Multicultural Holidays and Milestones

Some people call me a hypocrite for being Pagan yet celebrating Xmas with Shammy.  First of all Christmas has Pagan origins and elements so I don’t feel like I’m selling out anything and secondly, we don’t want to limit Shammy’s exposure to the traditions of other religions.  Even though his parents are Pagans they both grew up with Catholic/Christian traditions and we don’t see anything wrong with them (as long as you don’t get me started on the over-commercialization of the holiday).

We’ll give Shammy the opportunity to decide which traditions he wants to adopt. If he decides that he wants to be christian we’ll still love him just as much.  We celebrated Yule, Christmas and will probably celebrate Three Kings Day/Epiphany on January 6th. The only reason why we didn’t celebrate Festivus is because nobody in the household observes it.

We’ll do Santa as long as he wants us to but if at 3 years old he asks if Santa is real, I will not lie, give him the historical background and continue life, he will still get the same presents, we just won’t have to pretend about where they came from.  I knew about the Santa lie for years without admitting it to my parents for fear of a reduction in presents, I prefer us to have honesty from day 1.

The holidays turned out pretty well, I’m still amazed at how having kids suddenly turns a loner into a family person, no books warned me about that!

After finding my groove of pumping just once a day, I’ve had to slow down a bit and skip a day every once in a while because I started to notice an oversupply.  That wouldn’t be a bad thing if I could pump and freeze it all but I can’t always get the pump to fully empty the breasts and hate having to go to bed with already full breasts that will just get fuller.

The other night I skipped pumping and Shammy slept until 5:30am so by the time I woke up I was in a pool with the side of my shirt soaked from the pressure applied while sleeping on that side.  I always find this amusing.

I am amazed at how much Shammy can do and he’s not even 5 months old yet.  His feet were reaching the floor on the walker so I would put him on it for a few minutes a day.  He mainly used it to play with toys and occasionally move backwards  and it was a nice change from the bouncy chair which makes me all paranoid of flat head syndrome.  Imagine my shock when within days he’s walking all over the living room on it, wow.  I guess I should start to get him shoes…

Shammy finally got his taste of something other than breastmilk.  We gave him his first meal the day after Christmas.  I bought Earth’s Best Organic Whole Grain Brown Rice Cereal and mixed it with breastmilk for his first meal.  I was impressed at how readily he took to it.  People had warned me that he would make faces and spit out the food at first but that was not the case.  He readily accepted it and even insisted on feeding himself because daddy wasn’t being fast enough.  I got to cry behind the camera while it all took place.

For now he’s eating cereal once a day and after one week I’ll plan to introduce something else, probably a vegetable.  I got a food processor for Xmas which is going to be perfect for making his food at home.

A thing that I have realized now that he’s on solids is that I have nowhere near enough bibs.  I thought that I had tons of them but now we go through them a lot faster and I don’t do his laundry that often, that will now have to change if I want to keep the mess off his clothes.

Speaking of clothes, I have continued to experiment with tie dye and did a test batch of baby clothes, they turned out rather well so I have now opened an Etsy shop for them.  Help this mama stay at home with baby and still pay the bills.  There is little now but I am up for custom projects and will make more after I sell some.

I have to be careful when watching movies with Shammy.  I have a reputation when crying during family movies, specially if animals are involved.  Shammy and I were watching Santa Buddies and I started to cry during a happy scene, he looked at me and started to cry too.  He had no idea why but felt that since I was crying that was the thing to do at the time, lol.

This blog now has a Facebook page, go on over and become a fan, doing so gives you access to coupons for discounts on my Etsy shop.

Santa deemed me a good mom this year and got me a new camera, it’s an upgrade to my old Powershop providing HD video with stereo sound, yay!

On to this week’s rants:

1) I got a free subscription to Parents Magazine with my Boppy pillow, I would never pay for that magazine but since it was free I figured why not.  I just got my new issue and remembered why I’d much rather read Mothering Magazine, the advertisers for Parents are mostly companies that promote everything that I am against, some of those products shouldn’t even be promoted on this magazine but they are, and sadly this is the most popular magazine for mothers in this country.

2) My recent pet peeve is people that say: “My parents did ______, and I turned out ok.” Well, sure you did, but don’t you want more for your kids than “ok” or “fine”? This seems to be a common refrain for our generation to say when they make a choice that is against all the available evidence. I totally get that perfection is NOT possible but why try to make
excuses? OWN IT!

3) My latest annoyance is moms that feel that their baby’s percentile in the growth charts is a test where you need to aim for a 100 score.  Even more annoying is when people compare their baby’s ranking when breastfeeding and after they started using formula and talking about how their child jumped in the percentile scale therefore implying that the breastmilk was not good enough.

A percentile score is just there to give you an idea of where your child falls in what scientists consider “normal” development.  Remember that each child is normal for their own genetic makeup.  The idea with keeping track is not to increase the number.  A child in the 10th percentile at birth is still growing normally by being in the 10th percentile at 6 months.  A lot of parent’s race to “raise their child from the 25th percentile to 75th ultimately leads to a propensity for obesity later in life.

What I really roll my eyes at is parents that have unrealistic expectations of where they want their baby to fall on the growth chart.  It took me a lot of effort to stay calm while listening to some parents complained that their 6 month old was “only” 15 lbs, mind you if you look at both parents you can quickly see why this is normal.  They are both 4’11” and 95lbs when wet.  Why torture yourself by comparing your child to that from parents that are 6’5″?