Writing – Page 10

Project Life: First Spreads

September 1, 2014

So a few weeks ago I told you about my fear of forgetting my children’s early years and what I was going to do about, namely, start a physical album of photos and journalling based on the ProjectLife method of scrapbooking. I’ve completed my first few spreads so I wanted to report back and share what I think about this method and lessons I’ve learned thus far.

1. It’s easier than scrapbooking, but harder than just sticking pictures in an album.

I like that I don’t have to embellish anything If I don’t want to, but I’ve found that it takes some time and creativity to make use of the different layouts and pocket sizes to create a cohesive spread in the book. It’s fun, but definitely not effortless.

2. It makes just as big of a mess as scrapbooking.

At least, I make just as big of a mess working on a layout for my ProjectLife album as I would on any scrapbook. I’m making my own journal pages, rather than purchasing any kits for now, so that involves lots of paper cutting and various markers and pens. Many of the pocket sizes have required trimming down my photos as well. All these paper scraps make it a little more difficult for me to find the time to work on it because I have to get out all the materials to start work and put them all away when I’m done. I’m working on creating a better project space for myself so I can leave things out and come back to them as I get the chance.

3. I’ve developed some opinions on photo printing.

I used SnapFish to print my photos. It was by far the most affordable option I could find, and they were running a special on free shipping during the time I was printing these. I got 400 photos printed (remember, I’m catching up on 2 years!) for just around $35.00. Even though I probably won’t end up using all 400 photos in the book, the price was good enough that it was worth it for the ease of editing down the photos as I went along rather than trying to make all those decisions on the front end. Making decisions is not a strength for me.

There are a few things I wish I had done differently though. First, during checkout I was giving the option to have everything printed as a 4×6 or to have those pictures that were taken with my phone printed at a slightly smaller size that wouldn’t require the photos to be cropped to fit the 4×6 ratio. I thought that it would be better to avoid cropping, but once I got the photos I realized that it would have been more useful to have them all be a full 4×6 inches. The slightly smaller sized photos can leave some gaps on the edges of the pockets that I’m not a huge fan of.

I also realized that square instagram photos don’t translate well into rectangles. Several of my favorite instragrams had major portions of the photo cut off. I’m looking into some other options to get photos taken with instragram printed.

4. I learned that 6×8 photo books and pocket pages can come with different specifications.

The binder I ordered has 4 rings in it. While the pocket pages I ordered only come with two hole punches. I didn’t even think to look at this while I was ordering supplies. It’s not a huge deal to add some extra hole punches to the pocket pages, but it’s an inconvenient extra step that I wish I would have avoided.

5. I probably could have done the bigger album.

Before I started I thought a 12×12 album sounded too big and overwhelming. Now that I have 400 pictures to put in an album, I think I probably could have filled out the bigger pages just fine. I’m finding the smaller page sizes to be not quite as impressive looking as the 12×12 album examples I’ve seen online. Then again, maybe it just takes practice to get things really looking good.

6. It does make for a nice way to document important moments in life.

I’m happy with how my album is coming along so far, even though I’m just a few spreads in. I imagine as I do more and get into a better rhythm that I’ll start to put things together a bit faster and develop a particular style that I like. I feel like I’m definitely in the experimental stage right now.

I started the album out with a few images from my pregnancy with a couple of journalling cards to take note of the little details. I didn’t do a lot of documenting during pregnancy, so one spread pretty much covered all I had to say about it.

The next couple of pages are of our first moments in the hospital after he was born. I used a long skinny pocket on one page to write out a brief birth story and some of the vital stats (date, time, weight, and height – blurred out in this photo).

The other side of that spread continues the birth story along with some pictures of Charlie’s first moments with various family members who were there.

I’ve only gotten through the first few hours of Charlie’s life so far, so I have a long way to go. I’ll keep you updated!
Extended Breastfeeding and Weaning – Pt. 1

August 28, 2014

In the beginning…

Like many expectant mothers, I learned all about the benefits of breastfeeding early in my first pregnancy and quickly decided that’s what I wanted to do. I read the books and the blog posts about what a proper latch looks like. I knew all about how a mother’s body is miraculously equipped to change and adjust to nourish her baby at each age and stage. I learned how it has many emotional and health benefits for the mother as well as the baby. It was the obvious choice for me.

