Goals for August and September

Well, the last time I set goals for the month it was early February. I wasn't yet pregnant, we were still living in a small town, and Ellie was much younger. Now it's the middle of August and I feel the need to think out loud about what it is I want to have accomplished in the next 6 weeks. Before I start, I want to take a look at my goals from February and see if any of them are relevant or were accomplished way back then...

• Work on improving Ellie's night time sleep. I'm reading the No Cry Sleep Solution and so far it really resonates with me. I figure if I can get Ellie to the point where she only wakes to nurse a couple times each night, we're golden! This took us a while, but sometime in April or May we eventually went with the crying it out method, and then sometime in June Ellie stopped nursing at night entirely (thus ending our breastfeeding stint). The 12 straight hours of sleep she has each night are absolutely glorious!
• Finish writing the first draft of my business plan. Moving to a new city has completely changed this part of my life. I am no longer planning a business and am instead focusing on finishing a distance education program I started before Ellie was born.
• Go to more baby groups! It's good for Ellie and for my sanity to get out of the house. Driving into town each day isn't so great on our budget, but we'll have to make it work. I have no idea if we did this or not. I do remember working a lot more in February though, so probably not.
• Get more shifts at work. I feel happiest when I have a few hours every few days to do something productive away from home. Done!
• Green smoothies!! My veggie intake is waning again... not good! I feel like I crave sweets a lot more when I'm not getting enough fruits and veggies in my diet. I need to hop back on the green smoothie bandwagon. Maybe I should branch out and try a new recipe? Not sure.
• Get the oil changed in the car finally! I did (with Ellie in the car, nonetheless!), and alas, it's time again!

I'm actually surprised I remember back to February. My brain feels like mush most days. So, with those past goals in mind, and our new lives in mind, here are a few goals for the next 6 weeks:

• I want to get back into drinking more smoothies. It's so hot out these days that they sound super appealing, yet I haven't been bothered. I need to start by adding spinach, bananas and frozen mango to my grocery list.
• Get the oil changed in the car - again! And get the brake pads checked... it might be just about time for new ones.
• Work on my courses. I'm deliberately leaving this goal vague because I don't yet have the course outlines for the 3 courses I am attempting to do before this baby is born. 
• Prepare for the baby's arrival. I have a handful of things I'd like to do: make a mobile, make a baby book, have a baby shower, set up a crib and change station, etc.
• Make Ellie's Halloween costume. 
• Do most of our Christmas shopping.
• Make the baby's Christmas stocking. 
• Make time for fun family activities on our one day off a week that we get all together! 

I have other things I want to do, but I'm going to say that if I manage to accomplish everything above, I should feel great about that! Anything else is extra! 

5 Months in 1 Post

I'm terrible at keeping up with a blog, so in an effort to get back into it without too much of a hurdle to cross first, here's 5 months in 1 post:

• We're pregnant! Baby (girl!!!) number 2 is due to arrive October 28th.
• Ellie turned 9 months, then 10 months, then 11 months, then 1 year! Now she'll be 14 months tomorrow!!
• We took a trip to Vancouver for my birthday in March (Ikea & the Vancouver Aquarium!).
• We decided to move back to our true love, Victoria.
• We moved back to Victoria - Ellie started full time daycare, Adam and I each started new full time jobs. 
• As of 13 months, Ellie is officially weaned. Our breastfeeding journey has come to an end and she is blissfully sleeping 12 hours through the night without waking!!!!!!!!!!! (There are not enough exclamation marks in the world for this one!).
• I am changing my work life up a bit in a couple weeks time to be part time at my current job and part time at a job I've done in the past and love, love, love.
• I'm signed up to do 3 courses in a span of 6 weeks in an effort to establish an actual career by the time maternity leave #2 is over!

Life is good! Here's a few photos to recap the past 5 months, and hopefully in the months to come I will become a little more on top of the blog!

January Outcomes and February Ambitions!

