Isn't it lucky?

We had amazing weather this weekend - temperature in the high 60s (Fahrenheit!), bright sunshine and dry. It was just enough to remind me why we live here and put up with 9 months of grey.

TJ took T to a birthday party yesterday - her first one where we don't know the parents. It seems like a sort of milestone. She had a great time, of course. While they were gone, BabyM and I headed over to our local outdoor mall to walk and shop. I wanted to find some cute outfits for the girls to wear for our family photos next week.

Cute matching tutus from naartjie.com

I got lucky and found these gorgeous blue tutu skirts on sale at Naartjie. Oddly, the only one they had left, in size XXXL (9 years) fits T just fine.  It's a little long, but the waist fits just right. Crazy. And I was able to find one for BabyM as well. I'm a sucker for little girls in tutus.  But not the super short ones - I definitely prefer the ones that can be worn as skirts.

I like having coordinating outfits for family photo shoots - not totally matching, but I like the girls to match, and TJ and I will both wear black shirts and jeans. I found a nice black shirt at Eddie Bauer, so I can see the end of the nursing-wear tunnel, finally.  BabyM eats a lot less frequently than she used to, so I can try to wear some normal shirts again.



Awesome necklace from anntaylor.com

We passed the Ann Taylor store on the way back to the car, and an item in the window display stopped me in my tracks. It was a  bold sparkly necklace with round clear stones edged in aqua metal. Very retro cool. I had to have it. I walked into the store, ready to pay dearly for it, and was thrilled to find out it was "only" $58, but even better, IT WAS ON SALE. 30% off, baby.

So it's now mine, and will also make an appearance in our photo shoot. I'm excited because the aqua matches the cute shirt I bought for T, so we'll be matching too!

Today TJ made us waffles for breakfast, I had some crafting time, he took a motorcycle ride, the girls napped at the same time for a whole hour, and we had a picnic in the park with some good friends.

This weekend really felt like an unexpected gift. (Insert sigh of contentment here.)

Project Life 2013: There's a Hole in My Craft Room

My craft room has a giant hole in the ceiling.  There's a leak and we need to figure out how/if we can fix it. Fortunately the water never came into the room itself, but it was collecting over the ceiling, making a lovely bulge that looked like impending disaster.  So we moved *all* of my stuff out of the room, and are working on figuring out where the water is coming from.

So for the next couple of weeks my craftiness will invade our kitchen. I put together this biweekly Project Life layout with very limited supplies. Since my printer is now in the garage, I had the photos printed at Bartells Drugs, a local chain. They offer a matte finish, which is very cool, but the photo has a tendency to "rub off" when it gets scraped by something. I learned that the hard way when using one of my old crappy paper trimmers.

As usual I had more photos than I could use, so the crafty bits are limited. I used one of the Seafoam Project Life kit cards for the week summary, and then noticed that the Echo Park Photo Freedom ampersand and 'you are my sunshine' cards matched really nicely, too, and that got me set on an aqua and yellow theme. And that gave me a fantastic excuse to go crazy with the super cute KI Memories 'smile' washi tape I got in one of my Studio Calico kits.

Feb 25 - Mar 10: Redmond outing and dance class

Feb 25 - Mar 10: New glasses, coloring eggs, sisters

Calendar closeup - tiny bling

I filled my supercute IKEA Raskog 3-shelf cart with my essential Project Life supplies so I can continue to work on my pages while my craft room is being fixed.

I've found a formula that works for me to keep the layouts looking cohesive:

• One type of alphabet stickers
• 1 or 2 washi tapes, glitter tape or ribbon (coordinating)
• Use same journaling pen for entire layout
• Adhesive gems, enamel dots, brads, *or* wood veneer (choose one)
• 1-2 patterned papers only (coordinating)
• Month card with days marked off
• Week card with dates and bullet point summary
• Stick to color scheme for *all* embellishments

This 2 week period also contained TJ's birthday but I didn't get any good photos of our birthday dinner at Zeek's Pizza, or him opening his presents.  (Sad!). 

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

I belong with you, you belong with me

So remember when I wrote wistfully about how cosleeping never worked with BabyT? Yeah, let's file that under "be careful what you wish for".

BabyM will not sleep in her crib. She will begrudgingly stay there quietly for 10 minutes since we bought her this flashy light up musical "soother" (which does not soothe!), but sleep she WILL NOT.

