Baby Falls Asleep on Floor Clutching Drumstick

Tackle-It Tuesday: Puzzles

Every Tuesday, I tackle a different project around my home that's been bugging all of us!

If your kids' puzzles are all organized perfectly, then this post is not for you because you will judge me harshly. You see, I used to have mine all organized. I would take them from their cardboard box and put them in a plastic sandwich baggie. I would cut out the small picture of the completed puzzle and include it in the baggie. I even used to write on the back of each puzzle piece so I knew which puzzles went together if they were ever, say, all tossed up in the air at once.

What a mess!

Fast forward a few years and a few kids and the puzzle pieces DID end up everywhere. And I finally just tossed every piece I could find into a box like you see below (used commonly for scrapbooking or holding fabric in my family). For Tackle-It Tuesday I decided to tackle this project and trash all the puzzles that were not complete. This was hard because I am a very nostalgic person and tossing incomplete Dora puzzles was like tossing one of my children into the trash. I got over it when my daughter reminded me they are only puzzles and we have a few left that are complete AND we can always get more if someone gets a puzzle hankering. Here's my progress:

Putting puzzles together with my kids.

This is the kind of box I use for such things.

This is how they look now. Only a few puzzles, but they have all the pieces at least. Kids 3, 4 and 5 weren't as into puzzles as my first two kids.

What are your household projects you want to tackle? I have lots to come during upcoming Tackle-It Tuesday posts ... painting a kitchen wall, tackling a junk drawer in my bathroom, tackling a file cabinet full of paper ideas for writing, my bedroom closet.

Moshi Monster Monday: Cards

At a recent staff meeting with my kids in the mommyvan, we brainstormed some Moshi Monster Monday ideas for the blog. Today we'll start you out simple with the cards. Other Mondays will find us talking about the figures, the other collectibles, the books, the online game, Moshi Monsters made out of food and/or Legos and more.

Rather than bore you to death with MY explanation of this fun new kid fad (like Pokemon only cuter and much faster to play), head to the Moshi Monsters Wikia for anything you ever wanted to know. It's an online game (we'll talk about that another time), but is also cards and more. Some of my faves are above: Groanas Brothers, Peppy, Honey, Liberty, Cali, Katsuma, Poppet and Hansel, but there are tons more. I also like Broccoli Spears and Dustbin Beaver (can you guess the celebrities?!). I like that Moshi Monsters make a play on all kinds of monster-ish words ... like how they have a Gross-ery Store in the game.

Summer Sizzle Giveaway Hop!!! (June 24-30)

This giveaway is over. Please check the left side of the blog for more!

Welcome to the Summer Sizzle Giveaway Hop hosted by Mom With a Dot Com! Over 65 bloggers have gotten together to give you a chance to win some amazing prizes to keep you entertained throughout your summer!

Summer Sizzle will begin on June 24 and end on June 30. As you are hopping around, I hope you will find some prizes that you love - maybe you will even win one! Each giveaway will have a prize valued at $25 or more!

Tip: I plan to enter 10 giveaways per day for 7 days, which will hit all 70 (minus one, which is my own!!!) Good luck! May the odds be ever in your favor!

I am giving away two books: "A House United: Changing Children's Hearts and Behaviors by Teaching Self-Government" by Nicholeen Peck and "Intimacy: A 100-Day Guide to Lasting Relationships" by Douglas Weiss, a total value of $33.94.

Please enter below and don't forget to check out my other bloggy peeps below that for some awesome giveaways from some awesome bloggers! Good luck! Oh, and please share this link with everyone you know as a favor to me, who became a mommy for the first time on this day in 2001!!!

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The Attachment Parenting Debate: Mom of Five Weighs In

This picture was taken 2 years ago, and since then I've gotten a lot of new blog readers who may not know exactly what I'm about. Well, I'm about THIS. I'm about attachment parenting. I fell into it accidentally because my husband and I are big babies who couldn't stand to hear our son cry it out in his crib and just wanted some dang sleep. (no judgments from me if you did things differently; you leave my parenting alone and I will leave yours alone)

Okay, so I just wanted some dang sleep. And nursing Joel in bed helped with that a lot (well, after the first month, anyway ... that first month was hell ... getting up every two hours to nurse for an hour while I tried not to fall asleep sitting up). So we kept it up and 5 kids later we are still going strong. Only two kids in the bed now, though, with one who sometimes even leaves!

I love this picture because there's a photo of me off to the left watching over them. Since they are all 3 in the queen bed (Joel and Callie must have already been awake), I can only assume Aron was out of town.

So if you are doing this and feel bad about it or people are giving you crap about it, it's okay! Time will prove that you did your parenting the way you saw fit and that it all worked out. The day my oldest son was born (tomorrow, 11 years ago!), I prayed fervently to God that He would make me the kind of mother HE wanted me to be. Not the kind someone else wanted me to be or the mom society thought I should be. The kind of mother that a Higher Power wanted me to be, knew I could be.

Other forms of parenting work for other people. This one has worked well for us. It's not a parenting competition, trust me. None of that crap matters. It's about the kind of parent you are supposed to be. We are all different people, extremely different sometimes. Why would we all parent the exact same way based on a book or a fad or a TV show or advice from whoever?

Update: I posted this longer version of our attachment-parenting lifestyle here on the blog many years later. It's now mid-2021, and the kids are 11, 13, 16, 18, and 20. Four teenagers who are an actual pleasure to parent, as well as an energetic 11-year-old. I credit attachment parenting!