How I love, LOVE the Flylady.
She is the initiator of a website (flylady.com) that includes daily emails from her "followers" for lack of a better word, to encourage the lot of us to keep our households from becoming chaos.
A friend of mine, Katie, mentioned to me that once she became a stay at home mom, the Flylady helped her become organized in her household.
I decided to try it out and am a firm believer.
My 650sf apartment now has a baby bed, rocking mechanism, bouncer, vibrating chair, activity mat, and rock and play and because of my organizing and creativity in geometric placement I do not feel like I am going to go insane. All because of the flylady.
Basically, she teaches you how to keep things neat and orderly and clean(ish) ish being a very important part of the system. So that you look around your house (or small apartment in my case) and feel happy and restful and not like there are a million things to do and you don't have the energy to do any of them.
Some of the great things she's taught me,
"You can do anything for 15 minutes" If you are dreading a job or just getting overwhelmed as you look around, set the timer for 15 minutes and get to it. You can stop at 15 minutes, or what I have learned is that you are usually done in 15 minutes!
"Take a lick at a snake" which means wipe it up quickly and don't worry about it. It looks better than if you hadn't.
"A job imperfectly done still blesses the family" which means that when you keep something pretty neat on a daily basis it is much better than ignoring it until you can clean it perfectly. Plus you're not ignoring it when it is a mess, it is really bugging you!
"Do it for yourself and don't be a martyr" love your family by cleaning up the house, it is mostly for you anyway because you are happier when it looks neat and don't give out chores that you will be really frustrated about the family member not getting done just do those ones yourself. Stop whining.
It has revolutionized my feeling about the apartment and whether we can stick it out here for another year. Which would be the best financial thing for us right now. Houses near us that we'd like to buy are about 1.2 million dollars with about 15k in property taxes. So our little 1300 dollar apartment is quite ideal for our savings.
I also watch you tube videos about people in tiny (98sf) apartments in Manhattan to be more inspired about our so spacious apartment. :)
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Emily Almost 4 months - SLEEP! or not.
Welp, Emily is getting much bigger. According to my unscientific measuring, with me the scale and then me with Emily and subtracting out my weight (which I hate to talk about), she is over 15 pounds! Huge really.
And still perfect and wonderful. But she doesn't like to sleep at all during the day. I have been vacillating between thinking, "well, everyone's baby is different and mine just seems to be cranky and not want to sleep during the day, lots of people ask Google why their newborn is not napping, so she's not the only one" and "oh my goodness baby must be on a schedule soon or her brain development is going to lag and it will be all my fault!". The product of too much reading perhaps.
Dr. Sears seems to think that short catnaps during the day are okay, but the Baby Whisperer and the author of Healthy sleep habits, Happy baby and the author of Superbaby all deem a schedule to be of utmost importance. But when should that schedule start!!??
So, at almost 4 months, they'd all agree that the schedule should already have started or be starting now. So the plan is that once baby wakes up in the morning, she has only 2 or less hours of wakefulness at a time and then is put down for a nap.
Alas, how to put baby down for a nap??? We have been doing it all wrong. We bounce her in our arms on the yoga ball to get her to fall asleep. We had been so proud of our effective methods until I read the baby whisperer and then began to fault us for "not starting out as we wish to continue" and baby is getting darn heavy. My wrists and back begin to cram up when I bounce her too long. So I'm limiting my bouncing time to 5 minutes then 4 etc... to wean her off of it. And then into the bed for a nap. But alas again, she wakes up after 30 minutes of a nap and won't go back to sleep. So I have to bounce her again and put her on my lap in my arms and pat her butt and help her sleep the next hour. Or she sleeps in 30 minute bursts and is cranky for the entire day.
Other than thinking that we are messing up all over. Baby is lovely and I like her a lot.
I just also learned about the "dream feed", which means getting baby to the breast while she is sleeping so that she can sleep a big longer and feel full. It means that I can put her to bed around 9, then dream feed her at 11 and hope she sleeps until 5 or 6 (which she did last night), then I read that she should have already been weaned from the dream feed. Before I'd learned what it was. Argh.
She should have already been weaned from the swaddle too. Argh again. Swaddling her keeps her from smacking herself in the face with her hands and waking herself up. Still. So I can't stop that. But there is a little feeling of failure knowing that I should have stopped that months ago.
This failure feeling must follow you around throughout parenthood.
And still perfect and wonderful. But she doesn't like to sleep at all during the day. I have been vacillating between thinking, "well, everyone's baby is different and mine just seems to be cranky and not want to sleep during the day, lots of people ask Google why their newborn is not napping, so she's not the only one" and "oh my goodness baby must be on a schedule soon or her brain development is going to lag and it will be all my fault!". The product of too much reading perhaps.
Dr. Sears seems to think that short catnaps during the day are okay, but the Baby Whisperer and the author of Healthy sleep habits, Happy baby and the author of Superbaby all deem a schedule to be of utmost importance. But when should that schedule start!!??
So, at almost 4 months, they'd all agree that the schedule should already have started or be starting now. So the plan is that once baby wakes up in the morning, she has only 2 or less hours of wakefulness at a time and then is put down for a nap.
Alas, how to put baby down for a nap??? We have been doing it all wrong. We bounce her in our arms on the yoga ball to get her to fall asleep. We had been so proud of our effective methods until I read the baby whisperer and then began to fault us for "not starting out as we wish to continue" and baby is getting darn heavy. My wrists and back begin to cram up when I bounce her too long. So I'm limiting my bouncing time to 5 minutes then 4 etc... to wean her off of it. And then into the bed for a nap. But alas again, she wakes up after 30 minutes of a nap and won't go back to sleep. So I have to bounce her again and put her on my lap in my arms and pat her butt and help her sleep the next hour. Or she sleeps in 30 minute bursts and is cranky for the entire day.
Other than thinking that we are messing up all over. Baby is lovely and I like her a lot.
I just also learned about the "dream feed", which means getting baby to the breast while she is sleeping so that she can sleep a big longer and feel full. It means that I can put her to bed around 9, then dream feed her at 11 and hope she sleeps until 5 or 6 (which she did last night), then I read that she should have already been weaned from the dream feed. Before I'd learned what it was. Argh.
She should have already been weaned from the swaddle too. Argh again. Swaddling her keeps her from smacking herself in the face with her hands and waking herself up. Still. So I can't stop that. But there is a little feeling of failure knowing that I should have stopped that months ago.
This failure feeling must follow you around throughout parenthood.
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