Light of my life

Life is toddling along at a normal pace now. School holidays are over, so I now have regular activities to occupy my perpetual-motion toddler. Seriously, how is it that she can literally never stop moving? If I jumped around and ran and skipped and hopped and rolled and danced and wobbled and joggled and wriggled and squirmed half as much as Mapera does, I'd be stick-thin!! Maybe that's the secret to losing the baby weight - losing weight the toddler way...hmmm.

She is definitely improving with her behaviour, and I put it down to better sleep. Up til recently Mapera has been waking every night (without fail) at around 2 or 3 am (just when you're getting your high quality REM sleep) and standing at her door shouting for us to let her out. She has a gate on the door after I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown following a full week of getting up 5 or 6 times a night to put Mapera back in her own bed.

We were racking our brains as to how to break this habit with her, and we found an answer one day when she was playing dens. She sleeps in the bottom of a set of bunks, and Daddy hung a sheet all around the top bunk so her bed was completely enclosed. She wanted the den up when she went to bed, so we happily left it in place. The next morning we were awoken to the usual "Mummy! Please you take my gate off?!" but I didn't feel like it was the middle of the night. When I looked at the clock it was 5am! Although this was still to early for me to even consider getting up, it was a marked improvement on the previous wake up time. Fortunately, Mapera went back to bed without much fuss and woke up again at the normal time of 6.30.

So, we had moved the initial wake up to a slightly more civilised hour, but I really want Mapera to learn to stay in her room until it's time to get up, even if she is awake. She was coming in to our bed for a morning snooze, but recently, she's not been going back to sleep, and it's not easy to relax with a 2 1/2 year old poking their fingers into your ears.
She has all her toys and bears and dollies, so she could theoretically play happily in her bed til it was time to get up for breakfast.

Tareka hit upon a plan to put a light on a timer in her room. We got an old bedside lamp, a plug in timer and rigged it up well out of reach. We sat Mapera down and explained to her that the light would come on when it was time to get up. If she woke up and the light was off, she had to stay in her bed, if it was on she could call out to us that it was time to get up.
She was really keen on the whole plan and happily repeated the instructions back to us (especially the bit about getting up and calling "Mummy, the light is on!"). So we crossed our fingers and went to bed.

At ar0und 3am a little voice called out in the darkness "Mummy, the light is on!"

Bother.

I got up, checked that it wasn't actually on and pointed this out to Mapera, who agreed that it was off and that she should get back into bed.

Then at 7am, just as the news came on the radio alarm in our room, our little voice piped up again "Mummy, the light is on!". Looks like we may have got it after all.

We've now been using the light trick for about a week, and apart from that first night, Mapera has not called us before 7am ONCE!! I'm going to give her another week with the gate on the door and if she's still waiting til the light comes on, I may be able to take it off at last!

Hurrah! Website!

Thanks to THIS wonderful person I have a little corner of the internet all to myself!

www.giggigoofer.co.nz


It's still under construction and as I am learning html as I go along, it's slow going. BUT IT'S THERE! Let me know your thoughts!

Bad Mummy

Well, this blog seems to be a bit of a schizophrenic caper from my life as a Mum, to various ways of attempting to make money.

Today is about parenting. How not to do it.

Bad Parenting 101:
1. Ensure you go to bed late every night (hell, the kids are only going to wake you up anyway!)
2. When your baby wakes every hour, go in and stuff a dummy in their mouth (it's night time, they don't need anything else)
3. When your toddler climbs into bed with you at 4.30am, whisper angrily at them to be quiet every time they say "Mum" (they definitely know they are supposed to just snuggle up and go back to sleep, you've told them enough times)
4. Get up at 6.30am and stomp into the kitchen telling your skipping 2 year old that they can only have cereal (you can't be bothered to follow their usual routine, surely they can deal with that, can't they?)
5. Decide that you will stop giving the baby a dummy on the same day your toddler gets an ear infection, and after you've all had 3 nights of nicely broken sleep (I'll cope, what's one more sleepless night?)
6. Spend 1.5 hours at bedtime repeatedly taking toddler to bathroom for "poos" and waking tired baby (who is suffering from dummy withdrawal) in order to avoid a potential toilet accident, but knowing toddler is really stalling.
7. Give up and give baby the dummy.

Ah, bad parenting at it's finest.

I now have 2 sleeping children - thanks to the Pamol (Calpol) and the dummy.

One good thing to come out of all this, after spending a day getting Kaitereo to settle herself without a dummy, now when she wakes at night, I can leave her for a few minutes and she'll go back to sleep....won't she?

HATS FOR SALE!

Hats available now: (please note sizes are approximate)



Large Green - fits 9 to 12 months








Large Gray (pink ribbon detail) - fits 9 to 12 months











Large Sage - fits 9 to 12 months








Med Multi - fits 6-9 months











Med Red - fits 6-9 months (button fastened)











Med Blue - fits 6-9 months






Med Sage - fits 6-9 months (button fastened)









Small Red Speckle - fits 3-6 months








Small Green - fits 3-6 months







Small Cream, Blue Band - fits 3-6 months







NB Blue Striped - fits newborn









NB White with Lace & Ribbon edge - fits newborn








NB Cream Speckled - fits newborn







NB Gray Speckled - fits newborn





All hats are priced at $10 (that's New Zealand dollars) and include postage within NZ. If you are overseas, drop me an email with your details and I'll send you a price based on current exchange rates, and the cost of postage to your country.

Website on hold

For various reasons, my website for selling my lovely hats is on hold. I've been building a pretty little site in my nice little HTML program, but I have yet to find someone to host it. I can't afford to pay for web hosting, so I'm looking for a freebie (any offers?).
Until then I will post pictures of my hats for sale HERE!

Knitting up a storm

I have my first official order for a pixie hood! A friend in the UK has asked for one for her 8 month old, but wanted it to fit next winter. It's nearly winter here in NZ, but I assumed she was talking about the UK winter :) so he'll be getting on for 15 months by then. I've knitted the hat part, so now I need to do the tie and then sew it all together. It's come out a bit larger than I planned as the wool is a little thicker that I've used before, but it's slightly larger than the one I had of Mapera when she was about 1year old, so it should fit nicely!

The hat has taken just under a week to knit, as I do an hour or 2 a day/evening. The strap should take less time.

I'll ask her to send me some pictures once she gets it!

Projects a-go-go!

Current list as of today:

• Knitting - pixie hoods are now in "mass" production, and I am planning on setting up a website to sell them. Once the website is done, I will be heading up to the local maternity hospital with a business card, and poster!
• Website - following on from above I have now purchased a domain name ($25 for the year, not bad) and am waiting to hear back from an NZ web hoster, who may be able to host a simple site for free for me! Woo! I am planning a simple catalogue sort of page, and people will have to email me their orders.
• Scrapbooking - I have a "girls" album in progress for Mapera and Kaitereo, and I think the next page will be their Christmas photo.
• Decorating - we're planning to sell up this place and move to somewhere bigger with more land. In order to do this, we need to finish the decorating on this house (which we have lived in for nearly 3 years and not done yet!). I insisted that we make a start so that we can possibly start looking for a new place at the end of this year. We've started stripping the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, and it's going to take a while!

The only other projects on are the new job I started, doing piece work for Black Magic Tackle. They send me out work orders for various lures or flies and I tie the hooks. Then they go back to Black Magic to be made into fishing rigs.