Toddler, Toddler, Toddler

You may have to dig to find posts about anything but my toddler.

At it again...she was up way too late last night. And the night before. It has been a struggle, this past week, to get her to GO TO SLEEP. And no, I don't mean to get her to go to sleep on her own or without nursing or in her own bed or whatever other nice progress-in-development kind of thing. A struggle to get her to go to sleep in her usual cuddled-up-with-mama, nursing, book-reading kind of way.

This is simply NOT COOL in the world of the already-too-little-time Niki. I don't want to spend two hours getting my toddler to sleep. Do you have any idea what I could get accomplished in those two hours? You know, if I was being forced not to sleep anyway.

And on the subject of irritating toddler, GIRL would you PLEASE let me put a sweater on you? PLEASE? It wouldn't kill you, I PROMISE, and it was like 40 degrees out there with daddy last night. You were freezing. I know it because you tried to remedy that by curling up against my belly. COLDCOLDCOLDCOLDCOLD. But no sweater, jacket, anything. Must only have ONE LAYER of clothing, eh? And it HAS to be THAT SHIRT that you chose today, eh?

Well, freeze then.

What Toddlerness Is Made Of

So this morning, just after Toddlerness finished her "wake up nummies," she informed me:

"Mama, I made of nummies. And a french fries."

"oh, nummies and french fries?"

"yeah, and some a whip cream."

Good to know.

Gardening Semi-Success

A semi-success, because I don't know yet if it will actually result in an actual garden with actual thriving vegetables.

I've spent entirely too much time over the last week preparing the beds and planting my plants, and now I have just a smallish lineup of seedlings on my windowsill - I have reclaimed my living room! We ate at the table last night!

Anyway, I've got a lot of little bitty plant babies in the ground outside right now. Last year I had near-zero success with direct seeding, so I've only got three things I'm going to direct seed (and honestly it is a little depressing that I have MORE beds to prep).

MIL reframe success (or some similar title)

I have more than one family member who doesn't seem to understand homeschooling as anything other than school at home. Or at least, didn't. The last straw (so to speak) with my MIL came about two weeks ago, when she sent me a packet of interesting unit-study type stuff for the kidlets and "slipped in" a several-page piece on classroom management. I hadn't realized until that point just how badly she didn't get it. I wonder if there was a picture in her mind of me setting Girliness down at the table, fending off the younger two, and filling her head with the all-powerful schooly-type KNOWLEDGE day after day.

So I went a-searching for stuff to counter that (because what I SAY never seems to really sink in...oh, she is great about not challenging us, but it is like she doesn't REALLY believe it until it comes from somewhere else too). Wound up with Dumbing Us Down and Teach Your Own. Broke as I am, I borrowed them from the library and passed them off to MIL with attempted sensitivity "I don't think we're thinking of the same thing when we think of homeschooling - I brought these over so you can take a look and maybe we will be speaking the same language in the future. Take a look, you can return them at your library when you're done, let me know if you'd like more than 3 weeks, blah blah blah."

And much to my surprise, a few days later she wrote back with happy reviews, told me about how she's seen some of this in the classrooms when she subs, and is purchasing these books and a few others to add to her own collection. This is simply beyond my expectation (I was merely hoping for a little reprieve from the school-at-home mindset).