New Family Blog

I did switch to a new blog for the family. Hopefully we'll get Eric on board with posting as well.

http://purposefulchaos.wordpress.com/

Chatting with Strangers on Planes

So usually I don't like to chat with people on the plane. However, yesterday I sat next to a girl who was pregnant and I was missing my baby. So I thought I will be brave and strike up conversation such as oh when is your baby due? How exciting! Boy or girl? Not because I actually wanted to discuss her baby. No sir I'm way too selfish for that. I clearly dropped the hint that oh I have a sweet little boy at home, he's only 4 month, I clearly would like to discuss my baby. My sly hint dropping did not work and I did not get to brag about what a fantastic baby I have and how sweet he is. Sad. No more chatting with strangers on the plane for me. I'll stick to reading books and working.

In other news, thinking about starting with a new blog for the family. Will let you my one reader (hey mom!) know where it is if I change. :)

Don't Let Perfection Get in the Way of Good Enough

So, this is something that a friend of mine always tells me at work because I'm a psychotic perfectionist and usually things don't have to be perfect, they just need to be good enough. I've decided to apply this concept to the house. Now it's important to note that my house is usually quite messy. :) However, when I go to clean the house, I make a huge production of it and it takes forever. I had visions that I was going to have the baby and have the house perfect and everything in its place, etc. Except that I didn't even do that prior to having a baby so what makes me think that now with having to take care of a baby as well, I was going to make that happen. So I decided that the house doesn't have to be perfect and clean and 100% organized, it just has to be good enough to keep us from going crazy with how messy it is. That being said, I cleaned up the house in about an hour and a half today. It's no longer driving me crazy and I didn't have to dedicate a whole day to it. I made little notes of what I could do in each room to help keep it looking organized and easier to clean for the next round. We'll see if it helps. The idea is that if we can keep the house a basic level of clean during the week, then the weekend we don't have to do anything or we can pick one specific project to work on like organize the hall closet.

With the extra time I had, I put in a super mini garden. So last year I put in a huge garden and it failed miserably. Not because anything died or didn't grow, but because I was too good at growing stuff. The joke became that I was working on a prairie restoration project. So this year I wasn't going to do anything, but I decided to put in 5 plants. 1 tomato, 1 green bell pepper, 1 red bell pepper, 1 jalapeno and 1 habenero. We'll see how it goes. :)

Now I'm off to organize the week so that hopefully my first week back to work won't be too traumatic.

Goals, Goals and More Goals

I thought I would post about some of my goals as I lay here unable to sleep because Eric is out of town. I ultimately decided that having a noisy baby in the room was better than sleeping with the bedroom door unlocked. :) It's amazing that I can sleep alone just fine in hotels throughout the country, but leave me alone at my own house without Eric and I am terrified. And now we have a line of thunderstorms coming through. Perfect!

SI have a lot of goals that I would like to accomplish, like work really hard to be supermodel thin :) However, I don't think it makes sense to tackle all goals at once since it can get overwhelming and ultimately leads to burn out and not accomplishing goals. So I'm picking a top five to work on for this year. If I accomplish some of these prior to the end of the year, I will go ahead and get a headstart on the next round of goals, but I want to give myself a realistic amount of time to accomplish these things. I plan to give a goals update at the end of each month to keep myself in check.

1. Eating more nutritiously. This is a tough one as I really love sweets, but I don't necessarily want to diet, I just want to eat better and get rid of the junk food. I think ultimately, it's the best thing for me and a good example for Indie as he gets older. It's going to take me a while to break my habits, so I might as well start now.
2. Be more active. I really love spending an entire day in front of the TV watching movies or marathoning seasons of TV shows. This is already something that Indie has forced us to break a habit of doing and I think it's a good thing. Once again it's a want to set a good example thing. I also purchased some workout dvds that include babies so I can workout with Indie. I try to take him on walks when it's nice out and want to continue that habit.
3. Doing something outside on nice weekends. I haven't been very good at taking advantage of the nice weather in WI. So I'd like to try to something that is outside once a weekend when it's nice for the summer/fall. This might be just a trip to the farmers market, or a trip to the zoo (which is free in Madison woot woot!) and I'd like to take advantage of our many parks in WI and go on some hikes. We found an awesome backpack for carrying Indie so I'm going to use that as inspiration.
4. Be more organized around the house. I'm really good at organizing my time, but not my space. This one actually has multiple layers because part of this is getting rid of stuff that is clutter and we don't need. I've started with my sewing room. It's truly terrifying in there. The other part is to not bring as much junk into the house. I want everything that I purchase to have a specific plan and place. I definitely don't need 80 t-shirts. Just a few will do. :) I also don't need anymore random sewing/craft supplies.
5. Use up my sewing/craft/knitting supplies before buying more. I imagine I will have some exceptions to this, but I'd really like to always check what I have first before going shopping. A big part of this will be not doing an leisure shopping at Joann's on the weekends. This should be easier to not do with having the baby and wanting to spend time with him.

Spring Cleaning Fun!

So today is absolutely gorgeous here in Belleville. It's actually more summer weather than spring weather for us. As I type this it is 82 degrees out and sunny. Beautiful! I have been using my clothes line today (which is about to fall over, yikes!) and I every neighbor that I can see from my house is also using their clothes line!

Today has inspired me to really get moving on some projects that we have been meaning to work on. Eric and I made a list of projects to work on so that whenever we're just sitting around trying to figure out something to do, we'll already have a plan.

