Five Favorites

-1-

Pumpkin Spice French Toast. I just made it up. While the rest of the country is probably over pumpkin spice everything, down here in the south we're just getting started! Once or twice a week I find the energy to make french toast with gluten free bread and tons of pumpkin spices. So that means lots of cinnamon and little bit of nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and allspice. And brown sugar. Served with real maple syrup. It's delish.

-2-

My Kindle . It's the best. The one in the link is way fancier than mine. I have the super simple original and it is just perfect. It was given to me by a friend whodidn't have a use for it (What? I know!). I've had it for two years and honestly, I've hardly picked it up. But after watching these, I decided I had to finally read Pride and Prejudice. And since it's free on the Kindle, the Kindle it was. And boy was it awesome. I never had to find my page, could set it down on the couch while reading so I had two hands for eating. So light weight. So functional. I thought I would shed a tear parting ways with paper books, but I'm about to toss them out the window and never look back.

-3-

Pride and Prejudice . It was every bit as good as everyone said it would be. And now I feel like a real grown up because I've read it. Hey, I read it before I hit 30. So I'm not that late. And now I'm definitely in the mood to soak up all things Jane Austen. What's your favorite Austen book? Better yet, what's your favorite Austen book that I can download for free on the Kindle???

-4-

As mentioned in number three, these YouTube videos were just amazing. Addicting. Very, very addicting. You've been warned.

-5-

And a combo of favorites from our day so far. Beautiful crisp weather for the first time this year. A fun outing with friends. Eating lunch on the back porch (Hannah's new favorite). Both kids napping at the same time. :)

Five Favorites

Joining Hallie to share five of my favoritest things this week.

-1-

The St. Louis Cardinals. Oh yes they are. I know not everyone loves the Cardinals as much as I do, but then again, I don't think the Rockies made into the playoffs now did they? If you wanna watch baseball in October, then you gotta be a Cardinals fan.

-2-

If you wanna watch baseball in October, you also have to have cable. We're way too cheap for cable but not too cheap for a date night with free babysitting from friends! So Ted and I actually get to watch game five of the National League Division Series. Together. In a bar. Without children. And with alcohol.

It hasn't happened yet. But Wednesday night's date is already my favorite night of the week.

(And I'm just going to pretend like they are never, ever going to leave us.)

-3-

I started doing some actual speech therapy with Hannah this week. My goal is 20-30 minute sessions twice a week. I've known for a while she needed it but was hoping that my indirect approach would take off. It didn't. So now we're doing it the old fashioned way. It's been a lot of fun to see her rise to the challenge. She asks for it every time Paul goes down for a nap and (so far) has sat attentively for the entire time. I'm excited for her intelligibility to improve and for her to become more confident talking with her friends and other adults.

Don't mind the grease on the wall from the previous renters' popcorn machine. Who does that??

 I'm also incredibly grateful that I have two degrees and five years of experience in the exact area of help my daughter needs. Literally saving us thousands of dollars. That's a favorite.

She hung these up herself. So I think it's safe to say speech is a favorite of hers too.

But my favoritist favorite part of this "favorite" is hearing her say "speech" like "peets."

"We do peets now mommy?" Love it.

-4-

This outtake from our seven month photo shoot with Paul is my favorite. Gosh, I just love him. I could type that a thousand times and it wouldn't even come close to describing how much I love this little boy. He is just the best. An absolute joy.

He's been crawling and kneeling and pulling up for a few weeks now. It's adorable. But making my life a whole lot harder than it was before. A whole, whole lot. Not a favorite.

-5-

This is my new favorite spot of our house. I just moved the recliner about two feet to the right and turned some wasted space into a "reading corner". It actually makes our tiny living room feel quite a bit bigger. The mat on the floor spells out READ but you wouldn't know that because Crawl Joseph has taken it upon himself to continually rip all the books off the cute little spice rack bookshelf. Whatever. He loves it back there. Probably because he eats the floor mat, but who cares. And Hannah actually gets her books out more often because they're not scattered in with all of her toys. Wins all around. It's everybody's favorite.

Paul's Five Favorites

Linking with Hallie again, this time to dote on my sweet Paul.

Paul Man, you are six months old today! The time flew. Faster than I ever knew time could fly. You are such a delight to your family. Here are your top five favorite things in life at your ripe old age of six months.

