In case you somehow missed it, yesterday was Mother’s Day. I had a really great day and surprisingly, after 5 years of Mother’s Days it was the first time I had an open conversation with Aaron about what I want for Mother’s Day. Hopefully, that will mean that future Mother’s Days will be just as enjoyable.

What do I want?

I want to sleep in a bit. I want someone to say Happy Mother’s Day when I wake up. I want to spend the day together as a family, maybe go for a walk, maybe garden, maybe go for lunch.

I don’t want a day focused on getting stuff done.  I don’t want to be solely responsible for child care for large portions of the day. I don’t need a gift. I don’t mind making dinner. I just want to spend a nice day together. And maybe every few years it might be nice to be surprised with a pedicure or massage. This seems pretty simple in the wants department.

That’s pretty much how yesterday went and that’s why I loved it. It was simple but it was still an acknowledgement that I am appreciated.

Over the weekend I read a lot of blog posts about Mother’s Day. Most were along the lines of “I hate Mother’s Day. It’s too much pressure. It’s fake. It’s a Hallmark Holiday. It never measures up. I don’t want to be given corny poetry and flowers telling me that I am good at cleaning the house and washing laundry. I don’t want all this built-up fuss over ONE day when my family should do nice things for me all year, should appreciate me every day.”

You know what? I get that. I’ve had crappy Mother’s Days. I’ve had days where my family forgot. They sucked. And it’s true, we should appreciate our moms and dads every day of the year. We should randomly do nice things for people for no reason all year long.

But know what else? The truth is we don’t. We forget. We get busy living our lives. We take each other for granted. We take relationships for granted. We think of picking up a gift just because but we don’t end up acting on it. It seems extravagant or we’re in a hurry or we don’t have the money. How often do you sit down with the kids and draw I love daddy cards, just because? I don’t do it as much as I should. It’s sad, but it’s true.

That’s why we have birthdays. That’s why we have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. That’s why every day of the year is an acknowledgment of something. This week is Nurses Week. Should we abolish Nurses Week because we should appreciate nurses every day? May 5 was International Day of the Midwife. Should we not go to the effort of thanking our midwives and spreading word about the job they do just because it’s an arbitrary day on the calendar that has nothing to do with anything?

I realise that often these honorary days come across pretty phony and I agree with a lot of the Mother’s Day angst out there.  But I just don’t buy the line that it’s stupid to set aside a day to remind us about the wonderful jobs mothers do everyday.

Mother’s Day doesn’t give us an excuse to neglect our moms the rest of the year. The dialogue created around Mother’s Day is perhaps a good thing to remind us to do better year round. Mother’s Day is a chance to start over every year. It’s a chance to say, “Hey, I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being you and for being in my life. I should tell you that every day and I’m sorry that I forget. I’m going to try to do better. Starting today.”

…{Given that I still think Mother’s Day is a good idea, how am I dealing with the fact that tomorrow might be a let down? I decided not to be coy. No pretending. No hints. No secret hopes. I just brought up the conversation today, openly. I acknowledged that we’ve been really busy and that it’s really ok if we don’t do anything tomorrow. I’d rather we celebrate some other time instead of scrambling to do a half-hearted attempt out of some sense of obligation tomorrow.}…

So tell me, how do you feel about Mother’s Day? Are you open with your family about expectations around Mother’s Day?

Jumping straight in then, since this will have to be a big update:

January Progress – Getting Organized:

I joined pinterest as a place to start saving inspiration for our Farm Plan. You can follow me there at abluebirdmama. My boards that are relevant to our Farm Plan are: Cabinspiration, Farm Plan, and Shelter: Handmade & Tiny Homes.

I started my planned computer clean up by migrating most of my bookmarks to pinterest. Unfortunately, the purge is stalled there because the rest (sorting docs, downloads, emails) is too boring compared to playing on pinterest.

I have our household binder 90% complete. Unfortunately, I only use it 15% of the time.

We got a new (to us) van and we vowed 1) to keep up with the maintenance and 2) to keep it clean.

February Progress – She’s Crafty:

We finally completed and signed our Lease with the farmers where we are moving! This was a big deal for all of us. The process of writing the lease was lengthy and filled with yummy dinner meetings, and screaming-baby-filled-conference calls. It was a good beginning exercise in getting to know each other and learning to be vocal about needs, wants, hopes, expectations, and boundaries. Signing those pages was also very scary – no going back now!!

