November 26th, 2012 by Busy Mommy

This is something that I couldn’t come close to comprehending before we had a child.  The pace of your life has to slow down drastically with a little one around.  If you don’t your child won’t learn anything and you’ll both be very frustrated and unhappy.  I think Ben and I have actually done fairly well in the patience department but  it’s’ taken awhile to adjust in the pace of life department.  It’s been an ongoing process to realize what it really means to be a parent and how our priorities have to change.

My greatest desire is for Nolan to grow up to serve Jehovah.  To that end, we’ve realized that we must take the time to really teach him- since he’s only 3 this means we have to take it super slow- he is learning everything from scratch for the first time.

Case in point…..doing morning bible reading WITH Nolan usually means we only read a few verses instead of several pages- it’s not so much about how much we get done anymore, but instead what is achieved in the smaller amount we do accomplish- whether that’s a few scriptures where Nolan learns what the different words mean and how Jehovah feels about things, or that we went out in field service as a family and had a good refreshing time even though Nolan had to go pee as soon as we got to the territory and I only ended up getting an hour and a half of countable time because of the delays despite being involved with getting ready or trying to get in field service for more like 4 hours- with children TIME spent on other things just can’t be that important- rather the experience derived with your child in whatever time was spent on that particular activity is what must be focused on.

I don’t get to do this every morning because of that nasty thing called time, but Nolan really enjoys going over some scriptures and the daily text with me- we usually only get a few verses read because he has so many questions- which is awesome that he is so interested to learn what everything means (also take note of how long it takes him to eat a small bowl of  breakfast- 25 minutes- can you see why we can’t rush?  I’m told he takes after Uncle Zac in this department….)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La7LyK1vQg4&feature=youtube_gdata[/youtube]

November 18th, 2012 by Busy Mommy

Well, no sooner did Nolan start to “get better” from his 6 week cold/cough with profuse never ending nasal phlegm full of bacteria (I know, nice visual isn’t it?), then he gets the Chicken Pox.  A week ago, on Saturday, Nolan started getting a high fever around 101.4 or so every day for a couple hours in the afternoon, then it would go away.  At the time I thought perhaps it was his body finally rising to the occasion and fighting his cold more efficiently.  But then on thursday I saw little bumps around his mouth.  Then friday night he had a bunch of very raised bumps all over his feet.  Now they are on the backs of legs, the top of one hand, and a couple on his tummy.

Aside from being very clingy and wanting lots of mommy cuddle time, which I quite enjoy most of the time myself anyway, he’s in pretty good spirits and he’s not too itchy yet- but I know that is to come.

We will be endeavoring to do lots of fun things at home since now even the park is off limits, being that chicken pox is so contagious.  Yesterday we worked on a fun craft gluing seed catalog pictures and colored paper to a boring old clipboard so this mommy will have something to remind me of my dear little son while I’m working.Nolan has  been having a lot more, shall we say, power struggles, lately.  I’ll get into that more later, but at 3 years old he is starting to find that he really knows most everything there is to no, and certainly more than mommy and daddy by a long shot.  After getting far too demanding and not listening to his dear mother, I left him in the kitchen for awhile to let him rant and rave on his own.  After a few minutes I realized it was very very quiet in the kitchen.  I figured maybe he had started gluing stuff on his own again.  When I went to check on him, here’s how I found him:

November 16th, 2012 by Busy Mommy

1. A fun, motherly 5 year old girl.

2. Bubble wrap

3. A highlighter

I say “doctor” because in general we pretty much don’t do conventional medicine, but we do make use of alternative and homeopathic medicine.  Nolan has been sick literally for like 6 weeks straight so it was time to see if something more could be done.

The only problem is as soon as I told we were going to the “doctor” he freaked out a little, even though he’s never experienced anything scary at such a place before.

We needed to get him to hold the little gold metal thing with his right hand, but were having a hard time of it.  Instead he kept backing away and saying,

“no,  I wanna be sick, I don’t wanna get better!”

Between the 3 things listed above, we managed to get him to sit down and hold the gold thing and get his testing done. Now let’s hope he gets better!