gaining weight!

[veganloraine]

my 5 year old son is what most people envision a vegan child to be: small and thin - thank goodness i also have a huge fat baby to throw a kink in things! although he's consistently getting taller, he hasn't really gained any significant weight over the past year. however, in the last 2 months he's gained 4 POUNDS. woohoo! he's actually heavy. heehee.

he has a lot of food sensitivites - actually he's sensitive to EVERYTHING, but he must be adapting to it as he's trying new things and eating three complete meals a day (instead of picking at one or two items) with snack, snack, snacks.

[kjmckenzie]

that's awesome! Congratulations. We feel like our children have to be the healthiest and most perfect weight so that people won't assume bad things about being vegan. I am up against that because my sister-in-laws mostly formula fed toddler is much bigger than my only breast-fed toddler and my son is older. So I can appreciate your 4 pound victory!

On an aside, how was the transition from working to stay at homing? You are living my dream...too bad I felt the need to get fancy schmancy degrees even though all I ever wanted was to be a mom...now I have too many student loans to stay home I think it is amazing what you did and want to know all about it if you will share!

[veganloraine]

haha! i find myself justifying the size of my oldest boy (aiden) to strangers, eg. he's a december baby, his father was a small child, etc., etc... i have super-fatty breastmilk and i'm breastfeeding the baby (oliver) a lot longer than i breastfed his brother which, i think, explains his plumpness. there have been times when i considered pulling aiden up to the booby table in an effort to fatten him up too! :O

transitioning to a stay-at-home mom was easy in one sense - i was already on mat leave (which in Canada, as you know, is a full year) and it was difficult, emotionally speaking. some working moms (and i admit to being one of them) see stay-at-home moms as having the easiest job...when in reality (at least for me) being a stay-at-home mom is waaaaaaaay harder. i love my children, but they are anything but easy! aiden is highly sensitive and needs his environment to be managed 24/7 and the baby is messy and smelly . i do a lot with them - weekly visits to the library, taking them to the park and playgroups, morning circle time at home...so it's a lot of work. i get, on a good day, one hour to myself a day, and i'm only really "away" from the children on the weekends when i go grocery shopping

and this is the strangest fact of all, but it's actually harder to find time to do housework when you're a stay-at-home mom! this could possibly be due to the fact that you are ALWAYS cleaning it! fingerprints on the windows, food on the walls and all over the floors, kids pulling clothes, toys, etc. out of their bedroom drawers, moving to the next room and making a mess there, and so on and so forth...

BUT for me, it was the best possible decision to make. i too always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and although he makes me want to scream on a daily basis, i've never been closer to aiden. we didn't really bond when he was a baby because he didn't like to be touched too much and he cried all the time, but we're absolutely bonded now. plus, although my in-laws love him dearly, there weren't "raising" him as i wanted him to be. there was a lot of tv watching and the food they fed him, although vegan, was hardly food at all.

i guess i could go on about this forever and i almost have , i consider myself very lucky to be home with the boys. we have no money whatsoever, my college-degree husband collecting scrap metal on the side to keep us organically fed and second-hand clothed :O, but money is over-rated and love is all you need.

[kjmckenzie]

that is so awesome, you could keep going on and on, I love to hear about other people's experiences!

I hear you about it being tough, I know if I were to be at home, it would be difficult for me too, there is no "escaping" to work! Lol. But I also agree just how rewarding it would be too.

At this point we have a fantastic part-time nanny who comes to our house and I work the rest of the day from home (which means I am usually working in the wee hours of the night but it is worth it to be home most afternoons).

My employers do not like me working from home but they have grudglingly excepted it, however they have just upped the amount of work I need to do (I think in an effort to get me there more).

It is working for us and we need to pay off debt. I hope to have another baby in about a year's time and then I will take full advantage of the mat leave and then go from there. So we'll see!