2007

new years eve
sitting at home, having a quiet one.

somehow the most significant year of our life so far doesn't need a big night out to mark it's end.

i watched darkness fall on 2007 from danika's bedroom as she fell asleep in my arms. i never new Life could be so deeply satisfying.

God Bless for 2008
Love charlotte x

danika is on the move.

blooming

our parenting style is slowly unfolding, and it has an uncanny nack of revealing what we truly value. our hidden assumptions slowly come into the light. our fundamental beliefs about Christ, the bible and Truth are slowly exposed.

before Danika was born we were invited to do a parenting course.... "we did it and our kids are so compliant and well mannered."

'compliant'? 'well mannered'? slight cringe noticed somewhere inside myself. there's nothing wrong with those two things per say, they're just not exactly the two adjectives i would use to advertise a parenting course.

i guess when i imagine what i want for dani's life those two are not that high up on the list... they are on the list, but just not that high up.

so what words would i pick to advertise a parenting course??? courage? passion? empathy?

i can feel my perception of Christ influencing this. The Christ of our imaginations are always all of our favourite qualities rolled into one, one man, one symbol.

i imagine jesus to be this brave dare devil, who is absolutely gorgeous and kind and loving but didn't give a rats arse if he offended the snobs. i imagine him to be completely fearless whilst still being emotionally vulnerable. he looks me in the eye and invites me into all sorts of adventures, not one of the least being birthing a child.

jesus - compliant? are you kidding me?

my distaste for compliance is one of the reasons i am (at the moment) unable to let dani cry when she wants a cuddle (even if it's 2am). the baby psychology books i've been reading reckon when a baby consistently expresses a need (physical, emotional or spiritual, and i think they are all the same thing to a baby anyway) and it is ignored, they cope by slowly deadening they acknowledgement of that need. they learn not to listen to their own bodies when they are hungry, or their own heart when they want love. maybe it's the 4 in me (enneagram), but having an internal moral compass and listening to my own heart is one of the most important things in the world.

and the new research (and lots of the old) is saying that babies who are responded to quickly, in the end cry less and are more content.

maybe the psychology books and the research is wrong and maybe i am actually creating a demanding little spoilt brat, but heck, i'll still love her even if no one else does, and at least i'll know i've done my best.

use your mind
but follow
your
heart.

dry sheets
dry baby
happy baby
happy mummy
:)

if we can do this again it will mean the end of day time nappies!

potty

the warm weather is definitely suiting the no-nappy thing. we've made heaps of progress the last few weeks (not that this is about progress per say). she's becoming really clear at communicating when she wants to poo, and she only wees about every hour now and the window i have to catch the wee has grown. (for instance if she does a wee at 9am i can put her on the potty again at anywhere between 9.45 and 10.15 and successfully catch it, where as when she was little if she weed at 9am i would only have between 9.20 and 9.25 to catch the next one.) she doesn't seem to communicate that she's about to wee, or if she does it's really subtle and only about 1 second before she going to go, so for wees i tend to rely on timing (ie put her on the potty before she's busting) and poos i tend to rely on her communication (she stops what ever she's doing and concentrates either into my eyes or into space and her breathing changes.)

i just put dani down for her afternoon nap with no nappy on! i popped her on the potty and she did a tea spoon sized wee (obviously wasn't busting) and then i laid her down in her cot, bare bummed. It's a nice warm day so she doesn't need any blankets. i've left her door open so i can hear her if she stirs. the theory is that babies don't wee in their sleep, but as they wake. this theory has proved true because i often whip dani's nappy off as soon as she wakes up and she's dry, but will then do a big wee on the potty within about 5 seconds.

we'll see how we go :)
i love being a mum

common sense?

my notions of common sense have never been challenged so much as they have in the first six months of being a mum. it seems to turn out that what i get told is 'common sense' is really not so common after all.

