Busy Bee

I have been a busy bee lately.  I finally finished my office reorganization mission.  I moved some things around, purged some and put up a new shelf.  I feels great to be organized again.  (See before photos here)

Why would I just have one project going?  I wouldn't!  Here is what else I was doing.  From one of my favorite blog sites, Rambling Renovators, I saw this fantastic idea.  (I really wish I could take credit for this idea but I must give credit where credit is due)  I LOVE chalk boards despite the chalk dust so I just had to make my own.  Plus I have been dying to try out the chalkboard paint and this is the perfect opportunity.  I found this picture at Goodwill for $4. 

I was too lazy to take the frame apart to put a piece of wood so I just taped it off and painted the glass.  I don't plan on having this within Sully's reach so I figured it would be okay and I would not be worried about him breaking the glass.

I hung it up in the kitchen.  I am hoping that this will help me finally buy some toothpicks.

 I have more plans for the chalkboard paint with some pumpkins in the near future.  Stay tuned...

Addiction...

My late summer/early fall addiction is......

ICED MOCHAS from McDonalds!!!! 

OMG so delicious!  Hey, it is a great way to get a serving of dairy since I do not drink plain milk as I find the taste completely repulsive.  I highly suggest you get it made with whole milk verses the skim milk option- much tastier with whole milk.  Seriously, just try it;)

Apples and Plaid

Is there anything that says fall more that apples and plaid?  Ok, you are right, maybe football.  But apples and plaid come in a very close second.  Fall is by far my favorite time of the year.  The air is crisp and refreshing, the smell of school supplies fills the stores, you get to wear more clothes, layers and scarves, we get to eat chili again and football wakes from its hibernative state.  And, it precedes my second favorite time of year, early winter.  Yes, fall is here!

This was taken with my new professionalish (of course that is a word) camera, a Canon Rebel T3i, thanks to my wonderful parents.  Every year my mom asks me what we want for our birthdays, which are both, now all, in November, and Christmas and I am at a loss as we don't "need" anything and we have a hard time thinking of what we want. Not this year, I put my request in early, August to be exact.  I wanted a nice camera or at least some money to put toward one.  About 2 weeks ago, I get a surprise in the mail, a check for a new, nice camera!!!!   (I realize I gave them no choice as I have one of their adorable grandsons in my possession and I do feel a little guilty about that)  I quickly ordered my camera online and it arrived about 5 days later.  So far I can only point and shoot but I am determined to learn how to use all the features, or at least try them all a few times.  Now, to find a photography class...anyone in the Madison area want to take one with me?

'round here

What have we been doing 'round here lately?  Oh, so many new, exciting things!

Someone got a new car seat!  Clearly, he loves it!

We went to the Taste of Madison on sunday.  Sully's first pic in front of the capitol!

We got several "new" toys courtesy of the Shager family.  And boy, do we love them!

And lastly, today we started on the stairs.  Ohhhhhhh....

Last week crawling, this week stairs, tomorrow...pommel horse?  We will see.

Honesty

There have been a few happenings in my life lately that have got me thinking back to when I was a brand new mom.  It was a time that was supposed to be so joyous, so glorious...but was really rough.  For all of you brand new moms, semi-brand new moms or soon-to-be moms, this post is for you. 

I really wished someone would have told me how difficult having a baby would be.  Oh, maybe they did but I just didn't believe them, didn't really listen or just didn't think I would have a difficult time.  I mean, I am a nurse practitioner, in my 30's and tried so hard to get pregnant at all, of course it was going to be easy and fantastic, right?

Not so much.  This is not going to be a post about postpartum depression, don't worry.  No, this is simply an honest post about my adjustment to motherhood.  I know there are those people out there who transitioned seemlessly into motherhood on a cloud of love and joy and ease and I really thought I would be one of them.  But I wasn't, here is how it went...

If you read Sully's birth story, you will see that things kind of dragged on and did not go as I had hoped.  Truly, I was hoping for a very natural birthing experience without drugs or a c-section but I ended up getting it all.  I really can't explain why that made me so disappointed or upset but it did...and I never really told anyone that, at least not right away.  For some reason, that nagged at me those first few months.

