Double Stroller Denial

I've spent more time over the past several months researching double strollers than I care to admit.  For the longest time I've dreaded the thought of ever needing a double stroller.  Since my girls are spaced pretty far apart, I've never actually needed a double stroller until now.  I wasn't a fan of double strollers when my best friend needed one for her kids and I'm still not thrilled with the idea of them.  I've tried several out in the stores and have ruled many others out based on their excessive weight or their inability to accomodate the infant car seats that we have.  I think finding just the right double stroller is about as impossible as finding car that can fit two booster seats and a car seat in the back. (That was our mission near-impossible when I was pregnant with Katie.)

Up until about a month ago I was operating under the delusion that I could get away with using a double stroller for only about six months until Katie turned three.  A couple of shopping experiences with Katie ditching the stroller and running all over the store like a wild toddler walking in the store made me seriously question whether or not I'd survive outings with a three year old walking and an infant in a single stroller.  Then I chatted online with one of Bryan's distant cousins.  She, like me, had children who were spaced far enough apart that they never needed a double stroller. But all of that changed when baby number five came along two years after their fourth.  Frequently she shares stories of her youngest daughter on FaceBook that remind me of Katie.  So I asked her how she was handling the stroller situation with her two youngest.  She gave me the reality check that I needed.  The double stroller is going to be a fixture in my on the go life for more than six months.  Her suggestion was to find a stroller that would give Katie the option to sit or stand.  This would serve the purpose of being lighter than most doubles and would be narrow enough that I could still navigate the clothing racks in stores like Kohls, where I do a lot of shopping for the kids.  The thought of parking my kids out in the main aisle in their side by side double stroller was enough to make me think that I was probably going to be stuck doing all of my shopping on-line until Katie was old enough to not need a stroller.

I dragged Bryan to a baby store today after realizing that the Baby Trend Sit and Stand stroller that I picked up at Target yesterday wasn't going to work for me.  It was bulky, it was fincky to fold, and it looked like Katie didn't have the balance necessary to just sit on the little bench or stand on the back of the stroller without the possibility of falling off.  I wasn't sure if I'd find anything I liked but I wanted to see what my options were.  As luck would have it, they had a Joovy Caboose Ultralight Too on display.  The stroller comes with an adaptor to hold pretty much any infant carrier seat, a second seat that looks like it will work for Katie, and a nicely sized canopy.  Best of all, it folds up beautifully and isn't incredibly heavy.   I'm pretty sure I found my stroller.  The quality of the stroller is much nicer than the Baby Trend stroller and I feel like it has greater versatility.  I'm going to head back to the store with Katie later this week to test drive it with her in it and also to see how well the car seat I plan on using fits.

Who knows, maybe this whole double stroller thing won't be as bad as I think.  Honestly, of all the things to worry about with getting ready for a new baby, the stroller issue has to be the biggest one.

Pregnancy and Lent

Apparently I'm not the only one out in blog land that has been contemplating Lent while pregnant.  Both Djiwa and Christine have discussed Lent and pregnancy on their blogs today and at the risk of beating a dead horse and looking like a copy cat and using far too many puns all at the same time, I'm going to do it, too.

We're just a few days away from the start of Lent and I've yet to decide on what I'm giving up and/or taking on for Lent this year.  Eek!  Part of this is because I already feel like I'm living a super long drawn out Lent while pregnant this time around.  I found out back in October that things like deli meats, soft cheeses, and ceasar salad dressing are all foods you shouldn't eat while pregnant.   Now I knew that moldy cheeses and feta were off limits while pregnant long before my first pregnancy, but it was news to me when I found out that hoagies, ceasar salad and fresh buffalo mozzarella were all off the menu.  And being the sort of person who always wants what she can't have, I find myself longingly looking at Wawa and wishing I could have an Italian Hoagie.