I had a few nights of panic. Might as well lay there awake panicking while you wait for the baby to wake up again right?

We celebrated our last baby’s first birthday. I got crafty. I made a birthday banner.

I made a birthday crown.

I also stayed up until the wee hours of the morning making wee mice in wee tins for the wee ones’ Valentine’s Day gifts.

I made a cloth tote to keep stuff organized in the van. It holds snacks, spare diapers, a few baby toys, books. In the summer, it will also hold a spare towel, bug dope and sun screen.

You can also follow Things to Make & Do on pinterest.

March Progress – First Things First:

We cleared and leveled the (formerly forested) lot where our bus (Eliza Brownhome) and cabin (the Annex, the Panic Room, or the Pannex, whichever you prefer) will be sitting.

Doesn't look like much yet.

We sent trees from the lot to the mill to be milled into the beams that will become our cabin.

Noa balances on the future beams of the annex.

We dug a trench from the barn to our site to begin running our electrical, phone and water services to our site.

This is where our services will go.

By we, I mean Aaron. He did a lot of organizing, tree work,  and got to drive a bobcat.

Bobcat driving takes concentration

Rain got to have a short "turn"

I put in extra hours at the midwifery clinic.

I neglected to do any work at all on the kids’ baby books which was my assigned project for the month of March.

I celebrated my birthday by: 1) going for “breakfast” with a friend and accidentally staying for 3 hours of catching up on adult conversation that was totally free of kid-interruptions and included a delicious eggs benny AND dessert, and 2) getting my hair cut for the first time in 1 year and highlights for the first time in 7 years. That’s the part where some self-care energized me so that I would be able to energize our projects.

Except I also got the worst flu I’ve had in years and took my first real sick day since my oldest child was born. He came from school and found me in bed. Ordered me to get up and when I wouldn’t, he cried and asked, “who is going to take care of me?’ Hmm. Good question.

So much more to do before June 1. Stay tuned to my PEP (Project Energize Progress) talks to see how we fare over the next two months. And maybe say a little prayer that Silas will start sleeping for 3 hour stretches in the near future. That would be awesome.

How about you? Did you undertake any projects in the last couple of months? When’s the last time you energized yourself?

A couple of days later, I attended a school function where a fellow parent asked me to sum up the presentation or give the “one nugget” I had taken away. I was struck totally dumb. I couldn’t even begin to succinctly summarize the broad range of ideas that had been touched on. I’m sorry to say that my response was probably not a 30 second sound bite worthy of Dr. Mate. But, 10 days later, I’m ready to give it a try.

Essentially, Dr. Mate’s work deals with the mind-body connection. Babies are far more susceptible to stress in their environment than we might suppose. This includes prenatal maternal stress, but also from the circumstances of the birth itself, from separation from the mother, from the family/living environment. Dr. Mate explains that in response to stress, we may use adaptive states or protective behaviours as coping mechanisms and when these adaptive states which are meant to temporarily insulate us from the effects of the stress become long-term traits, we can see a variety of problems arise. These problems can include AD(H)D, autism, cancer, auto-immune diseases, addiction and more.

The subject of Dr. Mate’s talk on this occasion was The Biology of Loss: What Happens When Attachments Are Impaired and How to Foster Resilience so he was talking specifically about working with/parenting children. He brought up the dangers of the rising cesarean section rate, and the problems of using methods like cry-it-out to get babies to sleep. He discussed what happens when children become peer-oriented rather than seeking their cues from the adults in their lives. He also explained the optimum conditions for an attachment relationship, and how and why a relationship may be negatively affected.

So, what did I take away as the nugget of the day?

Firstly, I was struck by the fact that we are all carrying our own issues from childhood into our adult lives, and therefore, into our parenting.  Dr. Mate says that in order to form strong attachments, babies need a non-stressed, non-depressed mother. I remember when I first read Hold On To Your Kids I was expecting to gain all this insight into my parenting, and for the first half of the book I found I was learning more about myself, about my own adolescence and early 20′s. All of this serves as further validation of my own parenting theory which is that if you want to be the best parent, you have to work on being the best person you can be, you have to understand yourself, your motivations, your own unhealthy stress responses, your own childhood traumas. The short version: You want to be a good parent? Deal with your own shit.

I’m reminded here of a quote from the day which unfortunately I can not remember the source for:

The greatest gift we give our children is our happiness.

