Menu for the week

Honestly I don't do a daily menu but more so make sure I have about 5 dinners planned out for the week.
This is what I picked this week.
1. Southern Cobb Salad
2. Potato Cobb Salad - minus the bacon for meatless Friday
3. Strawberry Spinach Salad
4. Cucumber and Tomato Ranch Pasta Salad
5. Summer Tortellini Salad

Can you tell there is a theme that I am not turning on my oven this week?  90+ with no AC means minimal cooking and thus we get a week of salads. Should be yummy nonetheless.

Happy Anniversary

Ah what a 4 years its been. Praying for lifelong continued happiness.  Its been a wild ride thus far, and I bet it will just get crazier and sweeter.  Here's to continuing to help my husband get to heaven for the rest of our lives, and now our borrowed kiddos from God too.  Cheers.  :)

Overnight get away

So as means of having an overnight get away from Ben we decided to utilize Living Social and go to a B&B nearby for half price.  It was fun.  The place was called the Hillbrook Inn and looked like this from the front entrance.

Some rich guy brought over part of a castle from England to make his mansion and later it became an Inn and country club. Me being an architecture closet fan, loved the years behind this place.  The room we had was very nice, and honestly we were probably one of 2 guests the place had that weekend.  A lot of their efforts go into weddings/receptions that they seem to hold every weekend.  So we had some fun exploring the grounds and went into the town of Chagrin Falls to eat that night.  Apparently my appetite came back recently in this pregnancy 'cause food suddenly tastes good again.  I probably still like strange stuff, but the fact that I can eat and enjoy it is awesome.  So thus dinner was good and dessert was good. The next morning we found the room of breakfastland and ate oatmeal, granola, muffins and fruit.  The one thing about this place because they weren't run like a hotel is that if you wanted to know something you had to ask, otherwise you were left to explore on your own.  We probably did split the asking and exploring 50/50.  

We were sad we forgot our tennis stuff because they had 5 nice courts there, but we did remember to bring stuff to swim, and swim we did.  It was fun to just relax the two of us and have fun playing water games with Keith pretending to be Solid Snake and me attacking him with a water gun/kick board.  

Afterwards, we were set to have lunch at the place as part of our Living Social deal.  So we asked about lunch and they set us up our own private table as we said we were like the only non-wedding folks there, so it was kinda like we lived in our own little world.  The food was simple but good and filling.  

So after lunch we went to pick up Ben and well as much as I missed him, I'm not so sure he missed me or rather us.  He was just playing away at his grandparents without a care in the world and apparently was really good for them the whole time.  I guess he's becoming less needy, and maybe its the attachment parenting thing that makes him trusting of a few others besides me.  I dunno, all I know is that God made us be able to have a successful night away and a toddler that was ready to be away from his parents.  Thanks :)

Thrown together

1. No-Poo Deal - So I have been attempting the no shampoo way of washing your hair, subbing shampoo and conditioner for baking soda and a apple cider vinegar solution.  So far I have little complaints, only thing is that I am bad at remembering to put the baking soda in my hair before getting in the shower.  Other than that my hair feels way less itchy.  I really like the vinegar as conditioner, it just seems to work really well with my curly thick hair.  Though I noticed that a morning shower on a like 99% humidity day still makes my hair look like a frizz ball.  Anyway, because its going well, I am definitely going to continue this.


2. Down-syndrome babies - I read a blog on Catholic Mom today that said that 5,000 babies are born with down-syndrome a year in the USA, and that since 90% of down-syndrome babies are aborted, this means we are missing 45,000 babies.  It's just sad. So many people that I have heard from who have raised a down-syndrome child have said that it has been such a blessing.  I don't have any first hand experience, but I could see why as I remember the one girl that had down-syndrome that played field hockey with me in middle school.  That girl was so sweet and so determined in everything she did.  So the author goes more into it, but I just wanted to mention it and say it was worth the read.