When I'm not pregnant, I'm willing to give up certain foods or even eating out/ordering take out.  Knowing how I am, I know those types of sacrifices while pregnant will make me and everyone around me miserable, so they're out.  What I need to do is find something that is non-edible to give up for Lent.

When I was pregnant with Katie I gave up FaceBook for Lent.  I've considered doing that this time around, but part of me would really hate to do it.  Perhaps that's an indicator that I should give it up since doing so will certainly impact me.  Some people are good with giving up internet during the day but I doubt I could handle that especially since that's how I primarily communicate with Bryan during the work day. Then again, I might be able to sacrifice browsing websites and blogs during the day but still utilize the messenger that I use to contact Bryan.  I imagine if I cut out a lot of my internet usage or limited myself to only a certain amount of time on line per day that I'd probably get a lot more done around the house than I presently do.

As far as taking things on for Lent, in the past I have added things like going to daily Mass two or three times per week.  I did that last year for Lent and by the time we hit Easter I was going to daily Mass Monday through Friday and have been doing so ever since.  So, unless I decide to sacrifice my Saturday mornings, the only morning of the week where I get to sleep past 6:45, I don't think I'll be able to add going to daily Mass as a Lenten sacrifice.

I'm hopeful that I will be able to come up with something that is meaningful to give up and/or take on by Wednesday.  If you have any suggestions leave me a comment.

Quick Takes: A Blur of a Week

~1~

This week feels like it flew by, even though most of the days felt pretty long.

~2~

The baby is moving around a lot these days.  I think he must be starting to feel a bit cramped in there based on some of the movements.  Let me just say that it's really uncomfortable to have someone playing with the inside of your hip for a good portion of the day.

~3~

Can you believe that Lent is less than a week away?  I haven't the slightest idea what I'm going to give up or take on for Lent.  Last year we gave up all eating out and I took on going to daily Mass 2-3 times a week.  I've thought about giving up FaceBook like I did when I was pregnant with Katie but I'm not sure if I'll do that or not.  And as far as taking something on, I have no idea what to do.

~4~

I'm beginning to think there's no way I'm going to be able to handle a double stroller.  They're all so heavy (even the lightweight ones) and bulky.  I'm really interested in the Joovy Caboose Ultralight but none of the baby stores around here sell them.  It seems like it's something that I'd have to order online. I prefer to test drive strollers before I buy them so I'm not sure what to do.

~5~

After washing and setting up the nursery bedding, I decided to wash some of the blankets I bought for the baby.  I'm really looking forward to using these muslin swaddling blankets.  They seem like they'll be great nursing cover ups as well as nice lightweight blankets for the summer months.  I don't know how I never heard of these blankets when I was pregnant with Katie.

~6~

Madeline and Ellie went over to their friends' house this afternoon.  So Bryan, Katie and I went out to dinner while they were gone.  The girls had such a good time with their friends that they didn't seem too upset that we went out to eat without them.

~7~

I decided to go ahead and buy Easter candy while I was at the store today.  I have a note on my weekly planner to buy the candy two weeks before Easter, but I figured I'd be helping myself out by buying it now instead of waiting until I'm 35 weeks pregnant.  Of course, there's always the possibility that I will eat all of this candy before Easer rolls around.  If I open those bags I know that I'll be down to one bag of candy pretty quickly since I like everything that I picked up except for one bag of candy.

Small Successes February 27th

Celebrating the little things in life that add up...

1. Yesterday morning I was pretty upset that the nursery bedding wasn't working on the crib right out of the package.  Nothing annoys me more than spending a nice amount of money on something (in this case an overpriced crib skirt) and then having to alter it.  I spent way too much time fretting and complaining about the crib skirt needing alterations yesterday afternoon.  Finally, after running it through the washer and dryer to see if it would shrink, I decided to try pinning it up to see if my thoughts on hemming from the top would work.  Washing it made the skirt lose 3/4 of an inch.  After I ironed it, I folded it up and under 1 1/2 inches (3 inches total) and pinned it into place.  After trying it out on the crib it was exactly where I wanted it and it was even all around.  I asked Bryan to lug my sewing machine from the laundry room and I decided I'd try to sew it.  Sometimes my machine likes to give me a hard time so I was preparing for a battle.  Fortunately the machine was already threadded with the color I wanted  andhad enough thread on the bobbin.  It probably took me 15 minutes total to sew all four sides and it came out looking just right.  Crisis averted.