Secondly, I felt rather relieved of the huge burden of mother-guilt I carry with me most days. Listening to Dr. Mate speak, I was acutely aware that as far as healthy attachments go, we are doing a lot of things well. We are privileged enough to be able to make a lot of choices in our lives in our children’s best interest. They are lucky not to be abused or neglected or living in extreme poverty, or with the effects of addiction. They are lucky to have two involved, loving parents. We have been able to make choices to consistently foster our attachment with them like having homebirths, breastfeeding into toddlerhood, being responsive to their cries (including not practicing CIO), deciding that I wouldn’t return to full-time work out of the home, making careful deliberate decisions about schooling.

Thirdly, we are not meant to parent in isolation. This is where my parenting-guilt flared up again. Dr. Mate talked about the reasons that children in tribal communities tend to thrive. In addition to things like abundance of positive touch and lack of negative touch, the big one was multiplicity of attachments. That is, we are meant to live in extended families and parent together, within an attachment village, to share the burden. My family does not have an attachment village. We live far away from all of our extended family, and while we have close friends who live here, we certainly do not share in the parenting of our children, nor do we rely heavily on each other for support.

Honestly, all of those things that we are doing right—the extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, stay-at-home-parenting, homeschooling? Those things mostly fall to me. I have a wonderfully supportive, involved, hardworking co-parent, but he also works outside of the home and unfortunately doesn’t have breasts…which means that the nightwaking, and the daytime parenting both fall almost exclusively to me. And the burden of doing it alone without an attachment village seems to result in a (sleep-deprived) stressed, depressed mother. So you see? We’re back at the beginning and even our best intentions can feel like they aren’t enough.

As Gordon Neufeld says in this article on education, play and attachment, there is far too much pressure on the nuclear family. “In North America, we have a dangerously small nuclear family,” and he goes on to say, “If we don’t have a functional family, we need to develop surrogate families.”

I’m not sure what to do about this. Clearly, the answer is to foster an attachment village somehow, but I really don’t know how, or where to start. But evidently, it’s our best hope for our children.

What are your thoughts? Have you read any of Dr. Mate’s books? Do you have a village of attachment? What do you do to preserve your attachments with your children and to share the work of parenting?

I nursed my older two children both until they were just a few months shy of three years old. I assume it will be the same with Silas. However, the weaning has already begun. He eats table food and I can go out for four hours without him needing me. The frequency of his nursing will be gradually diminishing over the course of this next year, until I notice that he only nurses when he’s sad or hurt or going down for a nap. And then, another day, I will realize that he hasn’t nursed in a few days and I can’t even remember when the last time was.

Newborns seem to always have that milk breath smell about them. But toddlers—and Silas certainly seems to be crossing into toddler territory these days—toddlers have their own smells. Soon enough, the milk breath will be just a memory.

It seemed fitting that this moment should have come during the week of his first birthday, as I reflect on his birth, as I try to make peace with the idea of not having a baby anymore, or ever again. With all of this comes the realization that my menses should resume soon. I am still waiting, but I feel my body changing, gearing up as it were.

I never was one of those moon-goddess women who celebrated having my period or who saw it as some divine female rite. To be honest, it is painful, uncomfortable, messy and pretty much a pain in the ass… However, as a woman of childbearing age, I can appreciate the idea of being connected to the rhythms of my body, and as a mother, I am grateful that fertility-wise I had little trouble conceiving, that I had knowledge and more or less the control over whether and when we had children. I never did look forward to getting my period back after each of my children were born—though I likely would have felt differently if we had been anxious to conceive again and it was nowhere in sight.

Now, at this point in my childbearing path, when I consider that my fertility will be returning soon, I can’t help but feel more than a little put out. It seems pretty pointless for me to continue to endure the downsides of female fertility despite the fact that we have made the (mostly) permanent decision not to have any more children.

Aaron went in for a vasectomy last summer, when Silas was  six months old. On the face of it, I’m ok with that. We have three beautiful children and that often feels like a lot. My life, and my hands, are very full. I’m tired. I look forward to a time when I’ll be able to sleep again and have time to focus on some of my personal dreams in a more focused and meaningful way than I have been able to as the constant mother of a nursling. I blogged when I was pregnant with Silas about being done having kids and mostly, I am.

