Parenting Archives - Page 2 of 17

Ikea Duktig Play Kitchen Hack

May 24, 2015 1 Comment

A friend of mine recently posted a hack she did of the Ikea Duktig Play Kitchen. It was SO cute that I begged her for some pictures and instructions to post here on the blog!

Here is a stock picture from the Ikea website:

And here it is now! Don’t you just love the stick on faux granite contact paper on the counters?

She modeled her play kitchen after their recent real kitchen remodel:

(Gorgeous kitchen, no?)

Here were the steps she took, in her own words:

1. I first used a little sandpaper to rough up the birch pieces and appliance pieces so the paint would stick.

2. I painted all the birch parts of the kitchen white. I used a can of white paint I already had in my garage. Painting the kitchen white is easier then another color since half of the kitchen pieces are already white. I did 2 coats.

3. While that was drying I sprayed the microwave door, oven door, stovetop corners, sink and faucet with Krylon’s Nickel Satin Brushed Metallic spray paint. Spraying the faucet reminded me that we needed another one, and so, I made a mental note to Learn More on how that could be done. I got the paint at Hobby Lobby. I made sure to tape off the oven and microwave.

4. I used DC Fix 346-0181 Adhesive Film in Brown Granite (bought on amazon) to cover the countertop piece. I loved that this was so easy to just stick on and cut out the spaces for the stovetop and sink.

5. Once everything was dry I got to assembly!

6. I changed the 3 Duktig pulls for some my husband picked up for me at the hardware store. I’m unsure of the name of them. You can use any 5 inch pull and it will fit perfectly.

7. Once everything was assembled and screwed in place I added 3 Fulcrum 30010-301 LED Battery-Operated Stick-On Tap Lights in silver (bought on amazon). I put 2 under the top cabinet and 1 in the oven.

* I had plans to screw a knob on the side of kitchen to hang aprons but ended up just sticking on a small 3m command hook instead.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she also painted and upholstered the Ikea Latt table!

How cute is her little children’s corner? I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some serious inspiration envy going on! 😉

Gluten-Sensitivity and IBS

March 11, 2015 2 Comments

A friend emailed me the other day asking if I’d share more about my journey with gluten-sensitivity and IBS. A lot of people are quiet about this issue, mainly because they are embarrassed to talk about it. There’s also not a lot that Western medicine knows about this right now– if you’re not officially “celiac”, you usually get an eyeroll or two and then get written off as a “fad follower”.

I’ve decided to open up about my journey this past year with all of these issues, in the hope that perhaps it can help someone else who may be suffering.

I’ve talked quite a few times on this blog about how I went gluten-free nearly 2 years ago. I don’t cheat, I don’t sneak the “occasional” cracker, beer, or piece of cake. I don’t even cross-contaminate and use the same knife or cutting board as anything that came into contact with gluten. After reading up on the nature of gluten, I realized that it’s all a waste unless you completely cut it out of your life, as even the smallest crumb doesn’t leave your system for over a week.

But going gluten-free didn’t solve everything. Sure, it made things better, but my symptoms were still persisting. Horrible stomach pains that left me doubled over. Unremitting nausea. Blood sugar crashes for no apparent reason. Dramatic weight loss. Bleeding ulcers. Panic attacks. Dramatic mood swings. Massive bouts of depression and crying that didn’t stop for days.

Around this time last year, I saw a “normal” run of the mill doctor at the local clinic. He ordered a ton of blood work, wanting to rule out things like diabetes, cancer, celiac and hyperthyroidism.

But it turns out it wasn’t any of those things. By this point last year, in addition to gluten I was also unable to eat potatoes (even small traces of potato starch), chocolate (the.worst.flu-like.symptoms.ever), dairy, shrimp and beans. I had just eased off my 3 month anti-acid medication, and was finally adding back in things that contained even small amounts of acid, like citrus and tomatoes. But the list of things that I could eat was slowly dwindling down.

I started using essential oils at this time last year, and while they helped, I was afraid to do any sort of “detox” and anger my system even further. I got a few debilitating sinus infections, and was struggling to even function because of massive migraines. I could keep things manageable using Digest-Zen for stomach pain (stops nausea in its tracks!) and peppermint and Deep Blue for headaches.

Needless to say, one of my top priorities when moving to Dallas was to seek out a few specialists to help me figure out what was going on. I’d found lots of ways to cope and manage the pain, but I knew that this was nowhere close to a normal existence, especially not for someone in their late 20s.

