Our Impossible Adoption Story
If you're looking for the unbelievable account of how "impossible" became "done" in 5 business days, start here.
How To Make Cute BabyLegs
These couldn’t be easier, and I am no kind of seamstress. If I can do this, trust me, you can do this.
My mom knit a pair of baby leggings for The Meatball a couple of months ago, and I was like, “… leggings? Isn’t that a little feminine? And a little ’80s?”
But apparently Nana is a bit of a baby fashionista because now I see them everywhere – Etsy, mommy forums, the cloth diaper store in the next town. They’ve completely grown on me. They’re stinking adorable, AND – come on – they make diaper changes one step easier. (Which is especially nice now that diaper changes involve wrestling as well as stripping, wiping and dressing. I might not have been so encouraging about this rolling over thing had I any kind of foresight.)
But $15 to 20 is a lot of money for baby leg sleeves, and in my searching I found super easy DIYs for making them out of knee-high socks.
Is this kid a ham or what? Where on earth does he get that?
I should have taken my own pictures and re-designed my own instructions with my own URL/name on them to drive traffic and be a stats hog and all that … but this one is cute and easy to follow and what I used, so here you go: Read more…
Dancing and Singing
And so I stood there in the middle of the kitchen, hugging my four-and-a-half-month-old son over my left shoulder – sobbing like a baby.
It was early Thursday evening, and I was standard-frantic. Busy. Moving. But not panicing.
Meatball was content in his bouncy seat on the floor while I cut up bananas to freeze and rotated dishes out of and into the dishwasher. Mostly. He was content if I sang along with Bethel and danced around like an idiot.
Which, of course, I am generally more than happy to do if it makes him smile.
Bananas sliced and frozen, dishwasher running, we had maybe 15 minutes before we had to load ourselves in the minivan and head to grandma’s for dinner. I scooped him out of the chair, to squeals of delight, slid it under the table with my foot, and we danced and sang around our small kitchen.
I danced and sang because he’s happy with the worst dance moves and because I can sing these songs in my sleep – guitar solos and everything, which Husband especially loves. So I danced and sang, but part of me was in McHenry with my mom. Part of me was job-hunting with Husband. Parts of me were thinking about sermon illustrations and planning the vegetable garden and counting how many clean cloth diapers probably waited in the top drawer and how many hours I would have to do laundry when we got home. Read more…
On My First Mother’s Day As a Mommy
Yesterday was my first post-partum Mother’s Day, and do you know what great epiphany it inspired?
Nothing
It was pretty much the same.
I expected something. Not much, but … something. A mushier affection for my little Meatball, an extra dose of maternal instinct, newfound wisdom, silkier hair, a little bird singing on my windowsill … anything.
Mostly I just groaned at being the first one out of bed so I could shower before we headed to church.
And I got a few cute text messages and a few sweet Facebook tags. And a few of our friends saw us and exclaimed, “Happy first Mother’s Day!” – or something similarly cute.
But just as many of our friends started as we said goodbye 90 minutes later and remembered, “Oh ya, hey, it’s kind of your first Mother’s Day as a mommy!” … Or texted me later in the afternoon when they, “Just realized you’re actually a mommy now. Happy Mother’s Day!”
Offended? Are you kidding?
I’m flattered. Read more…
Good Reads
Service Recovery {Kelle Hampton}
I’ll never forget something I learned during orientation for new employees. Modeling patient satisfaction strategies after one of the greatest customer service standards in the world—the Ritz Carlton—new hire mentors explained the importance of service recovery—the act of salvaging a patient experience after something didn’t go as planned.
Study Finds Baby’s Spit-Cleaned Pacifier is OK {CNN}
Turns out cleaning a recently dropped pacifier with your saliva – meaning you put it in your mouth before inserting it back into your baby’s – may actually help strengthen your child’s immune system and keep him from developing certain allergies, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics.
Running Errands With My Mom {Cartoon Network}
Why is it – how is it – that the ability of an infant to sleep through the night seems to be the litmus test for what kind of kid you have, or what kind of parent you are? I could feed my four-month-old nothing but milkshakes and buckle him in the passenger seat of my minivan when we go out, but still be a model parent if he sleeps through the night.
Because the questions always go like this:
- “Awww, how old is he?”
- “So is he sleeping through the night (for you)?”
Al-ways
By new parents, old parents, not-parents (It’s the not-parents, especially, that I want to squint at and whisper, “You don’t even know what happens in our house after dark.”) Read more…
Spits and Wiggles 