2. The laundry is all caught up.  I spent a good amount of time on Monday and Tuesday getting the laundry situation under control.  Now, instead of having a mountain of laundry waiting for me every time I head into the laundry room I have just a few stray items that aren't enough to make a load sitting in a basket.  If I can stay on top of this it would be awesome.

3. My 30 week visit went really well today. The baby is head down and everything is looking good with him.  I still haven't actually written up my birth plan but I did go over my main points of concern with the doctor today.  He was just as receptive to what I want as the other doctors I've seen so far.  I also was telling him how I want out of the hospital ASAP after delivering the baby.  They're on board with discharing me within 6-8 hours after delivery provided we can get the pediatricians on board with letting the baby go home.  I called the peditrician's office today to see if we can set up a consult with the doctor we usually bring the girls to to see what he thinks.  The OB seems to think that as long as we have a plan in place to make sure the baby is brought in for the necessary bloodwork and is seen by the doctors the next day that we might be able to get out of the hospital quickly.  I can't express how much I don't even want to set foot in a hospital after my last hospital experience back in December.

4.  I organized a good portion of the basement last weekend.  I still have a lot to do down there but it's looking a lot better.

5.  It took about nine years, but we finally hung the Pooh Bear perpetual calendar that I bought before we moved to this house.  It looks nice on the family room wall.  (If I get a moment I'll update this with a picture.)

Nursery Decorating Woes

Now that it's been a week and a half since we moved Katie into her big girl room, I finally felt like I could go into the nursery and work on switching out the bedding.  I felt ill removing the perfect flower bedding that I had used for both Ellie and Katie.  I love this set and I was desperately hoping that this baby would be a girl so I could look at it for another two or three years.  So right off the bat I was setting myself up for an underwhelming experience.

Once I had all the girly bedding stripped away, I started to open up the boy alphabet bedding.  I put the pillow sham on our small Pottery Barn Kids pillow and was upset to see that it was huge on the pillow. So I went and checked the girly sham from PBK and saw that the dimensions on the tag were exactly the same as the new sham.  Odd.  The old one is a snug fit and this one is way too big.  Not a good start, but I told myself I could try to shrink it.

Then I pulled out the crib skirt.  I wasn't sure if I'd have to wash it first or not, but I knew either way, I'd have to iron it.  But first, I wanted to see how it fit on the crib.  I thought it was odd that the skirt was pooling on the floor so I checked to make sure I had it on properly and took a step back.  On the crib's lowest setting about 3-4 inches of fabric were on the floor on all three sides.  Seriously, how can this be?!  At this point I was on the verge of tears.

I went searching for a navy blue crib skirt that I have for my nephew's crib set and pulled that out.  I noticed the package said it had a 12 inch drop for the skirt.  So then I checked out the PBK one and see that it has a 16 inch drop.  I suspect it's just the perfect length for a Pottery Barn crib on the lowest mattress setting.  Had I been able to buy the crib skirt for Ellie's set 9 years ago (I believe it was either sold out or backordered.) I might have already known from experience that the skirt was going to be too long.  But since my mom made the skirt for that set I was blissfully unaware.

I'm tired and exhausted.  Naps don't happen for me at all thanks to a dog who barks when I try to sleep and a few other factors like me having to pick Ellie up at school when I would like to be sleeping.  I don't have the desire or the energy to alter a crib skirt for this new bedding set.