I also learned a lot about what a challenge it can be. How despite being the natural way to do things it does not always come naturally. How a poor latch can make it agonizing and ineffective and it can sometimes only be fixed with the help of a lactation consultant. How some mothers, no matter how dedicated they are, may not be able to produce enough milk to breastfeed exclusively. While I felt committed to the idea of breastfeeding, I knew that I should be prepared to face some challenges.

And face some challenges we did. It took what felt like forever for my milk to come in (all while the doctors were telling me that’s what my baby needed to be cleared of his jaundice). We had some struggles with latch at the beginning. I experienced both thrush and mastitis, neither of which make breastfeed particularly pleasant. And then there was just the fatigue of being constantly on call to feed a baby. During growth spurts it felt like that was all I did all day long, and I don’t care what the experts say about how breastfeeding should be painless when you’re doing it right; when you’re doing it almost constantly, it can hurt.

But my struggles were fairly minor in the grand scheme of things and we eventually figured it out. Nursing breaks became a (mostly) restful time for me to bond with my baby and overall we had a very positive breastfeeding experience. I reached a point where breastfeeding felt easy and natural.

My goal when I started out was to try to make it to a year. Other than my own mother, I didn’t know anyone personally who had made it much past that point, so I figured that would be the best that I could do. And the statistics backed that up. While about 80% of mother’s are breastfeeding when they leave the hospital, only 49% are still breastfeeding at 6 months, and only 26% make it all the way to a year. Among my friends, even those that were able to keep going past the first few months and establish a good breastfeeding routine would often comment that their babies weaned themselves by at least a year old when they started eating solids in earnest. I fully expected to experience something similar.

A year later…

So once Charlie reached his first birthday I quietly celebrated the fact that we had kept up breastfeeding for the first year. In fact, we were still going strong. Charlie still nursed several times a day, and though he was eating solid foods, we practiced baby led weaning and were very relaxed about how much he ate each day. I didn’t stress out about the solids he was eating because he was still nursing so well and I knew he was still getting plenty of nourishment from breastmilk. I knew that his solid food intake would continue to increase and become more varied, and his nursing needs would diminish. At this point it was pretty clear that we would continue nursing well past the one-year mark, but I still expected it to drop pretty drastically over the next year and figured he would be completely weaned well by the time he was two. By this time nursing felt so easy and natural to me that I didn’t feel any need to rush the weaning process or put it on a timeline. We were both happy with how things were going so I just let it be.

And a year after that…

Once we hit Charlie’s second birthday I found myself firmly in the camp of those that practiced “extended breastfeeding.” Charlie was still a big fan of mama’s milk and still asked to nurse about three times a day. For the most part I didn’t mind, but I was definitely in unknown territory. I didn’t know anyone personally who had gone for that long and I started to feel a bit self-conscious mentioning it to others. Would people think I was weird? Had I become one of “those” mothers? And even more pressing, would he ever actually wean himself? I realized I had spent so long expecting Charlie to just become disinterested eventually that I knew nothing about how to successfully encourage a child to wean. And honestly, at this point I was a little reluctant to try. Not because I wanted him to be attached to me forever, but because I had found breastfeeding to make so many things easier. It remained my one sure-fire method to get him to relax and get sleepy before bedtime. I knew that if he was hurt or sick that it would comfort him. And it was one of the only times in a day when he would actually be still and let me hold him for a while. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to give that up.

But once we became pregnant with baby number two I started to feel a bit more urgency to move the process along. First of all, although I knew tandem nursing was possible, it wasn’t really something I was interested in doing. But perhaps more persuasive was the fact that pregnancy had made breastfeeding pretty painful again. It was no longer a relaxing bonding time, but rather chore I had to brace myself for each time. I was also pretty sure that by this point I wasn’t producing much milk, either because Charlie didn’t need much anymore or because of the pregnancy, so I figured my body would be able to handle a transition to weaning pretty easily. But the question remained…how to do it?

