Amy’s toddler

Amy’s 2yo was taken to the hospital yesterday with excessive vomiting, chills, hallucinations, and a fever of 105.4.
Please join us in prayer for little Rebekah and the rest of her family as they wait for a diagnosis.

It worked

Not that I was worried, but oh boy did it work.
Just in case you’re wondering, the girls are stacking and arranging:

4 – 8oz bars of Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate

2 pints of Hagan Daaz Mayan Chocolate ice cream

a 3.5 oz bar of Green & Black’s organic bittersweet 70% dark chocolate

untold bags of Hershey’s dark chocolate miniatures

Yup, my man loves me.

 

mmmm…chocolate….

Godiva, See’s, and Ghiradelli are heavenly, but for everyday chocolate nothing beats Hershey’s.
Say what you will, there’s just something about sinking your teeth into a big hearty chunk of Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate.
It’s good enough for all but the snobbiest chocolate snobs, and cheap enough for guilt-free consumption.
I’m just mentioning this because…well, because I’m down to my very last 8 oz. bar that my wonderful handsome sweet thoughtful hubby bought me. And it’s shrinking by the hour.
And I know he reads my blog.
I love you, Honey.

WFMW: don’t lose your posts

Blogger has been hungry this week, probably due the new features they are rolling out in the beta (did you hear about that? Categories, even!). I lost – or almost lost – several posts and quite a few comments when I hit the publish (or even the Save as Draft) button.
But I have an easy safeguard against this, and I’m well on my way to making it a firm habit:
I just quickly highlight and copy the whole post before hitting the publish button. It only takes a second, and 5 seconds later I might be very, very glad I did it.
I don’t take time to actually paste it anywhere – I’m just copying so I can paste it if I have to recreate the post. Get it?
And if you don’t already use the keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting, you might want to learn it, since it’s another timesaver: Control C copies highlighted text, and Control V will paste. Faster than the mouse once you memorize it.
It’s working for me. Visit Shannon and see what works for everyone else.

Thumbsucking

I have received another email on the topic, so I thought I would move this comment to the front page and elaborate a bit. I would love to hear your comments as well, since our own experience has been limited and every child is different!

How do you break your kids of thumb-sucking?

I have a thumb-sucking phobia…I sucked my thumb (albeit in an chronically disfunctional family, so I probably *needed* it!) for a long, long time. LOOONG, long time.

Because of that, I’ve always done binkies with my kids, and with one of them who had a strong propensity towards sucking his thumb, I actually trained him away from it. I just know how hard, personally, it was to stop.

Have you had an easy time with this? What do you DO? I would love with future children to allow them this completely natural function, but I’m genuinely afraid to. Bizarre? I know…maybe so. But I would love to hear your method with this.

Most of our children have dedicated a good portion of their infancy to thumbsucking. We are ok with this.
I think that the thumb is a built-in security blanket, self-calming device, and sleep-inducing gadget of which every baby should make full and proper use. Every baby of mine, at least.
We haven’t needed to break them of the habit. Maybe we let it go longer than most, but it really looks like a security issue to us.
My husband and I tend to believe that a secure and happy child will normally outgrow the need. I sometimes wonder if we as a culture we wean our children too early, when the psychological need to suck is still very present. It seems that our children have naturally stopped the thumbsucking at normal weaning ages for many other cultures.
As our children get older and realize that it’s a “babyish” habit, they have quit with very little help, usually tapering off during the day around 2yo and kicking the nighttime habit by 4 or 5. They often ask us to remind them when we see they doing it and we’re happy to oblige, but that’s about it.
Our 6yo, who has matured more slowly in other areas, still does it just a bit when she’s very tired, and one of the older girls is sometimes seen sleeping with her thumb suspiciously near her mouth. To me, these really don’t seem like problems. If one of our daughters wakes up one morning with her thumb in her mouth after marriage, she and her husband can have a good laugh over it.
Most dentists or othodontists will tell you that thumbsucking doesn’t usually damage the bite unless the child is really using some suction or actually pressing against the teeth.
We have known stressful families where the habit hangs on much longer than toddlerhood, but it seems to me that the habit has become a source of security to the child in a stressful environment.
We *are* thankful that all of ours have kicked the habit so easily, and hope we don’t have to eat our own words someday.

All in one

We don’t often get a picture of all 8 children together, and I won’t try to convince you this one came naturally. But I love the way it turned out!

Vision Forum deal

If you like Vision Forum or great deals, you’ll love this!

Thursday thirteen: Happy Blogiversary to me!

updated: crazy Blogger posted this rather than saving as a draft (at least I’m going to blame it on Blogger since I just found out). What’s worse, Blogger didn’t even have the common sense to post the complete version.
So if you read this post and wondered why I thought today was Thursday or whether a mother who can’t count to 13 really ought to be educating her own children, now you know the answers to your burning questions.

Today is my first Blogiversary, and since it falls on a Thursday it seems natural to make a list of my 13 favorite posts.

1. Ten Tips for a wife to encourage her marriage
2. Our Ultimate Goal in Homeschooling
3. Coming from a large family
4. Of Mules and Martyrs
5. Overpopulation
6. Will your kids be Christian?
7. A new can of worms: vaccinations
8. My Standard Disclaimer
9. Socialization
10. Kids are cheap
11. Abortion in America
12. Sarah
13. Birth, death and the curse

A science day

Does any of this strike you as odd?

• I spent $20 on blank and prepared microscope slides to use in our $1.50 thrift store microscope – the one I almost didn’t buy because I thought it was $3.
• How cool are they? Our kids want to find out if there’s an affiliate program for the company that sold them.
• The blanks are being used to examine hair, pus and boogers.
• The kids are fighting over boogers.
• They are looking for a volunteer to donate some blood. Nobody has a scab fresh enough to pick, so it’s gonna take a fresh wound.

Who says homeschoolers are missing out?

Recipe carnival

The gracious Headmistress, one of my favorite bloggers, has posted the latest Carnival of Recipes, with delightful and delicious quotes throughout. Even if you don’t go for the recipes, go have a tasty literary treat.
My favorite:

Eating is an extremely old custom and has been practiced by the better classes of society almost without interruption from earliest times.