I feel like January flew by! I don't even remember writing my January goals, so I hope I was able to achieve some of them. Let's see how I did:

• Have a date night with my husband. We had a baby-free lunch date for our 7 year anniversary! We both would love to do a dinner, but that will have to wait until Ellie sleeps better at night.
• Try a new recipe. I tried quite a few new ones ~ lentil soup, potato corn chowder, mexican rice, to name a few!
• Take one step forward in my business planning process. Yes!
• Declutter our home. Yes, but I feel like it's a never ending process.
• Contact the company that holds our car loan and arrange for either larger payments or more frequent payments. Yes!
• Go to a Bikram yoga class. Yes! Although I only made it once, I'm still glad I went. It's a shame the classes are so expensive. However, I have signed up for a mom and baby fitness class that starts next week, so that's something!
• Schedule the car for an oil change. Soon...
• Visit friends and/or family. Not yet, but we have a brief trip planned to visit friends next week!
• Get Ellie to nap in her crib.SUCCESS!!!! OMG what took me so long!? 

I think I did great considering I forgot about most of these goals after a week or so! So now I'm ready to set some goals for this month!

• Work on improving Ellie's night time sleep. I'm reading the No Cry Sleep Solution and so far it really resonates with me. I figure if I can get Ellie to the point where she only wakes to nurse a couple times each night, we're golden!
• Finish writing the first draft of my business plan.
• Go to more baby groups! It's good for Ellie and for my sanity to get out of the house. Driving into town each day isn't so great on our budget, but we'll have to make it work.
• Get more shifts at work. I feel happiest when I have a few hours every few days to do something productive away from home.
• Green smoothies!! My veggie intake is waning again... not good! I feel like I crave sweets a lot more when I'm not getting enough fruits and veggies in my diet. I need to hop back on the green smoothie bandwagon. Maybe I should branch out and try a new recipe?
• Get the oil changed in the car finally!

8 Months!

January Goals

In keeping with my New Year's Resolutions, here are my goals for this month:

• Have a date night with my husband. This will probably entail renting a movie and watching it in another room while my mom babysits... but hey, at least it's a start! I would like to come up with a cheap and simple way to make it a little more special though since this month marks 7 years since our very first date! ♥
• Try a new recipe. Technically, tonight's dinner was a new recipe, but since it was just chicken in a different kind of tomato sauce and served over noodles... it didn't truly feel 'new' to us. So hopefully sometime this month we will break in my new cookbook and try something we've truly never had before!
• Take one step forward in my business planning process. I want to start working on my actual written business plan, but I also want to try to interview a current entrepreneur to get some insight into the sector I would be going into. Hopefully someone agrees to be my interviewee!
• Declutter our home. We've already made one trip to the thrift store this month, but hopefully we can continue the trend. We have a desk to sell, I have craft supplies to organize/purge, and we have a kitchen to declutter. And I seem to have totally forgotten about anything we have out in the shed... hmm.
• Contact the company that holds our car loan and arrange for either larger payments or more frequent payments.
• Go to a Bikram yoga class. I am planning on going this Saturday, so this should be an easy goal to accomplish! (After all, I didn't say I had to do well in the class... so even if I lie on my mat feeling like death for half the class, technically, I still went to it!)

So those goals should help me work towards my resolutions, but I also want to add in a couple things just for this month:

• Schedule the car for an oil change.
• Visit friends and/or family. We have a bunch of people we haven't seen in a while and have been meaning to visit, so hopefully we can knock one off the list this month! 
• Get Ellie to nap in her crib. I've had this goal before and totally flaked on it. But it's time. As much as I love our cuddles, sometimes I just really need the 'free' time to get other things done or take a nap myself!

Wish me luck!

Months 1 - 7

I was just reminiscing about how little Ellie used to be and thought it might be fun to do a post compiling all of her monthly photos. So without further ado, watch our magic bean grow right in front of your eyes!

 

 

 

 

 

Resolutions For A New And Exciting Year!

We had a wonderful, family-filled Christmas vacation all the way over in Ontario and are just now settling back into life at home. I've just caught up on reading other people's blog posts about New Year's resolutions, and feel like it's time to put mine out there in the world. Hopefully by sharing them with the vast audience of the internet (ha! more like my 2 regular readers!), I will be more accountable to following through on them. Time will tell!

Resolution #1: Have date nights with my husband once every couple weeks. We're still easing into leaving Ellie alone with a sitter (aka Grandma), but in order to get better at it we have to just do it! So our general plan is to start by renting a movie and watching it in one of the hotel rooms upstairs. Once we get more comfortable with that, we may venture out for the occasional date!

Resolution #2: Try new recipes. I got a cookbook for Christmas with lots of yummy, easy meals in it that I want to try. Not only that, but Adam and I really enjoy cooking together so hopefully this is something else we can do together in addition to date nights. We also really want to learn how to make our own sushi, so that fits in well with this idea!

