mathmom's blog

I have seen some babies being fed opening their mouths eagerly, wanting to be fed as fast as the parent can shovel the food in. Our children are not like that. For example, about 3 days ago I started feeding Luke green peas (mashed up, of course =). He will eat for about 10 minutes, needing lots of breaks to look around and spit out the peas I put in his mouth. About half of the time when I put the spoon up to his mouth he will keep his mouth closed or put something else in it. I have had some small success with giving him the loaded spoon and having him put it in his own mouth, but then he ends up gagging half the time. After a few minutes (probably less than 10) he is struggling to get off my lap, wanting to walk and crawl and do anything other than eating. This behavior does not end with infancy. Amanda (who has her own issues with food) usually eats about 3 bites of dinner before wanting to get down and play, and she has no trouble with not coming back to eat. Eleanor will s...

Baby Luke woke up at 5 today. I did try to get him back to sleep, but it didn't happen, so Michael took care of him from 6-6:40 or so. By then he was hungry (and ready for his first nap...) so he got back to sleep, Eleanor woke up. I did take a nap from 7-7:30, then worked on getting Eleanor and Michael out the door by 8, getting dressed and doing errands from 9:30-11:30, lunch, afternoon nap for Luke, make dinner (crock pot stew), drive to school to pick up Eleanor, go to the pool, eat dinner, get everyone to sleep, and it's 8 pm. That's 15 hours. It isn't all difficult, it isn't even all that unpleasant (only occasional bursts of unpleasantness...) , it's just long. Now I get to clean the kitchen, get Eleanor's things ready for school tomorrow, and start packing for our trip on Friday. And Michael just got home =)

We got fish for our tank today, after a week or two of it running on empty. Michael said that the tank looks good empty (which it does, thanks to the plants) but we should at least try keeping some fish. We got 5 zebra danios to start, we'll see how they do. The largest one is named Fred, the smaller ones are Danny. We did not let our kids name them since it is highly likely that at least one of them will die in the next few weeks, since we have no idea what we are doing beyond reading the manual for the tank. Since it is Sunday, here is a religious fish song for all of you (to be sung to the tune of "And they'll know we are Christians by our love"). In case you are wondering, we do not have Jesus fish on our cars =). There are fish on our Hondas, there are fish on our Fords There are fish on our cars to show we're driving for the Lord And they'll know God has blessed us by the cars we can afford, And they'll know we are Christians by the fish on our ...

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!

Lately I have been trying to read "Raising Your Spirited Child" by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. It has been helpful, mostly in reassuring me that 1) Eleanor is more spirited than most, and 2) she's within the bounds of normal. Ever since she was a baby she has been demanding, energetic, intense, and so on. I remember that my brother and sister-in-law would come over to walk her around the house from 10 tomidnight for her first 8 weeks. She started climbing things before she could walk. So far I've read the descriptions of the temprament traits that determine spiritedness---intensity, persistence, sensitivity, perceptiveness, adaptability, regularity, energy, first reaction, and disposition. Eleanor is higly intense, sensitive, perceptive, energy and irregular. She's just average in persistence, adaptability, first reaction and serious disposition. So when I send her up to get dressed in the morning and she ends up looking out the window for 10 minutes instead, tha...

Wednesday is definitely not the day to do errands. Luke got a good nap in this morning (9-11 am! That's more than Eleanor and Amanda ever napped in a whole day!) but then after lunch we went to: pet store (for information about fish) craft store (a bag for Amanda to take to school, plus decorations) grocery store (groceries, of course =) coffee store (feeding Michael's addiction) bread store (mmm, fresh bread!) pick up Eleanor from school home We got home at 3:15 and then left for gymnastics at 4, got back home at 6:15. He got a few winks of sleep, but he really wants to be home for a 1 hour nap in the afternoon. Sorry, buddy... On the one hand, he would like to be an only child so that I could make my schedule revolve around his naps and he would get them all regularly. On the other hand, he really does enjoy his sisters, they are so much funnier than his parents. Doing all the errands in one day does save gas, but it is not so much fun for the kids. Amanda seemed to en...