-1-

Me. I am the source of summit of your happiness. The term "mama's boy" has never been used more accurately to describe your love for me. It's amazing. You could be happily playing by yourself in the living room, but if you get just the tiniest glimpse of me out of the corner of your eye you must be near me. You will do anything to get in my arms. If I come home from being gone for a few hours you jump and flap and scream until I wrap you up and nurse you. And then you smile at me like this:

When you finish nursing you lay in my lamp and flap your left leg (always left) and just smile at me.

I am just as crazy about you as you are of me. And my favorite moment of every day is hearing you playing in your crib after you wake up from your nap. Then opening the door and watching you light up and wiggle all over the place because you are just so stinkin' happy to see me.

I love being your favorite.

-2-

Hannah is a close second. She makes you laugh way more than I can. But she can't nurse you. So I still win. Your love for Hannah is so beautiful. When we're in the car you just stare at her. In fact, you go weeks without ever fussing in the car, even for trips a half hour or more, because you are just so happy to sit and watch your sister.

A repeat picture, yes. It's so good it needed to be on  here twice.

Your daddy is right in line behind Hannah, but gaining ground every day. You are really getting into his roughhousing and tickling. He also makes you laugh harder than I can.

-3-

"Crawling". You've been sitting since you were four months old, pulled up for the first time at 4 1/2, and started rocking on your knees shortly after. You are all but crawling and I expect you'll do it any day now. Even though you can't crawl, you sure do get to where you want to go. It's kind of like an inchworm.  You pick yourself up onto your knees, sprawl out with a forward lunge, then shimmy back up to your knees again. Last night you got all the way across the living room to join us at the table during supper. You like being in the action.

You also like being very serious.

-4-

Food. Well just bananas really, that's the only food you've eaten so far. You act like you want to eat everything on our plates, but when we fed you some sweet potato on a spoon you got the chills and spit it out. But banana in the net feeder? Your new fave. You actually cried when I took it away to refill it today.

(You have the most gorgeous blue eyes.)

-5-

Talking. You are the babblingest six month I know. Your current repertoire consists of /b, m, bw, g, gw/ and an occasional /d/. You even combine consonants to say things like "bih-ma" or "ger-buh". It's quite impressive. You love to slap your hand across your mouth and listen to the way it changes your sounds. And you say everything with such purpose. Like you're really trying to tell me something. 

Picture taken mid babble

We love you Doodle. Thanks for adding so much joy to our family.

Hannah's Five Favorites

Linking up with Hallie with a little twist on Five Favorites.

-1-

Fishing with Daddy. 

Ted took her out on the boat for the first time to catch some bluegill ("boo dill") and she loved it. We packed tons of snacks but she hardly touched them. She was that excited about fishing. They fished for about an hour and a half. She handed Ted worms, held the rod, and even reeled in her own fish. I'm not sure which of them had more fun.

Come to think of it, I had the most fun. An entire Saturday morning in the house with a napping baby and time to do whatever I wanted. I think Saturday morning fishing trips need to be a regular occurrence.

-2-

This:

Making a bed for a statue of Mary out of our box set of Lord of the Rings. Very weird. But she loves it.

-3-

Her brother.

Yes, she still kicks him in the head occasionally, but for the most part she really, really loves him. She tells him what she sees out the window while we're driving. She makes him laugh just by looking at him. When her leapfrog laptop asks her, "Hannah, who is your best friend?" she almost always answers, "Paul," and I melt every single time with the adorableness of their sibling love. I think she generally enjoys having him around. Maybe "favorite" is a strong word, but he's definitely loved.

-4-

Her turtles.

Obsessed. They were a shower gift from some sweet Mississippi friends and she has loved them since she first laid eyes on them. They snap together and play music. When she was younger she would make us chase her around the house with them over and over and over again. They kept getting "lost" to give us a needed turtle respite, but somehow she always manages to find them. They make a reappearance every few weeks and she enters back into turtle heaven. This week's game is to try to pull them along the top of the couch without them falling off. As you can see, she's super successful.

-5-

Laundry.

This favorite really should occupy all five spots of the Five Favorites post. She loves to fold laundry. Loves it. "I dold yawnee?" she asks all day long. And she's actually quite good at it. She knows what clothes goes in which piles and she's very picky about laying them out flat and in the proper direction. Putting them away isn't so much a favorite, but we're working on it. She even requests to take all the clothes out of her and Paul's drawers and sort them.

