I have this incapacity to be anything but transparent. Even if words don’t come out of my mouth, my face says it all. I’ve been the same way on social media. You get all of me, in all of my no-makeup, meltdown throwing, dishes-in-the-sink, glory.
Whether I’m on Instagram or the blog here, I’ve committed to authenticity and vulnerability. Thus, I’ve decided to start doing a monthly review of our highs and lows. Parenting. Business. Life. Home. An overview of our wins, and yes, our losses.
This month, we crushed it with our fun fall sensory bin, pipe cleaners & a strainer, and our 15 bean magnets! .
We took advantage of our fall/orange themes for the month with lots of pumpkin things too. This was Athena’s first year experiencing cutting into a pumpkin!
We’ve had the opportunity to spend lots of time with family, including cousins on their way to South America to continue their journey as missionaries!
Athena got to experience her first wedding and be the flower girl for our sweet friends Katie & Glenn! Athena and her ring bearer cohort were the cutest little team.
We also managed to have some gorgeous October weather that we did our absolute best to take advantage of! Our favorite things to do are swing, jump on our trampoline, and play kick-a-ball. We made at least 3 batches of cookies this month, and spent plenty of time snuggling and playing with sissy.
Aaaaaand now for some of the lows.
Athena has been rough. Bedtime has been taking upwards of an hour again. We’ve tried no TV, some TV, reading 1 book, reading 5 books, singing 3 songs, singing 15 songs. We’ve tried 785982340 different ways over the last 3 months and nothing seems to be working. Sleep struggles are very common for gifted/extra smart kids, but this is def on the rough side. She has also more or less stopped napping. Which I would be fine with if she didn’t so desperately need to still nap. In tandem with fighting bed time, she’s up from 7am straight through til 8/8:30pm. By around 4pm she has hit the wall hard. Needless to say it is testing all of our patience to the max.
This has also meant our house is a wreck. No nap means I have 0 kid-free time during the day to get things done. Athena requires constant supervision or insists on “helping.” Eleanor takes some decent snoozes, but if Athena is awake, I can’t really put laundry away in our bedroom. We’ve been experimenting with putting her in her room for “quiet time,” and well….that ended with a Poop-acolypse the other day so you can imagine how I’d rather not spend an hour scrubbing poop from her carpet, washing all of her bed stuff, etc….I’m more or less playing the “pick 1” game. We can have dishes done, laundry done, livingroom clean, or really yummy dinner/food made. By the grace of God once in a blue-moon it’s a “pick 2” kind of day.
Did I mention both girls are also teething?
It’s fine. We’re fine. This season we are relying heavily on Jesus, Coffee, & Oils.
Amen.
The Nurtured Bee 