Saying Goodbye

Today was my last day of work. I know that I still have 2 more months before baby is due, but the timing was right to quit now. We'll be going to Florida next week for a whole week, and instead of taking a week off of work and then quitting a few weeks later, my boss and I just decided that it would be easier to have me stop working now. It was a day full of mixed emotions. I was sad to leave Grace. I've spend two years helping her learn and grow. I felt like I was abandoning her in some way. It was a really similar feeling to when Tony and I left Bratsigovo in Bulgaria. I am also feeling some excitement because I can now devote my time to preparing for our baby. It also means that baby is coming so soon!

My experience as a nanny was a terrific one. While it wasn't the career I saw for myself upon graduating from college, it was so wonderful to have a boss that respected me and understood life's situations. I wanted to do something nice for them to say "thanks" for being so good to me and letting me help raise their children!

I made this cookie bouquet:

It's basically sugar cookies with shiny icing. They are on lollipop sticks and stuck into some floral foam. It's time consuming, but fairly easy to do. I was (luckily) able to practice with Morgan while I was in Indiana, so I knew what to expect and what could go wrong.

I also wanted to write the kids and their parents little notes to let them know how much I'll miss them and how much I've enjoyed spending time with them.

This one is for Grace:
She loves panda bears, so I took that and ran with it. I used my Silhouette die cut machine to cut out these cute little pandas, then used some chalk to give them some rosy cheeks to make them look more "girlish." I also added the little bows. Grace loved the card and immediately realized that the two panda bears were us.

For Clay:
I went with a robot/space theme. I'm not sure if he'll like it, but I tried my best! It's always difficult for me to make cards for males. I feel like they don't appreciate it as much as girls do :) I used my Silhouette again here, cutting out the robot and the letters. I added the little details to the robot with my super-awesome silver Sharpie marker. Tony really liked this card a lot, so I'm confident Clay will like it, too.

For the parents:
I just did a basic thank you card. I hope I expressed how grateful I am that they treated me so well during my employment. I plan to keep in touch with them and see them from time to time. I am going to Grace's dance recital at the end of May and I'm really looking forward to it.

It's a really strange feeling to know that I won't be working, but Tony has some web development jobs lined up for me which kind of settles the stress of my lack of paycheck. We're getting closer to baby's appearance and I couldn't be more excited. It's a really great feeling to begin a new chapter of my life and begin raising my own little girl.

Baby Shower - Indiana

Last Wednesday I flew to Indiana to visit my family and so my mom could throw a baby shower for me. We were originally going to have one, but we ended up with two - a family shower, and a friends shower. It was really fun to see everyone, and I ended up with A LOT of girly things! It was also really nice to see my family again.

Hanging out in Morgan's room before the shower!

My mom made a "diaper cake" for the shower. It was so cute!

My mom and I decorated these cupcakes with our new flower-making skills. I'm really starting to love decorating with icing :)

All of the gifts from shower #1 (friends shower)

My mom is a *titch* excited for her first grandbaby. Here is her gift. It was a really cute idea! She gave me a wicker laundry basket full of clothes that were all clothes pinned on a clothesline. The clothesline was probably a mile long, but that's okay!

Shower #2 gifts (including my mom's) from the "family shower."

This baby is going to be WELL DRESSED. I could not believe how many clothes people gave me. They were all so generous! She's going to be more stylish than me, that little punk. :) The showers and parties sure made my trip fly by pretty fast. I feel like I didn't even get to see my parents and sisters! It was still a fun trip, though, and I'll see them again in June!

Tropical Cupcakes

WARNING: I am going to be a little braggy in this post. I'm quite proud of what I accomplished here, and I'll be patting myself on the back throughout this entry :).


My sister-in-law, Carleigh, is getting married next month. She currently lives in California and she was in town visiting a couple weeks ago, so we threw her a bridal shower. I helped Tony's mom by volunteering to make a treat for the party. Carleigh is obsessed with all things "beach" so Tony's mom decided to have an island/beach theme for the shower. How fun! I decided to make mini Pina Colada Cupcakes for the shower, and they were delicious!

I'm proud to say that my creative juices came flowing back to me the week of the shower. After a test run of these cupcakes (and a hefty cupcake donation to Tony's co-workers), I decided that these cupcakes were awesome, but needed something else. For some reason, icing flowers popped into my head. I have made cupcakes with sunflowers piped onto them, so I began researching what it would take to make a tropical icing flower to top these little guys.

