Archives for August 2017

Nursery

August 7, 2017 By 1 Comment

Well everyone, tomorrow is the day that baby girl arrives! And I promised you all a nursery update, so here it is… you can spend your time reading this while you anxiously await her arrival… no, just me (and of course my family!) anxiously awaiting her arrival? I’m sure I’ll post a pic to the Facebook page sometime in the next few days, but for probably the next week (at least) I’ll be MIA, recovering from the c-section and soaking up every minute with a precious newborn.  So in the meantime, enjoy the nursery!

We decided to go with a turquoise-y teal/navy theme for this room.  It mostly started when my mom found this super cute mini crib on clearance in a beautiful turquoise color. And from there, the rest of the room sort of evolved.

Hobby Lobby has a whole bunch of super cute artwork right now, so all three of these pictures above the crib were snagged from there, and a few of them even at 50% off!

We decided to go with the mini crib because Taylor is still sleeping well in her crib and shhhhh… she doesn’t know she is perfectly capable of climbing out. And with so many other changes in her life, we aren’t wanting to throw too many other life changes at her.  BUT, I think by the time new baby girl is too big for this crib, Taylor will have figured that out and will be in a big girl bed and we can move her crib into here.

We debated whether or not to buy a fancy glider or rocker for her room, but finally decided that the OLD la-z-boy recliner in our basement would match, is CRAZY comfortable and since I would be spending a lot of hours in the middle of the night hanging out nursing here, we decided to go with comfort over beauty.  And I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy with my decision in 6 months when baby girl is still waking up for 2am feedings. I’m still looking for a small table to put next to it, and maybe a lamp, but I love the little picture I framed above it.  Its a menu from a tea room in St. Louis that my grandmother had saved, presumably because she thought the menu was so cute.  I loved that it fit the colors of baby girl’s room, and brings in that touch of her that I would have missed without it.  It still makes me sad that she won’t get to meet this baby girl, because she loved Taylor and getting to spend time with Taylor so much.

The blackout curtains were a Target find– I love the navy and white stripe and the pop of color it brings to that end of the room.  Especially since I know that they will almost never be opened like this… and I’ll have to live with closed off curtains most of the time, because lets face it, open windows are not conducive to infant sleep… and everybody loves a sleeping infant.

The dresser was what we call an ‘investment’ piece.  We decided to take the plunge and spend the money on a nicer dresser from Pottery Barn Kids. It is the Elliot Extra Wide in Charcoal if you were looking for something similar.  We are pleased with the quality and size.  It looks great in there! In Taylor’s nursery, I bought a hand me down dresser in Waco one weekend and repainted it when I wanted it white and not cream. Its a beautiful dresser, and I still LOVE the look of it, but some of the drawers are not very easy to open and close, and at least one of them is mostly beyond repair.  So we decided for this room we wanted one that at least had functioning drawers.

The mirror is an OLD Ikea mirror that we have had for YEEEEEARS- like maybe 12 or 13?  My mom had the brilliant idea to paint the face of it Navy to match the room and I LOVE the way it turned out! She just taped around the edges and spray painted it Navy. It looks perfect above the gray dresser and really ties in all the pieces in the room.

And that’s where baby girl will live for the foreseeable future! I’m sure as she gets older, the room will evolve a bit, but I love the way this turned out.  I love that it is very different than Taylor’s first room was, and that she will have a space that is very much her own! Although I am sure that their shared Jack and Jill bathroom will be the source of many shenanigans over the years, I love that they will be connected there as well!

Pray for us as this new phase of life begins!

Filed Under: Baby, Nursery

A New Playroom

August 3, 2017 By 1 Comment

I know I still owe y’all a nursery update! And I will post one, I promise… I’m just waiting to finish one more thing up. In the meantime, I have a cute little update we did to our workout room.  Since the husband works out mostly at work or at the gym, and I haven’t been working out (at all) lately, our workout room in the basement has gone mostly under-utilized.  As we were talking about what sorts of changes we wanted to do to the house before new baby arrived, we decided our house would be best used if we had a playroom for Taylor and eventually new baby and most importantly, the growing collection of toys we have piling up at our house.  So we decided to turn this:

Into a young girl heaven:

The floor in the room is a rubber gym mat type floor that the previous owner had installed, but we wanted something soft and cushy for the girls to play on, so earlier this spring I started searching for a good area rug for their playroom.  And silly me… I checked Land of Nod (you know… just for inspiration) and fell in LOVE with this candy dot rug.  And yes, I am well aware that $800 dollars is entirely too much to pay for a rug that is going to go in a play room and probably have crayon and goldfish crammed into its tiny little fibers. So I didn’t buy it. And I kept looking. And I couldn’t find anything else that I loved… so I talked my mom (bless her!) into buying half of it for me for my birthday.  And it is perfection.  And we had a 15% off coupon with free shipping–so yay!

 

My grandfather built two sets of those tables and chairs for my mom and her sisters when they were little girls and I had one set stripped down (eek… they had lead paint on them and I didn’t really want Taylor ingesting any lead paint). Land of Nod had a picture in one of their catalogs of the rug with similar color table and chairs, so I can’t take credit for that inspiration, but I LOVE how cute and fun it turned out! I have to give a huge shout out to my mom and my husband who painted those for me, since I try to stay away from spray paint and similar things while pregnant.