And if someone sends some hand-me-downs over? Well she'll be busy for a good forty minutes.

Pile of clothes sitting by the door for Ted to take out and put in storage? Don't worry, she'll make sure it's neat and organized before being thrown haphazardly into a giant tub.

Those are Hannah's five favorites for this week. Who knows what she'll come up with next though.

Five Favorite Blogs

It's no secret that I love blogs. Any family or friends reading this might think that it's silly or dumb or a waste of time. But anyone who is a "blogger" gets it. I'm linking up with Hallie today for Five Favorite and sharing my current top five favorite blogs.

All You Who Hope

Karey is like the gateway drug for Catholic Infertility blogs. Just about every Catholic infertile blogger I know has found the community through Karey's blog. When I started making connections and reading fellow infertility blogs back in 2010, I avoided Karey's like the plague. Every time I came across it I exited out immediately. She had a picture of her daughter Clara at the top and in my mind that made her someone I didn't care to know. I didn't even know her story but I was too wounded to be happy for her. When I finally read her adoption story, I felt like the biggest jerk in the blogosphere.

Karey is incredibly honest and tells it like it is. She doesn't pretend to have it all together for the sake of her blog and I love that. Her children are precious and her adoption story, then pregnancy, and then second adoption story are so beautiful and speak so much of God's providential love for us. She's beautiful and married to a famous news anchor and gets more comments on each post that I do in a month. If she was at my high school she would have been the most popular girl in class. But instead of being mean and nasty like the popular girls I knew, she's sweet and genuine and humble. Her blog will never leave my feed.

A Knotted Life

Bonnie takes honesty to a whole new level. She says what she's thinking every single time she posts. It's so refreshing. I've linked to her blog probably a dozen time because I love, love, love it. I've even said this before, but it was the first blog I ever read. My friend Alisha directed to me to her posts about miscarriage we were still waiting to conceive and I felt like a door had been opened for me. I went home that night and started my blog. Bonnie's blog continues to be a favorite.

Then there's the miraculous healing of her son of the fact that Archbishop Fulton Sheen is possibly on his way to sainthood because of HER prayers. Pretty stinkin cool.

Ted was oh so stinking close to getting a job about 40 minutes from Bonnie and I was super bummed when I found out I didn't get to become her real life friend. So glad she blogs so I can still learn from her wisdom and honesty and laugh with her great sense of humor.

Time Flies When You're Having Babies

I'm relatively new to Ana's blog. And when I did discover it, it took me months to get up the courage to comment. Why? Because she's Scott Hahn's daughter-in-law! Scott Hahn is the most famous Catholic convert and speaker in the country. (If I was up on pop culture I would make a celebrity comparison here. Who's even popular right  now?) (I've met him twice, no big deal.) Honstly, when I stumbled on Ana's blog, I was starstruck. But I finally commented and now I'm hooked. A faithful Catholic who is funny, sarcastic, and tells it like it is. So honest (are you seeing the honesty theme here?) She makes me feel better about my parenting (which sounds like a complete put down but it totally isn't!). In my mind anyone who bears the last name Hahn would NEVER do things like....wear jeans to Mass, or lose her temper with her kids, or use TV as a babysitter for a while. But it's true. She does. And I love every word of it.

Narrative Heiress

Ashley is a friend from my freshman year of college. I was so intrigued by her and ate up every second I got to spend talking with her about life. Spending a weekend discernment retreat at a convent with her is one of my favorite college memories. (For the record, the sisters were clamoring for Ashley to come back and spend more time in discernment. They just loved her. The sweet vocation director all but told me, "I don't think you should be a nun my dear.")  Ashley thinks about things more than any other human being on the planet. If you think you are someone who is constantly analyzing and questioning and seeking ways to improve yourself, well multiply that by twenty and you have Ashley. Her amazing writing (she's an English teacher) is only a small, small sliver of the profound thoughts that fill her mind every single day. She can take what I'm thinking and spin it into the most beautiful and eloquent blog post that leaves me saying, "How did you get inside my head!?"

She's currently pregnant with twins!! due any day or a month from now and transitioning into becoming a stay-at-home-mom to the twins and her three year old. I find myself wishing all the time that we could move back to our college town in Missouri and live near Ashley. I always felt inspired and empowered after hanging out with her and I really miss it.