Next, the hormones were raging.  And I mean raging.  I knew this would happen, I mean I am a nurse for God sakes, of course I knew that.  But I really didn't know.  It first happened when I was still in the hospital and by it, I mean my first crying jag for no reason.  I was just sitting there, pumping, letting it all hang out and it just came upon me, like a tidal wave of emotion that I could not stop or explain.  I was not sad at all, but it was a sad sight to see (I am sure Clayton can attest to that).  It got more severe and much more often after we got home and the hormones tag-teamed with the lack of sleep to really get me good.  I simply had to look at my husband, whom I felt like I loved more than I ever had before, or my new baby, whom I felt deserved a much more stable mother, and I would completely break down.  And once the waterworks started, they just would not stop!  All day long!

On top of that, Sully would NOT breastfeed at all.  We had supplemented him in the hospital with a bottle as he was deemed a "lazy eater".  He would latch and start to suck only to have a complete meltdown 2 seconds later when there was no milk.  I never even wanted to breastfeed before I had him.  I was totally turned off by the notion but I found that after he was here, I really wanted to make it work.  In my hormone and lack of sleep induced haze I really tried to make the breastfeeding thing work for 3 long weeks.  I tried it all:  the nipple shield, dribbling formula or breastmilk over the shield, priming with the pump so he would not have to wait for the let down, absolutely withholding the bottle, giving the bottle first so he would not be so ravenous hungry, calling the lactation consultant but it just was not in the cards for us.  He just wasn't a breastfeeding baby.  I pumped religiously, every 3 hours, day and night, and still I could not make enough to feed him soley breastmilk, without supplementing with some formula.  At the 3 week mark, I gave up the dream and ALL of our lives got exponentially better.  Despite doing exactly what my baby wanted, I would constantly beat myself up about not being able to breastfeed with every bottle I gave him.  And every "So you are breastfeeding then?" comment stung terribly.

As luck would have it, I got an infection in my c-section incision a week after I had Sully which earned us a midnight trip to the ER with body aches and a temp of 102 F on a snowy cold December night with a crying newborn.  I had a CT scan with contrast so I had to pump and dump for 24 hours.  Ugh!  Then I was put on antibiotics for 10 days which, via breastmilk, gave Sully constant diarrhea and subsequent diaper rash (the only diaper rash he has ever had).

And so, it was rough.  I was pretty sure I was going to have to ship the kid to my mom so she could raise him for me.  But things turned around at the 6-7 week mark.  Sully started sleeping better and smiling, I started feeling more normal-physically and emotionally, I started sleeping when the baby slept and we sort of got into a routine.  I am not telling this to you for sympathy because I am very aware of just how blessed and fortunate I am to have a happy, healthy baby and supportive husband.  I am not telling you this to scare you.  It is just an honest account of my first weeks of motherhood and it might be comforting to know that you are not alone, you are not crazy, you are perfectly normal and you will be fine.

DIY

Alright, I finished the quickie DIY art for Sully's room.  Here it is.  (Nevermind how dark these are, my flash was not going off)

Here they are up on the wall.

Other fun, cheap, easy nursery DIY projects:

Fish art and customizing a standard Target lamp.

Underwater mobile (I could not find a mobile that I liked that wasn't stupid expensive).

A framed piece of art work made by Clayton as a little.

And my latest Target $1 bin find?  Babar bowl, cup and plate! 

(Pretty sure I had a Smurf variety set like this growing up and loved it)



Happy Monday!

9 months

Happy 9 months, my dear sweet Sullymon!!!  You are growing like crazy and loving life. 

You LOVE:
-puffs and yogi drops
-blankies
-Turbo
-posing for the camera
-being carried around
-remotes and cell phones
-mornings
-other kids
-chicken and apples baby food(yuck!)

Although you are not necessarily crawling yet, you can get places by flopping forward.  You may be a yoga instructor when you grow up as you are always working on different yoga poses, mainly different variations of downward facing dog.  You are working on your baby 6 pack abs I guess.  You can finally go from a crawling position to a sitting position.  You can pull yourself up to a standing position.

