Don't Wake the Baby!!!

Three months! I have been a new mommy for three months, and I haven't had a spare moment in THREE MONTHS!  Our bouncing baby girl came into this world unexpectedly April 6th. We had Taken Baby Momma to the hospital for her monthly check up thinking we had three more weeks to go. To our surprise she was in labor and dilated to 5cm. The girl never said a word. It completely baffles me. I have birth three babies and believe me I KNEW when I was in labor. three hours later we had our beautiful little girl Rosalin Olivia.

How had I forgotten how tiring babies are?? Maybe it's just because I'm no spring chicken any more. How did I ever take care of three little ones at one time, when this 8 pound ball on chubby single-handedly runs me into the ground every day?????  Oye vay!!!!

So for the past 9 weeks Pickles has been sleeping through the night from 8pm-6am. Yeah right? Well, it would be a yeah if she slept at least a little during the day.  Our little princess never sleeps longer than 20 mins during the day, and to top is off, if someone isn't holding her... she screams.  We are talking BLOODY MURDER SCREAM!  It is so hard to understand how such a smiley happy little thing can turn into Linda Blair in the matter of seconds.  Honestly it began to scare me.  Is there something wrong with my poor baby?  I even began to question Baby Momma's actions. What if she had been using drugs or drinking and we never knew????  I couldn't even imagine!  after 6 weeks of having to be held 15 hours a day, I am seriously thinking that Attachment Parenting folks are a bit crazy!  I mean, I love my baby, but my arms hurt, my back aches and I am going slowly insaine.

So.... I broke down.  First, I got cable TV installed. Now I can actually sit and watch something while holding Pickles and not feel like I am going to lose my mind.   And, as much as I hate to admit it, I hired a live in nanny/housekeeper. So now, I don't have to feel so quilty that my house is a mess and I haven't got ANT THING accomplished all day.  In my defence, my husband has been away in Africa for the past month and I was all alone trying to deal with screaming Mimi.

Now, at three months she is finally starting to give me a bit more time. Yesterday I actually finished painting my living room after three weeks! Pickles is finally calming down as we try to settle into a rhythm here in our jungle home and all the monkeys are happy...for now

Dating ABC's

After years of marriage you tend to start getting cobwebs in your dancing shoes. Google and I always have "date night" once a week, but it has really turned a bit routine (dinner/movie) and wasn't exciting the way it was meant to be. If you know us, you know that we had a very rocky year in 2009 and were separated for 7 months with me in Hawaii and him in Thailand. Thank you Love Dare for helping us fireproof our marriage! Being apart and the fear of losing our marriage really helped us to realize that the time we have together is a gift and should not be wasted.

So we started talking and came up with a new plan. First, we decided that instead off celebrating our anniversary just one time a year we were going to celebrate it every month with little mini monthaversary. To help us with ideas on things to do I came up with the idea of working through the alphabet (I'm such a teacher!) so each month we will do one or two things starting with the letter we are currently on.

Google thought this was a great idea and started going through the alphabet of restaurants we could eat at! NOT the idea! The things we do needed to be stuff that we wouldn't normally do. For example, we started all over for 2011 so this month we are on "C" and are taking a cooking class together and going camping.  Google doesn't know it yet, but next month I am dragging him to dance lessons to try to erase some of his white boy rhythm. For "E" maybe the elephant reserve, (of course he is going to say "eat"). The idea is to #1 spend time together doing things that we don't normally do and #2 get out and see more of Chiang Mai. We have so many awesome things here in this little town that tourist come to see, but as locals we never take the time for.  I can't wait to find out all the crazy adventures we might get into this year, and I look forward to spending time with my love! Any ideas for us???

B is for Boat....Scorpion Tailed boats!  http://www.scorpiontailed.com/

Mud huts shaped like boats and a river cruise. LOVED it! And the best part was that my DH planned it all himself!

Can't wait for this one!
Elephant Mahout!

March Monthly Baby Steps/ Save the Trees!

This month our focus has been on reducing the paper waste in our house. If you take a look around, I am sure that you will find many paper products that could very easily be replaced with reusable items or eliminated all together.  I love paper towels. And even though we compost them, I know that the idea isn’t really to recycle, but to try to reduce what we use so that it doesn’t have to be recycled in the first place. So, paper towels must go. In there place I bought a bundle or micro terry rags and put them in a basket on the counter for quick pick ups.

Next item on the list is sanitary napkins. Seems really gross at first, but if you install a handy dandy butt squirter like we have here in Thailand, it’s not too bad.  My DH Google actually designed the pads and I sewed them out of left-over pvc material, flannel and old towels.  I even have a little travel wet bag for when I am away from home. Takes a bit to get use to, but not too bad in the end. I am also making nursing pads right now because I tend to need them A LOT.

Oh the baby front, I have spent the month sewing cloth diapers for Pickles. Twenty of each size (nb, s,m.l) and about 20 liners. I also will be using handmade diaper wipes once again using  some really cheap baby washcloths and a lovely Jungle Baby Bottom Spray I made.

To add to potty time fun, say goodbye to the TP! I figure if we can use reusable wipes for the baby (EWWWW) why not for our little ( or not so little) bottoms?  We have the butt squirter, (so the yuck gets washed off) and here in Thailand we don’t flush the TP anyway, so why the heck not??? I got some lovely, soft, super cheap baby washcloths, cut them in half and put them in a nice little basket on the back of the potty. Add a nice covered can by the Boy is Baby Beans gonna love this when she gets here from the states in a few days!

If you have a baby and are already doing cloth diapers, this isn’t really any worse.

Check out Bonzi Aphrodite's Mission Last year to change to cloth TP too.

