason!). And Ninny has recently developed into "Nin-zy" or Ninzy-woo. Or even just Ninz.

Please remember that I do also love and nurture my little ones and they are reasonably well-adjusted (!) and happy, so I urge you not to make that call to Childline on their behalf. ;) Really, by the age of 3 or 4, the amount of daft nicknames is drastically reduced! There is hope for them, eventually! ;)

Okay, it's really late and I must go to bed. I did a little photo session with Nathan yesterday while the older boys were out at the park with Neil, and there are quite a few photos from that. They are of Nathan on the sofa with Monkey, because I did a similar session with Arthur on the sofa with Monkey when he was 6.5 months old, and again with Matthew, but I think he was only 4 or 5 months old. So I suddenly had the idea to do it with Nathan, and I'll post the results (along with a reminder photo from Arthur's and Matthew's sessions) in a separate entry this week sometime!

I do have a BUNCH of news about the other boys, and general waffle from the recesses of my brain, which I will really try to write down soon, because I so want to! I hope I'll find time this week one evening. If only I wasn't taking so many photos of the boys (particularly Nathan!) right now! Every time I come to catch up on the computer, there are like 80-120 more photos to dump off the camera and upload, edit, and resize! It puts me off getting down to it when I'm tired, but I don't like to leave the photos undone and just go on and write waffle instead. Anyway, I'm glad to have done some catching up with Nathan's photos!

Back soon! :)

More thoughts, and photos/videos of boys!

Thank you so incredibly much for all the wise advice and supportive comments last time I wrote! I want to do a proper follow-up to the stuff I was talking about then, but it's already so late (again!) and I came to post photos and stuff, so perhaps next time?

Although, just briefly (hahaha... ;) ), we have a new plan for the bed time crisis as a result of praying a lot, and talking about it a lot, and reading your comments (I read them out loud to Neil - we are both really grateful!). The down side is it involves completely decluttering the two bedrooms, and reducing the furniture in them to the bare minimum, which I can't FATHOM us ever achieving with no time, energy, or hands free, plus a child/baby sleeping in one or both rooms quite a lot of the day! But oh well!

The theoretical plan is that Neil moves back in with me (gasp! hehe!) and we clear out the boys' bedroom till there is just a big double chest of drawers for their clothes (which is there now), and Matthew's little toddler bed in the far corner, and Arthur's MATTRESS next to it in the other far corner. That's it! We'll take Arthur's bed down and have him go back to just a mattress on the floor for his bed, without a bed guard. Then they're at a similar height, and there is not nearly so much danger with kids jumping on high-up beds if we end up leaving them to go to sleep. NOT that we are planning to let them jump on beds all evening, but yeah. Minimalist effect - I feel good about it! :)

Our room will be decluttered in a similar way to the bare minimum, so that there is room to store a cotbed sized mattress under the end of our bed, and it can pull out onto the appropriate-sized space on the floor between the wardrobe and the end of our bed, if it becomes desperate that we separate the boys at bedtime to go to sleep. Then we can carry the sleeping boy (whichever boy it might be) to his own bed after he goes to sleep in our room. I'm not sure how that would work given the fact that our room is Nathan's room as well and he would be asleep in the cot (or trying to go to sleep) only a few feet away. That might not work at all, in fact. But it's good to have a Plan B all the same! :) And it would be soooooooo much nicer for all of us to have cleared, decluttered bedrooms to sleep and rest and relax in. It might even help their little psyches or something, to be in a calm and uncluttered room for bed (poor loves!).

