Baby couture.

First of all............ Look at how ADORABLE my baby is!!!!!!

Had enough? of course not, feel free to keep looking.

OKAY, moving on.

Lately I've been feeling like I could be some kind of super cool baby fashion designer. After making all kinds of cute little onesies for Baby Carrot I decided to try something a little harder.

I found a sweet and FREE pattern online for a baby snuggler or swaddler or sleep sack or as my husband called it a sleeping bag. Whatever it is you might call it, it's pretty much the best thing ever.

Baby Carrot loves being wrapped up to sleep so it's super helpful at keeping him wrapped during the night or naptime.

I'm providing you with the PATTERN and then my own two cents. It really is easier than it looks, I was a little nervous at first. Not that I'm a terrible seamstress or anything it's just that sometimes  my projects don't turn out if it isn't like curtains or a pillow. But miraculously this one turned out FABULOUS, even though I went rogue.

HINTS, TIPS & SHORTCUTS....I mean, advice.

So here's the dirty on this pattern, print it out and follow the directions.....just kidding, but really directions are important.

I didn't follow the directions per se.

My boy is LONG! If there was any hope of this snuggler to fit him for more than a week I was going to need to improvise and create a pattern to fit him. If you too have this same Long-baby issue print the pattern, cut it out and trace it onto tissue paper and elongate or expand the areas necessary. OR you can always trace your baby (what I did). Just make sure there is enough room on all sides for sewing and it won't be super tight on your sweetie pie.

"The pattern uses velcro, why did you use ribbon Holly?"

I'm glad you asked, because I'm out of velcro and I'm too impatient to wait until I get more, but that's only HALF the truth. I found that ribbon is a little more adjustable. I can basically tie Carrot in however tight or loose he wants. Also my kid is kind of handsie and sometimes he is just plain angry if he can't touch his face, so I can criss-cross the "wings" of the snuggler under his arms/across his chest and he's much happier. If you want to use the ribbon method as well, cut the ribbon to the desired length, find the middle, pin the middle of the ribbon on the middle of the back between the wings. continue to pin the ribbon down both wings. Sew both edges of the ribbon up one wing across the back and down the other wing. Also don't forget to finish the ends of the ribbon or it might unravel. 

That's it, like I said it's pretty simple but if you want help or have questions feel free to ask. I can try to help :)

Wilson Lake.

Hubby had Monday off of work so we decided to drive out to Wilson Lake. 

We heard it is one of the prettiest places around and in Kansas pretty things are few and far between so we made the hour journey to see the lake.

We found a blog talking about some bike trails and it had some pretty stellar pictures of an inlet. 

We followed the bike trail (on foot) to what we thought was going to be the inlet only to end up walking two miles and get STUCK in some nasty sinking mud. Let me rephrase that, I got stuck in nasty sinking mud.

The bike trail was really neat, it kind of reminded me of a desert or Mt. Haleakala (we biked it on our honeymoon). The sinking mud... Not so much. I got stuck while having a mini-FREAK OUT. Everything was sucking my feet down and there were spiders everywhere, it smelled like poop and all the fallen reeds looked like snakes, I couldn't handle it. Thankfully Hubby came and helped me out.

On our way out of the state park we realized that we drove right past the inlet and thinking back I remember thinking "hmmm that's a neat little inlet..."

We stopped and hung out for a while. Hubby even caught a fish on the FIRST cast. 

Now that we know where the good spots are we will totally go back for a visit. We are even planning to go back and ride the bike trails when we get bikes. We'll avoid the mud next time ;)

Family Visit and the Demolition Derby.

We were so excited to have Alex's family visiting us this past week/weekend!

Baby Carrot was so spoiled by all his Uncles and his Grammie and Grandad.

We like that our life gets to be an adventure with the Army but being so far too far away really is the pits. 

I guess that makes the time we are all together that much sweeter though...

The rodeo, 4H fair and carnival were all in town this weekend so we had lots to entertain our guests and Alex's parents helped us with some yard work we've been a little behind on...*embarrassing*. 

While Carrot was getting spoiled, Alex and I got to have a grown up date at the carnival which was a blast, we all know I'm a sucker for rides that look like they can kill ya!

