3 posts tagged “sahm”

I recently wrote an email to a newly married young woman who is expecting her first. I compiled a bunch of links for her to look over. I thought you might enjoy looking over the list too.

Fertility Awareness / Natural Family Planning
"Taking Charge of Your Fertility" by Toni Weschler
This book completely opened a whole new world for me as far as what my family planning options were. Highly recommended reading. It's a wonderful introduction to world of Fertility Awareness (Natural Family Planning).

Couple to Couple League
This is a Catholic organization that trains teaching couples to teach classes on Natural Family Planning (NFP). My husband and I took a class through them. Very informative and helpful. Again, highly recommended.

Natural Family Planning International, Inc.
When I took the NFP course they used the book "The Art of Natural Family Planning" by John and Shelia Kippley. CCLI no longer uses that exact text, and the Kippleys have gone on to form a new NFP organization (the above link). This site is good because the entire how-to book for learning NFP is free on their website (in PDF format). What I like about their approach to NFP is it is very comprehensive and gives you lots of options for figuring out your fertile/infertile days based on your  personal history, but all the options can be confusing. The Toni Weschler approach is much more simple, but less flexible.

Fertility Awareness on Wikipedia
Good general overview of Fertility Awareness/Natural Family Planning.

Birth Control
Contraception Resource Info
Great site that has lots of VERY ACCURATE and COMPREHENSIVE information on all thing contraception related. I've cross referenced information I've found on this site with lots of other resources and found it wonderful resource. There is stuff on hormonal birth control, IUD's, various barrier methods and various natural methods.

A Condensation of Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions? by Randy Alcorn
Basically, I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. It's up to you to read it, fact check, etc. and decide the morality of the situation, but I do want you to have the information. You can find some of my thoughts on this with lots of other links here:  Informed Consent?

Some Subtle Effects of the Birth Control Culture
Some wonderful thoughts analyzing how the wide use of birth control has affected our culture's view of children and family size.

Birth and Newborns
Preventing PPD: Summary of the plan
I had postpartum depression (PPD) after my first and managed to avoid it after my second and third. Implementing a lot of the strategies found at the above link was a large reason why I did much better in later pregnancies. I wrote some more thoughts about this here: Link Love: Ask Moxie: Preventing PPD

Kellymom
A great breastfeeding resource.

My (unsolicited) Advice on Bunches of Baby Things
As the title says, this a bunch of my unsolicited advice. Enjoy!

Parenting
Raising Godly Tomatoes
This book has been hugely helpful to me in figuring out what in the world I'm doing with this whole parenting thing. You can read the whole book online for free. I wrote a review after first reading it here: Parenting Lots of Little Ones

There are more parenting resources I could send you, but a lot of that stuff kicks in after the first year. So, I'm just sending you my favorite for now.

Life as a Stay-At-Home-Mom (SAHM)
Suburban CEO
Some wonderful thoughts on finding happiness and fulfillment in staying home and being a mother and wife in a society that teaches us that kind of life is not valuable, fulfilling or happy.

Why Modern Motherhood is So Much Harder than it Ought to Be
Some more thoughts analyzing the frustrations many modern women go through as we transition to being a SAHM, but from a more Christian perspective.

I'm about to go from full time stay-at-home mom to a work-out-of-the-home mom. Well, it's part-time, one day, part of one day really, and I won't be leaving my kids, but I am about to be gainfully employed. My current employment only pays in hugs and kisses with the occasional bonus nap, but I'm about to add US legal tender to those payments!

A few weeks ago I mentioned to the director of a Christian preschool/elementary school, where I do some volunteer design work, that I wouldn't mind subbing at the school if needed. My only stipulation was that my kids would need to be put into a class for the day I was subbing. That's not a big deal. I have some friends that work at the school and their kids attend there too. Well, I just got an email from the director letting me know that there's a long term sub position open at the preschool for one day a week. She asked me if I'd be interested in it. All my kids would get to go to preschool for no charge and the best part about it is that the position is in the baby class. That means that I would be able to keep the baby with me and I wouldn't need to pump (yay!). The pay's not great, but add in that my kids go to preschool for free, I still get to be with the baby AND I get paid something! I think it's a big win, win.

This will be my first job, job in over three years. It's kind of weird. I mean, I've done things here and there to make a little extra money, but not a job, job. You know the kind where you clock in somewhere in the morning and clock out in the afternoon. Not that this is as job, job as it gets. I do, after all, get to have my kids with me, but you know, it's still kinda weird. 

I have a personal blog that has been grossly neglected since I started up my vox blog. I recently got the bug to resurrect it (especially with the cross posting plugins for MT4). In the process I ended up rereading a lot of the old entries.

Wow, I was in a really bad place for some of those entries. Reading them just now makes me want cry. I want to go and give my old self a hug. I know this doesn't really make sense, but I want to tell her "I'm sorry." I'm sorry she went through that. I'm sorry I didn't know better to help her through those times. I'm sorry I didn't have the presence of mind to research ways to better help myself. I'm just sorry.

A lot of what I was reading was stuff that if a friend of mine came to me and told me she was going through, I would try to give her a little perspective and a lot of self forgiveness. I was pretty hard on myself at times. Thinking about it now, so much of it seems so unnecessary. Most of what I was going through were infertility, pregnancy, postpartum and new motherhood (new SAHM-hood) related. Lots and lots of other women have gone through what I went through. I shouldn't of had to feel so lonely. Why do we pretend like nobody goes through these things? 

Former Self: you are not alone, it does get better, I think you're doing a fine job and you are a good mom...now give me a hug.