The schooling.... I'm not sure what I want to say about that tonight, because it's a big and waffly subject (as far as I'm concerned anyway!) and it's actually a work in progress, our thoughts on it and feelings about it. So it's not concrete, whatever I write about how I'm feeling. One thing I can say is that it isn't so much that I want to prioritise the boys having a Christian education, in fact that was a belatedly-realised bonus of homeschooling, for me! Nor is it so extreme that I don't want the boys out of my sight... It's that I want to completely oversee their upbringing in basically EVERY way, when they are very young anyway. I sort of view it like tomato staking (great analogy that I found online and which EXACTLY describes my heart for the boys). When they're young, they are not yet equipped for the world, purely because of their immaturity. They WILL become mature (all kids will, whichever approach their parents take to bring them up), but I don't want to mature them by putting them out into the world and letting the world's values shape who they become. I want to be the "stake" for my baby tomato plants! I want to personally tend to my seedlings until they are strong enough to withstand the elements without a stake. I want to feed and water them with the best nourishment (I'm talking spiritually), and I want to protect the soil they grow in, plucking weeds as soon as I see them sprouting. I want to be right there as they stretch out tender new shoots that are too little and delicate to support themselves without a carefully placed foundational structure. I want that foundational structure to be ME. Well, Neil and I - both of us.

It isn't that I want them tied to my apron-strings - though I know it sounds like I'm saying pretty much the same thing when I say I want to keep them very close during their "foundation" years. A foundation WILL be laid, and whatever they are exposed to will shape what that foundation is made of. I have a big thing about making sure that foundation is exactly what I believe to be the best thing for them. School has risks, to me, in that respect. Socialising with other kids is important (although, that is up for debate apparently, according to recent research). I know it will sound extreme (or crazy!) of me, but I do not want ANY peer influence in these formative years, for my kids. I don't want any leanings towards the "normal" exclusion of other kids because they are "not the same age as me", "girls/boys", "different", etc. Or the separation between friends and siblings. PLENTY of siblings remain great friends, but there is a mindset on the whole at school that siblings are not cool but FRIENDS are (as if your sibling cannot possibly be your best friend!). That is my experience in all the schools I attended (some working class, some quite the opposite) anyway. I also don't feel too thrilled about the beginnings of the mindset that it's We The Kids versus Them The Parents/Teachers, and the general disrespect that can arise from that, egged on by peer influence over the years.

I WENT to school, several different ones. I know that school is a lot of fun, unless of course you are bullied to heck like I was, in which case it is MISERABLE, but somehow I also remember a lot of fun and have very fond memories of school in general. I don't have a problem with ANYONE sending their children to school! This is something extremely personal, about my own mindset, and my own personal brood of kiddies, and my desires for them, and how I am feeling led to raise them as I press into God and ask him to guide me. I think my little ones would probably love school and have fun, make lots of friends, and learn a lot. I think they have the potential to do very well academically. With those things popping into my head now and then, I get worried that I must therefore be doing something wrong in thinking NOT to send them down that road - it seems crazy not to sometimes! Maybe we still will? But right now (and since Arthur was about a year old, actually), I am thinking not.

It's a hard decision to make, and to follow through on. It's not so easy as saying, "Home-schooling sounds like The Thing for our kids! Right-ho, that's what we'll do then!" with cheerful confidence! My thoughts over the years have been more (nervously), "Oh my gosh... I think God is calling me to homeschool my children! What in the wide wiggly world am I going to do?!... (much frantic prayer...) Surely God doesn't MEAN me to isolate and seclude my children, or for that matter, teach them myself when I am currently tearing my hair out over being pregnant and having a baby and a toddler who are trying my patience severely?!?!" But then I also get, "Oh, I can't WAIT to homeschool! I'm so happy they will not be going to school - I could not be happier with my decision and I just know it's the right thing for them! Yayness!" Followed swiftly by, "Yaaargh, already my children are turning into pent-up and emotionally challenged little men because of my CRAZY decision to keep them from NORMAL mainstream education! What in the wide wiggly world have I done to my sweet loves?!?!" And then, "They so need my guidance in everything this early on.... I'm so thrilled to have the privilege of building a godly foundation for their lives, and protecting them from influences which would potentially go against that. There is NOTHING more important to me than their salvation, ultimately, nothing. Though they must choose for themselves, I want them to know Jesus. I know from personal experience - if I meet Neil and get to know him, I can't very well then say, "Oh, I don't believe Neil exists!" It's the very same thing with Jesus. So, I want them to know Jesus. What's to choose once you know him? I want to provide an environment where there is plenty of opportunity to get to KNOW Jesus, not just to learn about him and a ton of other "religious options", not while they're young." And so it goes on. I know some of that could be provided for in a Christian school, but *I* want to oversee their early years, me! I'm eager to! I don't want somebody else to tell me what they did or how they reacted to this or that, or how the learning process went for them over such-and-such. I want to be involved, so that I'm right there for them in everything. I will ease back as the years go by, as I see their foundation become stronger and their limbs more ready to run with the values I have helped them start off with.