My first time at a demolition derby was Sunday night. Alex's Dad, Will and Luke left Sunday morning but his Mom and Johnny stayed until Sunday night so they came to the Derby with us. Baby Carrot showed off his cuteness to everyone at the derby.

We were really glad to have family visitors, they will be missed :(

... Then Comes the Baby in the Baby Carriage.

        I've been slightly hesitant to write this post because I'm afraid it might be a little TMI, but I guess a month after the birth of my sweet baby I've decided to suck it up and tell the world how it happened.
So much to my dismay Baby Carrot (what we call him) was very content in Mama's belly and we had to be induced at 41 weeks and two days. This really freaked me out a bit because "naturally" we had prepared ourselves for a "natural", medication free birth ( using the Bradley Method) and "naturally" that was exactly what we didn't get.
My hubby read Husband Coached Child Birth by Dr. Bradley and I read The Bradley Method in hopes of finding out what was in-store for us and how we should deal with it. Our only fault was placing too much stock in our hopes for a "natural" birth and not paying much attention to whether it was wise to try to proceed medication free through an induction.

I know some people fully dive into the all-natural-crunchy-mom "I loved being pregnant and childbirth was so beautiful and painless and I feel so empowered- I am woman hear me roar!"

Whelp, y'all that is NOT me. I like to think of my sweet Baby Carrot as the FABULOUS result of an TORTUROUS 9 month-long endless-feeling process. The Bradley Method while it has great relaxation techniques was written for those "special" pregnancy-loving Mama's and so I already felt a little like someone was telling me I was a bad mommy because I didn't absolutely LOVE being pregnant. So, sifting through the passive agressive attacks on normal people laced through both of our books was quite the adventure.

Like I said before, 41 weeks and two days is where we started the induction process; my cervix was turned back and up towards my sacrum, dilated 0 and baby NOT engaged at all. We went in to the hospital at 5:30am on June 29th.

8:00am  

 I was started on Cervidil. - Cervidil is a cervix ripening drug, it takes about 12 hours to work it's cycle. Although a few lucky people have it work in about 4 hours, you may have guessed I am not one of those lucky few. I spent the full 12 hours laying in a hospital bed (you can't walk around when Cervidil is in) waiting for Cervidil to work and when the 12 hour were up the nurse came to tell me that I hadn't progressed any. Talk about dashed hopes and dreams.....

8:00pm

Cervidil was taken out at 8pm - I was able to get up and walk around all I wanted until .....

11:00pm

 I got to have another induction method implemented- My mid-wife and myself had hoped that Cervidil would do-the-trick and start labor for me and the rest would progress naturally.....no dice. 

This time the foley bulb was the method of choice. If you are like me you have no idea what a foley bulb is, allow me to break it down for you. Imagine a long stiff tube with a deflated balloon stuck on the end of it, then imagine having that tube fed into a bodily orifice. Into your completely un-dilated, completely turned back cervix and then having that balloon filled with water in an effort to FORCE your cervix open. Congratulations, you have just imagined your first foley build experience. Grand isn't it?

And let me just say, there is nothing like hearing one medical professional tell another medical professional that they have done something incorrectly, especially in reference to your body. That just kind of FREAKS me out. For some reason I've had this idea that doctors are all knowing, all powerful beings that know exactly how to heal me and not hurt me, the older I get the more I realize this is TOTALLY false.

As soon as the nurse started filling the foley bulb with water intense pain like I had NEVER felt before rushed over me, and I have to say that it was absolutely worse than any of the awful pitocin induced contractions that I later felt.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I started balling my eyes out uncontrollably when the nurse injected even more water into the foley bulb. The doctor immediately rushed over to find out why I had reacted so badly. We then learned that the nurse injected 50cc of fluid into the bulb when she should have injected 30cc. I know that doesn't sound like such a big deal but boy it felt like a big deal.

I was then given Pitocin to start my contractions......as if I didn't have enough on my plate with this crazy water balloon blowing up inside of me so suddenly. Then we waited.

2:00am

Relief??- after three hours of crying, after trying and failing at all the relaxation techniques we'd practiced and after hubby not knowing how to help me other than to stand there with Kleenex to wipe all the tears off my face; I broke down and got some IV drugs.