Luke is a very social baby. He has always been happiest when someone is smiling at him and paying attention to him (which I attribute to the fact that he has 2 sisters competing to play with him), but today he moved on to kissing. Michael was holding him and he saw me, smiled, and as I approached he reached out and grabbed the hair on both sides of my face and pulled me to him and gave me big open mouth kisses on my cheek and nose. We reacted so well to that that he did it again, but this time he got my glasses... He and we were all delighted. Earlier today he was trying valantly to blow a rasberry. Eleanor got down on her knees beside the exersaucer and showed him how to do it, which brought gales of laughter from Luke. Then Eleanor would listen for a while and encourage Luke ("Good job Luke!") and then demonstrate again. It's so much fun to see them interacting. I don't know if you'd call what Luke is doing "crawling" exactly. He gets his knee...

Today Luke turned 6 months old and had his first taste of real food! Well, if by real food you mean rice cereal =). He enjoyed the experience very much---he kept grabbing the spoon and putting it in his mouth. I think I made it a bit thick at first, so he gagged a little bit. But of all my children, he seemed the most adept at eating from the start, and he certainly seemed to like the taste. His expression on the first taste seemed to be something like, "why have you been keeping this from me!" The biggest problem with the feeding was that just before I started feeding him, he grabbed a handful of my hair so the spoon kept having hair draped over it. After he was done eating, of course, he leaned over my shoulder and started gnawing at the chair again. It may be that rice cereal is just another one of the new tastes he has every day, along with glasses, hair, train tracks, couch, etc. In a few days I can let you all know how he likes vegetables =)

Eleanor started kindergarten today! She had a great time. Her two comments to me when she got in the car were, "There were no math questions today," "We might get some homework!" She also commented that she gets to wait until she's in first grade to do the high monkey bars (there have been several broken arms over the past few years...) Yesterday afternoon she was acting up (blowing up over small things) and I said to her, "I know you might be worried about the start of kindergarten..." She looked at me in surprise "I'm not worried!" and she seemed to be honestly not worried. Well, today in the car as we were driving away she said "I was _so_ scared." I guess it's hard to figure out what you're feeling... Of course I managed to forget her bag with her snack and her lunch in it (Doh!). I was feeling an awful lot as though I was starting my first day of kindergarten, and not doing very well. Then I realized there ...

One of the problems with blogging is that you actually need to know what you want to say. In trying to write blog entries, I have found that I can almost always come up with a beginning or a title. Then I usually find out that I didn't really have that much to say about the topic, and it goes to my long list of unfinished blog entries. Even if I do have something important to say, I really have a hard time ending it. I can never come up with the correct bang! I almost always leave with some sort of whimper. I have more sympathy for the pastors who keep talking a good 15 minutes after they should have stopped---it's much easier to see from the oustide that you should stop talking. This is the reason I started writing blogs, though. Perhaps I will eventually learn. Until then, you all have my permission to stop reading each entry as soon as it starts getting pointless and boring.

There is something inexact about the term shopping to describe looking for a church home. "Shopping" implies that we are looking for the perfect church to meet all of our needs, like we would shop for a grill. The point of church is not to meet our needs for some sort of ministry or music or something else---the point is that human beings were created to worship God, and to do it in community with other believers. On the other hand, there are some things that are important. Here are some of the things I've been thinking about: Non-essential things: a building, a particular type of music, a bell choir, organ, a super organized Sunday school, communion every sunday. Important things: a congregation that sings songs that I can sing too, sermons that are expository, explaining the Bible and how it relates to our lives a congregation from all walks of life, ages, and races. Essential things: They've got to preach about Jesus and his love for his people They've got ...