I got my health insurance straightened out somewhere mid-October 2014, when all of a sudden, I threw my back out. I’ve always struggled with my tailbone (ever since Gregory’s birth where I cracked it), and I assumed this was the cause of my back pain. It took me two days before I was off the couch, since I constantly needed a heating pad in order to keep the muscles from spasming. Ibuprofen was also not an option, due to my tendency towards ulcers, and I really didn’t know where to turn. My friend advised me to try kratom capsules for pain relief, but I decided I should consult a doctor first.

I knew that a long-time friend from church worked as an all natural holistic chiropractor, and I’d been meaning to make an appointment for some time, but couldn’t find a place in the budget for it. Our house in CA was needing constant money and attention, and I was nervous about paying someone a lot of money to help me (he doesn’t take health insurance).

But throwing my back out forced me into a crossroads, and I finally worked up the courage to ask his wife if there was some sort of arrangement or payment plan we could arrive at. Turns out, they had been looking for a new music/voice teacher for their kids, and that my background in choir and piano lessons was a perfect fit for them. We worked out a payment system that enabled me to afford it!

I saw this doctor within just days and began treatment. The first visit was an hour long diagnostic, and a LOT of things came up. We hardly even dealt with my back pain, because, as it turns out, it wasn’t at all related to my tailbone but to all the nasty craziness going on in my gut. (Also, if anyone has doubts about Eastern medicine, you won’t after just a visit or two. They can identify EVERYTHING that’s wrong with you without even listening to your history or telling them your food allergies. I’m always amazed, time and time again).

I have been seeing this doctor 2-3x month in hopes of getting to the bottom of where all this is stemming from. As it turns out, a lot of the irregularities I’ve had ever since childhood are all linked together. For instance, whenever stressed, I start to shake uncontrollably. Playing piano for a few friends, getting into an argument, a foster care situation…all of it causes me to shake without being able to stop. The only thing that stops it is heat (heating pad, hot shower, etc.). When I do get cold, I have a few fingers that turn pink, and a few that glow white! Turns out, that’s NOT normal (I don’t know why I thought it was!) and an issue related to circulation. The debilitating migraines I’ve had ever since junior high? Directly related to where I store stress at the base of the brain.

And all of the sinus/allergies I’ve had? Directly related to my gut and the lack of health therein. Yes, even the seasonal allergies (which I used to be on lots of medications for) are a result.

Turns out, all of my symptoms point to have a hyper-aware immune system that starts rejecting foods and environmental hazards whenever I get slightly stressed. Certain people, it turns out, “somatisize” stress and store it somewhere in their body. This is why stressful situations or powerful emotions (anger, fear) manifest themselves physically. People who have a tendency towards it can be triggered by PTSD (for me, it was our foster care situation) and all of the tendencies can become full-blown.

Me? I store stress in my stomach, one specific place in my back, and at the base of my brain (which has nerves that connect to the nose and forehead, hence why the pain was always mis-diagnosed as sinus-related).

The closest our modern Western culture really comes to defining this phenomena is by targeting the physical manifestation and giving it a name. Krohn’s. IBS. Fibromyalgia. Allergies. Food Sensitivity. PTSD. Auto-immune. But we don’t really have cures for any of them, just ways to manage the pain.

Currently, I have just finished a one month detox program using homeopathic prescriptions from my doctor. We are now following it up with a powerful probiotic/prebiotic in order to restore gut-health. Although my diet could look more restricted than it used to be (the “no-no” list currently includes gluten, potato, nuts, starch of any kind, chocolate or any sugar including fruits, and any hydrogenated oils), it’s only because we are trying to give my gut a chance to heal itself before adding any stressers. Instead of these things, I’m following something very similar to the GAPS diet (although it’s Lent, so I’m actually not eating any meat other than fish, broth and eggs! Ah! Just a few more weeks!)

I still frequently experience daily nausea. I’ve actually likened it a lot to morning sickness (don’t worry, it’s not!), because it strikes at any moment and lasts for hours, only to disappear without explanation. I still get stomach pain, but it’s usually because I slipped up and ate beans, rice or (gasp!) gf cookies. But as long as I make sure I have a LOT of fat (ie., lots of butter on veggies! LOTS of avocados!) and a few servings of protein every day, I feel fine. I’ve been trying to keep my carbs under 20g/day, and I can cut that down even further once I can eat meat freely again.

And, best of all, I haven’t had a SINGLE migraine since I started seeing this doctor. I haven’t had any allergy attacks in over 6 months. The aches and pains have become fleeting, if at all, and my emotions and mood swings only stabilize more and more as each week passes.

Of course, I will keep updating things as the treatment continues. The goal is to one day be able to eat certain foods again in moderation without having it completely destroy me. I will always have this tendency, and retraining my body to handle stress in a less harmful way is going to be a priority for the rest of my life.

But I know what the problem is, and for that I am grateful. I know where to go for treatment, and I know more about myself than I ever used to. I know that I’m not “crazy”, and that all of these mysterious aches and pains have a root cause.