3. My kids are borrowed from God - My good friend sent me a forwarded saying or quote by Roy Lessin what struck me was this:


"Your children are precious to Me. Even more precious than they are to you. I have entrusted them to your care to raise for me. What you invest in them is an offering to me."

I love how its a reminder that my kids are really God's kids and its so much bigger than me, but at the same time what I do actually counts. It affirms my decision to be at home because I can and that is what God wants me to do, because I get to invest in my kiddos more this way and to me this is important. 

4. Chaos and embracing it - Speaking of kiddos, come October, things will be a little chaotic with a newborn and a 19mo old, but I am going to try my best to embrace the chaos.  It's taken a little while to own up to it all, but I think its gonna work out alright.  Embrace the chaos, right?

10 Updates

1. I am now 22 weeks pregnant, which seems kinda crazy as to how in the world did I get to this point already but I am thankful its been a pretty smooth pregnancy.  Definitely much harder finding food I like and want to eat but other than that I think its been okay.

2. On a side note I finally feel like I need to slow down a tad in what I attempt to do each day.  My hip expansion has kicked in this week.

3. Ben I think is going thru a growth spurt this week, or he's just catching up on the missed sleep over the weekend. He sleeps thru the night when he goes down, its just getting him down that is sometimes the hard part.

4. Randomly,  today we got a free fire truck push walker at a garage sale.  I'm amazed at the things a cute kid gets you.  Yesterday it was a free glass of kool-aid.  Craziness.

5. I actually have started sewing some of my projects again.  I still have two major ones, fixing a dress to fit and a shirt to fit.  Both that are way too big in the shoulders.  Even though I'm tall I've got a bony little upper body minus the baby sticking out out front.  Legs on the other hand, well you don't play soccer and run cross country for upteen years without acquiring some good muscle on those.

6. I am attempting a small veggie garden this year.  All in pots because I didn't know where to start a garden in my yard, so I figured I had a bunch of pots so I might as well use them. I am attempting to grow tomatoes, red and green peppers and zucchini.  I still have herbs as well and am hoping they continue to thrive like they did last year.

7. We signed up for the summer reading challenge for Ben.  While we read everyday, I am bad at logging the time.  So I have to estimate it all.  And also they want like one title of the books you read for every half hour which is impossible for a toddler and board books.

8. So we got back the results of Ben's lead test and they were double of what they want them to be so both Keith and I have been going into a cleaning frenzy and I have made Ben now actually consume his iron vitamin and so far if you put anything in his milk he will drink it.  Maybe I should make him smoothies and have him eat his fruits and veggies this way too.  I don't give him juice because most of the time he spits it back out and really juice is not that good for you, to me its like drinking soda with a little bit of vitamin C.  So anyway we hope that our house will be lead paint free or controlled at least and we will get that kid's lead levels back to normal by 18 months.

9. I have I told you how much I love having a produce store on the corner of my neighborhood.   It helps that the people that run it are super sweet too.  They have good prices and try to get local stuff as much as possible too.  A good deal all around.

10. I started selling books on amazon.  So far I've sold 2 out of the 18 I put online.  I still have a good 20 more to add to it, so I should probably get on that so I can sell more and declutter my bookshelf.

Take care all!  Hopefully I will post again at a better rate than I have been.

Weaning the first

First a disclosure, for those of you of the male type who don't like reading about mommy things, well then this isn't the post for you.  On the other hand if you like hearing about mommy things then keep reading.

So weaning.  Wow.  First of all I want to say when I approached the topic I was scared of doing it.  I thought it was going to be super hard and I was going to have tantrums and the such.  Maybe my baby was ahead of his game but really I thank God for helping us through it all.  Because I didn't know how it was gonna all go down and it ended up being way easier than I thought it would be.  Jordana over at Curmudgeonry gave me some excellent advice as a mom who had been through it more than once. And if I didn't thank you before, I will now.  Thank-you, you helped a lot.