I have a million and one ramblings about it, as you can see! Lots (if not all!) of it will rub at least some of my readers up the wrong way, and I just want to say again that by stating my own convictions I IN NO WAY intend to judge others or preach by them! They are just my own personal desires for my own children, and I don't mean to say that it's the way Christians should school their children either.

So anyway. I will continue to pray and wait on God, and he will continue to lead me, and hopefully I will not have too many freak-out-panicking episodes about what I'm doing to my children as a result, whatever the end decision! ;)

Well, Nathan has been awake and nursing since I started this. He's asleep (for now!) again, so I had better hurry up and post the pictures I wanted to post, and go to bed.

Today is Tuesday, and it was a GOOD day!!! I somehow randomly (!) transformed into No Nonsense Discipline Mama when I got out of bed this morning (and it WAS a random act, I assure you, lol!), and so today has been a reeeeally good day in terms of behaviour and nipping things in the bud. How I wish that was my default setting and I could naturally be that way every waking moment! Life would be a lot simpler if I were!

Arthur was put in the porch for 3 minutes today for not doing something I asked him to - something fairly small and petty on the scale of things, but disobedience nonetheless. He freaked right out in there, as he usually does (because he HATES going in the porch as a method of discipline!), and then said he needed a wee. So I put the potty in there and left him to it. When I came back, he had soaked ALL the wee up with his underwear, and was slapping said undergarments around the porch. The walls were running YELLOW and wee was spattered every which where. He looked mighty pleased with himself! Normally I would probably do my nut on discovering this kind of behaviour, because it would make me really cross! But thankfully (ohhh thankfully!) I was No Nonsense Discipline Mama today, and so I calmly administered several non-too-feeble smacks to his rear-end, and then handed him a towel and a pack of baby wipes and told him to clean the walls and door thoroughly, and left him to it! He looked most put out! I went back after a couple of minutes to make sure he was cleaning it up thoroughly enough - he wasn't, but he's only little so I did not hold that against him. I helped him clean up and then he had to stay in the porch for a further 3 minutes after it was all done. When I went back and asked him why he had been put in the porch, he instantly told me (sometimes he inexplicably loses his memory at this point) that he had disobeyed me, kicked up a fuss about going into the porch, dipped his pants in the wee and spread it around the porch, and that he understood he was never to do it again and he was very sorry!!! I am not 100% sure he won't do it again, but I was happy with his response to the way I handled it. *sigh* That boy is testing the boundaries like crazy these days! I'm constantly praying that I'm up to the challenge of reinforcing them.

Aaargh, it's so late! PHOTOS, stat!

I really wanted to post a whole bunch of photos of the boys that just keep not getting posted when I write diary entries! Some of them are nearly a month old. They are just random ones of two or three of the boys together (how my brain still boggles itself when confronted with that sentence, "two or three of the boys"! Hehe!). Arthur in particular loves to sit with Nathan - he still asks to hold Nathan, but Nathan's getting so big and squirmy and mobile now! They sit side by side more often, and it's always a photo opportunity. I always take photos, even if none of them end up coming out well. So here are some "brotherly" photos, starting with the oldest ones - of the boys loving their littlest brother (and the feeling being mutual!):

In this next one, Arthur kept on saying, "Cheese" and looking really unnatural! So I asked him to smile naturally, as though he was really happy about something. He did this, hahaha!