I've been reading around on the web about the interaction between Christianity and Harry Potter. Many of the reactions seem to be something like "Harry Potter will get children interested in magic and paganism and worse, and we should not let our children be corrupted!" One of my favorite reactions seems to be about the pope: Pope John Paul II supposedly said that the books were OK, Pope Benedict said that they were very bad (back before he became pope, anyway). Since I read it on the web, it must be true =) Here ( http://decentfilms.com/sections/articles/2567 ) is an article that manages to respond thoughtfully and respectfully to the magic dilemma. I like it for a few reasons: he doesn't just dismiss the biblical and traditional prohibitions against magic as old fashioned, he doesn't say that all magical fiction is bad, he has read and thought seriously about many works I really like. I don't always agree with him, but I appreciate the thought he put ...

Almost every day for the past 2 years I have made oat bran for breakfast (OK, not while I was having morning sickness, but most of the other days). I have gotten very good at it! Measure the water, measure the oat bran, microwave for 1 minute, stir, microwave for 55 seconds, put in bowl with milk substitute =) and eat. I remember finding out that 55 seconds (rather than 1 minute) was the correct time for the second round of microwaving---the oat bran would never overflow the container, so I didn't have to watch it. Lately, however, it only takes 50 seconds for the oat bran to overflow, sometimes only 45 seconds! Some might speculate that the weather is hotter, so the water I use is hotter than usual. This can't be true since I only get water from the refrigerator. I blame global warming. In other news, Luke woke up last night, talked for a while and then started screaming! When I went in to him, I found he had turned over on his stomach and couldn't quite turn back o...

For the past two years I have hired a "Mother's Helper", an 11 year old girl who helps me manage my 3 children, ages 5, 2.5 and 5.5 months. For the past few months she has come to the neighborhood pool, so she can swim with one child while I play with the other and hold the baby. She has a number of friends in the neighborhood, and today 3 of them were playing with her and both the older children. This turned out to be essential, since I can't find my swimming suit, so I was not in the water. On the one hand, I feel a little awkward about having her hang out with her friends while she is watching my children. They were talking about all sorts of middle school things (the older of the friends was sort of flirting with some middle school boys) and could have been distracted. It shows how responsible the helper is to say that I always feel like she is watching the girls, making sure they were safe and having fun. (On a side note, seeing the middle school experience...

Actual internal dialogue from last night: "Well, the kids are asleep, I should have time to write a quick blog entry before I clean the kitchen... Let's see here... "First I'll get some inspiration---ooh, Chanson has some new comments. Look at her blogroll , she's got a lot of interesting things on the side. Let me just check out Stay at Aum Mom's blog. She's got a link to Neil Gaiman ! I'll just read that one too. Oh, I haven't read my friend Lenise's blog for a long time, I'd better do that. Oh, someone told me the other day about a public domain audio book site, let's see, what was it called? Ahh , LibriVox . Any titles I'd be interested in? Wow, look at all of these! "OK, back to my blog. I'd like to tell friends about it, I wonder if there are any other mathmoms out there. I'll just google ... There are a ton of sites. Hmm , what about mathmomma ? Mathmama ? Here's a link to mathgoddess , what fu...

I bought the 7th Harry Potter novel a few days ago. To tell the truth, I can't even tell you what its name is, except that I knew I wanted to read it before it came out in paperback and there is no way I'm going to check it out from the library this century. Those of you who know that I read fast might ask if I like the ending. Yes, I do, although I haven't read the middle yet. It seems a bit scandalous, but almost the first thing I did was turn to the ending and see if it ended satisfactoraly. Before you judge me too harshly, keep in mind that I have 3 children, two of whom don't nap and the one who does nap has this tendency to stay up at least an hour in the middle of the night. This means that my reading time is limited to 10 minute spurts during the day between fights, and after they are asleep (when I usually clean the kitchen) and even when I am reading, I have such a small tired attention span that I can barely keep track of anything. This is a big book, a...

Today Luke sat by himself for about 30 seconds! He was very tippy, but he even put his hands out to catch himself from falling. He also rolled over from back to front, then over onto his back, so he is starting to be able to roll across the floor. This has enabled him to roll over to reach table legs and chairs. His favorite trick right now is to "catch" my arm when I am changing his diaper. It makes him laugh and laugh =) He just woke up, must go.