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A few days of Drewbie

Our life has changed... AJ displaying what we spend hours taking care of each week... dirty diapers. :) Thank goodness for Diaper Genies and weekly trash pickups!

Drewbie hanging out in his nursery after a morning of crying...

thank you for the gorgeous blanket, Janet and Henry!

We think he's a big baby... and then we see photos like this of him holding onto my Dad's hand for dear life and we realize he's still a little peanut... even if he's getting heavier by the day.

One of my absolute favorite photographs...

this captures perfectly what happens everyday when AJ comes home from work.



Mason Jars, Soap Dispensers and Short To Do Lists

I was reading one of my mom's back issues of Country Living and found their article on how to turn a mason jar into a soap dispenser. Last year my new year's resolution was to make a new recipe a week. This year I'd like to try to work on a craft a week... I've got a few things in the works but this is one of the (small) projects I'm most excited about.

I'm moving a little slower on my projects than I did pre-baby... It's hard to get used to the slower pace of getting things done... I'm still not finished with the chairs or painting the bedroom (uggg)... I'm now happy having a to-do list with five things on it and accomplishing three of the things I listed... no more lists that I can crank through anymore so I suppose my projects will have to be smaller like Mason Jar Soap Dispensers.

AJ keeps reminding me that my "job" during maternity leave is not to get projects done around the house... even though we've got a million of them, it's just to spend time with Drewbie (which I'm totally doing, don't worry!). When AJ comes home at the end of the day there isn't much I can tell him I've done besides feed Drew, change his diaper, cuddle with him and get a few things done while he sleeps. Are there any other new moms who feel guilty for getting so little done while home on maternity leave or am I the only one?

Good-bye 1800s wallpaper... hello calm-ish bedroom.

We've been in this house almost a year and I decided it was high time to get rid of our wallpaper depicting scenes from the 1800s. You know how your bedroom is supposed to be the most restful room in your house? Ours may have been the least restful... and it's because this was all over the walls (and because of the gross teal carpet on the floor):

So I got some paint from Restoration Hardware, Eucalyptus, to match our bedding (from RH in Eucalyptus... although a darker shade). One coat has covered fabulously well, which I was hoping for because I wanted to surprise AJ before he came home from work. And yes, I couldn't find our paint sticks so I'm stirring with a broken broom handle.

I need to do some painting on the molding and trim area, but all the rolling is done! It's not going to look perfect because I'm painting over three to four layers of wallpaper but whatever... I do feel like I'm going crazy when I walk in the bedroom anymore...

I'll post photos of the bedroom completely redone with the new paint... I'm hoping to create this mirror to go over our bed.

On a different note, we bundled Drewbie out yesterday night to take him to Home Depot (his favorite store :)). He looked adorable in his 25 layers! We weren't able to find any tiles we loved for our front entryway even though we purchased samples of everything from marble to sheets of gray colored pebbles. It's hard to find something that looks great with our dark wood floors and with the marble countertops. We're not sure where we'll look next. Any suggestions?



That's all for now!

all in a day's work...



Yesterday afternoon was the time for projects! Drew was a champion sleeper (see bottom photo) and let us crank out some work on the master bedroom and the bathroom.... see tomorrow's post for more about that. After his four hour nap Drew snuggled with AJ (Drew is a cuddler and doesn't let us forget it) so I used that time to work on a quick project. The blind in our bathroom was hideous... it was disgusting and it would always go down at an angle and stay there so it looked like we lived in a tenement (my mother's favorite expression whenever something didn't look quite right at her house). I had one white curtain left over from single life so I decided to figure out a way to use it in the bathroom. I stuck five nails at the top of the molding and looped the curtain around it and then used some neat rope that I found at JoAnn's for another project to tie it back... I'm trying to work the beach theme with what I have. I don't think I'd ever do the one curtain look like this if I wasn't trying to spend zero dollars but necessity is the mother of invention!

Once the bathroom was slightly better looking we decided to give Drewbie a bath...



He was not a happy camper for his first bath in the tub... we
just kept the foam mat under him... and then here he is
slightly less unhappy in his little doggy bathrobe.

He gave us four straight hours to work on the
master bedroom today... (thank you, Krista,
for this adorable outfit!)

Wainscoting on a snowy day... and blogging one-handed...

