Baby Kicks, Preschool Knowledge

My preschoolers are fascinated by the whole baby thing. One of them is constantly trying to feel it kick~ which of course happens all the time until she puts her hand to my stomach and then it ceases completely. I tell her it's because her hands are so cold ;) This same girl gave me a lesson in Baby 101. She made sure to point out to me that once I "pick the baby up from the hospital" I can't return it. And it's probably going to poop. Oh, and if (ha! IF!) it does, I cannot bring it to her house and she will NOT change diapers for me. We made a paper chain to help us count down the days so I don't have to answer the question of "How many more days?!?!?" every day. It's cute because when we started it, it was about 9 feet long, and just getting rid of one link of the chain is such a huge deal to them. Two of the kids volunteered to come and paint the baby's room for me and since them all of them have said they would do it for me. They've all got some interesting ideas of how to reach all the way to the ceiling ~ one of them is going to climb the wall like Spiderman, a few of the others believe we should find some monkeys and make them do it. (When I asked where we'd get monkeys, I was told we'd probably have to steal them from a zoo since you can't get them at a pet store.)

Kickwise, I don't really know what the excuse is, then, when Josh tries to feel the same thing. Maybe it's just a stubborn baby (Josh says that's most likely the case and that that character trait comes from me). What really entertains me is that he will fall asleep with his hand on my stomach and then the baby starts to kick like crazy, directly under Josh's hand. But when Josh is awake and actually hoping to feel the baby kick, it's always on the opposite side or a couple inches from his hand.

Only...

100 days left!!!! That's if this baby decides that it's due date is the day that it wants to be born.

Darn storybooks...

In last month's book order (I love being a teacher!) I ordered a book called "You Were Loved Before You Were Born." Tonight, I'm going through my books and took the time to read it. It is so sweet... and then I get to the page where the grandpa gives a rocking chair for the baby and I start to cry.

And so now, I have to dry the page of a brand new book before I can put it on the bookshelf that eventually will be in the baby's room.

Call Us Crazy...

Long before the whole baby thing came about, we discussed cloth diapering vs. disposable diapers. After even more discussion and research recently, we have officially decided to go the cloth diaper route. In all honesty, I never thought that this would be something I'd actually be excited about doing/trying, but I am.

Before you go assuming that we're complete nutjobs, please hear me/us out: We're not tree huggers, though we have actually been making an effort to live a little more "green" in the last year. The cloth diapers that we were going to use are not the dishtowel and pin crap from 100 years ago. If that were the case, we probably wouldn't even have considered cloth diapers.

Once we get in a system of doing things, using cloth diapers won't be anymore complicated than using disposable ones. They use the same way, it's just that instead of carting 40 pounds of dirty diapers outside to the curb each week, we will be washing a load of diapers every other day. I would much rather have to wash diapers than know that we've contributed disposable diapers 80+ diapers a week to a landfill that will take 10-20 years to biodegrade.

It's not so much the saving the Earth aspect that helped us make this decision, it's the "holy crap, do you realize how much it costs to put your baby in disposable diapers for 2+ years?!?!?!?" I mean, yeah, YAY we're helping the planet out a bit. But really it's more about the money that we will save by using them. Our game plan is to have at least 2 kids, maybe 3. If/When we really stick with the cloth diapering for each of them, we'll have saved thousands of dollars. Yes, the diapers are not cheap to begin with, but you have to figure that paying $300 for diapers that you can reuse until they're worn out or grown out of is a lot cheaper than spending that much every month or two for disposables.

So that's my story. Maybe we are nutjobs, but it makes sense to us.