House Unseen. Life Unscripted

You know anyone with a name like Dwija is going to be interesting. She is a beautiful Catholic convert with a house full of children and appears to be as almost as cheap as I am. She's another one who really tells it like it is and if you haven't read her recent post on NFP you are missing out. I may or may not use "Y U not?" in my daily conversation with my two year old because of her blog. "Hannah Y U not be sweet and cooperative right now?" She's newly pregnant and embracing the crazy, crazy life God's given her. A beautiful role model.

It was hard to stop at five. But Hallie made me. I could have talked about Sarah, who reminds me so much of myself exactly two years ago, or Haley who I love in real life and online, or hilarious Grace, or kindred spirit Cynthia, or Jenny, who I just discovered and can't believe I'm so late to the party, or Susan, my sweet new real life friend (who is sick right now. say a prayer for her!). But that would be cheating. (But really, you should go check them out too.)

What are some of your top five favorite blogs? Not that I need any more to read....

Five Favorites

I'm jumping on board the Five Favorites train to share my favorite postpartum products. Here goes:

-1-

I read this tip in the comment section of a blog post when I was pregnant with Hannah and boy oh boy was I glad I did! Buy the most expensive toilet paper you can find. Take a role to the hospital. Use the rest at home. Because really-the time for using crappy one ply toilet paper is NOT hours after you give birth.

-2-

I have an extreme amount of pity for any nursing mother who wasn't told about lanolin when they started nursing. The last thing our doula said before leaving us when Hannah was born was, "Lanolin. Both sides. Every single time." And I listened. I had virtually no pain with Hannah and am only having some with Paul (i.e. cussing only once or twice per day) Waiting until your nipples are cracked and bleeding is NOT the time to go out and get some lanolin. Have it ready. Use it liberally.

-3-

I love these nursing tanks from Target. I bought two with Hannah and am still using them (although they're slightly stained from all the lanolin). I have one in black for wearing by itself and one in cream-which is good for wearing under clothes. I've lived in them from the time we got to our postpartum room until now-with no end in sight. I wash them both almost every single day because they are usually covered in spit up and breastmilk. If you can afford it-get three or four. Order them small, they stretch out a bit. I have one with "side slings" and one with holes cut out for your boobs. I like the side sling one better-the extra fabric on the other gets in the way sometimes. Absolutely could not survive the messy months of nursing without them.

-4-

A sweet blogger friend gifted me with a postpartum care kit from Earth Mama Angel Baby when I was pregnant with Hannah. I had no idea what a perfect gift it was until I started using it. This bottom balm was essential in healing from my tear, these bath herbs were wonderful when added to a sitz bath, but this spray was absolutely amazing. I only have the balm and herbs leftover for this time around and I really wish I had the spray. This would make a great gift for a pregnant friend!

-5-

I had no idea this little gem existed with my first nursing go-around. Oh how I wish I had! I think it could have saved us months of agony from oversupply. Not to mention the hours I could have NOT been pumping had I known about it. It's a Milkies Milk Saver (click for link) and it does just that. It saves the milk that leaks out from the breast that's not attached to the baby. The first time I used it I got 2.5 ounces in just a single 15 minute nursing session. That's an entire lady's night out! Effortlessly! In only a few days I've managed to stock 33 ounces of breast milk in the freezer. If this keeps up, I won't ever have to pump. Ever. Granted, I'm not working full time like I was with Hannah. I probably would have had to pump a little then-but it's likely it would only have been one time a day.

And if I thought this thing was awesome yesterday-today I'm even more in love. I skipped it last night because I was too lazy to walk back into the kitchen before crawling in bed. I've been engorged all day-it has been saving me of this discomfort and I didn't even know it! I think this is because I'm letting all that extra milk out rather than smashing my unused breast to try to stop it.

I'm not soaked when I get up from nursing. I'm not pumping to have a supply for the times I need to be separated from Paul. I'm not engorged and uncomfortable. It's a win-win (win-win-win-win....).

-6-

I'm cheating and adding a sixth favorite. 

This guy.

He makes all the postpartum trouble worth it.

Any other postpartum essentials that I've missed? I'm really wanting to try reusable breast pads this time around (so I can stop buying the disposables every time I turn around) but want to know if they really work.  I tried the cheapos from Walmart with Hannah and felt like I had wet rags in my bra all day. Anyone know of a brand that really works? Tell me about your favorite postpartum items in the comments!