You are getting your 7th tooth.  I just love your toothy grin which you flash me constantly.

You still get up to eat 1 or 2 5 oz bottles everynight.  You have slept straight through the night 5 times in your life.

Grumpy Gary comes out if you only get one nap at daycare.  And Grumpy Gary is NOT pleasant.  Thankfully, he only comes out on very rare occasions.

You have a little stranger anxiety sometimes but you warm up very fast.

You are wearing some 6, some 9 and some 12 month clothes.

Overall, you are a happy, healthy little guy.  You seem to be losing your baby looks and resembling a little boy.  You are pure gold joy to your mama and daddy.  We love you more than we ever thought it possible to love a baby.  If I think about it too much, I tear up.  So I try not to think about how much I love you and how much better my life is with you in it and just enjoy each day as it comes and celebrate each milestone with lots of hugs, kisses and claps. 

In Progress...

I absolutely love organizing and being organized.  Then why do I have rooms in my house that are not in perfect order you ask?  Life, that is why.  Stuff gets stacked in a room and not put away in the proper place, you visit the Target $1 bins 8 times in one month, you start too many projects before you have time to finish the previous one(s), you are busy multitasking 14 other things and chaos ensues.  The great thing about organizing is that it needs to be redone occasionally.  Well, I think this is a great thing because I enjoy doing it or at least the feeling of just getting done organizing.  Once again, I find the spare bedroom/office/craft room upstairs in need of another round of organizing.  Here is what it looks like now.

 It is not horrible, but I want to get it under control before I gets unmanageable.  I will start this tonight and hopefully finish by the end of the weekend.

I also have 2 other projects that I am working on.  The first is just simple art for Sully's room since he has a wall that could use some character.  I just got some cheap plastic frames from Hobby Lobby and I am placing fabric and ribbon in them.  I also took my favorite baby gift bag that I got a shower gift in and cut it to put it in two of the frames.  Here are the frames.

I should be done with these very soon and I will post pics.

I will be starting a necklace that I saw in Martha Stewart magazine.  Here are all my supplies I will need. 

I have not started yet.  I plan to start in the next day or two.  One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep myself accountable for all the projects I want to do.  I feel like I will finish them if I blog about them and they won't sit around half done forever.  I will let you know if it works.  So far, so good.

Milestones

Holy cow, we are hitting milestones like crazy around here!  Sully turns 9 months on Saturday and this past week and weekend has brought many new abilities! 

His language skills are evolving.  He now says "la-la-la-la" and "da-da-da-da" in addition to his super loud screams.

He successfully fed himself his first solid food that was not made just for baby- a piece of wheat toast with butter.  Not even a fake puke!

He can wave and clap now.  His clap involves his left hand in his mouth and the right hand slapping the back of his other hand- his very own signature clap. 

He slept 11 hours straight last night! (making his parents and dog sooooo happy!)

And finally, today, I look over and see this:

These images were captured after I jumped up off the couch snagging the computer cord between my toes and half falling down in an attempt to grab the camera before he fell back down to the ground- success!!  Have a great Monday!

Good reads.

I have come to really hate most childrens books.  I mean, they are truly boring and pretty lame, to be totally honest.  Unfortunately, the books that I find interesting, Sully would not as they have no colorful pictures and they are way too long.  We have tons of childrens board books, thanks to my wonderul SIL, niece and nephew.  However, since we read several books to Sully each night, I swear I have read all of them 100 times.  My real favorite one, that I have loved ever since the first time I read it, is Snowmen at Night.

This book I can definitely stand to read several times a week unlike some of the others.  The hubs likes to read Sully Is Your Mama a Llama?

Its ok but I can't read it in the proper voice like the hubs can.

As far as non-childrens books, I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

It was a fantastic book and I recommend it to anyone who has time to read a 600+ pager.  I am excited to read the next two in the series.

Have any of you read any good books lately??

Name Bubbles

The name bubbles are here, the name bubbles are here!!!!  I saw these name bubbles when I met my friend's baby, Eleanor, for the first time.  I thought they were great and my friend told me she got them from the website Name Bubbles.  As soon as I got home, I jumped on the website and designed Sully's name bubbles.  They came a week later.  Here they are!