We’ve also identified that my 4 year old Gregory is very very similar to me in all the above ways, and so I know how to keep an eye out for any issues he may have. Turns out, his recent gluten and dairy intolerances (he used to throw up when coming into contact with them) are very similar to mine, and that with proper treatment, he should be able to eat those foods again, especially since we caught this early. He is on a special vitamin and a few other homeopathic treatments to stabilize his emotions and keep his gut strong. We’ve already seen dramatic improvement.

Thanks for listening, and hopefully this helps!

Being A Mom Is Hard

March 9, 2015 6 Comments

Okay, I’m going to go ahead and state the obvious thing that every mom knows– being a mom is hard. Sometimes, I picture the job description to be somewhere along the lines of, “housekeeper/teacher/referee/wrestling opponent/scheduler/nurse”.

Lately, however, I’ve wished that I had taken some sort of crash course in Early Child Development 101. I always swore that I would not parent my children with one style, regardless of their personalities, and that became an even more important resolution when I realized that my 2nd child, only 17 months younger than his brother, was such a polar opposite in so many ways. Even when he was an infant I had to disregard most of the skills I had learned with my first baby and replace them with entirely new ones! On the one hand, I felt like a bit of a veteran since I’d already recently navigated the infant stages, but on the other hand, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

Mothers with multiple kids also know how easy it is to only pay attention to the development of the oldest child. It’s natural, since we’ve never seen any of our offspring go through those stages and we are naturally curious. What’s talking going to be like? Walking? Potty training? Preschool? When the stages are new to us as well, we are more engaged because we want to see what happens next.

But the second child? Often we forget to even record those milestones like we did with our first, and it’s not always because we’re too busy. Sometimes it’s just because they don’t seem as important, somehow.

At the end of last week, I had a bit of an emotional meltdown (sound familiar?) because I was feeling a serious amount of mothering guilt and uncertainty. AJ, my soon-to-be 3 year old, has been going through some tantrums of epic proportions, and I’ve felt a bit like a detective as I am trying to unravel the mysterious cause of it all. He’s always been such a sweet and docile baby, that to suddenly have such a screaming, wailing TYRANT on my hands is a bit alarming.

After doing some real soul-searching, I was able to pinpoint and diagnose part of the problem as a lack of independence in our house. You see, I’ve always viewed AJ as my baby, because he’s always been the youngest no matter what. When we had foster kids, AJ’s birth order in the family never got displaced because he was always the “baby”, and treated as such by everyone. He didn’t walk until he was nearly 2, so I had already grown accustomed to carrying him everywhere. Because he was such a late walker, he’s always been a bit cautious when it comes to anything that has to do with his lower body, including climbing steps or running. He needs a lot of help in these areas, and gets frightened by having to do some of them on his own.

Not only have we been treating him like the baby of the family, but he’s also seemed to enjoy it greatly, even basking in the amount of attention he receives for it.

But not recently. Recently, there’s just been lots of obstinance and tantrums.

There was this tender bedtime moment a few days ago where I was talking to Gregory and said that he was my “big boy”, and AJ was my “baby”.

Gregory looked at me very sternly and said, “Momma, you keep saying that. But AJ is not a baby, he’s a big boy like me.”

Ugh, talk about a heart stabber, am I right?

Because I realized, in that moment, my four year old was seeing his brother more accurately than I was. AJ had been struggling to show me his independence, and I wasn’t even aware of it. All I saw were the incessant tantrums and cranky behavior.

So I spent the rest of the week taking a step back and observing my almost-3-year-old AJ.

Instead of making him his sandwich, I put the step stool next to the counter along with a butter knife and the peanut butter jar. I watched him climb up, deftly grab the knife and not only spread the peanut butter, but cut his sandwich. (!)

I gave him one of his brother’s more advanced jigsaw puzzle, and watched him pull out all the different pieces and articulately name the colors, even differentiating and deliberating between gray and black, pink or red (I didn’t teach him any of it! He’s been learning from Gregory!).

I watched his playing and realized that he was word for word quoting GIANT 2-5 minute sections of a Winnie the Pooh movie he saw over a week ago.

I realized that his screaming fit after dinner wasn’t because I was washing him, it was because HE wasn’t the one to do it himself.

Since noticing these things, I’ve realized that I need to let go of my own emotional needs and empower my AJ to be independent. I realized that part of my reluctance to let him do things for himself is because I am holding onto this idea that he is still my baby, instead of the toddler/preschooler he is becoming. We don’t yet have a plan for a Baby #3, so I think I’ve been holding on these last vestiges of my 2 year old, trying to make him slow down.