The next one was better :)

Here are quite a few of Arthur and Nathan that I took a few days ago - they sat fairly still long enough for me to take lots of photos! Arthur is so lovely with Nathan. He loves to be affectionate with him and put his arms around him and snuggle him :) Matthew is similarly affectionate (in fact he is a little more affectionate in general than Arthur, though there's not much in it given that Arthur is a very affectionate child anyway) and Nathan NEVER goes for a nap or to bed for the night without a kiss on his face or lips from Matthew, no matter what Matthew is doing at the time - he MUST stop and "give kiss, Ninny!" It's so adorable. *sigh*

The older boys have been a mixture of affectionate and, er, the opposite (!) with each other lately. That reminds me, thanks Jemma for mentioning the rough-and-tumble with Daddy thing! I remember somebody (you??) gave me that advice a while ago, before Nathan was born I think, and we initiated rough-and-tumble with Daddy every day after work, after that, for both boys. They loved it! It's only your message that made me realise that somehow that has slipped and they really haven't had that nearly so often for a while. Thanks so much for the reminder! I'll mention it to Neil and get it back on track!

Meanwhile the boys enjoy rough-and-tumble with each other during the day. They don't really get aggressive (mean) with each other, just play and enjoy it. I videoed them for FIVE MINUTES STRAIGHT just wrestling on the floor and giggling today! But I can't show you it because I maxed out my monthly upload thingy at One True Media, with a few other videos that I uploaded (to come soon!). But here are a few photos from yesterday's rough-and-tumble :) Note Nathan in the 4th photo, as yet totally innocent to such behaviour, haha! Not for much longer, my boy, not for much longer....

On the theme of brotherliness (word?! spelling?!), here are a couple of random short videos clips (less than a minute each because longer than that and I have to wait all YEAR for it to upload). There are three, but please OH PLEASE, if you don't have time to watch them, I beg you to squeeze in a viewing of the last one! It's of Nathan finding Arthur too funny doing a crazy little quick-step dancey thingy in the kitchen (which, sadly, I didn't get much footage of, since the camera was mostly pointed at Nathan or my own double chin). He laughed so much that he squealed and gasped, and I just love it so much that I want you people to see it too! Please dooo! :)

Thursday was my daddy's 60th birthday and because he is in France, we didn't see him in person. We had birthday cake though! I let the boys decorate it with chocolate icing and mini smarties (not the sour American kind!!! ;) ) and put candles in it (the boys loved blowing those out and singing happy birthday!). And we had a little party with balloons and games! I made 2 pass-the-parcels with a little toy car in the middle of each, and a chocolate finger biscuit in between each layer! They loved that. Here is a little clip of the boys sitting ready to play the first pass-the-parcel game. I put the CD player on for the music, and it happened to be my Chris Tomlin CD which the boys hear sometimes at "Bible Time" (around 10-10.30am every day). Instead of grabbing for the parcel or bugging me to start the game like they had been before I put the music on, they sat and did a funny little bop to the music for a bit (while Nathan coveted the little parcel in my lap!):

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Here's the little video clip I made for my daddy, of the boys singing/saying Happy Birthday to him, sitting on the sofa. I have no idea why Arthur must pick his nose for the better part of each day.

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And here's the video clip of sweet little Nathan laughing his head off at Arthur's antics. Please please avert your eyes from the hideous kitchen that you see flashing about the edges of the shot (I beg you). Pretend it's clean and shiny and uncluttered and real-honest-white. Okay? Also, never mind my double chin.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Isn't he so precious?! Ahhh I love him soooo! I love them all just so much. I feel so blessed to be A Mama. She who brings up littlies. What a privilege! :D