Talk about a cliff hanger, huh? I found I had way too much to say on this subject so I’ll continue with some strategies that helped me next week. UPDATE: Here’s part two!
These Days // 2

August 24, 2014

These days I am:

enjoying: a kid free weekend. My parents took Charlie to spend some time at their house, so Chris and I have had the whole weekend to ourselves. We went on one weekend trip without Charlie last year, but this is the first time we’ve spent time in our own home without him since he was born. It think it’s been a good time for everyone.

accomplishing: lots of little house projects that I never find the time to do with a toddler underfoot.

feeling: tired. It’s been a productive day!

anticipating: the arrival of our baby girl at the end of the year! We found out a few weeks ago that our life of cars and trains is going to be shaken up a bit by dolls and tea parties. We’re excited for the new adventure heading our way!

And here are some snapshots from recent days…

We brought home some girly cupcakes to share the news with Charlie. While I couldn’t tell if he was excited about having a baby sister or not, he was definitely excited about having some cupcakes.

I found a pretty moth on my way home from work one day.

Selfies with my boy
The Things that Keep Me Up at Night

August 11, 2014

The other day Charlie woke up at 5:30 in the morning. This isn’t all that unusual, and honestly, it’s not that much of a bother. I can usually go in, pat his back, give him a drink of water, and count on him to fall back asleep for at least another couple of hours (and I can get a bit more precious sleep myself). No problem.

But on this particular day I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was thinking about pictures. And journals. And memory keeping. And my complete and utter lack of any physical documentation of Charlie’s first years of life. I started to panic. I couldn’t remember Charlie’s first word. (It was “car”, my husband reminded me later. Of course it was.) I wasn’t entirely sure when he started crawling, or walking, or when he got his first teeth. I was starting to picture a future when my children wanted to know interesting details about their early life and they would be dismayed to find that their mother had NO IDEA. I might have been going a little crazy. I’ll blame it on the hormones.

So at 6:00 that morning I decided I needed to get on this. I had read about Project Life from a few different bloggers I follow, so I decided that seemed like the most realistic way to go about catching up on the past two years of missing documentation. Project Life is a system that is meant to be a simpler version of scrapbooking. You get photos printed out and slip them in pocket sleeves like a traditional photo album, but you mix in pretty journaling cards to tell the story behind the pictures. Official Project Life products have pocket sleeve pages in a variety of layouts so you can mix things up and keep it interesting. They also make several kits of cute coordinating cards and journaling prompts. The bloggers I follow get really creative with their layouts and some even design their own cards, so it’s a system that can be as simple or elaborate as you choose to make it.

This layout by Elise Joy makes good use of journal cards and shows a creative way to crop images to make use of different layouts.

This is a layout featured on A Beautiful Mess. I love how the images follow the same color scheme.

Rather than the typical 12×12 inch album, I went with a smaller 6×8 inch size. I figured 12×12 would get too overwhelming – not something I need right now. I also like the fact that the albums are really just binders, so I can fill it with as much as I can get done, but if I don’t get all the way through two years I’ll at least have something and it won’t look sadly incomplete. I can also work out of order and rearrange pages as needed, so I can make a page for things I want to document now, while still catching up on the past.

I’m still waiting on my supplies and photo prints to come in so I can get started on my album, but I’m excited to get going. After I get a few spreads done and have a better idea of how realistic this plan is, I’ll share an update.

Here are a few other photo/life documentation ideas:

Artifact Uprising has really nice looking softcover books specifically designed for instagram photos. I think this could be really nice to make someday, it just doesn’t have the journalling aspect that I wanted for this project.