I asked advice on this topic in February but didn't actually start the process till March.  I tried in early February to night wean and man did we have tantrums.  But a few weeks later the same thing was tried again and there was success.  It was just odd.  Part of philosophy was that I wasn't going to force it on him to a point.  I wanted there to be a more natural component to the weaning and oddly there was throughout the whole bit of it.  So the second time we tried night weaning it was a success and so then we were just down to 4 nursing sessions a day.  I decided that at nighttime I would keep a sippy cup of water on the night stand for him, and this has saved a bit of screaming sessions from being endless.  I think the kid just gets thirsty sometimes cause he's a heavy drooler.  Apparently this is a family trait from my side of the family, go figure.  Not something that is very elegant for a girl to have as a family trait.

Around the same time Ben was transitioning from 2 to 1 naps a day, and since for him association of nursing with sleep helped us cut down the 4 feedings to 3 in a pretty easy manner.  There was a week in there that he caught a nasty cold and so I let him go back up to 4 feedings because it seemed like he needed it but then when all was well again he didn't object to the 3 feedings.

After this I started noticing that he would pass out in the car on the way home from things like morning storytime at the library and such.  Normally he would wake up and I would nurse him to get him back to sleep.  Well I started feeding him lunch of big people food prior to the car ride home and it worked to keep him asleep and soon we were down to just 2 nursing sessions a day.

The last two nursing sessions were the killer ones to me, just because to me they were the key to having this kid sleep 12 hours at night.  We would nurse before bed to ensure a full belly for good sleeping, and then again at like 6am to give me an extra hour or two of sleep out of him.  So maybe I was a little bit selfish about not wanting these to go away, but who can blame me I am and was pregnant so sleep is precious to me.

So of the last two nursing times, I first chose the before bedtime feeding thinking I could sub out a bottle of milk for breastmilk.  Unfortunately, Ben wouldn't have it.  He would drink the milk fine, but he wanted to nurse too, probably more for comfort but nonetheless he wasn't ready to give that time up.  So I waited a few days, and decided well maybe, just maybe I can get him back to sleep in the morning without nursing him.  Well it worked and then not really.  I think having the water nearby helped, mainly because sometimes he really was thirsty from too much drool, but overall the kid does rise earlier.  But what helped me to continue to get my sleep was my awesome husband.  Who has to get up for work at an earlier hour than I like to get up, so we decided he could take care of Ben for an hour or 2 before work and I could get my precious pregnant lady sleep.  And man am I so thankful for him and his sacrifice and help here.  I don't think I would make it through the day without this extra sleep sometimes.

So finishing this out, the last nursing session went on for a few more weeks, until I noticed a difference in the way Ben was behaving towards it.  He no longer was nursing to sleep he was nursing in like what some would consider a snacking manner and then kicking his way to sleep.  So I just decided that it seemed like he was ready, so I stopped one night and made my husband put him to sleep to make sure he would know nursing wasn't an option that night.  And the first night it didn't work, but the second night it did.  And then the 3rd night due to circumstance I had to put him to bed again and we just cuddled and rocked it out and there wasn't any fight.  So as weird as it was to me I was done nursing. It was 2 months ahead of the deadline I gave myself, and I didn't have any pain from stopping so I guess the kiddo was weaning himself in the process and probably the pregnancy hormones were helping limit the milk.  Thankfully he is still growing well, he apparently gained 1.5 lbs in 2 months(the weaning months) so I know he's still getting food, just from other sources than me.

So that's my first story with weaning.  It was interesting to live it but I'm glad through it all it worked out.  To me it just evidence that if you are persistent about your prayer, God does listen!

blogging rut

I have started a few posts but didn't know how to finish them without sounding like an idiot, so, thus, I didn't.  So to end the lull, I will do a picture post.  Here's what Ben and I have been up to the last few weeks.

We've been having fun playing in parks.

Hanging out at the zoo.

And playing in the sand box/table.