tip: jot down memorable moments.

If you are a new parent and you are anything like me, you probably have one of these lying around somewhere:

A beautiful baby journal that you got months before your due date. You probably spent countless hours fantasizing about recording your precious angel's every move.

Until you had the baby. Then the journal was abruptly shoved in that pile on your desk of white onesies you were going to decorate and ink pads you were going to use to imprint baby's hands and feet every week. Hah! Instead your life is a constant blur of poop and spit up and now pureed spinach you somehow find in your ears (how did they manage that?) and you have long forgotten that beautiful blank baby journal.

You know that saying. The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is today.

We don't all have time to get out there and dig the holes and plant the trees and make them pretty and make sure they're watered and maintained. And that's ok. While you're in the thick of this crazy whirlwind that is the first year of your baby's life, you aren't expected to spend hours you don't have filling out a baby journal. But at some point life will calm down a bit and you will have the time (or at least that's what they tell me), and when that day comes there is an easy way to remember all those moments that seemed to pass by in an instant.

Grab a simple crappy wall calendar from the dollar bin the next time you're at the supermarket, and jot down the memorable events as they happen.

Just a few words, shorthand, something to help you remember what was going on. Baby doubled their birth weight, baby sat up, baby ate asparagus for the first time. You get the picture.

Keep it in the room you are most often in when baby does something memorable; where you eat or play for example. Make sure there is a pen next to the calendar at all times.

If you are really on top of it, keep a camera next to the calendar, and whenever your sweet babe does something memorable, snap a few photos before you jot it down. This not only forever preserves the memory of your baby doing something exciting, but together with your calendar it can be used as a chronological reference later on for when the other bajillion pictures of your baby were taken.

Later you can easily look back at this and fill in that baby journal as if you never even missed a beat. I promise, your baby will never know you cheated and filled out the book when they were three (or thirteen)!

What are you waiting for? Make those memories, people!

tip: freeze milk flat.

We have had a lot of milk donations over the past seven months and it has taught me quite a bit about milk storage. I still remember the first time I thawed a bag of milk that had been frozen flat. The amount of time and water required was reduced by at least ten times what we were used to, and at that time we were feeding our boys exclusively donor milk by bottle. Between the two of them, we spent a lot of time thawing milk, and this significantly cut down on bottle prep time.

Most milk when it gets thrown into the freezer ends up looking something like this:

This hard nugget of milk takes incredibly long to thaw and its odd shape makes it a pain to keep the freezer even remotely organized. I think it often gets frozen this way so the number of ounces is easily visible with the markings on the bag.

Instead, mark the number of ounces on the outside of the bag in permanent marker along with the date and place it flat in the freezer so when it is frozen it looks something like this:

Having the milk frozen this way increases the surface area, which means when you thaw it under warm water, more of the water can touch more of the milk, helping it thaw faster. Plus its slim shape means it is very easy to store the milk upright chronologically, making it easier to follow a first-in-first-out milk-using policy (use older milk first).

This is the one of the simplest changes possible, takes zero extra time, and can make your life significantly easier.

Happy pumping!

trick: try side sitting.

Some babies just don't like tummy time no matter how you try to entice them. With special toys, laying on your chest, with snazzy books, on a play mat. You can make it seem like the most fun activity in the whole wide world and still they fuss and whine and cry it out any time you put them on their stomach.

The goal of tummy time is to work the chest and arm muscles in preparation of crawling and it may seem like the only way, but it's not. Helping your baby side sit is another great way to build the muscles of the upper body and help them get ready to crawl. Plus it helps them learn to eventually transition from sitting to crawling on their own later down the road.

Seat baby in front of you facing you.

Turn baby's right leg so their knee is down in the center and their foot is pointing out to their right, just like the left one. Position baby's body towards their left and place their hands out in front of them to the side.

The further away from their body the hands (and the closer their face to the floor), the more strength needed to keep them stable. Start with them close to their body and progressively move them further away to build strength. 


This is usually more tolerated than tummy time and it is easier to distract baby in this position by reading stories or playing with toys. It is also easier to do small little sessions of side sitting without causing a total upset - if baby starts getting fussy, simply move them back to sitting. It is less of a total transition from being on their tummies.

Make sure to switch sides to build strength equally in both arms.

Happy sitting!

tip: stay cool in the pool.

It has been infernal here in beautiful Pacific Northwest this past week. I know other parts of the country and world suffer much greater heat than this all the time, but 94 in the shade? That's too much for fair-skinned rain-loving Seattlites like myself. Don't get me wrong, I like sun. My body just wasn't designed to take this much of it.

If I'm feeling faint, I can only imagine what my poor sweaty little boys are feeling. So how have we been managing? By taking the advice of another fellow mama.

We've been staying cool in the pool!

My soul hurt a little bit as we bought the cheap made-in-China pools at the toy store, but I don't know of any well-made baby pools or what type of store would sell them locally. If any of you know where to find one, please let me know!