Nevertheless, I cried when I picked Aaron up from his appointment. As much as I am certain that three kids is enough for us given our resources (time, money, energy, support systems), it is so hard to let go of this phase in my life. I love babies and I mostly enjoyed pregnancy. I had really fulfilling complication-free homebirths and I am at ease as a nursing mother. I will miss each of these things. A lot. As much as I look forward to the life phase ahead of us—as a family of five with no babies—I also feel sad to close the door on childbearing.

And then there is the loss of those never-even-dreamed-of-children. Like many parents, I had some vision in my head of who my baby might be when I was pregnant with my first child. Then he was born and he was nothing like I had imagined, and he was 5 million times better than anything I could have dreamed up. When I was pregnant with my second, I found I couldn’t even begin to imagine a child that wasn’t like my firstborn. All of my daydreams presented a smaller version of my oldest child. Then she was born, and while she looked like him, she was so totally different, and so earth-shatteringly awesome. So, then, when I was pregnant with Silas, my mind told me that he would look like them but be different in personality. This time, he looked like his own person from the very first moment, and I finally realized (for real, on a deep level) what geneticists and parents of large families must know: that there are infinite ways that the genes of two people can combine and that every single one of those combinations is gut-wrenchingly beautiful, heart-achingly brilliant and absolutely a work of art…and of course, by now I know too that despite having less time and money and energy, there is no limit to the amount of children I can hold in my heart. Picking Aaron up after his vasectomy, I cried for those children that would never be, I cried for the sister that Noa would never have, and I cried for the fact that evolution and biology want me to have as many kids as I possibly can, but that socially and culturally, it’s pretty hard to have more than two or three.

A year after my last child was born, I find myself awaiting the return of my fertility while also knowing that there will be no more children and it seems somehow wrong or unfair that my body should continue to ovulate, to ripen and prepare to grow more children when it will never nourish or cradle another. It seems unfair that I should still be at the mercy of the hormones that inspire babylust in us, that my body (from a biological, evolutionary standpoint) should still yearn for children, for more, when my mind has made the decision to move on.

This kind of moving on, this kind of relationship with my fertility seems tricky to navigate, slippery to understand. I stand in a strange place, with one foot still in the land of babies, breastfeeding, nightwaking, and one foot venturing tentatively forward, into a new terrain where I am no longer a childbearing woman, where, when Silas has weaned, I am ultimately on the road toward menopause. For now, I am suspended in a middle ground: a fertile woman who will bear no more children. It’s no wonder the whiff of milk on the breath of my last baby should make me a little tearful.

How about you? Where do you stand in the childbearing terrain? How do you feel about fertility?

Do you know that feeling, when you have a really great idea? It’s energizing and exciting, and it feels really, really good. You may even feel compelled to stop everything else you’re doing just to focus on your new project. It’s kind of like being in love, only instead of a person, you’re infatuated by your dreams.

Discouragement Sets In

Unfortunately, in romance or in ideas, infatuation doesn’t last. Eventually, that first blush of love fades and you’re seeing things in the clear light of day. What you’re seeing may not look anything like what you envisioned. Doubts start creeping in, from any number of sources. Maybe your friend says, “Oh, yeah, I read about this guy who tried that, but it totally didn’t work.” Maybe you realize that your idea requires more time and money than you currently have. Or maybe you just get sidetracked by a kid who gets sick right just as your partner is leaving town for two weeks.

One of the biggest sources of discouragement for many parents is the way that everything can take a really, really long time when you have kids. Something you could have finished in two weeks in your pre-child days now drags on over months or even years. You can’t just let your toddler fend for himself as you lock yourself in your office over a long weekend, working late into the night. You can’t easily travel or take classes or even shop in stores that carry lots of breakables. Everything requires a new level of planning and patience than it used to, and it’s easy to feel as if you’re not able to get anything done.

Getting Back on Track

When you’re feeling discouraged, and your dreams have been sidetracked, there are a few steps you can take to help get back on track:

