One Blessed Boutique

It's finally up! After years of making baby things and giving them to family and friends as gifts, I have finally opened my own etsy shop. Feel free to check it out here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/OneBlessedBoutique 

I am nervous and excited at the same time. If you have any suggestions, just let me know!

Until then, here are some of the pictures of things I have ready to sell, and some projects I am planning on making also:

Which ones are your favorites? least favorites? Any feedback helps!

Hope ya know...

we had a hard time. There was a talk given not too long ago about how a family's stuggles and their perseverance. Everytime they struggled, they would pray to God, "Hope ya know, we had a hard time." In the past few months years, I've found myself saying that same phrase to God.

But happy day - Jeff and I were accepted to get our master's! We were so thrilled and over joyed, we scooped up maddie and danced around with her around the house. Then it hit me, our hard time is far from over. Grad school will continue to bring struggles, and who know how we'll manage papers and research and homework on top of work and dishes and diapers?

So to Maddie,

I hope ya know we had a hard time. I hope you know that when you were a baby, you didn't have any fancy toys, or perfectly matching outfits. You didn't have your own room with perfectly planned decor. You did, however, have kitchen pots and pans to play with, lovingly worn hand-me down, and a crib right next to our bed.

While I'm going to grad school, I hope you know the sleepless nights I'll have. The meals I skipped while making your own. The days I chose to stay up all night finishing a paper because I wanted to rock you to sleep before.

I hope you grow up knowing how important family and education is. And how unimportant the other things are. I hope one day you realize just how much we sacrificed to get our education, so we could provide for you and set an example for you. You continue to inspire me to be a better person in every way.

You are smart. You are [so] loved. You are important.

How to lose 10 lbs in a day

answer: you chop off all your hair.

to be fair, I asked the hairdresser to leave it much, much longer. But since she was young and in hair school, she just kept chopping until everything was even. That's ok, though. Hair grows.

I really did love my long hair before, but I never actually got the chance to enjoy it. It took too long to do anything other than a messy bun.

Before

after

Now that it's much, much shorter, I might actually have time to do my hair, and then be able to feel great while doing stuff like this: 

Speaking of which, go check out this adorable video of maddie standing up for one of the first times:

Baby Drama

Jeff and I were asked to sing in church today, and we were pretty nervous about it. We didn't have much time to practice, Jeff was sick, and the song was particularly high.

Luckily, maddie has also been learning how to pull herself up this week, and she knew that would make me feel better. So she pulled herself up all by herself today... using my shirt.

Yup, she pulled my shirt down past my bra in the middle of church.

I just had to share the embarrassment.

On a related note, maddie thinks it's hilarious to pull her dress up and show off her belly. Since she's a baby and not a teenage girl, I think it's pretty adorable too. Here's a picture of her doing it in the middle of church.

Making Changes

When you first start dating someone, you have a lot of visions and ideas about what you'd be like together. When you're engaged, you're convinced that your life will be exactly how you plan it to be, and you feel on top of the world.

Then you get married, and things don't always go the way you plan, so you make plans for the kind of lifestyle you'll adopt once you have kids.

Then you have a kid, and not much has changed. What do you do then?

Change.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want maddie to grow up with. What kind of eating habits do I want to teach her? What do I want her to remember most about her childhood. And I never thought I would say it, but I'm reverting back to my Oregon Hippie roots.

Changes Jeff and I are considering about making:

- No TV. I'm not sure why we haven't talked about doing it before, since my whole undergraduate course of study was on how damaging the media is to men, women, and children. Not to mention how much free time you have together as a family when you're not watching TV.
But here are a few problems: how would we be able to watch sports? That is honestly and truly the only thing holding us back at this point. Does anyone who has experience with this have any solutions?

- Being vegan.
Just kidding! Not totally vegan, but adding more and more fruits and vegetables to our diets. We've already successfully cut out all fast food. (not that we don't still crave it at times)
Now we're considering cutting out processed foods all together.

But there you have it. a healthier diet, and less time around the TV. Does anyone have any experience with either of these things? suggestions?

a day in the life of a happy baby

She plays hard... 

and she sleeps hard. 

and yes,  all of this was in the same day. 

Time keeps on tickin'...

Madison turned 6 months old today. Can you believe it? I sure couldn't. To celebrate, we fed her desert with dinner - mashed up blackberries. She LOVED it and threw a fit once she was done.

On a more serious note, her half-birthday made me reflect on her birth. I went searching through old pictures and found this one, and my heart stopped: 

This was in the middle of the night, after everything had settled down. As you can tell from my swollen eyelids (no, that's not makeup), and my bloated lips, I felt like I had been beaten up. Madison had been separated from me all day, and once we were finally reunited, I insisted that she sleep on my chest with me.

We were two beaten up gals.

Compare that to today, and we have both come a long way.

Since her birth, I've been determined to take back control of my body and rebuild my strength. Not that working out would have or will prevent another c-section, but I just felt so weak after her birth, I needed to prove my strength to myself.