The play kitchen is the Chelsea All In One kitchen from Pottery Barn Kids and Taylor loves it.  She is always getting out her food and pots and pans, etc. and to bring you strange concoctions like a tomato and chocolate chip cookie sandwich.

We definitely needed some adult seating in there- and in these pictures I have put our Pier 1 Director’s Chairs in black that I have had FOREVER with some green covers on them (long story… but I’ve also had the green covers that I bought forever ago in the garage and it turned out they looked cute in this room!).  HOWEVER, since I took these photos last week, we have put a love seat that my aunt wasn’t using anymore in there for some more comfy seating, but I’m trying to decide whether or not to recover it!

Notice that I didn’t show you the other half of the room in the picture above… that is because this room has reverted back to its normal state of TOTAL DISASTER ZONE. And that is the whole point of the room, so I’m just going to leave it that way.  And if I never have to reassemble the 16 piece cupcake set that Taylor loves to dump over? Ladies and Gentleman, that is what we call success.

I also had some curtains that I had purchased for the living room at our house in Texas (but had never gotten around to hanging) that were simple white curtains, so I decided to sew some fun trim on the edges to give it a little pop of color, and I LOVE the way they turned out! This was super simple to do, I just picked up some of the ball trim at JoAnns and gave it a zig zag stitch along the edge to secure it to the curtains.

Such a fun little update to the house, and I am super happy to have a place for all of Taylor’s toys to live. Although, that does mean that new baby doesn’t get the opportunity to do planks with dad like Taylor did:

 

Filed Under: Decorating, Playroom

Week 38 Recap

August 1, 2017 By 2 Comments

Alright y’all, this will be the final weekly recap, because next week at this time, baby girl will be here! That’s right, we have a c-section scheduled for next Tuesday morning (8/8).

This has been a great, quiet week.  The calm before the storm.  Reese, Taylor and I had a great weekend of just hanging around the house, playing with toys and in our playroom–which I should have an update post for you later this week!  We also took advantage of the slightly cooler weather and went to the neighborhood pool and the local YMCA water park over the weekend.  Taylor pretty much spends the whole time at the water park people watching instead of playing in the water, but they have fun fountains and a fun toddler splash area, so it was a good distraction out of the house.

We got down all of the baby items that we had been storing in the basement–like the rock n’ play and playmat and bouncer for baby girl to use. And just generally relaxed since we won’t have much time to do that after she comes! I’ve had my hospital bag packed since I started having contractions… so I feel like I have everything that I could have ready, ready!

Speaking of contractions, I’ve been having them pretty much non-stop for two weeks now, which is CRAZY, but since they aren’t very strong and not very close together, Doctor says they are normal and just to live with them! I’ve had 2 doctor’s appointments since they started and haven’t made enough progress for her to think anything will interfere with our regularly scheduled c-section.  I went back and forth for a while about whether or not to have a scheduled c-section with this baby (If you weren’t around back then… or just want to re-read it, here is Taylor’s birth story and why I had a C-Section last time).  Anyway, after long convos with my doctor, we decided that probably a c-section was the best course of action this time for a few reasons: 1. My body had a hard time with c-section recovery last time and we thought maybe not having to go through hours and hours of labor first would help it have a better recovery time this time.  2. VBACs can have complications, and after talking about why I didn’t progress last time, she wasn’t convinced that it would be any different this time. So, to each their own about whether or not to do a VBAC or C-section, but this seemed like the safest and best option for us! So bright and early next Tuesday–exactly 39 weeks, I’ll check into the hospital to meet baby girl! (That is unless she has other plans between now and then).

 

So here’s your update:

Baby’s Size: Yep, still no idea–guess we will be surprised! She feels about the same as Taylor did–so I’m guessing right around 7ish lbs since she will be a week earlier than Taylor.

Baby’s Progress: More temperature regulation, brain and lung development are the name of the game.  At our last sono they did tell me she had a lot of hair, so I expect that to be similar to Taylor as well!

Weight Gain: I’m up 2 more lbs from last week, so about 22 lbs gained.  There is just no describing how large you feel when you are literally weeks away from giving birth. Every movement is effort.

Sleep: I’m still getting some decent sleep, which at this point is much appreciated.  I’ve had a few nights where I’ve woken up with the contractions or having to use the bathroom a billion times, but overall… I’m still getting some sleep. I’m going to enjoy it while I can, since in a week and a half it will be a distant, distant memory.

 

Symptoms: I’m still rocking the serious back pain, I actually thought to myself a few days ago that I understood why people used walkers… they seem so useful when I need something to lean on.  Its usually the worst right when I get up from having been sedentary, and after my doctor appointment this week where I had to lay there for 20 minutes on one of those awful hard tables, I looked like a 100 year old woman trying to shuffle walk out of the appointment. Other than that I have some trouble breathing deeply and some pretty solid heartburn… all lovely things that 3rd trimester of pregnancy and sharing your body organ space with a 7ish lb baby will do to you.

But most days I feel as good as can be expected, and I’m mostly just trying to soak in as many of these moments as I can before we change over to a family of 4! PS… how cute are they doing laundry together?!? Although I am sure all you parents of toddler+ age children can attest to JUST HOW HELPFUL 2 year olds can be at laundry.

Filed Under: Pregnancy