First feeding!! woohoo!!

I have a few milestones i want to share with you all. About a week ago, Katryn slept through the night!! she fell asleep for good about 9pm, and didn't wake up until 7am!! Needless to say, I was dying. . .I thought I was going to pop! She hasn't done that since though. Probably a fluke :)

On wednesday, she rolled over! From her stomach to her back!! woohoo!! She was scooching forward, trying to get to her toy, and just kicked right over! Matt and I were both cheering and clapping for her, and she just grinned at us like, "I totally did that"

and yesterday, we fed her cereal for the first time! She loved it. Everytime she saw the spoon, she'd open her mouth and just start kicking her feet for it. She stayed pretty clean too, I was impressed. And she didn't want to stop, we finally just stopped feeding her, because I didn't want to clean up puke in the middle of the night!
(and the rumor about babies sleeping longer if you give them cereal before bed. . .total lie, she woke up the same amount she always did--exact same times as well)

anyway, I knew you ladies would all understand my excitement behind all this!

Beware of the monsters

Hi all you moms of toddlers out there,

My sweet, almost 2 year old girls have turned into MONSTERS lately. They hit (not only each other, but me and my husband as well - that really pushes my buttons), they bite, they push and shove, and Isabelle has been throwing some royal tantrums lately. Sadly, the nursery leader informed us on Sunday that Eliza bit a classmate. I really don't know how to handle it all. And I don't even know where it is coming from. They can't communicate very well yet (I think their language skills are lagging because of their twinness) and I attribute a lot of their behavior to frustration, but still, where do they learn this from? They don't see mommy and daddy hitting and they don't watch it on TV, so is this instinctual? How have you handled this type of behavior? Ignore it? Time outs? What? I am at a total loss. I put them in time outs, explain to them why I put them in time out, but not five minutes later, they strike again. Seems like the time out is completely ineffective. So, my big question is how do you teach not to hit?

Cloth Diapers

A number of friends have asked me about cloth diapers recently. We use cloth diapers because they are a lot cheaper than disposables and will be easier to use out in Egypt. We're also doing elimination communication with Rachel and so often catch her just as she's starting to go, remind her to stop, and then go to the potty, so her diaper would only be a little wet. I felt bad putting a used disposable on her, but felt bad throwing it away because it was hardly used. So cloth works out well for us.

We're fairly new to this, but here's our little system.

We buy our diapers from Cotton Babies. The "try-it kit" probably isn't a bad way to start. I wished that I had purchased it instead of just the prefolds when I started out. It comes with prefolds and the expensive kind of covers. We just bought the cheap-o covers. They work fine, but for value, the "try-it kit" is actually pretty good, I think. It's $30 and you get 2 $12 covers, plus the prefolds. Anyway, we've survived without nice diaper covers, but there have been occasions when I wished we didn't have to pull the diaper covers down...

We get Indian prefolds and Dappi covers. We bought our pins at Wal-mart or somewhere, but you can also get them from this website. Folding the prefolds is a little tricky, and counterintuitive, really, since they call it a prefold, yet you fold it. Yeah, that's because the "birdseye" ones are even worse--they are just a flat layer of flanel and you have to fold it in thirds and then wrap it on your baby. The prefolds come ready to just wrap on your baby. I don't know if that made sense.

Anyway, I had to have my mom come and help me learn to fold a diaper. And I looked at a couple of websites. I found this one most helpful, but if you search for "diapering 101" or "how to fold a cloth diaper" or anything like that, a number of helpful sites should pop up for you.

I do the "twist" wrap for Rachel. I find it a little less bulky.

Now for the AIO (all in ones)...there is so much lingo to learn with cloth diapering, it's kind of ridiculous. I have a couple of friends who also use cloth diapers and I polled them about what they use. One of my friend only uses BumGenius. Crystal uses Bummies or something like that (I don't remember). She warned me to stay clear of Kushies, which is the kind they sell at Wal-Mart, so I haven't tried them. I just took her word for it. I would also steer clear of Happy Heiny's and Mommy's Touch. We tried them in our trial pack and they just didn't hold water (get it? They just didn't hold water...ah, ha, ha).

We did like Haute Pockets and Bum Genius, although, the Bum Genius are our favorite. They have a cool little flap thing to help keep the liner inside, which is nice. The Haute Pockets kind doesn't have that, although I think they have more colors to choose from, which is kind of fun but since they're just diapers, who cares, right?

These diapers look and act just like disposable diapers, which means that husbands and babysitters can use them, no problem. Andrew doesn't use pins and babysitters won't touch cloth diapers, so the nicer ones are convenient. They are also less bulky so we like to wear them when we get out of the house so that Rachel doesn't look like she has a huge behind.

They are rather pricey, though, and run upwards of $15 a pop. I think they are worth it, but it is difficult to buy enough all at once. Our initial purchase was 12 prefolds, 4 diaper covers, and 4 pins. That's enough typically to carry us through two days of diapering. We wash every other day so it worked out well. And it only cost us about $25, which is way cheap.

After using just prefolds for a while we felt like we could splurge and get some nicer diapers, so we ordered the trial pack from Nicki's Diapers since we still weren't quite sure which kind to buy. After using those for a week or so (in addition to our prefolds) we decided that we liked BumGenius the best so we ordered six of them from Cotton Babies. Now we have 12 prefolds, 1 HautePocket, and 7 BumGenius diapers that we use and that's fine for us for now. We're thinking about getting a few more BumGenius before we leave for Egypt though.

Anyway, that's pretty much all I know about diapers. Not a whole lot. We're still kind of in the experimental stage.