Happy Birthday to me ;)

Even if my birthday was almost a month ago, I'm still not going to waste an opportunity to share such adorable pictures of a little half naked baby helping her mama blow out birthday candles ;) no, no I am not!

This was good practice for when she has her very own birthday in *sniff sniff* 3 months! WAAAAA! I can't believe it.

We had my favorite meal evAR. Pot roast with mashed potatoes, peas and yellow cake with chocolate frosting. nomnomnom!

time marches on

Day after day I find myself thinking the same thoughts. Doing the same things. Making the same resolves (or is it resolutions?) For example:

thinking I should get up during nap time and clean my bedroom floor as the pile of clean and semi-clean laundry mounts higher and higher. Why don't I just fold it? Or put it away once folded? Why can I not just throw things away, why do they need to sit on my desk or on the counter unattended to for literally months until they are useless and then I feel justified getting rid of it.

Tomorrow I will clean this room. I will sweep this floor. I will start brushing the baby's (now 4!) teeth.

Amidst all this, I get mentally constipated thinking there is something more important I should be doing. And that is watching my baby grow up. Sometimes I feel like a lazy oaf, because I honestly prefer sitting with her or holding her and watching her learn and grow and helping her along the way than doing anything "important." Because in my mind, doing those things is more important than all the other things.

I still kick myself though. I want to balance my life and not have regrets. But the truth is, what will I regret more? Never really having a clean bedroom, or not being able to remember my baby at 8 months 4 weeks and 1 day old.

Every night when I nurse her before bed I get emotional. Like literally. No, I'm not mentally unstable, I don't need psychiatric help... err, well, let's not go there ;) But seriously, I look at her hair and how it has grown. How it has lightened. How her head is so much bigger. And she is so long. But yet, she is still a baby. My baby. I cannot get time back... it is impossible. And anticipating another time is a waste of time. The only thing that makes sense is to enjoy every.single.second. Take it all in.

I never quite finish all my projects. You might come in my house and find some very friendly dust bunnies (they are our favorite pets). The windows I'm afraid have never been cleaned and I don't often make my bed. But I'm ok with that because time marches on, and I refuse to live with regrets.

Instagram phone dump 4

Too many pictures, too little time! Lately that's how I feel. Well who am I kidding, I always feel that way!
It's a good thing I have my camera phone, because if I didn't I really wouldn't take many pictures. Thankfully it's always on hand and takes relatively good photos in good light... and regardless of the quality, at the end of the day, I'd rather have a blurry/grainy/dark picture than no picture at all ;)

This was taken on one of our morning walks... it's pretty exhausting getting out in the morning an all, ya know, right after you've just slept all night ;)

A few weeks ago Alicia and Jacob came for an overnight visit. Just like old times... except not. Because now there are babies. Hehehe :)Oh, and a husband. HA! She went to the dentist the next morning and Eliza and Jacob had playtime together. Which involved watching Baby Neptune since they were both crying at the same time and that was the way I was able to get them to stop. What would I ever do with twins?!?! Jacob and Eliza played together quite nicely... meaning they mainly stayed out of the others way but if one happened to interfere with the other there may have been a look or two passed between them saying, "um, I don't know who you are or why you're here, but this is my toy and I am playing right now, so uhhh, move along please." ;) All that to say that they pretty much just did their own thing with little regard for the other :)

For some reason Eliza really loved the show So You Think You Can Dance this year. She would watch as attentively as she watches her Baby Einstein videos, which is *ahem* very attentively. Here she is watching the season finale.

Food is a continuing adventure here! This little girl loves her food. She is almost always happy to eat whatever I put in front of her... unless it is pea soup. Which, I have to say I don't really blame her. I think it's just meh, ya know, good if cooked right, but I did a bad job on this batch of pea soup. But she has been eating more and more chunky solid food. In fact, earlier this evening she ate more than half a raw peach! I peeled the skin off and she took bite after bite of it, I was blown away at how much she packed away. Keep in mind, she did this with the peach after her normal portion of dinner as well as a quarter of an avocado... LOL She is constantly eating new things and learning how to feed herself better and better. Here she is eating stinkastoo casserole that Daddy is feeding her as well as some plums :)

We were going on morning walks quite regularly for a couple weeks ;) This one pretty chilly. It's getting cold here! Luckily we have ways of keeping a baby stinkastoo nice and cozy ;)

My friend Carrie said that she loved when her daughter became more independent in the bathtub she would use bathtime to clean the bathroom. What a good idea! So I have started doing just that :)

Eliza's love for reading continues. She absolutely loves to sit and read, looking at the pictures, turning the pages :) One of our favorite places to spend Sunday afternoon is at Grandma's house... warm by the fire reading stories... ahh, a little baby stinkastoo life ;)

Early on, Eliza showed us that she preferred to have her face buried when snuggling. I am glad that she still does this with me sometimes ;)

A beautiful dahlia from my Dad's garden!

