We let the kids camp out in the living room a few weeks ago. Then we let them do it in the backyard too a few times.

OK, I can’t sleep. Every once in a while I get insomnia and instead of lying there awake with my mind racing for two hours I have screen time and check up on my email and FB and sometimes blog until I am so sleepy I am nodding off.

Today was a marathon day of dejunking to cap off the two weeks I have been doing this. I also spent time with the boys cleaning their room again. We are getting rid of most of the stuffed animals! Lara Gallagher would be so proud of me! After lunch I focused on finishing up the schoolroom junk. I really wanted our schoolroom ready to start homeschooling tomorrow. Sorry about the lack of pictures of it.  I finally got my desk cleared off, which is in the schoolroom,  and the yard-high pile of papers that was on top of it filed or thrown away. I am determined to be better about filing and stop putting papers in a pile! I also went through the files I created when I first started homeschooling, 12 years ago. I cleared off the homeschool table as well. We don’t have a huge basement to stash things so things that would normally go into a craft room, a sewing room, a laundry room, or a storage room end up on the homeschool table. We have two small storage rooms and I cleaned up a lot in the one room and organized the games.

The homeschool closet has some new crayons and markers in it too to surprise the younger kids. I am excited for tomorrow. It’s always fun to say, “let’s hurry and get the breakfast dishes done so we can go see what surprise is in the closet for school.” It almost feel like Christmas. My little girl Princessa has been begging me to start school. When I told her we would start tomorrow she said, “Yes! I love homeschool!” I can’t say enough about Mary Ann Johnson’s program to teach homeschoolers about “the closet” in homeschooling. It really works, to get your kids beg for school, at least for Princessa. Cowboy, who is 18 months older, has been telling me he doesn’t want school to start. He’s such a funny kid. He secretly likes it I think. He actually asked me to teach him to read a few weeks ago so I am somehow going to fan that spark into a flame. As far as academics is concerned, I prefer waiting for kids to beg for it. It’s so much easier that way. It’s time to pull out the Cowboy Andy book that I thought we had lost but happily found during my dejunking.

Cowboy learned how to ride his bike without training wheels. Yee-haw! His big brother taught him how to pop a wheelie.

Tonight I remembered that we have been meaning to move my toddler into a big bed instead of his crib. With Valor off to college, my husband decided it was time to play musical beds and move Cowboy into his bed and Bugsy into Cowboy’s bed. Bugsy has been sleeping in a crib next to our bed in a sidecar arrangement so I can nurse him easily during the night.

My baby is two. He’s the youngest of 7. We are “still” breastfeeding and proud of it. I just found this fun post from my sister’s sister-in-law, Jen. I got to meet her at the California beach last summer. She apparently is quite prolific, both in terms of babies and blogging. She has ten kids and five blogs. Here is her post about extending nursing of her twins http://rtheyallyours.blogspot.com/2009/07/breastfeeding-post-since-its-been-while.html She is a woman after my own heart. Her mom and dad went to La Leche League meetings when she was a kid.

After baby #2, I finally figured out the cosleeping thing to make it harmonious for both parties. I read about it with baby #1 in the Sears’ Baby Book, but i didn’t fully embrace it. I guess I just thought that babies are supposed to sleep in cribs. I did keep his crib in my room though. I’ve never been able to have a baby and separate them into a nursery. Nurseries are usually more about a mom’s need to buy and decorate than they are about the needs of babies.  I remember one night getting up to nurse him and sitting up in bed. The next morning he was in his crib and I didn’t remember putting him back! I still maintain to this day that an angel put him there. With Baby #2, I still started the baby out sleeping in a bassinet by my bed but eventually mastered the lying down to nurse in bed. By the time #3 came, I started nursing in bed from day one, literally, since he was born at home.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time because it’s a great shot of my dh and daughters after church one Sunday. My older daughter just showed me how to post is so it wouldn’t be sideways.

Well, fast forward to baby #7. I have let him nurse the longest for night nursing. Usually by the time my baby is 18 months I wean from night nursing. It’s a habit instead of a need for nutrition, at least for my babies, and I prefer to get more sleep at that point.  He usually wakes up in the early  morning hours of 5-6 AM to nurse and goes back to sleep. But he always kicks me a lot and tugs at the breast and it’s so uncomfortable. I don’t know what it is, maybe my milk flow is slow and the supply is low. Here’s a case of where a La Leche League Leader needs a Leader. He doesn’t need to nurse for nutrition during the night any more. I am finally to the point of being ready to break him of this habit.

So I put him to bed in the green bed as we call it, since the bed sheet is green, and then went to bed myself. When he woke up crying a few hours later I went into him and promptly started nursing him back to sleep. Then I remembered that the whole point of all of this was to wean him from night nursing. Oh yeah. Old habits die hard, especially when you have been sleeping. We will start again tomorrow. I’m going to do with him what I did with the other kids, which is to hold him and offer water and rock him and remind him that we don’t nurse at night any more. He might be mad about it, but at least he won’t be sad from me letting him cry it out because I will be holding him. There’s a big difference there and I have to keep reminding myself of that.