A few weeks ago, we were on a preschool tour for a beautiful Montessori school down the road from us. The lady said hello to Gregory, and then pointed up at AJ (in my arms) and said, “And who is this?”

“Oh this is AJ. He’s my baby. He’s not ready for preschool.” I said. I remember that I didn’t even let AJ out of my arms, not even once. I wasn’t even interested in seeing if he was ready for preschool. I wasn’t ready. So I didn’t even give him a chance. (And, turns out, we’re probably not sending either child to any preschool, but that’s a long discussion for another day!).

All of this is to say that this motherhood gig is hard, because sometimes, sometimes our loving emotions can lead us astray and keep us from caring properly for our children. It’s a scary thought, but one that’s good to realize.

As moms, we also tend to pigeon-hole our kids into a certain personality or description, sometimes without even realizing that we’re doing it. I think that we’re all trying to save time, by and large, and we all love a good shortcut. There’s also a comfortability and certainty when we formulate a description, and we fall back on that when the going gets rough. In so doing, we sometimes forget to realize that our kids are not descriptions, they are growing and changing people.

I know that there are advice columns and blog posts by the dozens written about motherhood, but if I had to sum all the important things into one statement, it would be this: Become an instinctual observer. 99% of the time, when something works it isn’t because I read it in a book, it’s because I became an observation expert on my kids. Don’t base any decisions off of what someone else is doing or the newest fad/parenting solution. Just watch, learn, and be humble about it.

How People Change

February 4, 2015 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how people change, why they change, and even, if they should change.

You see, today is my birthday. As I near a certain milestone (ahem, I’ll give you a hint, it has the number “3” in it), I’ve done a lot of reflecting over my life thus far and who I am as a wife and mother.

Over the holidays, a situation arose within my family wherein I had my feelings pretty hurt over something my family was teasing me about. It’s no secret in our family that I was a “difficult” child. I took it quite personally when my first younger brother was born, and I tried to hurt him or get him into trouble every time my parents turned their backs. I was always taught to speak my mind, which didn’t sit well with other adults who thought that children should be “seen and not heard”. I grew up thinking that it was a given that all adults and authority figures wanted to hear my take on their rules, which got me into a lot of trouble throughout school.

Growing up, in a nutshell, was a long series of being ashamed of myself and wishing I was different– more meek, more quiet, less ambitious, more docile. I always felt like I was the bossy older sister/black sheep who could never stop arguing with others. Every time I got into trouble at school or church confirmed in my mind that I was broken or damaged, somehow.

But there is one specific moment that is frozen in time for me. I remember every single detail. I was 5, and I’d just been punished after yet another one of my 3+ hour screaming tantrums (I.can’t.even.imagine….Mom and Dad, I’m so sorry).

After my punishment was over (hint: it began with an “s” and ended with a “panking”, because yes, those actually do work sometimes), my Dad sat me in his lap. And he said something I’ll never forget.

“Kelly,” he said. “You’re only 5, but I can already say this. You are probably the strongest-willed person I know. But you don’t need to worry, because someday, God is going to use that for good. Once you learn the right way to handle it, your stubbornness is going to be a huge strength for you.”

I don’t think my Dad realized how profound this was for me at the time, but these words were what I clung to when the going got rough. I couldn’t figure out why I always wanted to rebel, why I always felt so strongly about things, why I couldn’t be silent when I saw injustice or why I couldn’t just give up and move on when the going got rough.

And when I became an adult, I realized that this is part of the reason I am still standing. I’m so stinking stubborn, that even when it would be easier to give up, I keep going. I’ve been dealing with a nightmarish landlord/tenant/rental situation for the past 6 months, and we haven’t given up. In my almost-30 years, we’ve moved across the country 3 times, gotten 2 graduate degrees, foster parented through some very difficult situations and bought a house and sold (almost) a house. We are currently in escrow on another.

I’m so glad that I’ve had the strength to get through all of this, and that God made me such a stubborn person. I know that without that drive, I would’ve given up long ago.

It’s tough, isn’t it? Accepting who you are, moving past any of the shame associated with our weaknesses and learning to own them?

I’ve just started adopting this concept with my own kids, because I think it’s a message that every child needs to hear. I want to enable my boys to own their own strengths and weaknesses without being ashamed and without wishing they were someone else. In the midst of their disobedient moments, I want to empower them and show them that they don’t need to throw away the most valuable parts of their spirits in order to submit and obey. These things may look like disobedience many times, when in fact they just need to be re-directed and used for the right things. God made them the way they are for a reason, and I want them to love and cherish this, just as I am learning to.

Ikea Duktig Play Kitchen Hack

Gluten-Sensitivity and IBS

Being A Mom Is Hard

How People Change

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