As I've mentioned before, emptying baskets is one of Eliza's favorite things to do :) Laundry baskets are no exception to this rule. But I have a feeling that if she is old enough to stuff her own diapers, it may be more than time to potty train ;)

When she was a tiny baby I would put her on the couch for naps often, now she almost always sleeps in her crib. The only time I don't put her in the crib is if I don't want her to be settling in for a long nap, so when she just couldn't stay awake any longer this one morning, I laid her on the couch and then couldn't help but pull the other pictures together for comparison :)

I came home one night to my baby girl all tucked away into bed :) I just love to see her so happy and content in there, makes me happy too.

Again, another sleeping picture. I just can't help it! She's so gosh darn cute when she sleeps! The hilarious part about this though is that when she gets sleepy, she will find something to hold onto (if her elephant Eleanor is around, she will snuggle that, but if not any random object will do) and she will roll kinda on her side and clutch said object close to her face and make grunting noises... like she's making a surprise, but she isn't. And then all of a sudden, before you know it, she's laying there asleep. It's the most adorable thing ever. And hilarious the toys that she snuggles to sleep sometimes ;)

One day we went to PetSmart to visit the doggies and kitties. The doggies all play in a room together behind a big wall of plexiglass so everyone can see in. Eliza just thought that was the bees knees. Seriously, she was shrieking for joy at the sight of so many friendly pups! Then we went to see the kitties, and she was so happy to find a kitty tha couldn't run away from her ;) She was reaching out and petting the glass and one little kitten in particular was rather fond of Eliza and patted the glass right back. So sweet!

You might remember my fall decorating win from a few weeks ago. Suffice it to say, this is the fall decorating fail version of that project. :-/ I was sad :(

 

green for my smoothies

Well, green smoothies to be precise. That's what this post is about. Why drink a green smoothie? Well, there are a ton of health benefits to adding a handful of fresh spinach to your diet. And what easier way to do it than in a smoothie? Just in case you ever wondered, spinach is a significant source of fiber which aids in digestion, prevents constipation (tmi i know!), maintains low blood sugar and helps curb overeating! (probably because noone really wants to eat too much spinach ;)

I've been adding spinach to smoothies for a couple of years now and have constantly run into the problem of keeping the spinach fresh. It stays for about a week before looking kinda wilted, but when I'm really the only person eating it, well, that's a lot of spinach to eat in 1 week ;)

I've gotten different kinds over time, but the Wegmans organic club pack is the best as far as I'm concerned. Lasts the longest and is the best value. Plus, it's organic!



So what made me think to do this is making Eliza's baby food. I add spinach to her meals daily and I did it by blending fresh spinach in the food processor with breastmilk and froze it in ice cube trays but only filled them a little bit. Because once the spinach is broken down it is so dense, you don't need much.

Once I realized I could do the same thing for my own food it was like DUH! Why haven't you done this sooner??? :) I did 2 things differently than her food. I used rice milk and I made bigger cubes (because I'm bigger, ya know ;)



I keep the vanilla kind on hand for smoothies as well as the original coconut milk. I threw a bunch of spinach in the food processor and added the milk and blended away.



I fit almost the entire 11oz container of spinach in the smaller bowl part of my food processor. I could have added it all, but i saved some out for a quesadilla ;) nomnomnom

Then I spooned it into the ice cube trays and froze it to save for later!



The rest of the smoothie situation is as follows (aka what I put in my smoothies!)
1C vanilla rice milk

1/4-1/2C original coconut milk

about 1/2-3/4C frozen desired fruit
1/4-1/2 frozen banana
1 cube spinach (or a big handful fresh)

Blend in a blender and then enjoy :) I find these refreshing and energy boosting. I will get into a rut where I have one for breakfast every day, but then I switch out and go to cereal for awhile. Depends on the mood really. But if I am having a day where all I want to do is eat chocolate chips, well, this is what I *should* do instead ;)

Bears

It wasn't long after I met Steve that I found out marrying him meant adopting the Bears. Even Bears that did not exist yet. You see, Steve and his family have an affinity for all animals stuffed. The kind with lots of fluff and hugs. It may seem silly to some (though I think those who think it is silly might need to relax a little) but we just love our Bears.

Right now, at our house we have two special Bears. Below you see Coconut on the left and Roary on the right. Coconut is officially Eliza's that we made for her before she was born, and Roary is Steve's who I made on our first Valentine's Day.



Although Coconut officially belongs to Eliza, she likes to sleep with Steve and me. She often finds our way into our room and consequently into our bed... and when Coconut gets in, so does Roary. We don't mind though. They're good company and require minimal care and take up only a small amount of space ;)

Well, the point of telling all this is to remember an incident the other night. A night that the Bears were sleeping with us again. It was around 2am when I woke to see Steve pulling Coconut out from deep within the covers. She had worked her way down there since it's warmer you know. I said sleepily that she was trying to attack him, and in his drowsy state he replied, "no, she just wanted to snuggle more."

The next morning, as I recalled this, I realized that we are truly and completely out of control. We may have a serious problem on our hands with these Bears ;)