Can't Live Without You - 3rd Edition

It's crazy how shit changes in the matter of days around here, and I'm not talking exclusive about poop. Peanut will be 6 months old in a few short days and that blows my freakin' mind. She has become such a little lady and definitely isn't a newborn baby anymore. She has developed quite a personality and it's so lovely to feel like I actually know her now. Anywho, here is a list of our can't live without you items from the last few months.

1. Bath Sponge - this thing cost a whopping $8.00 and is perfect for little peanut in the bathtub. So sliding around and she seems so cozy laying on it.

2. Gardening kneeling pads - My husband and I like to do bath time together (often with our puppy's head resting on our shoulders, watching) and our gardening pads save our knees. I grabbed them from Walmart for $3 a piece.

3. Plastic Rings - Oh man! These things have provided hours of entertainment and teething comfort. I originally bought them to hang toys off of but I quickly found that peanut loves the rings without crap hanging from them. They go everywhere with us. In the stroller, the car, when we go out to eat - super handy because they can snap onto just about anything.

4. Baby Legs - We've been wearing these for the last 3 months, multiple times a week. They are so handy especially when the temperatures are starting to drop in the evening.


5. Bumbleride Indie -  HOLLA! Peanut finally enjoys her stroller. We've been using it a ton and we both love it. It wasn't cheap that's for sure but in my opinion it is worth every dang penny. This is a smooth ride for road and trail walking as well as for jogging. It's only 20 lbs so we take it everywhere with us and it can collapse and fit in the backseat even with peanut's car seat in the centre.

6. Small Baby Cloths - In retrospect this should have been on my first and second list as well. We have a ridiculous amount of these clothes - 45 to be exact! At first I felt crazy keeping all of them (we got them as gifts) but I quickly realized those little bastards were great for everything! When we were bottle feeding for the first 6 weeks we would use them as a bib to keep peanut clean and dry. Peanut had a blocked tear ducts for 5.5 months which required up to massage her eye up to 10 times daily with a warm cloth. BAM! good thing we had 45 to choose from. I am now using them to wash off the never-ending doggy kisses, for bath time and spit ups and I always carry a few in my purse just in case.

Items we still cannot live without:
- Jump-a-roo
- Floor play mat
- U pillow (now used to help peanut sit up on her own)
- Noise machine! Life saver!
- BioGaia probiotics
- Sleep sacks (peanut is no longer swaddled! YAHOO!)

Sausage, Potato & Kale Soup

Pinterest strikes again! A friend of mine pinned this recipe and I immediate wanted to make it. It looked so delish. I would have liked to make this when the weather was a little cooler but I just couldn't wait. The original recipe was so freakin' wordy (sooooo annoying) so I pared it down and made some alterations. You.r.welcome.

Yield: 6-8 servings

Ingredients
1 pound spicy Italian sausage, casing removed
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
salt & pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (if you like spice)
6 cups chicken broth or stock, 2 boxes
1/2 cup coffee cream
4 huge handfuls of kale, stemmed and chopped
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
2 large russet baking potatoes, cubed (keep skin on!)

Method
Over medium heat warm olive oil in a medium-large pot then drop the sausage, onion, garlic, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes into the hot pot, breaking it up and stirring it constantly, until sausage is browned (about 8 minutes). Turn heat up to high and pour in chicken stock and nutmeg and stir until it starts to boil and reduce to low and simmer. slowly pour in cream then add kale and sliced potatoes, cover and simmer over low heat until potatoes are tender, about 30 minutes. Stir every 5 minutes. I know it seems like an intense amount of kale but keep in mind that the kale will wilt. Voilà. Soup.

Peace.out.

Bacon & Veggie Risotto

Thank you Pinterest for the inspiration for the recipe I made last night. This turned out great and we have a lot of leftovers to enjoy. Here is the link to the original recipe but I of course altered it a bit. I will for sure make this again and try out other veggie combos. Keep in mind this isn't a dish that you can walk away from while preparing as it requires a ton of stirring. So worth the elbow grease though. Yummy!

Yield: 6 entre sized portions

Ingredients
2 cups arborio rice

1/4 cup olive oil

6 cups chicken stock

1 cup dry white wine

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup bacon crumbs (cooked!)

