Scheduling and health check-in

Well, we're making progress on the family schedule and adjustments to our routine. We've been as consistent as possible with both bedtimes and routines, and it does seem to be working. Last night Baby E woke up only twice all night, at 5 and 7, and then slept until 8--woohoo!

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She pooped in the potty after breakfast this morning and then I laid her down for a nap. She started acting tired around 9, but since she'd gotten up at 8 I held her off until her normal naptime of 10 a.m.

It took 45 minutes of screaming before she finally dropped off to sleep. I went in to try to calm her and gave her some teething medicine, but it didn't seem to help much. Now I'm not sure whether to wake her at the normal time she'd wake up, which would mean a 15-minute nap, or let her sleep for an hour and possibly mess up the schedule for the rest of the day. (Moot point: She woke up at 11:15, before I finished typing this entry.)

Last night I was reading a book about helping kids sleep better, and it mentioned that if a child was having extremely sporadic sleep habits and being awake for hours in the middle of the night as Baby E has been doing, it can be a result of their body clock being erratic. The way to reset and normalize it is to set a consistent schedule for not just sleep times, but also meal times, wake up times, etc.

That's what we're trying to do right now. I think all the kids like having a predictable day, anyway, and it will help when we start more structured homeschooling in the fall, too. Mom and I are going to the NW Curriculum Fair this weekend to fill the gaps in our school supplies, and then she'll help me do scheduling and lesson plans. I'm excited about that!

I've been keeping track of everything I eat and do with the pyramid tracker program at mypyramidtracker.gov this week. It's been really helpful.

I've discovered that, not counting breastfeeding, on a normal day I expend just under 2,500 calories. If I do something extra like hiking or more exercising than usual, it might be closer to 3,000. So with the extra 300 to 500 calories from nursing baby E, I'm probably needing to take in between 2,300 and 3,500 calories per day. I did find out that just with my daily life, doing house/yard work, playing with the kids, climbing stairs and carrying the baby, I'm getting quite a bit of exercise. That's nice to know.

You can eat a lot of fruits and vegetables before it adds up to 2,000 calories! Since I'm limiting simple highly-refined carbohydrates, dairy products, peanuts, avocados, added oils and refined sugars for health/allergy reasons, that almost makes it difficult to consume more than 2,000 calories a day.

I can eat 2 eggs, a cup of whole-grain hot cereal, a half-cup of rice milk and a cup of fruit for breakfast, a fruit smoothie for lunch, a huge 2-pound plateful of veggie and meat stir-fry with whole-grain noodles for lunch, a handful of veggies with hummus and a mocha rice milk smoothie in the afternoon, and then 3-4 ounces of meat, a cup or two of cooked vegetables, a salad and a handful of corn chips for dinner, then a cup of soup and/or some chocolate teff pudding in the evening for another snack, and I've reached about 2,000 calories.

The nice thing about the pyramid tracker program is that halfway through the day I can look at it and see that I've reached my goal for carbohydrates and sugars, so I need to limit those for the rest of the day, and that I need more fiber and calcium, so I need to eat something high in those.

My goal right now is to see if I can work up to taking in between 2,300 and 2,500 calories per day and see if that causes my weight to stabilize and increases my energy levels. I'm losing less than a pound per week taking in 2,000 calories, so I think it's likely that my body doesn't really need the full 3,000+ calories.

I do find that by monitoring my food intake I am eating more fruits and vegetables and fewer breads, which is a good thing. I'm also filling up a 2-liter pitcher with filtered water each morning and trying to drink it all over the course of the day. The first day and a half of this I felt worse--bloated, lethargic, and just kind of yucky. But after that I started to feel better, especially when adding a period of doing something active to my schedule in the afternoon when I usually get an energy crash. Getting more sleep is going to help, too, I'm sure.