So I immediately gathered all the things I wanted to label.  These are great if your child goes to daycare or if you are often around other babies who have the same bottles, snack dispensers, etc.

Sully even "helped" (and by helped I mean drooled on everything while looking super cute).  The great thing about these name bubbles is that they are waterproof.  Supposedly they stay on through hand and dishwasher washings.  I am a little skeptical about this but I am going to try it out.  These will also be great when he goes to school to label his lunch box, etc.  Have a great Monday!

Seasonal

It is mid-August and it is almost my most favoritest time of year....fall and football season!!!  The first pre-season game is on tonight as a nice teaser for the season.  I will be watching all the pre-season games to scout for my fantasy football team.  I have a little time to scout since our draft is not until Labor Day.  It will be my third fantasy season and I actually placed 3rd in the league those two years.  In our league, 3rd place wins you your entry fee back so I have yet to lose any money on the deal. 

This particular fall is special for two reasons.  One, we will be welcoming my new nephew any minute now.  What a great way to start a new season, with a new family member!  And two, this is the last season in Sully's "year of firsts."  I can't believe he will be 1 year old soon!  I have actually been thinking about his first birthday party and what traditions I want to start.  Now that I have done this motherhood thing for a short time, I realize how truly special your baby's first birthday is, for you as much as the child.  It is amazing how much a baby grows and learns in one short year.  But it is equally amazing how much you, as a parent, adapt and change as well.  For instance, I don't think I could even, as much as I want to, sleep 7 or 8 consecutive hours without waking up and looking at the clock and wondering when Sully will need a bottle, I have not napped after work since going back to work after my maternity leave, I have a permanent backache from lugging that damn car seat everywhere, my daily chores now always include bottle and sippy cup washing, laundry has almost doubled, I have only been woken up by my alarm clock about twice since going back to work, there is not a moment in my day that I do not first think of the little Mister and how my decisions will affect him and because of that I finally started to take medication for my high cholesterol (which has been high since my early 20s).  Other family members lives have changed, too.  Our dog has not been to the dog park since the beginning of my pregnancy and we even forgot her outside one evening while we were so wrapped up with feeding/bathing/adjusting the crib for the Sul.  Our neighbor rang our doorbell and told us she thought our dog was thirsty (aka why are you such terrible pet parents and forget your dog was outside on a hot evening??).  Oh and our cat (wait, we still have a cat?) would probably like to fire us from litter box duty.  It is a miracle she has not started to just poop and pee all over the house in protest.  Ok, I am done rambling.  Are you ready for some football?????

Tears...

It finally happened.  Someone said something so mean and rude about Sully and his hemangioma that it made me cry.  I still can't believe it happened.  Sully and I were having a great day.  We headed over to my friend's house to meet her week old little man and brought the new parents some food.  The new little guy is so adorable and sweet and Sully was so good and smiley and giggly.  Afterward, we went to super Target for stuff and groceries.  (BTW, I scored two hot pink food and water bowls for the cat in the dollar bins)  We were at the check out when it happened.  There was a mom(sister?babysitter?) with two kids behind me in line.  Naturally, I had a ridiculous amount of stuff and was waiting for it to get rung up.  One of the kids behind me in line, a girl, probably about 7, was talking to her brother about Sully.  She got this sour grape look in her face and said to her brother, "Look at that baby.  He is NOT cute.  Look at his head!"  I was in so much shock that I didn't do anything and tried to just brush it off.  I mean, she is 7, give her a break, right?  Well, about 60 seconds later, she said the exact same thing to her brother, again with the sour grape, disgusted look on her face.  Now, I am not her mother so it is not my job to make sure she is well behaved and not being rude or a jerk but the mother(or who ever the adult with them was) was too preocupied with texting or facebooking on her phone and was totally oblivious to what was going on.  All of a sudden, a burning, hot gob of protective mother raged bubbled from within and I had to say something in defense of my sweet boy.  "What did you say?" came out of my mouth before I knew I was thinking it.  The girl looked away and sort of tried to hide behind her brother.  "What did you say?"  I again questioned.  No response from the girl but now the adult with them looked at the girl and asked her the same thing.  Again, no response, just looking away and hiding behind her brother.  "Did you have a question?"  I asked.  Yeah, there was no way she was talking to me so I went on, "It is a birthmark.  It doesn't hurt him and it will some day go away."  Still no response from the girl.  The adult with the kids said "oh, yeah, you know about birthmarks, I have two on my stomach."  As she went back to her texting or facebooking.  "Sorry" the adult said very insincerely as she was busy with her phone.  I decided to end the conversation at that point.  Clearly the girl was embarassed and probably learned her lesson to not say such rude comments.  As far as the adult with the kids, she was not offering up any sort of parenting at that time.  The backs of my eyes were burning and I was just trying to hold it together until I could get the hell out of there.  I paid for my junk and groceries and hurried to my car, in the rain. 