1 small zucchini, chopped

1 medium head of broccoli, chopped

1/2 cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese

Pepper and sea salt to taste

 

Method

Chop veggies to desired size and set aside. Bring stock and wine to a simmer in a medium sauce pan and let it simmer until it is entirely used up. In a frying pan heat olive oil and cook onions until tender, about 4 minutes. Add Arborio rice and cooked bacon to fry pan and coat with the olive oil and cook for about 4 minutes, stirring often. Add one ladle of stock mixture at a time to the frying pan and stir constantly until liquid is mostly gone (about 2 mins). Add another ladle full do continue the same process until there is about two ladle-fulls left to add. At this point add your cheese, veggies, sea salt and pepper with the remaining stock mixture. Continue cooking until most liquid is gone. Don't let it dry out too much. This should take 30-35 minutes. Serve immediately. So yummy!

Mama Advice

When I was going through a difficult time with peanuts sleep issues, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article that instantly made me feel better. Ridiculously hilarious! Enjoy the read Mama's.

I Read All The Baby Sleep Books

Written by: Ava Neyer

Article from: Huffington Post

I went on Amazon and bought all the top books on baby sleep and development. I read through them all, as well as several blogs and sleep websites. I gathered lots of advice.

You shouldn't sleep train at all, before a year, before 6 months, or before 4 months, but if you wait too late, your baby will never be able to sleep without you. College-aged children never need to be nursed, rocked, helped to sleep, so don't worry about any bad habits. Nursing, rocking, singing, swaddling, etc. to sleep are all bad habits and should be stopped immediately. White noise will help them fall asleep. White noise, heartbeart sounds, etc., don't work. Naps should only be taken in the bed, never in a swing, carseat, stroller, or when worn. Letting them sleep in the carseat or swing will damage their skulls. If your baby has trouble falling asleep in the bed, put them in a swing, carseat, stroller, or wear them.

Put the baby in a nursery, bed in your room, in your bed. Co-sleeping is the best way to get sleep, except that it can kill your baby, so never ever do it. If your baby doesn't die, you will need to bedshare until college.

Use the same cues as night: cut lights, keep the house quiet and still. Differentiate naps from nightly sleep by leaving the lights on and making a regular amount of noise. Keep the room warm, but not too warm. Swaddle the baby tightly, but not too tightly. Put them on their back to sleep, but don't let them be on their backs too long or they will be developmentally delayed. Give them a pacifier to reduce SIDS. Be careful about pacifiers because they can cause nursing problems and stop your baby from sleeping soundly. If your baby sleeps too soundly, they'll die of SIDS.

Don't let your baby sleep too long, except when they've been napping too much, then you should wake them. Never wake a sleeping baby. Any baby problem can be solved by putting them to bed earlier, even if they are waking up too early. If your baby wakes up too early, put them to bed later or cut out a nap. Don't let them nap after 5 pm. Sleep begets sleep, so try to get your child to sleep as much as possible. Put the baby to bed awake but drowsy. Don't wake the baby if it fell asleep while nursing.

You should start a routine and keep track of everything. Not just when they sleep and how long, but how long it has been between sleep, how many naps they've had per day, and what you were doing before they slept. Have a set time per day that you put them to bed. Don't watch the clock. Put them on a schedule. Scheduling will make your life impossible because they will constantly be thrown off of it and you will become a prisoner in your home.

Using CIO will make them think they've been abandoned and will be eaten by a lion shortly. It also causes brain damage. Not getting enough sleep will cause behavior and mental problems, so be sure to put them to sleep by any means necessary, especially CIO, which is the most effective form. Extinction CIO is cruel beyond belief and the only thing that truly works because parents are a distraction. The Sleep Lady Shuffle and Ferber method are really CIO in disguise or Controlled Crying and so much better than Extinction. All three of these will prevent your child from ever bonding with you in a healthy way. Bedsharing and gentler forms of settling will cause your child to become too dependent on you.

Topping the baby off before bed will help prevent night wakings. When babies wake at night, it isn't because they are hungry. If the baby wants to nurse to sleep, press on the baby's chin to close its mouth. Don't stop the baby from nursing when asleep because that doesn't cause a bad habit. Be wary of night feeds. If you respond too quickly with food or comfort, your baby is manipulating you. Babies can't manipulate. Babies older than six months can manipulate.

Sleep when the baby sleeps. Clean when the baby cleans. Don't worry. Stress causes your baby stress and a stressed baby won't sleep.



 

Yet another Banana Muffin recipe

I realize that I post a lot of muffin recipes on my blog but I can't help it. Muffins are so handy to have around for easy to grab breakfast, snack or dessert. I did a double batch this time around so I could pop some in the freezer for later. I have a few different banana muffin recipes on my blog but I thought I'd try out yet another. Hope you like 'em too.