1. Re-Evaluate – Sometimes a project isn’t working because it’s not the right fit for us. Other times, we realize that we really do want to do this thing, we’ve just gotten a bit sidetracked. Take some time to re-evaluate and be really honest with yourself. Should you drop this idea, and free up space for something better, or should you pick it back up and make it happen? Only you can decide.
2. Cut Yourself Slack – There are actually scientific studies that explain our tendency to overcommit. When we’re planning for the future, we forget about all the ordinary, everyday tasks we’ll have to do, like cleaning and commuting and taking our kids to the dentist. As a result, we create unrealistic schedules for ourselves. If you can cut yourself some slack when things take longer than you’d hoped, instead of beating yourself up and giving up in discouragement, you’ll stand a much better chance of realizing your dreams.
3. Find Support – In our lives, we have people who are really great at supporting us, and people who just aren’t. When you’re following your dreams, you need a lot of support. Seek out the people or communities where you always feel uplifted. And when you’re with someone who has a way of taking the wind out of your sails, find something else to talk about.
4. Seek Inspiration – Whatever your dream, there is someone who has been just where you are and carried it through. While their journey won’t be identical to yours, seeking out those who have succeeded, or whose stories resonate with you, can help remind you what you’re doing and why. It can also remind you that your dream is actually very achievable. Seek out inspiration, and return to it when you need a little boost.

Crafting my Life

I have been on a personal journey to figure out exactly what I want to do with my life for almost three years now. Along the way, I have experienced my fair share of discouragement. I have let some ideas go, and nurtured others. No matter how each project turned out, I have learned something every step of the way. No effort is wasted in life.

One of my biggest realizations, as I sought my own bliss, was that I really wanted to help other people live more purposeful and authentic lives. The seeds of that desire to help grew into Crafting my Life. Crafting my Life is a set of online tools for busy moms who want a life of greater intention and purpose. It’s targeted to moms because we have some special constraints in our lives. It’s hard for us to get out of the house to take classes or spend time by ourselves. Crafting my Life is something that you can do on your own schedule, at your own pace, without ever having to leave your house.

Discouragement happens, but we don’t have to let it overpower us. We can use it as a tool to help us hone our focus and clarify our intentions. I won’t let my dreams be de-railed just because they’re taking a little longer than I expected. I hope you won’t, either.

How do you deal with discouragement?

Amber Strocel is a writer, life-crafter, dreamer, and rather shoddy housekeeper who lives in the Vancouver area with her husband and two kids. She’s devoted to simplifying and living a more sustainable life. She helps moms follow their bliss at Crafting my Life, records her daily adventures on her blog Strocel.com, and works as the Content Manager for VancouverMom.ca.

And there are big. HUGE. things staring back at me.

In addition to the revelation of my word for the year, I guess I have an announcement to make: I’m excited and terrified to announce that Aaron and I have made arrangements to move back into our bus, Eliza Brownhome, this coming summer. We converted and lived in her in the middle of Vancouver for 5 years, part of the time with a baby and a black lab. She’s pretty comfortable and we’re intimately acquainted with life in a small space like that. However, we’ve never done it with 3 very loud kids before. With these kids in the middle of a rainy Wet Coast winter, I often feel that our 1900 square foot rental is too small so I’m really not sure what it will feel like to squish everyone back into Eliza. On that front, I’m feeling some, um, trepidation.

However, I’m so excited about how this fits in with our bigger dreams to eventually live rurally, build a house, garden, support local agriculture, create community, reconnect with my sister’s family and centralize home life – that is to say, live, work, learn and play all on the same site. I realize that I haven’t publicly described this vision before so some of this may seem fuzzy to you…but suffice to say, that moving back into Eliza for the summer is the first tangible step in the direction of making our dreams a reality.

The initial plan is to do this for the summer and reassess in the fall. The hope is that some of the considerable money we pay in rent will be freed up for investing in our dreams.

It will be fun, and exciting, but we’re also facing a lot of hard work to make this happen which brings me to my word for 2012: ENERGIZE.

en·er·gize

verb /enər jīz/

1. Give vitality and enthusiasm to
2. Supply energy, typically kinetic or electrical energy, to (something)

This word came to me late at night on New Year’s Eve, as I lay in bed tossing ideas around. I had considered DO, ACT, ACTION, COMMIT but they all seemed a little heavy, a little bossy. You see, I was looking for a word that would mean just do it, don’t be afraid, quit procrastinating, you can do it, you have it in you, go for it. Even without this bus plan, I have a handful of projects that have been hanging over my head for quite some time:

• finish the kid’s baby books
• deal with the clutter spots (closet floor, top of dressers, junk drawers)
• clean up computer (sort 5 years of digital photos, clear out inbox, purge favourites/bookmarks)
• back up computer
• make slideshow/video for Silas’ first birthday
• finish making a useful household notebook
• organize all the loose paper recipes laying around

And now, on top of those, I have to sort, store and declutter so that we can fit the five of us in 500 square feet. These projects will be very freeing, but they take time and require action and commitment. They can be boring, easy to start dreading and easy to put off. My plan is to assign one project to each month and do it, no more excuses.

