Happy Birthday to Me!

Do you have a song? A song, that to you, or other’s is just YOU? I do.

A long time ago, I found a group called Gaelic Storm {they were the band that played in the movie Titanic, the whole below deck scene with Rose dancing and doing her ballet moves} and loved them ever since.

I quickly discovered a song of their’s that I loved…that was just…ME!
Pina Colada in a Pint Glass!

So why do I love this song? Why is it me?

It’s just a simple girl looking for the simple pleasures in life, while working hard to pay for her dream. It’s my absolute favoritest song, because it is fun! It’s Irish, it’s a pina colada, it’s a pint glass, it’s a beach, and I love it! There’s no pretention, no high-falutin’ ideas. It’s just fun…good old fashioned, girl next door, fun.

Why am I sharing this, today? Because it’s my birthday, and quite frankly the idea of a pina colada in a pint glass sitting on milk white sand and looking at gin-clear water sounds like absolute perfection!

What’s your song?

One Year Later

A year ago this past weekend we moved back home, after being gone for almost 4 months, during renovations. I remember how good it was to be HOME, there truly is no place like it, but I hadn’t quite remembered everything, until my TimeHop showed up this morning with this POST…where I shared about my tears shed over a children’s book.

This past year has been busy…we accomplished a lot, but not nearly as much as I had hoped {there is this unfortunate reality of money, which becomes a particular nuisance when it involves MAJOR renovations….it doesn’t last as long or go as far as one thinks it should}.

What did we accomplish this year?

We finished our kitchen {for the most part—still some paint touch ups to do}

We finished our mudroom {for the most part—still have to nail the moldings in place}

We finished the girls’ room {but it’s different even now}

and we had a baby {that last one kind of prevented me from getting more stuff done around here and probably will continue to do so, but that’s ok…babies don’t keep!}

I’d love to say that this year we’ll get everything finished, but I know better. I do hope that we at least finish he myriad of little projects that are around here: Grass in the yard, the bathroom and the bedroom finished {they literally need paint touch ups and décor}, the decks painted {we’ve had the paint for a year} and a few other little things. It’d be really great if the basement was finished and the front porch done, but we’ll see.

One Month Old

I hate this…I hate that he’s already a month old! It’s gone so quickly, even when you do slow down, let the house go, and enjoy it. It’s just too fleeting. How has this month been, besides SHORT: It’s been really good. Peter is an exceptionally easy baby…he sleeps well, eats well and is just generally happy all around.

I was pretty much up and around the next day after Peter was born. Matt was home for the day and that was a big help. I was able to spend a lot of time just resting in bed, nursing, and chilling out. Matt had to go back to work the next day, but my mom was around pretty much every day 7am-7pm, so that I could rest and then so I had help getting back into the swing of things.

Nursing was going really well. My milk came in with very little discomfort, my nipples weren’t getting overly sore from his nursing, but he was pretty much attached 24/7…which was ok, forced me to take it easy and rest. However, by the time he was two weeks old I knew something was wrong.

He was nowhere near as chunky as when he was born. I broke out the kitchen scale and he was down to 8lbs on the nose, from his birth weight of 9lbs 4 ounces. He wasn’t dehydrated or anything…he had lots of wet diapers, but hadn’t pooped in over a week. Bottom line, there’s just not enough fat in my milk for him to gain weight. It was a hard day.

I cried. I was disappointed. I felt like I had betrayed Peter. I really was hoping the breastfeeding was going to work this time…it was working! It was going so well and I was quite literally reveling in my bodies ability to completely sustain this little baby, until it didn’t.

One of the things with breastfeeding after a reduction is the unknown: Unless I pump I don’t know how much milk Peter gets from me. My midwife and I were hopeful that it would all come together this time, for at least a month or two. We had done more research, were finding hopefully information that the more pregnancies you had that the ducts regenerated and breastfeeding became more successful with each attempt, but not this time.

The other difficulty was that Peter developed a pretty nasty case of thrush, that he shared with me. His mouth was to the point that he did not want to nurse because it hurt his poor little tongue too much. Given both of these issues we began pumping, bottle feeding, and supplementing.

He weighed in at 9lbs 11.9 ounces yesterday, which was fantastic! He was up 17 ounces from his appointment 10 days earlier, a vast improve from the 8lbs he was down to. Praise the Lord!

In this family we have a tradition….The Incredible Shrinking Bunny! Each of the kids have had their pictures taken with this bunny to mark how much they’ve grown. Unfortunately, none of the kids have their picture with the bunny at birth…no matter how hard I tried. {You can find the rest of the kids 4 Week/One Month posts HERE and HERE}.

And some other fun pictures from the past month…

I hashtag Peter’s pictures on Instagram with #SweetPicklePeter

The Art of American Whiskey {a Review}

A long while ago, I decided I had time to get a few more book reviews done before the baby was born…and then they didn’t happen. Well at least this one didn’t happen, because, you see, I showed Matt the book and it kind of disappeared. He and my dad were pouring over the pages of it. We’re kind of in the process of a new business venture, for which this book was extremely relevant; designing and creating our own labels for our own adult beverage {as we call them in our house}. 

The pictures in this book are gorgeous!  The history behind the different labels and companies, their graphics and their recipes were all spectacular! I particularly loved the old photographs of different distilleries and from Prohibition. There are so many different labels in this book, companies I’ve never heard of, and from a design standpoint it is incredible to see what other distillers have done over the last few hundred years!

If you know anyone who is at all interested in whiskey or in commercial graphic design, this is a serious thrill of a book to sit down with. It even has a few recipes to enjoy while you peruse!

**I received this book for free from Waterbrook Multnomah in exchange for my honest review. The opinions expressed here are solely my own. You can read my entire disclosure policy here. You can find this book for sale on Amazon.com.