The Dunstan Dialogue

I have now organized and included all the weekly themes I want to do. I have 52 themes planned, enough for the entire year.  It is now the beginning of the year and we are starting! I start each new week on a Monday and so technically this all started on the 30th of January and the last week will be the 22nd of December. Most of the themes are random things, but there are some that coincide with holidays which are the week of that specific holiday. OK, here they are: Week 1(Dec 30)- New years resolution Week 2(Jan 6)- Body Week 3(Jan 13)- Alphabet Week 4(Jan 20)- Numbers Week 5(Jan 27)- Animals Week 6(Feb 3)- Colors Week 7(Feb 10)- Valentine's Week 8(Feb 17)- Shapes Week 9(Feb 24)- Music Week 10(Mar 3)- Textures Week 11(Mar 10)- Facial Expressions/mood Week 12(Mar 17)- Spring Week 13(Mar 24)- Service Week 14(Mar 31)- Occupations Week 15(Apr 7)- Different Cultures Week 16(Apr 14)- Easter Week 17(Apr 21)- Body Week 18(Apr 28)- Alphab

Ok, so I haven't updated the blog all summer long- but this is not the post that will update you on my summer.  This is a blogger in need of advice. I am the kind of person who needs structure to my days. I like to have things planned out so I know whats going on and I can figure out how to be flexible.  So I decided to plan out exactly how each of my days with Olivia would run. I wrote down what I would do at each wake time and each nap time. And I told myself this was a tentative schedule and we would see if it ran smoothly.  Well, finding motivation to actually put my plans into action is super difficult. I made a list of things I wanted to do with Olivia, which I admit, the goals were a bit lofty. What am I supposed to do?? There are so many blogs about sensory boxes and teaching your kid every state in the U.S. and making them a super genius by age 3. So I wanted to make sure Olivia was going to get that from me. I wanted her teachers (when she eventually goes

Hey Friends, I know it's been a long time coming, but I had to make sure I had this down before I posted about my cloth diaper experience. I still have a lot of learning and improving to do but here is what I've got so far. If you want to just get down to business, I have a video at the bottom here that you can just watch without reading the boring story first ;) So to begin, as some of you may know, I received a TON of cloth diapers from a friend and since we were considering trying it anyway, this really tipped us over the fence and here we are doing cloth diapering. At first, I wanted to wait because I thought Olivia was too small for any of the diapers I had, which I found out was not actually true, they just look HUGE when you put them on your baby. You can also make diapers smaller, which I show in the video. My first day on the job was hard. The first time I tried to spray poop off a diaper was, simply put: messy. **Holding the diaper more down in th

I have given hints here and there that I would do cloth diapering with Olivia. I have put it off and put it off, but have now run out of excuses. We have everything in  order and starting tomorrow, I will begin working with cloth diapers. Periodically I will blog my experiences so that others may learn from my mistakes or maybe give answers to questions I will inevitably have along the way. Wish me luck! Matt installed a sprayer for our toilet     We received a ton of cloth diapers for free from a friend       Snappi's for keeping the cloth diapers together. No pins!    All organized and ready to go!     Now do I stick with disposable wipes or reusable? Thoughts on how to go about this?

So here's the low down on how my baby came to be (not the first stages- we all know how that happened).  It started on a Saturday night at our ward Halloween party. I started feeling contractions every 20 minutes. They weren't very strong, but I knew that finally things were happening. It made me really excited because it was the day before my due date and it would be super awesome if she came on her due date. The contractions continued through the night (very hard to sleep through by the way) every 20 minutes. In the morning around 9, they started to get farther apart and we were sad, hoping that it would have progressed instead of slowing down.  That night they started up again at 20 minutes apart and by Monday morning around 5:30, they were coming 3-5 minutes apart and went on for a good hour. YAY! It's time to go to the hospital! Now, our car has an odd quirk. Sometimes if it's too cold outside, then the ignition won't start and it will alert t

Matt and I have decided to take on the challenge of cloth diapers. We have done much research and this is the end result. We have not decided to go COMPLETELY cloth, but will do it as much as we can. A.K.A we will do disposable when we go out of the house most of the time.  I was a little nervous to do this at first. Yes, it's better for the environment. Yes, it reduces diaper rash significantly. And yes, in the long run, it's cheaper. But is it really worth all the work?? The thing that tipped us this way instead of the other, I think, is that a friend had a garbage bag full of cloth diapers and diaper covers and gave them to us. So Matt and I looked through them. There were diaper covers of every kind. There were a ton of cloths. Matt tried to show me how to fold one.... I don't think he remembers as much as he thinks he does from his family using cloth diapers. Anyway.. We looked up how to fold and use these things and decided it would be a good thing to do. Esp