I sat on the nursery floor and cried for a bit.  Bryan offered to buy a new crib if that would solve the problem but I told him I didn't want it.  Then I decided to try the crib skirt from the girly set with the boy sheeting to see if I could live with it.  I thought it was a possibility until I added the baby blue mesh bumper.  I really dislike baby blue for boys and this was just too much.  I sent Bryan another text with a picture of that combination.  He suggested finding somethign that works, as in another bedding set.  No, I already brought wall decor that worked with this and my chances of finding something I like that goes with the wall color are slim to none.  I'm picky, and when it comes to decorating a nursery I have to have everything just so or I'll fixate on everything that is wrong.

I started to wonder what I'd have to do to make the crib skirt work.  I can't hem it from the bottom since it has a design and applique work at the bottom.  My only choice would be to hem it from the top.  After I had my little pity party and cried again about the bedding situation I put the skirt back on the bed and tucked about three or four inches under the mattress on one side.  That gave me the look I wanted.  So now I know what has to be done.  I either need to alter the crib skirt myself, or take it to a seamstress.  I'm not sure which option I'm going to go with at the moment.  I really don't want to get into a sewing project.

I talked to my mom and she suggested running it through the washer and dryer to see if it shrinks up a bit so that if I take on the alterations myself I don't find myself having to alter the crib skirt twice.  The bedding is in the wash right now and will be going in the dryer soon.  Here's hoping that it shrinks a bit.    If not, I will probably cry a bit more.

On the bright side, I do like the way the bedding looks and I think it goes nicely with the color of the room and the wall art I picked for the nursery.  

Ellie's Crazy Hair

This week Ellie's school is having "Anti Bullying Week" and each day has the kids either dressing up a certain way or something like that. Today she was supposed to dress up for career day.  When her original idea of PE teacher didn't work this morning she switched to dress pants and a nice shirt and decided to go to school as a teacher.  Quick, easy and done.

Tomorrow is crazy hair day.  We've done a few crazy hair days in the past and we usually are pretty tame with it.  Maybe one side is a braid and the other a pig tail or something like that.  This time we decided to add a little twist.

We went with a braid on one side which I was going to make look like a Kirsten from American Girl braid loop.  But then we were trying to figure out what to do with the other side.  We ended up doing a throw back to an old hair style I used to love on Ellie where she had two cute knots or "knotsies" as I used to call them until people thought my child was taking about Nazis when she was complimented on her hair.  Yes, you get strange looks when people ask if your four year old just said something about the Nazis and you try to explain that that's what you call her hair-do.

So here's the 360 of Ellie's crazy hair for tomorrow.  I'm assuming she might get some funny looks at Mass tomorrow morning.

Organization and Detachment

I think it's been about a year or two now that I have been wadering around the house complaining to Bryan that we have too much stuff.  This little fact becomes irritatingly evident when I walk into the basement and find a play room strewn with toys that are so plentiful that my children can't put any of them away.  Sometimes I try to walk away and ignore the mess and other times I hit the roof and go on a clean and purge rampage.

Bryan was in Vegas last week for a business trip and while he was gone I did my best to try and get the house clean.  The main level of the house looked pretty good when he got home around 1AM on Saturday.  Early Saturday morning I woke up pretty early and decided that I'd go and take care of the laundry and a few other things before anyone else was awake.  I was feeling pretty good about the main level of the house being nice and clean so I wasn't at all prepared for what was waiting for me down in the basement.  The playroom which my children assured me was clean and straightened for their dad's return home was not clean.  No, it looked like a bomb had hit that room.  At first I was just going to try putting some of the toys away, but the more I tried to straighten things, the angrier I was becoming.  This room, this total monstrosity littered with hundreds of choking hazards is where my two year old had spent hours playing with her sisters the night before.  The older girls know they can't have this room like this with a toddler in the house and yet here it was in all it's horrible scattered glory.