My friend Tina made a simple and cute pregnancy journal that she shared on her blog. I like that it was small enough to easily update on a regular basis. I could see this kind of photo journal working for a lot of special events in life.
Doll Hair

August 7, 2014

In order to help prepare Charlie for the impending arrival of baby #2, I decided he needed a baby doll. Being a boy, he doesn’t really have a lot of those, and therefore has no chance to practice being quiet, gentle and nurturing to his toys. A plethora of cars, trucks, and trains don’t exactly encourage that kind of play.

So in my search for the perfect baby doll to be Charlie’s very own, I came upon Waldorf dolls. This is a particular style of doll that is used in Waldorf early childhood education. They are stuffed dolls, making them more cuddly than the average plastic-limbed doll. They typically have simple neutral expressions on their faces, meant to suit a variety of imaginary play situations. Waldorf dolls are usually handmade from high quality (and often organic) materials. All of these things are good. But the thing I love most about these dolls is the HAIR.

The doll makers I’ve looked at get incredibly creative with the hair on these dolls. It makes me want to get dreads and dye my hair in a multitude of colors. Could I pull that off?

All the dolls I’m sharing in this post come from a doll shop called Bambolleta Dolls. They release a limited number of new dolls each week and they seem to sell out quickly. I didn’t end up getting Charlie’s doll from here because they are pretty pricey and don’t make many boy dolls, but I LOVE to look at them.

I was so inspired by the hair that I wanted to try to make my own head of doll hair. So one evening I sewed together a quick sock doll and followed this tutorial on making a doll wig. I used a variety of yarn that I just had around the house and was able to complete the head of hair in just a couple evenings.

I know. Seeing my little attempt at a doll next to the professional ones is almost cringe-worthy. But it was fun to try a new craft. And you’ve got to start somewhere, right?
Chicagoland

July 30, 2014

My younger sister made a big move to Chicago a little less than a year ago. She’s working downtown and living in a little studio apartment and navigating the transit system like a pro. But I hadn’t had the chance to visit her and see what her new life is like until this past weekend when my mom, youngest sister, and I invaded her tiny apartment for a girls weekend in the big city.

We fit a lot in just a few days. Walking the lakefront, the Navy Pier, Lincoln Park, and the general downtown area.

We also went spent a full day at the Art Institute. It’s a huge museum with more art in it than you can really take in in a day. I think one of my favorite parts was their large Monet exhibit. They had several examples of paintings Monet had done of the same scene at different times. It was fascinating to see the paintings side by side and compare the way he depicted the way the light and color changed.

The Chicago River runs right through the middle of downtown, so we ended our trip with a twilight river cruise. It was basically one giant photo-op, and a perfect way to end our weekend in the city.
These Days

July 29, 2014

These Days I am:

watching: a lot of Modern Family, and the occasional Weird Al Video

making: a weaving! Hopefully I’ll get it finished soon so I can share it with you.

enjoying: our shady backyard. It makes the summer days a lot more enjoyable.

feeling: a lot more energetic than even a few weeks ago. Thank God for the second trimester.

thinking: that I should probably be making a grocery list right now instead of writing this…

loving: that I’m back home with my little family after almost 5 days apart!
Hey, Goals

July 16, 2014

At the beginning of the year I wrote a long list of somewhat unrealistic goals. A big reason I started blogging in the first place was to have a place to document my progress in life and keep me accountable for the different things I try to accomplish. So here’s an update on how I’m doing on some of my goals…

4. Get stuff hung on the walls of our house – I put up a couple of pieces of artwork by my sister. We still have a lot of empty walls though.

7. Plant a garden (vegetable or flower) – Here’s my flower bed. It’s overrun with weeds, but I planted it and the flowers have lived. I’m going to say this goal was accomplished.

10. Work on rebranding our web design business – YES! We have a new name, new logo, and new website.

11. Develop marketing materials and strategies for our web design business – ALMOST! My sister interned with our business this summer and helped me make a lot of progress on this goal. We wrote up some good copy to explain our services and process and have a rough draft of a brochure to hand out to potential clients.

14. Organize Charlie’s toys – YES! Accomplished mainly by purging a lot of toys. They stay organized a lot better when they actually fit in the space you have.