Needless to say, they are a hit. They are dually amazing in providing fun water exploration activity and a way to stay cool. An added plus is how much they wear the babes out. Every time we have water time the following nap is quite a doozy. We have been doing this daily and probably will continue to do so until the cool weather returns. Thursday is the 4th of July, so when the rain comes back for the fireworks, maybe we'll take a break then! :)

tip: sit baby up.

Sometime around four to eight months babies start to want to sit up. They discover life from a whole new perspective than the one they've had on their backs or during tummy time. It is new and exciting and they want more.

My babes were at the point last week where they were so excited about sitting up that they no longer wanted to be laying down. No more time on the fun blanket, no more tummy time, no more bicycles or rolling races. Nuh uh. They wanted to be seated. I am more than willing to oblige; helping them sit is a very amusing albeit stressful job - I am still waiting for the first inevitable head bonk - but I am only one person. I can only give my attention to one wobbly baby trying to sit up at a time. Whoever I was helping was having a blast. Whoever was left laying next to us watching was not too happy about being left out. I needed a solution.

I have heard about special chairs designed to help a baby sit up, but I know this phase will only last a few weeks at most and buying more baby stuff seems excessive.

And then a dear friend of mine gave me the best freaking tip ever...

Use a nursing pillow!

If you help baby sit up all the time and don't let them fall a little bit, it takes them a long time to figure out that there is a physical consequence to wobbling and that usually results in a big bonk or total face plant. Sitting them in the middle of a nursing pillow reduces the risk of a major head injury, while still letting them fall over and learn about their little body mechanics.

When they start to tip, they will learn to instinctively put their hand out to catch themselves, even if the pillow will do most of the catching for them. Not having the protection of your arms there every time will help them learn to have confidence in themselves.

Of course this should always be done under your supervision. Once baby is sitting up by themselves and able to play freely with something in their hands, it's time to occasionally take the pillow away for practice with their balance, but in the meantime, enjoy having your hands free!

Happy sitting!

tip: give baby a spoon.

Sometimes when you're first starting to experiment with solids it's hard to get food into baby's mouth. They want to play with the spoon, they want to play with your hands, they want to make spitting noises. This play is all good for baby's development.

Sometimes, however, you need to get that food in there. We personally want our own babes to both get at least a taste of each food we've prepared at every solid food meal because sometimes it can take ten or twelve tries before baby decides they like or dislike a certain food. If they don't want to eat it after that first taste we don't push it; it's never a good idea to force food on a baby. If baby knows that you're coming at them with a certain offender, though, sometimes you need a trick to get that first bite in there.

An easy fix: give baby a spoon of their own to play with. They have fun, they go to put it in their mouth and you slip in a bite of food along with it. It's minimally invasive and baby will tell you right away if they respond well to it or not. An added plus is the hand-eye coordination it works on, and pretty soon they'll start trying to feed themselves. And it's darn cute to boot!

(This is one of those things, like being in a high chair, that should always be supervised. It's amazing how far a baby can jam one of those tiny spoons in their mouth when you're not looking. We don't want any choking!)

Happy Spooning!

tip: lulling baby to sleep.

Lullabies are the best. Until you've been singing the same song over and over again for three hours, that is.Your baby loves the lullaby so much they just won't let themselves drift off.

After years and years of rocking my three younger sisters and all the babies in the neighborhood to sleep (I was an awesome and well-reputed babysitter, thankyouverymuch!), I learned a thing or two about getting babes to finally let themselves fall into a deep slumber.

A simple yet effective way to lull them into sleep is to progressively slow the tempo of the song and quiet the volume of your voice. By the end you should be singing so slow that it's hard to follow the words and so softly that it's just a bit above a whisper.

It works even better if you are tapping their back along in time with the music. As the tempo slows, the taps slow. Baby's breathing slows. They take a deep breath and...

...zzzzzz...

Sweet dreams!

tip: easy solid food clean-up.

We just recently started introducing solids for our babes and it's quite a learning experience for all of us. The babes have learned how tasty white rice and bananas and avocado can be while Papa and I have learned that one meager tablespoon of mush can somehow cover the entire living room by the end of a feeding!

We haven't quite figured out how to avoid rice dreadlocks or banana earwax, but we did come up with a way to avoid dealing with stains and to make clean-up a breeze.

It's quite simple, really.

Eat naked!

Owen getting ready for avocado time!

Well, okay, eat with just a diaper and a bib. This may sound intuitive and way too easy of an idea and maybe some of you already use this method, but after our first time just unvelcroing the bib and dunking them in the bath instead of trying to take off a completely saturated onesie without recoloring the whole bedroom avocado green I couldn't help thinking, "You are a genius!!!"

When they are a little older and able to really sit up on their own and as the weather gets warmer and warmer, we might even take eating solids outside once a day to get some vitamin D along with their yummy mush (and to make clean-up just that much easier)!

Bon appetit!