according to this book i've been reading 'our babies, ourselves' (by m f small) 90% of children sleep with at least one other adult, over 8% of babies sleep with other children and less than 2% of babies in the world tonight will sleep in a room alone.

less than 2%!! and it's not just the poor families that can only afford a one room house. so it's clearly not the common consensus that babies should sleep alone. and from a quick google search there seems to be a wealth of new research showing that it's actually not good for babies to sleep alone.

i look back at the early settlers and their crazy logic and i say 'bringing foxes to australia!! what were you thinking??!!'

i wonder if our grandkids will look back and say to us 'forcing babies to sleep alone!! what were you thinking??!!'

and the average age for weaning? my little bubble of 'common sense' would tell me 12 months is plenty, but the global 'common sense' turns out to be around 4 years.

so where do we get our crazy common sense ideas from anyway? fill me in if you find out.

ummm... thought i'd better write something since there's now a link to this page?????
hmmm... nothing really in my brain today. maybe i'll post a pic instead.

book

currently reading "Parenting for a Peaceful World" by Robin Grille. wow. i can feel it changing my world as i flip the pages over one by one.

i have this longing in my heart that constantly resurfaces. i can not shake it and i can not put it to sleep. i want the oppression in Burma to end. i want the child sex slave industry in asia to collapse. i want the slaughter in africa to stop. i want the abuse of aboriginal children to finish. i want rich humans to stop plundering our environment. i want the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven.

could it be that we can create either heaven or hell on earth by the way we treat our children?

Grille argues that child rearing practices have affected societies and international affairs throughout history including the rise of Hitler and Stalin. He walks through history and shows how common parenting practices are an incredibly accurate indicator of what that society will become.

Grille outlines six different parenting modes (from worst to best). The first 4 are highly abusive and would be illegal in modern Australia. The Growing Kids God's way stuff is quite clearly number 5 (the socialising mode). But everything he is saying about the sixth mode (the helpful mode) is resonating as deeply true.

it would blow you away some of the stuff that was considered normal in other parenting mode eras. like tighlty swaddling babies 24 hours a day until they're 9 months old and stuffing their mouths with rags soaked in flour and water to stop them crying. i will never trust 'common sense' again because these practices (and many others far worse) were considered common sense in many societies for hundreds of years.

Was talking with Grandma last night about babies. She grew up in a children's home herself. She hated it. "I love how you lot love and cuddle your babies," she said, "it's much better". better than what? i didn't want to ask.

can't wait for daddy ellery to read this and hear his perspective.

alfie kohn

"There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear it's hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At this point when objections are not even answered any more because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us."

my free speech

was chatting with a mate about 'why blog' the other day. why do i blog? ummmm... it feels healthy? i have a private written journal as well but there is something very releasing about putting it out there on the vast and lonely world wide web. i suppose it's like writing a speech... even if no one comes to listen it's still a valuable process for the speaker to go through...thinking, organizing and presenting thoughts. they say the best way to learn is to teach, so i'll happily teach, even if i'm the only one learning. like screaming a sermon into the desert. it feels good.

my mate wondered if blogs were about feeding ego's... like 'oh.. i wonder how many comments i got today'. maybe, but i don't think so. i'd rather feed my ego by being good a surfing or being really green or having loads of friends. those things are cool. being good at writing is a bit nerdy.

so i think i can safely say that i don't really mind too much how many people read this stuff. (which is probably a good thing because on the cyberspace map this site is not really a Sydney intersection, more of a Meliden culdesac... yes exactly, you don't even know where that is.) but i do love it when close mates do read it and mention it to me later... especially if it's about spiritually stuff. i guess it's nice to know that people care, or are at least willing to engage with me in soul wonderings.

and i suppose in the back of my head i hope that in 20 years time this blog will still be floating around for me to come back to and read, and remember where we were. who knows, dani might even read it one day?

our friends in Burma literally risk their lives to write their blogs.

http://www.ftub.org/
http://www.angelfire.com/ok/NLD/NLD.html