So in a lot of ways, her 6 month birthday was just as much of a milestone for myself. This morning, I went jogging while pushing maddie in the stroller like always. But this time I ran farther than I have since high school. It was liberating. I finally felt strong again.

Hopefully I can keep this up... who knows what I (or she) will accomplish by her 1st birthday?

nursing a crazy baby

I've heard a few stories of babies lovingly learning to reach up for their mother's faces while being nursed. Some play with their mothers' ears, a few of my nephews reached for their mom's chin, just to make sure she's still there.

So I was pretty excited when maddie started learning to reach. I was hoping she would lovingly put her hand on my face to make sure I was still there.

and reach for me, she does. she puts her hand up to my face and shoves her fist into my mouth any chance she gets. she thinks it's the funniest thing in the world. Not exactly what I was thinking of... but I wouldn't expect anything less from her. She definitely has her own personality.

Mobile Maddie

For a few weeks now, we would put maddie on the floor for tummy time, leave the room, and come back only to find her on the opposite side of the room.

It was a big mystery considering she isn't crawling, and isn't supposed to be crawling yet for a couple months.

well, today we finally witnessed it. She is officially crawling... backwards. and only backwards.

So not only is my baby ahead of the game, she's also an innovator... sort of.

Either way, I am proud of her.

another milestone this week: maddie has learned to reach up for either Jeff or I when she wants to be picked up. The first time it happened, I went to go get her after she woke up from her morning nap, and she looked right at me, smiled, and reached. I started crying!
Jeff rushed into the room to see what was wrong, and then tried to get maddie to reach for him. It didn't work. Instead, she nearly fell out of his arms trying to reach for me again. :) She's definitely a mamma's girl!

whiteley update

I have to apologize for not blogging so much lately. The truth is, it's easier for me to share what's going on, when I actually have all of my ducks in a row, and right now, none of my ducks are in any row.

But here's what IS going on:

Maddie is beginning to crawl, roll, and scooch her way around everywhere. Part of me loves it, and part of me wants to scream, "stop growing!!"

I have been searching for a job, but have not had much luck. It's really frustrating, especially when all I want to do is stay at home with maddie.

Jeff and I both found a college in the area that has a great counseling program, and we're applying for acceptance for this winter. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

For now, my sanity has been working out. Gosh, I never thought I would ever say that. But since my amazing sister-in-law has lost over 100 lbs, she has been a huge motivation for me to get back into shape. And I have to say, having gone from my c-section and feeling so weak and hardly able to sit up at times, to now, where I have a little more muscle, it just feels amazing.

and now, enjoy this hilarious video of maddie blowing raspberries. 

my grandma Doris

Growing up, I always loved visiting my grandma Doris. Grandma was very crafty, and every time we went to go visit her, her craft room/workshop was filled with so many crafts and colorful things that whenever I imagined Santa's workshop, I pictured my Grandma Doris's craftroom.

Luckily for me, she liked to make a few things for me when I was a kid. I cannot even begin to tell you how many of our own Christmas decorations were handmade or hand-painted by my grandma. I truly cherish them.

For some reason, when I was a kid, I decided I wanted to collect music boxes. So my grandma Doris, with help from grandpa bud, I'm sure, found/made/repaired a bunch of music boxes for my collection. Now they all sit proudly in madison's room.

My favorite one of all has a spinning sun that plays "you are my sunshine", and it's completely hand-painted by my grandmother. Recently, it has become maddie's favorite thing to watch. She will sit, mesmerized and watch the sun go around and around.

I'm pretty lucky that I had such an amazing and talented grandma. And maddie's lucky she has such an amazing great-grandma!

Catching up

Maddie is growing more and more every day. I swear there are days I wake up and think "who replaced my baby with this big one?"

My mother asks me every single time I talk to her "when are you going to put up more pictures of maddie?" and I laugh, because typically I just put up new pictures the day before. So to pacify her (for at least a few days,) here's a giant maddie post, so everyone can get their fix.

2 months old: 

pouty face because I made her go to bed. 

first discovering her toungue

3 months old

Loving her daddy

Naptime with momma

learnin how to escape her swing and feeling pretty proud of herself. 

bumped her nose

more to come of these later - first time meeting some of her cousins!

  4 months old

caught in the act! 

happy baby

just hanging out on momma

riding a mini-horse.

just a visual of how much she has grown. Look at those chunky legs!

fascinated with a goat. 

baby blessing day

loving aunt susie

maddie's new favorite game - trying to catch the birds in her mobile

first bite of real food!

I'm a proud momma!

she insist on holding her own spoon at all times. 

new mode of transportation

cuddle time with daddy

this was the week she discovered her fingers. 

swim time!

and this was the week she figured out how to shimmy her way around her crib. 

trying to figure out how to escape.

Add caption

during another morning jog, maddie discovered the joy of sucking on her toes. 

not happy about bedtime. 

passed sitting up, after a long day of play.