I settled on a petunia, because I though it looked like the flowers found in Hawaiian leis. I bought the supplies I needed, which included bright teal blue icing coloring gel, royal icing mix, and a lily nail.
This is a lily nail. It's pretty intense. It makes it so you can pipe a more 3-dimensional flower. I felt pretty professional as I worked with this tool.

My first attempt at making these flowers was a complete and utter FAILURE. I was going off of some written directions on wilton.com, and it was just not working out for me. My flowers looked like a 2-year-old did them. A batch of royal icing wasted and severely blue tinted fingers later, I went to the source of knowledge of all things: youtube. I found a tutorial video, slapped my forehead as I realized I was completely doing it wrong, and tried my hand at piping petunias a couple days later. Thanks to this lovely lady who posted her video, I wound up with this:

A perfectly formed petunia! I was so proud! Unfortunately my celebration didn't last long, I had 49 more of these babies to pipe out! I spend a couple hours piping flowers and decorating them with edible pearl dust and stamens so they looked realistic. These flowers were quite legit.

Here is a picture of the flowers completely decorated:
My flowers took FIVE DAYS to dry and before popping them off of the foil I had to stick them in the freezer for a few minutes. I learned this the hard way and ended up with a few flower casualties in the process.

Tony and I were getting a little sick of bright blue petunias after a while. They took over our kitchen table and I was quite protective of them. :)





The finished product! I love how these turned out (fyi: I toasted the coconut that goes on top of these cupcakes. The recipe doesn't say to, but I think it looks and tastes better). I love that these cupcakes look like little hula dancers! :)


I may have made this sound super hard, but if you have patience and a steady hand, you can TOTALLY make these flowers! By doing this project, I began to get back to my pre-pregnancy self. However, after it was all over I vowed to Tony that I would never do anything like that again. (We all know I will)

Baby's Room

We are so lucky that my parents so graciously purchased the furniture we wanted and needed for baby's new room. Last weekend we painted the walls a really pretty aqua green/blue. It looks really great with her bedding that's mostly pink and orange. I didn't pull this blue idea out of nowhere, though. There were flowers in the quilt that accented this color I picked. I really didn't want it to look like a pink monster puked in her room. This weekend we were able to pick up two pieces of the furniture that were delivered to the store. You see here our glider and changing table/dresser.

Before

March Madness was not missed! Tony moved the TV in our bedroom to the hallway where he could watch the games and didn't have to miss a second! :)

Working hard!

All finished! I LOVE the furniture we got!!

I need to get some baskets for this changing table. I'm excited to take on the challenge :)

I'm really excited we got this done, but we are exhausted. That changing table/dresser thing was hardcore. We literally built it from the start! It just came in a million pieces. Now we're relaxing, munching on girl scout cookies, and rooting on BYU as they take on Gonzaga. What a great Saturday!

Welcome to Third Trimester

This week I entered the third and final trimester of my pregnancy. As of March 16th I was 3 months away from my due date. This is all going so crazy fast! Part of me is scared to death of giving birth and wants to postpone as long as possible, and the other part is wishing she was born yesterday. I've continued to have trouble sleeping and when I do, I have very strange baby-related dreams. Here are some gems for you:

-I constantly dream that I'm at the doctor and for whatever reason they do an ultrasound that reveals that our baby is a BOY and not a girl. I hate this dream, ha ha.

-Several times I have had dreams that my baby comes out HUGE. Like, walking and talking huge. The doctors are always clueless as to why she's so big, like it was something they couldn't catch. How's that for a subconscious fear? :)

-Of course there's been the "baby mix up at the hospital" dream. I had a dream the other night that they accidentally gave our little girl to someone else but in return let us choose any baby we wanted from the nursery. I'm not sure how anyone got home with their own baby with this procedure!

Anyway, my dreams have been entertaining to say the least.

I've been feeling really good lately about this whole being a mom thing. I am learning to run on 3 hours of sleep, I'm mastering the art of concealer under my eyes (something I've never had to do before), and I somehow get through the days without a nap. I feel like I'll be well prepared in the sleep area for this little child!

I've been really struggling, however, with this whole being a huge whale thing. I haven't gained more weight than I should, but I feel so huge compared to everyone around me. I hate shopping for clothes. I recently went to a bachelorette party for my sister-in-law, Carleigh, where everyone dressed up all fancy. I was able to squeeze my fat butt into a pre-pregnancy dress that was considerably stretchy and I did my hair the best I could. (I have a limited time frame for primping. My feet start KILLING after a while!) While I thought I looked good when I left, I was sure a sore thumb in this group of skinny girls! Ah, oh well. I'll be hot again one day :)

I'm starting to get comments from strangers, now. It's amazing to me the things people feel like they can say to you just because you are pregnant. Some of my favorites:

"Wow, you look like you've put on a lot of baby weight!" -someone I've never met in my life

"I don't know if we can both fit through here! *giggle*" -random lady at the craft store while passing me in the aisle. I'm not sure why she said this. I wasn't walking sideways or anything.

