Love

This is my new favorite picture. And it's not really even that great of a picture in the grand scheme of things, but I love it. I love it because as most wives can attest, seeing your hubby nurture and love and play with your child makes you fall in love with him all over again.


I have lots of recent reasons to be madly in love with K. Aside from all of the charming characteristics he's had since the day we started dating, he's selflessly spent much of his time recently doing stuff for our home and our family - mostly stuff that I want him to do, not necessarily stuff that he would choose to do if he had a free weekend to himself. He's also been great about taking care of the little things - things that mean the most to me - like letting me sleep in on the weekends while he gets up with B, taking her outside to see the garden every night after he gets home from work so I can have a few minutes of peace and quiet after a long day, bathing her regularly - with crazy colored water!!! (Crayola Bath Dropz are the new hip thing around our house these days)...


This past weekend was one of the best family weekends we've had in a long time. In addition to the monumental Freebirds trip, we spent lots of time outside working in the garden and continuing to get things together for B's big girl room. The pinterest fanatics out there will surely have seen Ikea's Bekvam spice racks used as hanging bookshelves. Our local Ikea happens to be out of this product until May, so K decided to make some on his own that we could paint in fun colors that match B's bedding. B was a great helper and loved every second!




K is usually in charge of dinner on Sundays, and after spending much time on the phone with his bro (who is a chef) he came up with the following delightful meal - stuffed portabello mushrooms, rice, and brussel sprouts with onions and applewood smoked bacon. It was absolutely delicious and again - an example of his sweet and selfless devotion to our family.


See? Told you there's much to love about this man...

Freebirds

This was a monumental weekend in that B had her first Freebirds burrito. I couldn't resist documenting the epic meal. She was a big fan!!!

Jack and Jill Bath

My pregnancy hormones are still pumping, and for whatever reason with this baby I've become all about interior design. For the record I am a horrible decorator. I have no vision and I hate planning out where furniture goes, what fabrics / pillows go together, what curtains to hang, etc. At the end of the day, the normal version of me has always been about function over form. For example - a towel is used for drying, so who cares if it comes from Wal-mart or Pottery Barn Kids? Both my pregnant self and my normal self would agree that it doesn't matter where it comes from, but my pregnant self would say strongly that Pottery Barn Kids has WAY cuter towels, towels that my kids NEED!

Don't be too alarmed - there are still rational parts in my brain, including the part that feels it's absolutely ridiculous to pay PBK prices. I justified the cost to myself by using our credit card points to get gift cards, lessening our out of pocket expense substantially. We have to pay the bills and buy groceries anyways, right? So might as well take advantage of the rewards.

To cut to the chase, I couldn't resist the PBK safari towel set. I really love the existing towels and bath accessories that are on display in our jack and jill bath, but couldn't resist the urge to make it into a kiddie bathroom since our 2 babies will be sharing it. Here's the before - a pale turquoise, brown and creme combo with a simple silver bee donning each ceramic accessory:


While I have yet to find cute kiddie bath accessories, here's an after with the towels in addition to another completed project off my list - the brush, flush, wash signs hanging above the toilet. (Inspiration again came from etsy, animals came from a diaper cake that my friend Meg made for B's baby shower way back when.)





My next goal is to make a valance using the leftover stitch witchery from B's pennant project along with some yellow fabric and green ribbon that I picked up at Joann's today. We plan to move B to her big girl room in the next couple weeks, so will hopefully have everything done by then. Once little man comes I'll probably look back and say, "what was I thinking?" going crazy with all of this decorating insanity. But in the meantime, it keeps me busy and gives me something random to blog about. :-)

Garden Update

I love, love, love watching our garden grow. So far we have a big chunk of it planted, with the exception of tomatoes, peppers, and other veggies that require planting after the last freeze. Since we pretty much had no winter at all this year, I'm guessing I could've planted these in December and they'd be giant by now. Maybe? Maybe not.

In bed #1 we have 3 different types of lettuce: Black Seeded Simpson, Red Sails, and Little Gem. The squirrels disrupted several of the seeds before they were able to set root due to their annoying acorn digging, but otherwise everything is growing nicely. The cool thing about lettuce is that it grows fast, meaning you can harvest it quickly and replant more, or use that space for planting veggies later in the spring. The rest of the bed we left empty with plans to fill it with squash, green beans, and bell peppers when the time comes.


In bed #2 we have broccoli and onions with carrots in the middle: Nutri-Red and Danvers 126. The broccoli heads are just starting to grow, and the carrot seeds are sprouting up. Our onions are looking pretty puny in comparison to last year's batch, but there's still lots of time for them to develop.



In bed #3 we planted red potatoes with a small row of more onions in the back.


In addition to the 3 beds, we plan to pot 2 tomato transplants (one Early Girl and the other TBD). Over the past 2 years my potted tomatoes have gone wild compared to the transplants we had in the ground last year, so I'm hoping that the tradition continues...

Those Eyes!!

I have a thing for blue eyes. I love them. I think they are beautiful. I always wished I had them. And apparently I did - at one point in time, along with red hair. And then they changed, but not till way later than normal for most babies. Then I had a baby girl. And she had blue eyes!!! And still does. But if you enlarge, you can see in the picture below the ring of hazel that is forming. I don't think anyone believed me when I said they'd eventually change (this late??), but it's happening...


Check out that tummy!



And here are a few more B pictures from over the past couple weeks. First up, a trip to the Arboretum...look how long her hair is getting!!