18. Make improvements to church website – a few small adjustments have been made, but I have bigger ideas for down the road.

19. Practice hand lettering in designs – Somewhat. A few of my blog posts feature hand lettered art.

20. Read more to Charlie – YES! Story time is now firmly established as part of the bedtime routine and we just got library cards so we (I) won’t get bored of reading the same books over and over.

28. Cut down on grocery budget – getting pregnant kind of threw this one out the window.

29. Get comfortable using Adobe Illustrator – I’m slowly improving on this one. Photoshop is still my go-to program, but I’m finding more and more opportunities to use Illustrator.

32. Grow readership of blog – taking a 3 month break didn’t help with this one. We’ll see if I can build it back up by the end of the year.

33. Find ways to make a modest income from blogging – While still a nice thought, I think I want to focus more on experimenting with the topics I write about and find what I like best before thinking too much about how to make money from it.

So there you go. Out of the 30+ goals I set for myself, I’ve accomplished or made progress on nine of them. I knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t be able to cross them ALL off, so it feels pretty good to know that I’ve accomplished at least some. And there’s still a lot of the year left to make progress on even more!
Long Time, No See

July 14, 2014

Hey!

It’s been a while. I have several excuses. First were a few very busy weeks at work. I didn’t have time to be inspired to blog. Then there was vacation. I tried to unplug for the most part. Then came the complete and utter exhaustion that happens when you start growing a baby in your belly. Yep, that’s right. We’ll be welcoming a new little person into our family sometime near the year’s end. And it makes me tired. So, I pretty much just slept for a while.

I slept instead of blogging. I slept instead of doing dishes. I slept instead of vacuuming the floor, and cleaning out my purse, and hanging up my clothes in the closet. If anything, those weeks made it very clear to me that all the little tasks and chores I fill my life with actually do some good. Because when they don’t get done the whole house just turns into one giant pile of mess. Hooray for validation!

Thankfully I have a husband who finds me food and takes over child duty, a mom who can plow through household chores and still have time to play with her grandson, and a mother-in-law who reminds me that such a thing as paper plates exist (so brilliant!).

I feel like I’m slowly starting to rejoin the world, and hopefully our survival mode status can go on hold at least until this new baby is born. Maybe I’ll start to blog some more again. Maybe I’ll organize my closet to make space for my maternity clothes. At the very least I should probably do some dishes.

See you again soon! (I hope.)

P.S. You may have noticed that I moved to a new domain name and got a new design. This is largely thanks to my super talented husband. Who else can code up a functional custom WordPress theme in an afternoon?
If I Were a Rich Man…Romantic bedroom

July 9, 2014
I’ve known for a long time that I have good taste. I like things that are well-made, high quality, thoughtfully designed… and expensive. My bank account has never lived up to my tastes. I usually just have to look at pretty things, sigh, and hum that old tune from Fiddler on the Roof, “if I were a rich man… ya da da da di da di da di da diddle diddle dum…”

But rather than let all that good taste go to waste, I decided I should channel it into the occasional imaginary shopping trip post on the off chance that you, dear reader, are a rich man. Or woman, more likely. But that’s not how the song goes.

So if you’ve been wanting to redecorate your bedroom into a romantic retreat with touches of gold, here are some ideas for you…
1. Round Capiz Chandelier- Gold | West Elm I love how glitzy this chandelier is while still keeping a very modern vibe. I can only imagine how pretty all that gold would be with the light bouncing around in it.
2. Macrame Wall Hanging | Urban Outfitters This wall hanging brings in some more earthy texture but it’s still feminine and lacy.
3. Hadley Ruched Duvet Cover | Pottery Barn The ruching on this duvet cover gives the feel of ruffles without being overly girly. Also, I love the idea of a bed that looks like a big fluffy cloud.
4. Egerton Wallpaper | Anthropologie This wallpaper is so pretty. The colors are subtle and subdued, but the metallic gold leaves make it something special.
5. Simple Hoop Mirror | Anthropologie Any girly bedroom needs a mirror. This mirror is simple but elegant.