I am worried about him getting teased about the hemagioma.  Obviously, he had no idea he was getting talked about that way today but someday he will.  I don't know why kids have to be so mean but I know I won't always be there to deflect their comments or call them out on it.  I can't control others behavior, only how I react to it.  And at some point, it won't be about the hemangioma but something else ridiculous and superficial.  I only hope that I can give him enough self worth and that he has enough self esteem to be able to shrug off any rude comments.  I also hope that I can instill compassion into him so that he can empathize with others and accept differences in people.  And I hope that I can be mature enough and even tempered enough to react in a polite and respectful way when it occurs in front of me because rudeness on top of rudeness is not the answer.

Sully fell asleep in the car and I soothed my hurt feelings with a DQ cherry dipped cone (my fave).  Then I thought of the Flight of the Concords song "Hurt Feelings" all the way home.  Yes, we will be alright...life goes on...there will be another day. 

Reupholstered chair



Well, now that it is done, I realize the project was probably a bit too advanced for my first time reupholstery project and required more than the amount of time I really wanted to put into it.  I kind of got lazy at the end and thus sloppy.  But it is not horrible and I will definitely be keeping the chair in the living room, for now.

Before

The fabric

Fabric removal

Applying new fabric

New Chair (with a cute model)!

Boys and Baby Dolls

Sully was bored with sitting at home on Monday, so we took a drive.  I decided we wanted to quickly browse through south towne Goodwill since I am always looking for old, cool furniture.  The minute I pulled into the parking lot I saw it.  The most perfect, beautiful little white baby doll crib I have ever seen.  It was out on the sidewalk in front of Goodwill as part of a display that was set up outside.  I was immediately drawn to it.  I slowly walked past it, staring at it and saw it was only $2.99?!?  What a deal!  I tried to push it out of my mind as I headed into the store (after all, I have a little BOY, not a little GIRL).  Once inside the store, I actually found the perfect 1970s end table for Sully's room so I brought that up to the counter.  Wouldn't you know that I forgot my wallet in the car?  As I quickly ran out to my car, I couldn't resist it a second time.  I ripped the tag off of the crib and had her to ring that up for me as well when I went back into the store.  I left with these two items:

As I drove away with the baby doll crib in my car, I thought "I can give it to one of my friends who has a little girl."  But I truly loved the little thing already and it pained me to think I would just give it away.  Then I thought, "I will keep it in case I have a little girl of my own someday."  Yeah, I will just keep it, in case.  But then I thought, why do I have to keep it "in case"?  Why can't Sully play with it?  Why can't a little boy have a baby doll crib?  If little girls practice being "mommys,"  why can't little boys practice being "daddys"?  So I decided it will be Sully's baby doll crib.  When I got home and told the hubs about it, you would have thought I told him I was going to start feeding the kid marbles.  He thought it was weird and a silly idea.  What do you think?  Is it weird?  If so, why?  I am I crazy, wrong, silly?

Anyway, here is where the 1970s table found a home (I would have thought I would have NEVER actually bought a table like this a few years ago as I am sure there was a time when one could not wait to get rid of such a thing.  I think most of my parents friends had an end table or two like this.)
 

Fits in perfectly!