Yield: 12 muffins
Ingredients
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup white flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup chocolate chips (optional)
1 cup mashed banana (2 medium ripe bananas)
2 eggs
1/2 cup unsweetened apple sauce

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease muffin tin (if you use paper cups make sure to grease them too since there is no butter or oil in this recipe). Combine dry ingredients in one bowl and mix well. In another bowl mix all wet ingredients. Add together and mix well. Spoon into muffin tin and bake for 15-20 minutes or until tooth pick comes out clean.

Sleep Training Update

A week and a half ago I wrote a post about peanuts sleep regression and thought I would provide you with an update. Things couldn't be better! I honestly didn't think I would be writing a positive update when I originally wrote the sleep regression post. While we were making headway at that point I was still skeptical that it would actually work longer than a night or two. We are 14 nights in and peanut is doing amazing. At the 7 night mark she totally got it. Again, I wanted to mention that it took longer then normal because we were teaching her how to sleep without a swaddle as well. Peanut now falls asleep within 5 minutes on her own with very minimal fussing (usually) and is sleeping 11-12 hours straight and now naps for up to 2 hours at a time (sometimes its 30 mins still). She also discovered that she prefers to sleep on her tummy, which gave me a panic attack the first night (I was up every hour to check on her) but she sleeps so much more soundly now that she has found her 'sweet spot'. Her mood is drastically better throughout the day and is even enjoying car rides, walks and now jogs in the stroller. Because she is getting a good amount of sleep she has figured out a nap routine for herself. The only bummer is if we don't adhere to that nap routine she gets pretty cranky, pretty fast which was demonstrated this weekend while visiting Gramma and Grandpa. We are napping three times a day but I've read that around the 6-7 month mark babies tend to drop their third nap so we will see how that goes over the next month or so. Here is the routine that peanut seems to jive with the best;

Wake: 11-12 hours after going to bed
Nap #1: 1 hour 15 minutes after waking
Nap #2: 2.5 hours after waking from nap #1
Nap #3: 2 hours after waking from nap #2
Bath time: 7:00pm
Bed time: 7:30pm

It is so nice to finally feel like we have the nap situation under control and a happy baby. We are spending more time at home and doing quick little outings to make sure we are home for nap time but that's ok with me. We need to put in the time to establish a good routine. All in all, my husband and I are extremely happy that we decided to sleep train our daughter. Some people won't agree with that we did, but that's something I'm willing to live with. She's happier, is getting more sleep and we have given her the tools to be able to fall asleep comfortably on her own which will be useful in the years to come. Everyone wins!

Road Rage

Happy Monday.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

PS: Sorry for the language - I tried to clean it up a bit.

All Things Fall

I'm 32 years old and my whole life the answer to the question "What is your favourite season?" has always been, without a doubt SUMMER.  I now have this extreme love for the Fall. The crispness in the air, the smells, colours, sounds, traditions - I'm all of a sudden obsessed with the arrival of autumn. Perhaps I loved summer so much because I've always had summers off as a student and teacher.  For the first time the Fall isn't marked by the start of a new school year and the stresses that go along with it and I'm able to savour the Fall season. I could certainly get used to this...

Sweet corn on the family farm

My loves

Beautiful walking day

Sleep Regression. ugh.

I'd like to preface this post by saying that not everyone will agree with the sleep training approach we took with our daughter but it was the best decision for us. Each family has different needs so what might work for one family might not work for another. K, onto the post.

Like the term "Witching Hour", I had never heard of "sleep regression" before having a child. Now I cringe when I hear it. Screw you sleep regression.  When my daughter turned 14 weeks she started to become difficult to put down for naps, and by difficult I mean she would hardy f'n nap at all. After hours and hours of research and discussing this with friends and family, I attribute my daughters sleep regression to the following;

1) A growth spurt
2) A huge cognitive leap
3) Maturing sleep cycles

I literally tried everything to get our daughter to nap - new sleep routines, blacking out her room, noise machine, quiet decompression time before sleeping, soft lighting, unswaddling, not nursing before sleeping, rocking, soother - NOTHING WAS WORKING! Eventually the nap strike turned into a nap-and-going-to-bed-at-night strike. We were having to tap her bum and basically pin her down for 15-30 minutes every night, and often she'd wake after her 30 minute sleep cycle so we'd have to do it all over again. Some nights it took us 2.5 hours to get her to sleep for the night. The silver-ling was that she slept so well once she was asleep for the night. Sleeping 9-12 hours straight wasn't abnormal. After 8 weeks of peanut hardly napping and 4 weeks of taking 1+ hours to fall asleep at night my husband and I decided something had to change. I'm going to be the first to admit that before peanut was born I thought I'd be sleep training the shit out of her as soon as it were socially acceptable, that was until I realized that sleep training wasn't socially acceptable. Crap. People get heated about it. Like, really heated. After weeks and weeks of research, 5 months of getting to know my babe, and a few days of not being able to get peanut to sleep until after 3:00am we decided that sleep training needed to happen for the good of everyone. Our mission was to teach her how to fall asleep on her own once we had met all of her needs (diaper change, cuddles, a feed and quiet decompression time). As mentioned before, she isn't a baby that wakes a lot in the night so the odd time that she wakes and can't get herself back to sleep I happily feed her since I figure she needs a little snack because she's only 5 months old.