I like the word energize because:

1. It’s a verb so it suggests action.
2. It reminds me to be enthusiastic about my projects.
3. It encourages me to put in the energy, not to procrastinate.
4. I love the bit about vitality and enthusiasm – it means that with our energy we can bring life to our dreams.
5. There is room for me to prioritize self-care so that I feel energized too.

The flip side of our plan to live in the bus again this summer is that we’ve also agreed to help a local farming family with some of their projects, to help make their dreams more attainable and I look forward to bringing our energy, vitality and enthusiasm to their farm.

It’s going to be big year. I can’t wait.

Do you have a word of the year? I would love to hear what it is. Link up if you posted about it. And just because I’m curious, how many of you have some of the same projects hanging over your heads??

This year I am again in a mental space that allows me to step back and look at the bigger picture. This year I’ve chosen a word and I’ve been able to look back at the last two years to see the themes and lessons that brought us to today.

2010 began with me seeking a clear vision of my path, and consequently, faith and trust that my dreams were achievable. It was supposed to be a year of planning and moving forward, but we got thrown a curve-ball mid-way through the year, in the form of an unplanned pregnancy. Just like that everything changed: I forgot all about my intentions and plans from January and focused on the baby we would be welcoming. Yet, looking back, I see that the year was still embodied by vision, faith and trust. I had to rewrite my vision of our family and our plans and I again found myself looking for clarity of purpose as I reconsidered my dreams. I learned to trust the process and have faith in myself and my family as I fearfully wondered whether we had the energy to welcome/care for another child. I learned to relax and believe that it would all work out.

2011 ended up being a year of being, of presence. Mindfulness is a bit of a catch word in the last decade and I wish I could say that I consciously chose to be present but the reality is that it just happened. This summer, Aaron and I made the decision that our family was complete and Aaron went in for a vasectomy which meant that 2011 was the last year I will ever be pregnant, or give birth, or hold my own newborn baby against my skin. I spent 2011 reveling in the anticipation and feeling gratitude for the childbearing phase in a woman’s life. I spent 2011 watching my baby grow and trying to soak it up, knowing now, the third time around, how very fleeting it is, knowing that I can’t slow it down, knowing that I won’t experience this first hand ever again.

After all the fears and uncertainty and surprise of 2010, we were delighted to welcome Silas into our lives. He has been a wonderful ray of light and sweetness in our family. He balanced us out and healed old wounds and the first 5-6 months with him were so beautiful and—I still can’t believe it—easy. I couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have him.

The last few months have been harder as sleep became a huge challenge and as a result, 2011 echoed 2009 in being a year of family, a year of being still and getting to know each other, a year of not taking on too much. I even went so far as to broadcast on facebook that we were struggling with sleep deprivation to the point where I was focusing only keeping my kids’ fed and clothed and as such my friends would have to forgive my lack of phone calls/visits.

2011 was about living day-to-day. 2011 was about the moment. 2011 was about now.

But here we are: it is January. The days have slipped by. We have a new year. We can see Silas’ first birthday there on the horizon. Our baby days are almost behind us. It is a time to let go and look forward. We are picking up where we left off: planning and visioning with eyes to the future, grateful for the last two years and excited for what is to come.

Stay tuned for my next post where I will reveal my word of the year for 2012. In the mean time, do you like to reflect on the last year as part of your process of setting intentions/goals for the New Year? What word would sum up the last year? How does it fit in the continuum of recent years? How does it inform your plans for the next year?

It’s no secret that kids don’t actually need a bunch of fancy toys, but unfortunately, I’ve also observed that given the choice, they just can’t resist the shiny, plastic, battery operated, noisy, walking, talking, lights-flashing ones.

When you first start to introduce natural toys you may find, like I did, that they aren’t played with as much as you’d hoped. Despite observing the kids in a Waldorf Kindergarten regularly play with rocks and acorns and silks, I have a hard time imagining my kids choosing horse chestnuts and pine cones over a bucket of Lego, given the choice. And it’s not just the rocks that pose this problem. At first even the more exciting toys like the wooden castle filled with wooden horses and knights were only played with when they were brand new and often sat in the corner after that.

So, you probably wonder what has worked for us?

