Start As You Mean To Go On
After Alynne turned one and my weekly Aly blogging subsided, I was eager to start blogging about other mommy topics and what not. However, now I find myself hesitant to write about the various topics I had in mind. One side of me really wants to blog about the various things we've done with Aly (like sleep training, etc) in hopes to help others or even just for my sake to be able to remember what/how we did things. The other side of me doesn't want to blog about topics at all for a few reasons. 1. I am absolutely, in no way, an expert, or the best mom out there. 2. Though we have done things a certain way, I know that there are certainly multiple ways to parent your children, and what works for one child doesn't necessarily work for another, even within the same home. 3. I would never want to start any "mommy wars." There is no competition in motherhood. No exact formula for how to do things. And there should be no judgement.
So, with all that being said, I think I will venture forward with my first topic.
"Start as You Mean to Go On."
I read this quote in one of the mommy books I read while pregnant, and it stuck with me. It talks about trying to do things from the very beginning how you would want them to be done 6 months down the road, 2 years, etc. So here are some examples of what that looked like for us:
-Independent playtime. We knew we didn't want a 3 year old who couldn't play on their own, or didn't know how to entertain themselves when siblings came into the picture. So from the very beginning, even when Alynne was a newborn, we would allow her to have pockets of independent playtime. In the beginning, this meant she just laid on her mat and stared at lights haha. Now at a year, Alynne is able to play by herself multiple times a day.
-Sleeping. We wanted Alynne to sleep in her crib, and we also wanted her to be able to put herself to sleep. The day we brought her home from the hospital, she slept in her crib. We never rocked or fed her to get her to sleep. We did a bit of sleep training to help her put herself back to sleep at 3.5 months, and she has been sleeping 8pm-8am since. I will post more on our sleep training adventures at some point.
-Eating. We chose do baby led weaning with Alynne, to help introduce her to regular eating sooner. (Ron and I are huge advocates for introducing solids this way, I'll blog about it soon!)
-Reading. We wanted to get in the habit of reading with Alynne and instill a love for reading early on. We started reading to Alynne several times a day from the time she was a newborn. Now, she already loves to read so much. It is one of her favorite things to do with us or on her own!
-Apologizing. Something we said we wanted to do as parents was be able to apologize to our children when we were wrong. Our kids need to see that we are sinful and need to see us repent of our sins. So even when Aly was just a couple months old, we would take the time to apologize to her if we got frustrated, even if she couldn't understand us, we wanted to get in the practice of it early on.
-Praying and reading the Bible. We've incorporated this into our bedtime routine from the beginning. She loves this time!
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, these are just some that I could remember being intentional about!