I should also mention that we are teaching our daughter how to sleep without her swaddle on so the sleep training is taking a bit longer then it typically should. We tried a few different approaches and the one that we found best for us is the Ferber technique. If you are going to try out this approach be sure read the book "Solve your child's sleep problems" by Richard Ferber so you fully understand the approach. I also found it extremely helpful to have an honest conversation with friends who had gone through the process before. You have to make sure it's the right fit for you. We have completed 5 nights of the training and have seen vast improvements. We tweaked the approach a bit to better suit our peanuts needs and are staying super consistent, even when I want to give up.

In a nutshell, this is what we are doing;  Once we complete our nightly/nap routine we place peanut in her crib after giving her a hug and a kiss and we say "Peanut we love you and are here for you. It is time to go to sleep." I give her little belly a rub and I slowly exit her room and close the door behind me, leaving her white noise machine and night light on. I immediately started my cellphone timer for 5 minutes. Using the video monitor we watch and listen to what is going on with peanut. If after 5 minutes she was still upset then one of us enters her room slowly, go over and rub her belly and say the same thing; "Peanut, we love you and are here for you. It's time to go to sleep", and stay only a maximum of 1 minute and slowly exit. We'd wait 10 minutes the next time and do the same thing. Then 15 minute intervals for the remainder of the night. If she is only whining or laying quietly we do not enter her room. Now at day 5 we had spread out the "room visits" a bit more - we enter at 10 minutes the first time, then 15 minutes for the remainder of the evening until she falls asleep. Tonight she only required one room visit but it did take her over an hour to get herself into her deep sleep (she was in an out of light sleep and was whining a bit here and there). We will see what the next few nights bring.

I'm the first to admit that this isn't easy. Sleep training isn't for the weak, that's for sure. I've cried more than my daughter but I need to keep reminding myself that most babies cannot figure out sleeping skills on their own. Peanut needs us to teach her these skills. These skills are needed for her to develop positive sleep habits. Here are a few things that have helped us get through this last week;

Consistency
Research, research, research
Tweaked the approach to suit our family
Tracked progress
Talk to friends & family for advice/support
Show peanut a tons of love


You.got.this.

BBQ Baby Back Pork Ribs

I'm the first to admit that I'm a lazy cook and like recipes that have very few ingredients and steps. When I make ribs I usually toss them in the crock pot for the day and don't worry about them. Yesterday I decided to make ribs the 'real' way, planned ahead and followed a recipe to a T (excepted I halved it), which never happens. I dry rubbed them, roasted them for a few hours then tossed them on the BBQ to finish them off. They were DELISH! I don't usually enjoy meat with bones (that's what she said) but these ribs might have changed my mind. I served them with roasted potatoes and homegrown zucchini. The homemade BBQ sauce is amaze-balls. Here is the link of the recipe of followed. I'm not going to retype it out there since there are multiple steps and...well...I'm lazy.

Nuts & Bolts

Growing up the holiday season always included a massive batch of my Mom's homemade Nuts and Bolts. They were awesome! I never really considered making them myself until I was at the grocery store and I noticed cereal was on big time sale. Perfect! I realize it's no where near Christmas time (well, sort of - 16 Friday's until Christmas!), but I love me some good ol' salty snacks so I thought, why not. Warning: This stuff is addictive!

Ingredients
1/2 box Cheereos (regular or multigrain)
1/2 Shreddies
1/2 large bag of stick pretzels
2 cups mixed nuts (salted & roasted)
3/4 cup melted butter
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon celery salt
3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon seasoning salt
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika

Method
Preheat oven to 250 degrees. In a large roasting pan pour in cereals, pretzels and nuts. In a small bowl melt butter in microwave. Whisk all spices into melted better. Pour evenly over cereal mixture.  Bake for 1 hour stirring mixture every 10 minutes. Let cool and store in tins or Tupperware and eat the shit out of this stuff. So.addictive.damn.