I was really concerned about this, I didn't want to seem weak or anything, I mean people have babies without pain drugs all the time right? But I reasoned with myself, it was only IV drugs, it wasn't like it was an epidural or anything, because heaven forbid I get one of those and have a horrible birth experience like all those Bradley Method nuts people say you'll have.

3:00am

MORE relief??-By 3am I needed another round of IV drugs, which wore off thirty minutes faster than the first round.....

 4:00am

You are not helping- I was still crying and in the WORST pain I've ever felt balled up in my bed. My husband had now taken to laying on a cot trying to ignore me as best as possible. Now, I don't think he was doing this to be mean or selfish, I really truly believe that he had false expectations of what birth would be like and I think he was overwhelmed by the amount of pain I was experiencing. While the books we had read and the ideas of birth that the Bradley Method promotes may be nice to aspire to, they are not realistic to the average person. The idea of an all-natural, painless birth would definitely be great, but it's just not going to happen. Despite all my pain I was hopeful. You'd think to be in this much pain meant something had to be moving..... and you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. We were still at ZERO, everything was at zero. Baby hadn't engaged cervix hadn't moved forward and no dilation had occurred.

My next thought was that if my body didn't respond soon they would try to force a C-section on me and I didn't want to work myself up into a situation where I needed a C-section. So, I asked the nurse if I could have an epidural. OH MY GOODNESS!!! I thought those words alone probably killed Dr. Bradley where he stood. And I was pretty sure my husband was going to get up off the cot where he was pretending to sleep and lecture me on everything he had read in the Bradley book, like he had done when he read about the dangers of using hairspray while pregnant and how using hairspray while pregnant must mean that you hate your baby and you are unfit to be a mother- or however Dr. Bradley had so gently put it in his book. (after that chapter we had a long talk about the difference between using hairspray and "huffing" hairspray.)

Unfortunately the anesthesiologists were about to change shifts in a few minutes and we all know that takes precedence over a patient in pain( I'm still a little bitter. Can you tell?) so requesting an epidural at 4am meant not getting one until 7am. 

6:00am

Put me out of my misery!- I was in full on someone-is-cutting-my-body-into-two-pieces pain and I'm pretty sure everyone at the nurses station was getting sick of hearing me screaming my head off. This nurse came in my room and flipped on every light and started to talk loudly, so my husband couldn't pretend to be asleep anymore(hahaha). She looked at me and said "focus, don't scream, just breathe" and she coached me through the contractions, like somebody was supposed to be doing, *ahem.*

Once that wonderful nurse got me to get ahold of myself I could at least breathe regularly until my epidural arrived at 7.

7:00am

Shoot me up Doc.- I am TERRIFIED to no end of needles, I avoid flu shots like the plague but let me tell you I was so ready for that doctor to shoot me up I could hardly stand it. And once he did I could finally sleep! I slept from 7am-2pm, Praise Jesus! 

2:00pm

When I woke up they told me I finally dilated to 4cm, and that was a big deal people!! I put my makeup on fixed my hair, my water broke and I was feeling good until....

6:00pm

I was feeling A LOT of pressure with every contraction so the doctor increased the epidural and gave me oxygen for the migraine I was experiencing due to long hours of labor. 

 
7:30pm 

I was at 7cm!!!!!!

 
 8:00pm-ish

 Oh, you're fine...-I started feeling the pressure even more (if that was even possible), I told the nurse, who then told me "you're fine". The pressure was getting worse, it was hurting and I was feeling like I needed to push. Another nurse walked into our room while I was trying to work my way through a contraction( you know breathing heavily, grunting, the whole nine yards) then she asked the dumbest question "oh, what's wrong"? I really just wanted to yell at her in my ghetto voice and say "what the heck do you think is wrong, Barbie"? But I remembered myself and refrained. Instead I said " I think my baby is coming out... NOW". She then assured me that I "was only 7cm so that could not be the case" I insisted that yes, it most certainly was the case and I'd feel better if she checked. Which she did and then said "oh, you are having this baby like right now, I'll go get someone".