 Some other things I am working on are home made cloth dinner napkins and placemats, reusable sandwich bags, Bento box lunches,  and switching to small containers for condiments(instead of things like sugar packets.)

It took a little work, but what an easy change it was to make and I figure it will save us about 1200 baht ($40) a month. Yipee Ki Yah!!!!

Baby Carbon Steps

Sometimes I feel like I am fighting an up hill battle trying to be green in this plastic jungle.  There are so many things in our home here in Thailand that I want to change to improve our carbon foot print. Every year we try, but just get so frustrated and over whelmed that we give up on many things.  This year we agreed to try something new.After reading this article I decided that we needed a family mission statement.  I am a total 7 Habits person, and I feel that it is important to begin with the end in mind. So, family meeting time! It's not easy to sum up your life in a paragraph, but I recommended to keep it simple and don't try to over think it. Simply look at what you think is most important and what your family hopes to represent. In other words, when poeple look at you, what do you want them to see?

In order to really live this mission statement,we have decided to concentrate on changing one thing a month that we feel needs changing in our lives. It may be something to move towards lowering our carbon foot print, to a health change or maybe even a spiritual change. Heaven knows we got issues and 12 months ain't gonna change them all, but by taking them one baby step at a time, maybe we will really make important changes..  

I challenge you to join us in the baby steps to change our lives. Each moth choose one thing that you would like to change in your home or life style.  It might be using only reusable grocery bags, changing to chemical free cleaners, changing to cloth diapers or giving up meat.  You make the choices on what you feel are the most important  things that you what to change. Through out the month work on your goal and then blog about it, and send me a link to you blog. Or add your comments here.  I look forward to hearing what you would like to change and how you do it.

Although it is almost April, I am adding my journals for the past few months so you can see how we have faired.

Baking Soda Betty

I love baking soda. Next to Windex (don't get me started on the Windex) and coconut oil, baking soda is one of my all time favorite household secrets. The ladies in my family are Queens of Clean and have taught me well.  We don't need no fancy cleaning products. Oh no! We just need a few simple normal house hold items and we can make your house sparkle.  Infact, my Mamo, she invinted oxy clean (not that Billy Mays guy) but back in her day, they called it dundundah..... baking soda!

So here's Mamo's Cleaner before there was the Oxy:
1.Take a box of baking soda
2. pour it in a pan
3.  bake it at 400 F or 204 C
4. keep it in an air tight container (keep it tight or air will get back in)
5. Use the same way you would the oxy stuff, as a stain soak (over night) or as a laundry booster. OR>>> for stubborn stains pour a little baking soda on the stain, add some soda water and rub.

Whaaalaaaa! There you have it. the secrete to keeping your jungle brights, bright and your whites, white!

Tell them you heard it from Baking Soda Betty =)

Queen of the Diaper Pail!

My baby's not even here yet and I can't believe how many diapers I have washed. Thank goodness DH,Google, bought me a beautiful new washing machine! For the past two years I washed clothes buy hand or with a laundry service.  Now I have a lovely washer and can do it on my own. (Can you feel the excitement?)
I thought I would share some Jungle Baby washing that you can do in your own home (even in the big city)

Washing diperliners:
 No more toilet swirling for me!  Her is my #1 Tip from Thailand. YOU NEED THIS!
Let me introduce you to what we lovingly call the "Butt Squirt"

Please ignore the nasty floor, this is my outside bathroom!

So this little guy can be found in almost every bathroom in Thailand. We don't have a very good sewer system here, so you aren't suppose to flush TP. So the creative Thais installed these lovely things to there toilets. Think poor man's Bidet!   My dear friend told me when her Thai husband first went to Canada he asked why they had a but squirter in the kitchen sink!  ROTFLMAO!!!! I wonder if he envisioned us crazy white people with our bottoms over the sink????!!!!!

These are the greatest thing with diapers (or mommy's  monthly). It's so easy to install, even I can do it!  Her is a great easy tutorial for you folks over therefrom 3Strands

To clean your diapers, you just hold the poopy diaper or liner over the potty and give it a good squirt. for my diaper liners and cloth wipes, I keep a big bowl next to the toilet that I have added one small scoop of homemade oxi-like cleaner, you just toss the liner in there and let them soak over night. The diaper covers I Velcro closed and toss in the laundry basket if they aren't soiled, or simply add them to the soak bucket. 

The next morning while I am still in the shower, I dump the bucket in the shower and rinse them all out, (scrubbing if needed). Another thing we do is dump them in the bathtub water after I've taken a bath and use the water (earth friendly). After a nice rinse the liners hang out in the glorious Thai sun to  naturally bleach them and leave them smelling April fresh! Not that's not so hard!

How it all Started

So this whole Jungle Baby thing started with a simple diaper.  Or maybe lack of diapers. I knew right away that I didn't want to use disposables. Landfills, chemicals, not to mention the cost!  When "the Grown Ups" where babies Seattle (where they were born) was on this "No Disposables" kick. Which was OK, but not easy. My Dear Auntie Vi, taught me to fold the diapers, pin them one, swirl them in the toilet, then send them off to diper service. Not fun!

Fast forward to 2011.  Now we have these fancy newfangled all-in-one cloth diapers that take away all that hassle. Woopie! this is going to be so cool! Google and I set out to buy little pickles her own cutie poototie AIO just like on the internet.  That where the problem started. guess what? the don't sell AIO here. I did manage to find on brand in Rimping, but they were so crappy and cost 300 baht. (about 10$). AND Amazon won't ship to Thailand! (Are you feeling my pain now?)

so our cloth diaper making journey has began. After about 20 tries and five different  patterns, Goggle made our own lovely pattern, (he's quite the seamstress) and we have decided that we should open a little store and sell them so that others don't have to run around Thailand looking for a good diaper the way we did.