First off, don’t get discouraged. Keep buying natural toys whenever you can.  Make it a priority to invest in these types of toys even if your initial efforts aren’t the raging success you were hoping for. Pool cash gifts from family and friends to get a big item or suggest that family members go together to purchase something you’ve been dreaming of. We started getting the kids some of the bigger ticket items every time a birthday or Christmas rolled around. We started with a beautiful wooden castle and eventually got each of the kids their own Waldorf doll. Expect that as you start getting more of them, there will be a shift.

Wooden castle folded open. King in the dungeon.

Expect that it will take a while, especially if finances are a big factor. Here are some ways to cut down on the expense:

Try making stuff. The woman who did up this room for her son says she got very DIY and made a lot of the toys. Some of the things that we’ve made for our kids include a wooden doll bed, some doll clothes, felt birthday crowns, a wooden sword, and a knight’s tunic. I also have a book that shows how to make simple felt animals which I intend to do with Rain. A lot of etsy vendors even sell patterns for making your own felt food and you can get cheap plain silk and dye your own play cloths. Involving your kids in the process is a good way to ensure that they will be more willing to play with the creations too.

Evaluate what big items you really want to purchase and what could be skipped. Do you really need those expensive play arches (even though they are cool)? It seems to me that you could invest in a lot more TOYS to be played with rather than the fancy shelves. Could you make do with a homemade stove/sink combo that sits on a table top rather than an expensive kitchen? Save those purchases until the end when you are really sure that you want/need/can afford them.

Two Good Starting Points:

Felt Food – I started getting the kids one set of felt play food from etsy for every gift giving occasion. I only spent about $20 at a time, but I did this for Easter, Valentine’s Day, Birthdays and Christmas so they added up quickly. At first they didn’t get used often but as the sets have started to pile up, they now play with them quite a bit. The sets aren’t expensive when you buy them slowly over time like this, and I feel good about supporting handmade etsy products. These make playing with the Fisher Price plastic stuff more fun until we can eventually afford the time/money to either make or buy a kitchen.

Dress Up – starting a dress up bin is also a good place to start. This can be done inexpensively at a Thrift store and you can round it out with some play silks, a shield, a pirate hat, a sword and felt crowns. You could splurge and purchase some of the key items to round out your dress up bin or you could make your own. I personally found that the silks were instrumental in getting the kids to play dress up more often. I didn’t expect it but as soon as I started showing the kids all the ways they could use a silk, they regularly became a part of their play.

Play silks, sword and birthday crown in use.

But how to get the toys played with??

Rotate toys. Every preschool and daycare I’ve ever set foot in rotates their toys so that they are always offering the kids something fresh and new to play with. Put the wooden farm away for a month and then bring it out and put the Playmobile away for a while.

If possible, try to weed out the undesirable toys across a developmental stage. It’s easy to get rid of the plastic baby/toddler toys when your preschooler no longer plays with them and replace with natural toys that are age appropriate. This isn’t always possible when, like us, you have younger kids who might still be using those toys or if your older child isn’t even close to outgrowing their current toys yet.

Move some of these toys to a part of the house where they can still play with them but it might not be as desirable. For example, when Silas started crawling we moved all of the Lego upstairs for safety reasons. Rain has begun playing dress up and castle more often because those items are on the main floor where he prefers to play.

Most of us probably have far more toys around than are really necessary. You can institute a strict rule that every time something new comes in the house, an old toy is donated to good will. Or if you’ve taken a toy out of rotation for a while and it really doesn’t seem to be missed, send it to the Thrift Store. Over time, the balance of natural toys and plastic toys will shift, and as it does, you’ll find your kids will be more creative about using the toys they have around.

Flikr photo credit: Christaface

A couple of things got in the way of this plan:

1. Money – these natural toys are NOT cheap. Especially some of the bigger items like the wooden kitchen and play arches. I would be willing to save up cash birthday gifts from relatives until we could afford a fancy kitchen like this but Aaron finds them unreasonably expensive toys for kids (despite in my opinion, the obvious care, quality materials and craftsmanship that goes into some of them).
2. Hand-Me-Downs – my sister with older kids gave me a lot of the things they had outgrown and my mom passed down a lot of my old toys from when I was young. My toys had sentimental value plus, being made in the 70′s, they were durable despite being plastic (particularly my old Duplo and Fisher Price sink, stove and dishes). Also, who was I to say no to free toys?
3. Gifts – personally, I think it’s just a bit pretentious to tell people that I only want a certain type of toy for my kids, especially when these toys are also expensive and hard to find. If someone loves my kid enough to buy them a gift, I’m going to smile and say “thank you very much.” When people ask me what my child might like for Christmas or a birthday, I’ve found that the safest answer is “We always love books at our house!” About the only thing I will actually come right out and say is that we prefer not to have clothes or toys with licensed characters on them.
4. Super Cool Non-Natural Toys - over the years, we were occasionally swayed by really cool gifts, or marketing, or our kids’ likes and dislikes, towards things like Lego, Schleich animals and so on.
5. Mindset – to be honest, I think Aaron and I are both unwilling to be so rigidly crunchy as to make this kind of playroom a priority. We probably always will have a few plastic toys and Toy Story puzzles around. Afterall, I don’t think that the majority of non-natural toys are inherently evil (battery operated ones being the exception) so I’m not opposed to having them in the house. Frankly, I’m not wealthy or snobby enough to go all out on creating a natural playroom from scratch overnight. I assume that to be true for most people who admire these types of play spaces.

That said, a mostly natural playroom is still something we’re working towards. We’ve had both challenges and successes with this and my intention was to discuss what seems to work in making the slow transition to natural toys…but alas, I blathered on too long again so I will offer that up in my next post.

And then I grew up and became a mom. {insert crazed laughter here}

Can you imagine the adjustment motherhood has been for me in the personal space department?

Moms don’t get to have their own bodies. From conception, our little ones start sharing our bodies in a way that is equal parts annoying and magical. Then, wonder of wonders, they pass right through our bodies, out into the world and we begin the slow process of separation.

It doesn’t happen overnight. At first, there’s nursing. I’ve been nursing now for six years, minus a few months during each pregnancy. This means that day and night, someone is attached to me, sucking on me, crawling on me, sleeping on me, grabbing at me, sometimes even pinning me down or chasing me. (Don’t get me wrong – I love breastfeeding). Silas has also gotten to the play with his food stage: he pinches and squeezes the boob as he nurses, pulls the nipple out of his mouth, then lunges to re-latch. I know from past experience that this is coming too: sticking fingers up my nose or in my mouth repeatedly, trying to grab my tongue, while nursing. Thankfully, I’ve never allowed the nipple twiddling that most nurslings are famous for because I knew that would send me right up the wall.

And it doesn’t end with weaning. My older kids are always sitting on me, touching me, pinching me. They even try to move my arms or legs to suit their own purposes when I’m busy trying to do something (like sleep, or nurse their little brother).

But I’ll tell you a secret. For the most part, I don’t mind.

I remember my prenatal class instructor telling us about a woman who scooped up her newborn baby, covered in blood and vernix and began instinctively, to LICK him clean…like a cat. I think it’s worth mentioning that at the time I heard this story, 7 months pregnant with my first child, I thought it was bewilderingly outrageous, but now, after three kids, I kind of see where she was coming from (though, I must say I have never done it).

Because these little beings began their lives safely sheltered and cradled inside my own body, part of me views them as an extension of my own body. In my mind, I observe my interactions with Silas, the way I wrap my body around his, kissing armpits, blowing raspberries on soft belly skin, nibbling toes. I could eat him up. He’s delicious. He’s a cuddler and in the mornings, we often lay together entwined, mouths millimeters from cheeks, breathing together, feeling each other’s warmth. His neck rolls may smell like sour milk and he drools on me but I barely notice. I remember being the same with Rain and Noa. There is no too close with them. It often feels like we can’t be close enough, for long enough.

There’s another little surprise though. I feel that slowly shifting with Rain. He is six now and I can feel our personal space beginning to bubble between us. Sure, we still cuddle and hug and hold hands and kiss and fall asleep with our arms wrapped around each other, but now, when I lay down with him at bedtime, his breath in my face feels too close sometimes. Or his stinky feet and dirty toes gross me out when I trim his toe nails for him. I recoil when he squeezes my bare arm with slobbery fingers that seconds before were in his mouth as he chewed on them. The division between parent and child grows more distinct as he grows up.

Now, sometimes now, I want space again. I want a few minutes when no one is touching me. I am coming back to the personal after six years of intimately sharing my space with him. I feel myself walking that same journey slowly with Noa too and I know it will come with Silas.

How about you? Have you felt that shift happen between you and your kids? Have you ever licked your babies? And more importantly, do you ever feel like you go insane if one more person touches you?!?