*Sidebar with me for a moment here- why is it that for two days in that hospital nurses and doctors were in my room the whole time touching and poking me and could not keep there hands to themselves and the minute baby boy starts coming out NO ONE is around? Sidebar done.

The doctor and a few other nurses came in and with a few minutes of pushing baby boy was out at 8:36pm on June 30th. And boy was I so HAPPY to hold my sweet baby!!!

He was, is PERFECT 7lb 13oz 21 inches long, sweet Grayson Price Tompkins.

Would I do it again? Too soon for that question, give me a few years.... Maybe many years. But in all seriousness I love my baby boy, I don't feel that an epidural ruined my birth experience I didn't feel lethargic or unresponsive like some of the theories claim and Grayson wasn't lethargic or slow to respond. In fact I feel that having an epidural got me the closest to having some semblance of a natural birth. My greatest fear was a C-section and we didn't have to go that route. I think without the epidural my muscles would have never relaxed enough to let me dilate and I think ultimately I would have had to go the C-section route.

When you are reading literature on anything but especially childbirth, pregnancy and parenting realize that no human is the end-all, be-all and at the end of the day they are giving you their best opinion laced with some fact. We have to make our best decisions based on what we know to be true and Godly and sometimes that might rub a few people the wrong way but in the end these are our families and hopefully we are asking the Lord for the guidance to make the right decisions for them.

In hindsight I would have picked books that focused more on the facts of birth, and relaxation techniques that would have given my husband a more realistic idea of what to expect so that he wouldn't have felt completely blindsided by the fact that I was in pain. In the end it worked out okay, we have our sweet Baby Carrot and we have experience under our belts.......literally.

A Pretty Fridge is a Happy Fridge.

Yesterday I decided to organize our refrigerator in an attempt to make it slightly more aesthetically pleasing. We have certain documents that we keep on our fridge at all times,(cleaning schedule, infant CPR instructions, infant feeding guide) So that these documents remain fully visible and don't need extra magnets I used spray adhesive to back these documents with scrapbook paper. I'm really happy with how these turned out, the colors of the scrapbook paper are accent colors in our kitchen and the paper gives these documents a little more stability. I popped a peel and stick magnet on the back and voila! 

One of the most annoying things that take up a million magnets on our fridge is our bills! We hang our bills on the fridge until they are paid and they take up a lot of space and a lot of magnets. 

My Solution: The Bill Bar!

The only supplies you need are.....

Paint Stir Stick

Paint

Scrapbook Paper

Mini Clothespins 

Hot Glue/ Glue Gun

Magnets 

Step 1:

Trace and cutout scrapbook paper.

Step 2:

Glue paper to the stir stick.

Step 4:

Paint your clothespins coordinating colors

Step 4:

Glue your clothes pins to the stir stick

Step 5:

Glue your magnets to the back of the stir stick

TA-DAH! A Bill Bar!

Chalk-It-Up to Practicality.

We love chalkboard stuff around here. In-fact we have a whole chalkboard wall (more on that later).

It's not just a typical chalkboard that tickles my fancy but rather the use of chalkboards as labels. 

I love them so much, I even used them at my wedding!

So why do I love chalkboard labeling so much(and why should you)?

A. It's practical.
The great thing about chalkboard labeling is that you can change your mind about anything you labeled or how you labeled it. You can change the color, the font/writing, you can even decide you want something totally different in that container all together.

B. It's cute.

Let's be honest it's just way more aesthetically pleasing than a piece of tape with pen scrawled across it.

You can pretty much paint a chalkboard square on any container and create a nice area to label your container, however if your surface is shiny and plastic it most-likely will not stick and even if it does stick to your surface you must tape off the area to get a nice even area to write on.

I found myself in this predicament today when I went to label the cat and dog's food containers. I came across a great solution... Chalkboard stickers!

Supplies.

All you need is the sticker labels in any shape or size you desire.

Chalkboard paint (or you can make your own, recipe at the bottom)

Paintbrush

Step One.

Paint labels and let dry.

Step Two.

Peel off and stick on.

Step Three.

Enjoy your labels!

Homemade chalkboard paint.

I've made this paint two different ways and both work equally as well.

Method One.