This post is going to take me forever to write because I'm going at it one-handed... I've got a very fussy baby in my other arm who wants to be cuddled... ahhh my wonderful husband just took over the snuggling duty at just the perfect time.

At 5:30am when AJ got the call about school being cancelled there was a definite groan because its only January and he's already had three snow days... here's to teaching kids straight into July! I hate to say I was glad for his misfortune... but that did mean that he made some fabulous progress on the wainscoting in the kitchen! He had a great vision for what he wanted it to look like and mapped it out on the wall... you can't really tell in the photos but there are penciled in lines all over our kitchen walls for what it'll look like.

We'll go all the way around the kitchen and have the molding around the windows match... although we are waiting for slightly better weather to replace the windows since they will have to remove the entire frame and window and the house will be literally freezing if we do it now.

Sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to sand the kitchen table and the legs of the chairs and stain them a darker shade of the floor (we'll do the table in Jacobean stain) but that'll have to wait because I'm working on recovering chairs in the living room now... with much needed help from my mom. (see photo of gross looking, but very comfy, green chairs... I'm having a hard time uploading my photo of the slipcover I'm working on).



Kitchen Update: Our Backsplash

We just added a backsplash! It is a tin reproduction and really brings out the gray veining in the marble. We still have to finish the molding around the window and finish the tin at the top of the wall, but I couldn't resist posting!

The paperwhites that you see are the AJ's winter gardening project, he has them all over our downstairs.

Great CS Lewis quote... especially from someone who loves renovations...

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
Quote taken from Mere Christianity ... my favorite CS Lewis book

Dear Warren...

The day after Drew was born Warren and Danielle came into the hospital to visit. As we were sitting around talking Warren asked me how (or if) having a baby made me think about pregnancy differently. I didn’t want to answer right away because I’d only had my baby for about 30 hours at that point… so here is my attempt at answering the question, eight days later.


Warren-

The simple answer to your question is that I’d do pregnancy again. I’d go through the shock of finding out we were pregnant, the sickness, even if it were doubly bad, and the endless doctor’s reports and all the fear again in order for us to have Drew. We are in love… as evidenced by us telling him every five minutes how precious he is and how we can’t stop kissing his face. I’m pretty sure he’s going to have some kind of rash from AJ’s five o’clock shadow because he constantly kisses him. :)

The other day we found out that Eric Dokken’s sister had died from a very severe case of cerebral palsy. We watched the amazing video tribute he put together for her funeral and I sat there and cried and cried (it was a little embarrassing because we were in Panera) and as I looked at Drew I thought back to all the predictions the doctors gave us and how they were as dire as what Eric’s sister had to live with. And as I looked at sweet Drew I knew I’d take him in an instant even if he had a million disabilities.

Everyone told me, Warren, that my life would change the second I held him. It didn’t, and that made me scared. I loved him but it wasn’t this overwhelming feeling everyone talked about. It could have been because I was still sort of out of it from the c-section, I don’t know, but I do know that when I fed him for the first time that is when the overwhelming protective urge and love kicked in. I was the provider of food for this little guy, I was the person he knew best and AJ and I were the two people who would be solely responsible for him.

My biggest fear during pregnancy was that I would be a terrible mom, especially because I wasn't "ready". I worried about my inability to change a diaper without it falling off of Drew. I worried my klutziness would kick in while I was holding him and I’d drop him (this is still a reoccurring fear). I worried that nothing would come naturally. Growing up, Kim was the baby-sitter who has turned into the incredible first grader teacher. I was the one with the lawn mowing business who loved event planning (weird combo, I know). But here’s the thing I learned maybe about five seconds into feeding him for the first time. I’m not a terrible mom and I won’t be. I may have a lot to learn but I came from a house where I watched two fabulous parents raise me. Even if I’ve never had the desire to work with children for a living like AJ or Kim I know some great tips on how to raise a child just from growing up. And if I don’t know how to do something, I have no problem asking for help. Because this has been an overwhelming worry to me as I sat in the hospital bed I started to think of raising a child from an event planners perspective, not from the perspective of someone scared of messing up. I needed to think of raising Drew in terms of something I understood instead of looking at it through my fear and complete uncertainty of the future… But I think I’ll talk more about that in another post because I’m really hungry for some breakfast, AJ just made me a waffle with blueberries and cranberries that Tammy brought over. :)

Jen

Drew's Newborn Photos

All photos were taken by Morgan Roy Photography.