Resolution #3: Work on my business idea. I'm still not quite ready to share it with the world, but if I can put more time and effort into the idea, I might be ready soon! One thing I was hoping to do was to use a babysitter a couple times a week and devote that time to working on my business plan. I would need to take my laptop and work outside of our suite (but still in the building in case I need to nurse Ellie), but it would probably be the easiest way to make some actual progress.

Resolution #4: Keep our home simple and clutter free. This is a huge challenge, particularly around holidays and events like Christmas and birthdays. Having a baby makes it especially challenging! People are always incredibly generous about giving gifts to babies and children, but what I need to be better at is proactively communicating to our family and friends about what we need/want and what we'd really like to avoid. We're currently in the middle of a big time decluttering of our house, so this is a step in the right direction. We just have to keep it decluttered! Ellie's first birthday might be a challenge!

Resolution #5: Pay off the car loan. Provided we don't have any major changes to our financial situation, this is completely feasible! It definitely means sticking to our budget and might mean forfeiting trips that we had hoped to take, but it would be worth it to have the weight off our shoulders! After the car loan is paid off, we would only have student loans remaining.

Resolution #6: Exercise. This isn't the typical New Year's resolution about losing weight or going to the gym X number of times each week. I simply want the endorphins! I have a hot yoga class coming up this week that I am absolutely DYING to go to. It's not the physical exercise that I care so much about, but the amazing feelings that I can't even do justice by attempting to describe. It's something I can do that makes my soul feel good!

It's always possible to make a million lists of things I want to do or change, but I want to stop there. If I keep it short, it will likely be even more manageable! Next I have to make my goals for January and see if I can work towards some of these resolutions in baby steps starting with this month...

7 Months!

Living In The Moment

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how different my frame of mind is now, compared to a few months ago when Ellie was a newborn. In the 0-3 month phase, I remember constantly thinking 'it'll be easier when...' or 'I can't wait until she's able to...', filling in the gaps with milestones I thought would make my life easier. Having a newborn was simultaneously incredibly challenging and a wonderful blessing.

I feel like my attitude started to shift around the 4 month mark. Ellie started acknowledging and reacting to me (smiles, laughs, etc) and I started to feel like having a baby around was just as much fun as it was work. And even then, some of that 'work' was actually pretty great (breastfeeding, bath time, etc.).

Now, at nearly 7 months, she is such a joy to be around! She laughs, plays, reaches for toys, reaches for me, babbles, sits up on her own, makes funny faces (especially the one she makes when I try to feed her apples or hummous). She brings so much joy to my life and I couldn't imagine going a day without her (the day of my surgery was brutal!). All of this gushing doesn't mean she isn't still a challenge and a lot of work (that's just part of being a parent), but the work is a lot less daunting these days. Here's hoping she's still this much of a joy when she's a teenager ;)

Little Miss Pees A Lot

I love cloth diapers. I love not filling a garbage bin full of diapers or having to run to the store at the last minute (and that store is a 30 minute drive away too!) and fork out a ridiculous amount of cash for diapers. What I don't love is our current struggle with keeping Ellie dry overnight. We've stopped changing her diaper at night because she's just too sleepy and a diaper change results in blood-curdling screams from a child who just doesn't want to be woken up quite that much. Sadly though, we still have to sometimes as we are still figuring out the perfect night time cloth diaper. We have a few options. We have two DryBees fleece night diapers that seem to hold everything in, depending on how many inserts we put in them. The downside is that they are super bulky and for the last half of the night her bum feels ever so slightly damp, since they don't have any plastic lining (PUL I think it's called?). We also have two BumGenius 4.0's that we stuff with both inserts they came with (one long one that folds down and snaps to be a shorter length and one short one that's fairly thin). The downside to these is that we never seem to get the perfect fit around both legs and she ends up leaky about half way through the night. Finally, we have our cheapie CozyKids pocket diapers that we stuff with two regular inserts. This usually works to avoid leaks, but we sometimes have fit issues. The upside is that they aren't bulky, even with two inserts (neither are the BumGenius). Is there a perfect overnight cloth diaper out there? Can anyone recommend one? Something that's not too bulky, fits lots of different sizes, and can hold a whole lotta pee???