Black (or what ever color you desire) acrylic paint

Plaster wall patch, dry mix. This should be a powder, if it's a paste you've got the wrong stuff.

Mix your desired amount of paint with about a third as much of the wall patch mix. If you want a paint with a little more grit you can add more of the dry mix.

Method Two.

Is exactly the same as the first method but you use baking soda instead of the dry mix. You can really customize this recipe as much as you want, it's very hard to add too much baking soda or dry mix to the paint.

DIY-My-Dishwasher

SO, A FEW WEEKS AGO I DISCOVERED THAT THE DISHES WERE GROSS..........

I guess I just had other things on my mind all that other times I was unloading the dishwasher because I know that cloudy look to our glasses and the almost tarnished looking silverware hadn't JUST appeared there. So I immediately began to try and discover the cause.....

I thought I was doing most things right, I pre-washed, I even talked to my sweet hubby about pre-washing the dishes, because he is very nice and likes to load and unload the dishwasher for me a lot :)

We were using the cascade complete gel with bleach, which I though was the good stuff....or maybe I'm just a sucker for advertising. Anyway, we were paying like we were using the good stuff and it was making our dishes look NASTY.

I emailed our land-lady to ask her if this was an issue when they lived in the house or if maybe the washer needed to be serviced, she said it had always been that way but if I used a finishing agent it would probably reduce some of the cloudiness. Well, people Jetdry isn't cheap and it comes in a small bottle and I really didn't want to pay a whole lot for a tiny chance that it would PROBABLY make my dishes look cleaner so I turned to the internet and read all about what people were saying about DIY dish detergent.

I make my own laundry detergent and use it in a HE front-loading washer and it works great so I really wasn't scared about putting homemade remedies in my dishwasher. 

I came across a recipe for homemade dish detergent here and it was....ALRIGHT. It cut down the cloudiness but not a whole lot so I read some more, tweaked my approach and achieved perfection.

IT'S ALL IN THE INGREDIENTS...

•  1 cup Borax
•  1 cup Washing Soda
•  1/2 cup Kosher Salt
•  1/2 cup Citric Acid 

All these ingredients are super easy to find anywhere, so that was fabulous. I was a little worried about the citric acid but that was really easy too, they will have it at any Walmart or grocery store in the canning supplies.

So you will want to put all those ingredients in a bowl and whisk them together....

NOW, HERE'S WHERE I MADE MY MISTAKE

When you whisk all the ingredients together you get this nice little powdery mixture, DON"T ASSUME YOU'RE DONE!!

My first attempt at this stuff I just put the mixture in a container and when I woke up the next morning and did my dishes, this is what I found...

It pretty much looked like huge clumps of feta cheese, but it does not crumble so easily. some of the rocks it made were HUGE and would just be unusable because it seemed that the different ingredients had found itself and only adhered to particles like it.

SO I WENT BACK TO THE INTERNET...

Turns out citric acid will make the mixture separate and clump, NO GOOD. However you can always breakout your trusty food processor to help break down all those little clumps into a nice powder once again, so I did. 

I MADE A SECOND BATCH, 

and added the broken down, older batch too it in a mixing bowl. I read that if you make a batch, leave it out on your counter in a bowl for a day or two after you make it, whisking it periodically it will maintain a powdery form and then you can store it in a container without it clumping.

SUCCESS!

I left the mixture out for three days before containing it. The morning of day two the mixture seemed kind of sticky, like the powder was slightly wet (BUT IT WASN'T). I just whisked it back into a powder and let it sit for another day and a half and it was good to go, NO MORE STICKING.

NOW FOR A BIG FINISH.

For my first try with homemade dish detergent I was doing the 1/2 cup vinegar mixed with three drops dish soap and just pouring it in the bottom of the washer with the 1TBS of detergent, like I said before this wasn't giving me the results I wanted. Thanks to research I now pour vinegar into the rinse agent dispenser and make sure it stays full. I still pour 1 TBS of the detergent in the bottom of the washer and then the washer releases the vinegar when it's doing it's thang.

SO HERE'S MY RESULT!

The little spoon is the old recipe, it's not TERRIBLE, but it's nothing compared to the nice shiny spoons I now have (Big spoon).