Running around like a wild child in her new pj's from our sweet babysitter. This is after having had no nap at Mothers Day Out that day.


Blueberries off a pregnant lady's belly - anyone?


So much love for this amazing daughter!!

Big Girl Project #2

Since I haven't finished B's sunshine project quite yet, I decided to move on to the next one. That way my to do list will stay forever long with nothing crossed off. Brilliant, right? This one I knew was going to take a while and had to be done in phases, so I decided to go ahead and kick it off...

We completely arranged B's soon-to-be big girl room to give our toddler more floor space to play. One of the things we did was push her bed up against the wall. LOVE the way it opens up the space, but hated how one side became splashed with color given our whimsical choice for her bedding while the other remained drab in comparison. What whimsical bedding did we wind up with you ask?

Love me some Land of Nod.

So we had a couple of options - 1) decorate the bookshelves with splashes of color or 2) change the existing chocolate brown curtains, both on the opposite side of the room from the bed. (I know it's hard to visualize what we're working with since I'm too lazy to take any before pictures - sorry!) Choice #1 remains a valid option, but I wasn't really excited about choice #2 because I felt like we needed a neutral color to tone down the bedding (which I love now, but when we first got I swear it was like NEON it was so bright). I know, I know - I said the other side of the room needed color, but just a touch.

Solution? A colorful fabric pennant banner to hang across the curtains!! I surfed the net searching for a no-sew option (this definitely would've been an easier project had I known how to operate a sewing machine), and found one that used this fancy stuff called Stitch Witchery - essentially an iron-on product that can be used in lieu of hemming.

After a trip to JoAnn's I had my fabric, cut out my pennants using a paper template, "hemmed" the edges of each flag then "sewed" them to the ribbon before hanging. Here are a couple close ups of the fabric / ribbon itself, followed by one of the finished product (ignore the messy table and unfinished bookshelves). I tried to get the corner of the bedding in to see how everything ties together...




All in all I love how it turned out! I'm still on the fence about what to do with the curtains - leave them hanging straight? Tie them back? Add a couple more sheer panels in the middle to somewhat shield the glaringly white blinds? We need the ability to open and close them easily in order to block out the light while B naps...

To end with a follow-up item: I think I passed my glucose test!! My doctor never called, and no news is good news which I guess means I can keep eating brownie sundaes every day...

I Remember...

I remember one time I was talking to my friend Em on the phone. It was back in my career girl days, and I was wearing a suit looking out the window of a conference room in the middle of downtown Dallas. I had probably come back from a professional lunch with a CFO, likely an old man in his 50's or 60's, old enough to be my dad, wondering why this freckle-faced-just-out-of-college girl expected him to trust her with his business as an advisor and financial consultant. Em and I were BFF's in high school. She was my first friend to get married and have kids, and I always remember thinking how close we were and how different our lives ended up being. Her with 2 kids, me as a single yuppie working at a bank. Of course I deeply wanted to be married with kids someday, but really, really enjoyed my single days. God totally used that time to grow and change my heart in unbelievable ways, and I learned lessons about Him and his character that I would've never had time to focus on otherwise...

But back to our conversation. So I think everyone goes through cycles of monotony, no matter where you are in life. It's human nature to think that the grass is always greener on the other side. I must've been having one of those days - one where I was tired of wearing high heels every day and trying to climb the career ladder, one where the politics and bureaucracies of corporate america were dragging me down, one where I was sick of schmoozing....because I remember saying, "Em...okay...so you know how somedays I'm like ugh - I do NOT want to get up and go to work today. Do you ever have days where you're like ugh - I do NOT want to be a Mom today?" I think I was probably expecting her to gush about how much she loved her kids, seeking her validation that indeed - the grass WAS greener on the other side. Not having had a baby at the time, I had a romanticized picture of what I thought being a mom was going to be like. I knew it would be tough, but I would love it like she loved it surely.

And this is why I love Em. Because she's real. And honest. And she said back to me on the phone that day, "Uh - YEAH. Like when your son is poking your eyes out to wake up in the morning as he stands beside your bed when you're not done sleeping." Or something to that effect. And I was all, "REALLY????"

If someone asked me that exact question today, my response would be the same as Em's. Not about the son poking my eyes out, but just the answer of YES - sometimes it's hard being a Mom. And as I'm getting ready to be a Mom of not 1, but 2 babies, the looming difficulty of being responsible for 2 human beings at the same time is somewhat overwhelming.

People say that you forget how hard it is when your child is a newborn. True, it's a blur, but I remember how my stomach felt like it was going to rip open at my C-section incision, how it burned like fire every time I laughed or coughed or sneezed those first couple weeks, how B had 2 hour parties in the middle of the night instead of sleeping. I remember how hard it is to have a baby.

But I also see how quickly babies grow up. And how you can't get back lost time after they grow and all of a sudden are walking and talking and learning things at the speed of lightning. And how you all of a sudden miss those days when they'd sleep on your chest. I remember the startle reflex that they have when they first come home from the hospital that makes you laugh every time you go wake them up to eat. I remember how B cooed and giggled and how she had a mohawk. I remember how she'd sit under my chair chewing on an empty Pepsi box while I ate a frozen burrito for lunch, thinking, "these are the days and oh how I love them...."

And out of all this remembering, good and bad, no matter how hard I know it will be to have our family expand, it will also be an amazingly JOYFUL time. There will be long days, tiring days, but they DO grow up and nothing will be as it is today forever. These revelations have brought me to a place of great excitement for what's yet to come...