"WOW you are PREGNANT."

"What are you, like 8 months?" NO. I'm 6, thank you very much!

It makes me laugh when they happen, but I get annoyed with people. For some reason you can tell a pregnant lady she's gotten chubbier and it's okay. If you tell a regular person they have gotten chubbier, its rude. I know I'm not the only pregnant lady this has ever happened to, but it's still annoying :)

Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling. There's my update for you all.

Big Girl

I apologize to those of you who really couldn't care less about all of the details of my pregnancy, but I think starting a "baby blog" is just too darn hard. If one thing has changed me in this pregnancy, it's that I am so much more lazy. I usually go the extra mile and make things from scratch, try a new recipe each week, etc. We now eat chicken nuggets and if it comes in a box form, made-from-scratch goodies are out of the question. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's so not me! Hopefully I can go back to my old self someday :)

This little girl swimming inside me is getting bigger and stronger by the day! Every appointment we go to they struggle to find her heartbeat because she's moving so much in there. I even purposely scheduled my last appointment for right before lunch hoping that she'd be calm since it wouldn't be right after a meal. Nope! At this last one they couldn't even record a heart rate. After about 15 minutes of work with the doppler they had to just say "we think it's 160." I asked the nurse if I should cut back on sugar or something and she informed me that a moving baby is a happy, healthy baby and to keep doing what I'm doing. So that's good. She's definitely Tony's daughter! :)

There are so many joyful things about being pregnant, but as many of you know it doesn't come without non-joyful things. I am one week away from entering my third trimester, and I am already experiencing the "uncomfortable-ness" that is often associated with the third. I can't remember the last night I slept well. My old pal body pillow is doing nothing now for my comfort. I get SO hot then suddenly I'm freezing. I just cannot get comfortable in bed. I lie in bed so completely dead tired but I stay up for hours! Because my little girl is getting bigger (and MUCH stronger) by the day, I think feeling her more is making it difficult for me to find a good position to sleep in. Anytime I move, she moves and puts herself in the least convenient places. Her favorite time to play is midnight to 2am. I know this because I'm awake to feel her playing in there. I know it's good practice for when she comes, but you'd think nature would let pregnant ladies sleep as much as they could prior to baby's arrival!

I've been so tempted to get one of those nifty 3D ultrasounds. Tony was even interested until we saw the price tag. $140 to get a 30 minute ultrasound. We were so interested in seeing our baby's features and figuring out what she looks like, but we'd rather spend the money buying clothes or diapers. If it were cheaper we might consider doing it. Darn!

This baby stuff is all starting to become really real to me. Of course I always knew it was real. My ever-growing belly fails to let me believe otherwise. But the fact that I'm only 3 months away from holding our little girl is just unreal to me. I'm so nervous, anxious, excited for her arrival. I just hope I can be the best for her :)

Channeling My Inner Designer

One thing I sort of stressed about even before we knew the gender of Baby A was how to set up and decorate the nursery! I didn't want it too "theme-y" or "baby-ish." I wanted it to last for at least the first few years of life. While I think cartoon jungle animals are cute, I don't know how cool those would be to a 5-year-old. Once we found out Baby A is a girl, it helped me begin to narrow my ideas. I had in mind this bedding that was beautiful but if anything impractical.

I loved that this looked like it was a little girl's room, but wasn't too baby or way super pink. (I wouldn't paint the walls pink, so MY version wouldn't have been super pink.) I also loved the antique look of this set. However, not only was the quilt too puffy for a baby and the bumpers too fluffly, it was a hefty price of nearly $250. I just couldn't bring myself to consider buying or even getting it as a gift when I can foresee huge poop blowouts in this bedding's future.

So began my search for cute, girly bedding that could last at a good price. After days (yes, days) of searching and getting opinions from Tony, my mom, Tony's mom, sisters, etc. I finally decided on a cute one from Target:

I feel like this will last into toddler-hood, and I can decorate with things that aren't just baby-ish. While its pink and has a clear theme, I don't feel its too "theme-y."

Tony and I have had fun thinking of colors to paint the room, how to decorate with crafty, cheap, homemade items, and picking out furniture. I know that Baby A couldn't care less what her room looks like, but I do. I want her to have a fun room. I'll have to post pictures as we finish it up!!