Wearing Our Baby

Burl loves to be held. What baby doesn't? Some of the baby gear I've gotten the most use out of have been my baby carriers. He lives in them. In fact, the bigger he gets, the more he loves being in them. Ugg. But we love the closeness and the convenience.

I took him on a 6 mile hike the other day in one of my wraps. It worked out well, but I think as he gets bigger, I'll need another type of carrier for long walks and hikes.

Right now, I use the gypsy mama for extended use, and the hot sling for quick in and out use. Alex is still testing the carriers to see which one he prefers. We still haven't used the stroller, waste of money. Oh well, you live and learn.

4 Generations

Alex's Grandpa Bishop on his mom's side is in town. We had a wonderful dinner with him last night and caught a couple pictures of the four generations.


Our baby is so lucky to have all of his grandparents alive and love him so much. And to have a great-grandpa as well. It's more that Alex or I ever had.

This smile above is how he looks at me all day long. I feel like the luckiest mom to have my baby so in love with me and smile at me like this!

1 Year Ago

It was a year ago we found out I was pregnant, right here in our bathroom, one of the happiest days of our lives. Burl is 4 months old now, and we're so in love.

In the bathroom with my naked boy


In his new woolies and the shirt we tie dyed together

Our Washing Machine is Broken

Bad news for a cloth diapering mama who doesn't use a diaper service. It's been going down hill for about a month now. Alex has been working on it but can't figure out what's wrong with it. With three adults, three dogs and one baby, we average about 1 load of laundry every other day. The smelly diapers are piling up. I may have to go to the laundry mat tomorrow, haven't had to do that since college.

Yeah, We're Those Kind of Neighbors

In my efforts to conserve money now that we're down to one income, I've been sun drying our laundry. They come out smelling fresh and feeling crisp. I put the diapers through the dryer for a few minutes to soften them up so they aren't so stiff against our baby's bottom.



With the heat and the starting of the teething, Burl has been wanting to combine three of his favorite activities: Walking around, being outside, and nursing. We've been spending lots of time outside doing just that, nursing while I walk him around. Oh, and he's naked more often too. I can't blame the kid, I would probably want to do the same thing.

I hope our neighbors don't mind, although I really don't care if they do, I'll do what it takes to keep our hot, teething baby happy. It may seem a little redneck, but let's review our neighbors:

The ones to our right have a teenage son that smokes in his backyard and throws his cigarettes in our yard, classy.
To the right, our neighbors have yappy dogs that don't get much attention and bark at us whenever we go outside because they're so bored :(.
Behind us the lady stands at her front door, looks through our windows and waves at us. She's caught us a few times indecent and doesn't look away. They also have a neglected dog that barks at us.
And our neighbors in front have raging Corona, Karaoke parties weekly. They have over 50 cars in their yard, literally, that spill over into parking in front of our house. They grill up all kinds of species of meat. We went to one of their parties when we first moved in. They're Vietnamese and don't speak much English. Apparently "No Meat" are words they didn't understand, because they kept piling our plates full of meat. With one platter of meat that went by, someone said "Dog meat". Obviously, we haven't gone back to one of their barbeque's.

Despite all this, we have a great report with our neighbors. And we love our house and our neighborhood!

So if sun drying our laundry and nursing our baby outside are the worst of our neighborly actions, I think we're not that bad.

Third of July

We wanted to avoid loud, crowded places this year, since we have a baby. My parents live in a quaint little ocean town on Whidbey Island. Their town has a small fireworks show over the bay on the Third of July. We decided to go to that instead of any larger shows in the city. I was still concerned that it would be too much noise for the baby. You can see here he slept through the whole thing and didn't even flinch during the fireworks show. Oh to be a baby and sleep soundly wherever you are!

Teething

Burl is almost 4 months old. I think the teething has started...
Everything goes into the mouth, my fingers are his favorite. And he doesn't just suck, he's gnawing and chewing. Thankfully he hasn't started doing this while nursing.


We'll be trying some home remedies for teething. I have an old Amber necklace and some Amber beads my friend from Amman Jordan gave me years ago. I'm going to restrand them for his size, he may even get a little charm on his necklace :). We'll see if it helps.

Mariner's Game

We took Burl to his first baseball game last night with my family as a belated Father's Day outing with my dad. I had mixed feelings about taking Burl this soon. I was worried it would be too much stimulation for a four month old. But he did pretty well. The train scared him a few times, the fighter jets overhead scared me, and the drunk Canadians sitting behind us scared us all. It was Canadian Day in Seattle yesterday and the M's played the Blue Jays, so you know what that means? Lots of proud, boisterous Canadians in the bleachers.







We all had a fantastic time with our dad watching the game. And having beer spilled on us made the whole bleacher experience complete. Oh, and the stimulation was a little much, but it did help us have a great night of sleep :)!