You may remember the picnic table from last year (there's a post with a picture if you don't). Well I just had to have the wooden picnic table, even though Eric wanted the metal/plastic one. His reason was, we won't have to stain it. I can now admit that I really wish I would have listened to him, but my pregnant self was insistant that I had to have the wooden one. We left the picnic table out all winter uncovered and had never stained it or put anything protective on it. This was a mistake and the picnic table was quite ugly after the winter. So, one of my first projects was to stain the picnic table and it is officially done! Yay! I'll get a picture and post it after I turn the table back over, right now the bottom side is drying.

For the next couple days it's supposed to rain, so I am going to work on some inside projects. Mainly I'm going to focus on organizing my sewing room and the workout room. We made some progress on the workout room the other day. You can actually see most of the floor and there is a path through the room. You can also use the treadmill now because we cleaned all the boxes off of it. :)

I'm off to tackle picking up the house since we are having guests over tomorrow!

Indie's First Road Trip and Other Updates

Here are some pix from our trip to TN and some other updates.

Yesterday we had our first ever cry/scream free bath. Indie just hung out in his tubby and relaxed during his bath. He still peed in the water eventually, but that's okay. He's getting much more interactive and spent most of the day yesterday fascinated with hanging out with Eric. He definitely likes to be on the move most of the time.

Indie is turning into a very good sleeper at night. He sleeps in his own room in his crib. After a bottle he goes right to sleep without crying or fussing and he sleeps about 7 hours most nights. It's really great. However, he's not taking big naps during the day like he used to. This presents a challenge in trying to get anything done since he likes to be moving constantly.

Here is Indie hanging out with his Dad yesterday. I thought this was cute. Now for pix from the tn trip.
Indie and all his traveling buddies.

Cousins! Indie and Lena.
Nana, Pops, Lena and Indie outside the aquarium.
Indie and his pirate turtle that pops bought him.
Nana, Pops and Lena checking out the sting rays.
eric and giant shark jaws.
Nana, Pops and their grand babies.
Cutest easter bunny ever.

Auntie Shanny and Indie
Learning to lift up his head
showing off his ducky outfit for easter
bath time with nana
indie and his 2nd cousin john

First Tubby Bath

Today was Indie's first bath in a tubby rather than sponge bath. He was not really a fan. I think we're going to get him a different tub since he had a little too much freedom to scooch around in the tub we have.

Here he is getting ready for the bath. Look how cute his belly button is!Tubby time! That's a well placed foot!

sewing, sewing, sewing

I finally have struck a balance with all the baby stuff and am managing to get some sewing done. Of course it is sewing for Indie. He needed some plaid pants and a black hoodie to go with his checkered vans. Since he has giant feet and will likely be outgrowing those shoes soon, I thought I should get working. I'm hoping to have them finished before we leave for TN on Wednesday. Indie is being a good baby today and is not being super fussy so far so I have hope that I can do that. Right now he is sleeping. I bought him a little soothie seahorse that plays music and lights up that is supposed to be very helpful in helping babies go to sleep. I've heard good things about it. I hope it works for us. He did just go down for his nap relatively painlessly with the seahorse playing lullabies. The true test will be night time as he is an excellent napper, but hates to go to sleep at night.

In other Indie news, today we're going to try to give him an actual tubby bath instead of a sponge bath. Wish us luck! We'll get pictures.

New Indie Pix

Indie has decided that now he loves his swing that Aunti Shannon got for him. He took his afternoon nap in the swing today and is now working on falling asleep for the evening in his swing.

Here's some pix of Eric feeding Indie for the first time. so cute!

More Indie Updates

Indie is officially a week old as of yesterday. We have learned alot in a week. For example, Indie is not a fan of the dark and is happiest when there is at least a dim light on. He also loves loves loves the vibrating chair. This has brought alot more free time to our hands since he constantly wants to be moving.

We had a tough time getting him to sleep last night, but once we did he let us sleep for 5 hours and then after a quick feeding, went back to sleep for another 3.5. So despite the initial frustration, we're feeling good today.

Here are some more pictures!

Sleeping in his fave chair

another sleepy babyfirst stroller ride. at first not so much a fanby the end of the walk, he was very happy and completely crashed.
alert baby

Indigo Harrison

Haven't updated in a while, but Indigo Harrison was born on March 17th at 2:10pm. He was 8 lbs 8 oz and 19 inches long. So far we are all doing fantastic and learning to rearrange our very habitual schedules for Indie. :) The dogs are adjusting quite nicely as well. They are sad that they cannot sleep upstairs anymore, but have been so good with the baby and we're all able to hang out on the couch and watch movies together. Mr. Big even stopped whining on his own last night without us having to reprimand him.

Couple of days old, chillin in his swing.

Pops and IndieCute little Indie

Indie and Dad
Nana and Indie
Indie and Dad sleeping Tomorrow Indie will be one week old and we're going to the doctor for our first visit.

cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

I'm hoping that the fact that all I want to do today is clean to make sure the house is ready is a good sign that Indie will be here soon. I told eric yesterday that I feel like this week is the week. Let's hope!

I haven't posted in forever

Sorry I haven't posted in forever! Needless to say, I am still gigantically pregnant. I'm probably not the most fun to be around right now. Poor Eric! I've been so grumpy for the past week. I'm doing everything possible to try to convince Indie that he wants to be born sooner rather than later. Although my official due date is in one week, March 4.

Hopefully soon I'll be posting baby pictures!