All over the place I was finding things that shouldn't be.  Legos were all over the floor.  A loose screw that had been knocked out of a rocking moose was just left on the floor.  Nerf darts were everywhere. Polly Pocket and her dimiutive accessories were all over the place and made me realize that like her friend Barbie, she and her friends had just earned the status of personna non grata.  Glass bowls that aren't even supposed to be in the basement were precariously perched in the most unlikely places.  Let's not forget the cache of dirty socks and candy wrappers that were also stashed all over the place.  I wanted to scream, but since everyone was sleeping and Bryan was jet lagged I didn't.  I went and grabbed a trash bag instead.

Like Barbie before her, Polly and all her friends were rounded up and stuffed into a zip lock bag destined to be donated.  I don't like to trash perfectly good toys just because my girls won't put them away.

Barbie was banished years ago, but I spared a few select dolls.  Since the great Barbie round up during Advent of 2011 I have had a take no prisoners policy with Barbie accessories and dolls that are left out where they do not belong.  They get picked up and tossed either in the trash or the donation pile.  At this point we have two Barbie cars, an Ariel doll, two or three outfits and a giant Little Tikes doll house.  I'm at the point now where I want to dismantle the doll house and put it in the attic or just sell it.

But back to the mountains of scattered toys.  I've come to realize that a big part of our problem is attachment.  I keep toys around because someone gave it as a gift and I know they spent a nice bit of money on it, or I keep them for sentimental reasons.  So while my kids are attached to some of these toys, I'm also attached to some of them.

I went through the toys on Saturday and decided that some things needed to be given away and other things need to be sold.  In all the years that we've been married, I've never once done a yard sale.  I've given away just about everything that we didn't want any more. But now with a new baby on the way I started thinking that perhaps some of the toys and baby gear that we don't need or want should be sold to help fund the things that we do need or want.

The basement essentially made me realize that keeping things for the sake of keeping them isn't working and only contributes to a horrible cycle of me freaking out about the messes the kids make.  If we don't have so many toys that they can't all be put away neatly then we won't have these cataclysmic messes.

So I started to look around and see how I might organize things better.  One thing that jumped out at me was the number of block containers that we have.  We had four bins of Duplo blocks, two huge containers of Mega Blocks, a stack of wood unit block sets, and more Lego containers than any family of ten ought to have (bearing in mind that we're a family of five with one on the way).  Madness.  Pure madness.  And then I realized that the manufacturer supplied containers, while they're very nice aren't practical when it comes to organizing and storing this products efficiently if you're like us and have thousands upon thousands of blocks in the house.  So I decided it was time to detach myself from original manufacture packaging.  It was time to face it, no one is ever going to say "Ooh, you have the Costco sized box of primary colored Mega Blocks from 2002!  Wow, that's worth a mint!"  Same goes for the 2003 container of Duplo blocks or even, the GASP, hard to find Mickey Mouse Duplo blocks that Katie just got for Christmas.  I decided to start out with a big clear (so I can see if the kids are stashing toys that don't belong) 66 qt container and see two sets of Mega Blocks would fit.  They did!  So that gave me the confidence to get another container the same size to consolidate all of the Duplo blocks into one bin, and two smaller ones to hold some of the girls Legos.  It really has made a big difference and I believe it is a big step in helping the girls get a handle on being able to put their toys away neatly.

I also thought about a post I recently saw on Like Mother, Like Daughter about a closet re-do that Auntie Leila did.  She brought up a lot of valid points with regards to stacking items and setting things up so you're not setting things up for failure.  So I took a look at the games in our under the stairs closet and the laundry room.  I decided to remove some games and toys that haven't been touched in years and likely won't be touched.  Games that I despise, like Pretty Pretty Princess, went into the donate pile.  And even games that I really like, such as Monopoly weren't safe.  I asked myself if I really "needed" five different versions of Monopoly.  After talking with Bryan I decided that I didn't and I chose two versions to keep.  I did the same with Candy Land.

I think with better organization and an increase in detachment things will bet better and my sanity will stay in tact.  At least I hope it will.