She's been sleeping in our bed for a few months now, aka most of her life since she's only 5 months old. I got over my paranoia about blankets and suffocation and baby being squished by one of us, in favor of more sleep. 

And it's true, we do get more sleep. I do not feel sleep-deprived, but the quality of the sleep I'm getting isn't great, so I need a LOT. And I'm a high-sleep-needs person to start with, so now it's even worse.  It seems as though BabyM is enjoying her proximity to The Milk, so she wakes a few times to nurse. On the rare occasion we've gotten her to sleep somewhere else (like the crib - once!) or when I go sleep elsewhere, she only wakes once.

So yeah, we'd love to get her to sleep in her crib at the end of our bed - just a few feet away, which to BabyM might as well be across the country.  I can't say I blame her - our memory foam mattress and fluffy duvet are very nice to sleep with.

She's training us well - anytime we invest some time and effort into getting her to sleep elsewhere, she falls asleep easily but then wakes every 20 minutes or so, requiring us to soothe her back to sleep. When we give up on this plan, and just take her back to our bed, she sleeps the next 7 or so hours straight. That's one smart baby.

Sleeping with her is very much like sleeping with Spike, our beagle (who, thankfully, is not allowed in our bed). We start out in our own space, but in the middle of the night, I find a little warm body snuggled up next to me, slowly pushing me over to the very edge of the bed. 

It's frustrating because I keep waking so often - I think I must be responding to some kind of change in her breathing, because I wake up right before she does most of the time. And as nice and cuddly as she is, I do like sleeping by myself, with no one *touching* me. 

But as they say, "the days are long but the years are short" and soon enough she won't want to sleep in our bed.  It makes sense that evolutionarily, babies probably like to stay with their mamas most of the time. And I know every time we try to "make" a baby do something, it never works, and just frustrates us as well as them.

So I'm admitting defeat. I don't want to make it harder on myself by doing some elaborate "sleep training" routine. We'll try something different when she's not sleeping well, or if we aren't getting enough sleep. But for now, I'm embracing my inner crunchy mama.

Wordless Wednesday: Published!

There's so much more that you need to work out

I keep composing blog posts in my head during the quiet times while nursing, showering, and driving but haven't been able to sit down and write them.

My daily life has been turned upside down by TJ's return to work.  Not in a bad way, but just in an "I need to get used to the new normal" way.  Before he started work, I literally had not spent more than 4 hours alone with the girls - just the time it took for TJ to get a good motorcycle ride in over the weekend, or have dinner with a friend.

Four hours is very different from an entire week, which is what I had when he had to go to the East Coast for his new job's orientation. It was a trial by fire, serendipitously aided by the arrival of my friend Di who just happened to be visiting that first weekend.  She helped us get in the groove by chatting with T while I was nursing M, or hanging out with M while I helped T get dressed.

Sadly, she had to leave on Sunday night, but we made it through the week.  By the end, I even felt like we had our routine DOWN. I got T to preschool on time every day that week with her lunch, everyone got a couple of baths and we slept ok.  We were in "survival mode", doing only what we needed to get through the day. Sometimes we all went to bed at 7:30pm.

When TJ returned from his trip, we had to figure out our routines again, this time with him. It was great having him around to handle bedtime and tag-team again when he was home, but there were new wrinkles, like the fact that he gets ready for work around 5:30 or 6am, and BabyM is a ridiculously light sleeper, so suddenly my day was starting then too.

But now we're 3 weeks into this new life and finding our way through it.  Once a week or so, I get to that magical state where I got everything done during the day that I was planning to do: basic chores, something fun outside the house with the girls, some exercise, an actual home cooked dinner, and maybe even a blog post or some crafty time.

The rest of the time, I'm still muddling through trying to figure out how to get the girls to nap in parallel rather than in series, how to keep the baby entertained for a few minutes while I shower, and how to convince the 3yo that her mere presence while I'm nursing the baby causes the baby to completely ignore me.

So by the end of the day, I'm worn out and way too tired to use that time to craft or blog. On the bright side I've been getting a reasonable amount of (crappy, baby-bedsharing) sleep, which makes me a better mama overall.

I think I'm going to have to switch my "me-time" activities to the early morning, which is painful for this night owl. We'll see. Every day is like a new (tiring) adventure.