Goodbye 2012

This was a crazy year for our family. In fact the last several years have been pretty action packed. Let's review:

2007: Chris and I graduated college, got engaged, and he started law school while I planned our wedding
2008: I started my first professional job, we got married
2009: Chris broke his hip
2010: Chris graduated law school and I started my current job at the Chamber
2011: Chris started his own law practice, we bought our house and I got pregnant and had Margot
2012: Margot's first year aka the year of no sleep, Chris started his job at the firm

whew! I'm exhasted just writing that list.

So here is our New Year's wish: for nothing big to happen.

Seriously, we just want one year of working, playing, raising Margot, cooking food, going on walks and paying off student loans. No new jobs, no new babies, no moving, no dramatic life changing events. That is our goal.

scenes from a very happy christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas. Margot lived up to all our expectations and was in awe of Christmas and all it's beauty. On Christmas Eve we celebrated with my Mom and Step Father. After a gorgeous Christmas dinner we opened presents. Margot had been wearing a beautiful Christmas dress. But by the time presents came it was so hot in the house with all of the people and commotion that we ended up taking her clothes off.

 Margot loves her chatter phone.

 She was also in awe of her new Fancy Nancy book

 Chris and I got this beautiful Pendleton wool blanket.

And we are love with this cook book.

Back at home on Christmas morning Santa came and left Margot a rocking Moose!

And a stocking filled with treats!

We hosted Christmas brunch

 And were able to finish most of our cooking before Margot woke up to see what Santa left

While she's still getting the hang of opening presents she had no problems with the stocking!

 Margot LOVES her Noah's Ark

 We had a full and crowded house but it was well worth it

 After brunch we packed up and headed to the cabin where we were greeted by a white wonderland

 Margot needed lots of snuggle time after all that excitement

we even had a funny little tree

And my Christmas ended with a sleeping baby, new decorating books and spiked egg nog:)

Merry Christmas

Today is my last day of work before 9 days off! I am so excited. Work this year has been completely insane and I haven't had more than three consecutive days off since I came back from maternity leave. Our Christmas plans are simple and delightful. Christmas Eve we will celebrate with my Mom and Step Father with Christmas dinner, presents and lots of fun. My brother and sister are going to come back with us and spend the night. We will go to the 11pm candlelight service. Then Christmas morning my Dad and Step Mother and Grandparents are all coming over for brunch and to open presents. Everyone is eagerly anticipating Margot's reaction to what Santa brings her.

I am going to spend my vacation with Chris, Margot, friends and family. I'm going to cook, eat, organize, shop and play in the Tepee. I probably will stay far away for the computer.

Here's wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas from the Potters!

Lately...

Margot has been making some very funny facial expressions

Some scenes from our holiday cocktail party:

The bar

Mingling

 Making manhattan's

Shaking Martini's 

Margot all dressed up for a holiday ladies tea

and not so keen on stopping to take a photo never mind how adorable she is in her Christmas dress

  Busy crawling around exploring the Christmas tree

In this adorable Christmas dress all ready for Church on Sunday

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The Best winter dinner

Chris and I ate the best dinner tonight, perfect for the cold stormy rainy night we are having. I made coconut shrimp soup from The everyday food, fresh food fast cook book.

It is especially good with my perfect gin tonic I made.

Laura's Gin Tonic
1.5 ounces good gin
.5 ounces of dry vermouth
Splash lime juice
Stir, add some ice and top off with splash of tonic

Here is to an especially yummy Monday evening at home!

Yay for Sleep

I am having a good day today. The reason? I got a decent night of sleep last night. Despite the fact that our baby is 13 months old this is not as common as you might think.

I know I have alluded to lack of sleep on this blog but I haven't really talked directly about it. Margot has never been a good sleeper. I take that back, she sleeps great if she is cuddled up with Chris or I but otherwise...not so much.

Part of the problem is Chris and I. We don't like to let her cry and we love to cuddle with her. We did a little sleep training with her at 3-4 months to get her to go down in her own bed so we could have some time together in the evenings but we generally just bring her into our bed when she wakes up. This has always worked pretty well for us and seemed like a good compromise. It also made my life a lot easier when she was still nursing at night. And we love waking up with her in the bed, having morning snuggles and starting our day together. But as I often hear from co-sleeping families, "it worked until it didn't". The past few weeks we hit a rough patch. First Margot weened and since she'd always nursed to sleep bedtime became a nightmare. It was taking us 45 minutes to an hour to get her to sleep and then she was waking up at 9pm wanting to get in our bed. We did that a few times and realized that a baby in your bed from 9pm-5am way different story than a baby in your bed from 3-4am until 5am. She also starting flailing and squirming like crazy in her sleep, so much so that Chris retreated to the couch. It just wasn't working plain and simple.

After a lot of agonizing about what to do we decided to use the Ferber method, which is what we had done to get her to sleep in her own bed. We were prepared for a few very hard days with lots of tears and crying. We also decided that we'd better just teach her to not only fall asleep in her own bed but *gulp* sleep all night in her bed. So I was prepared for some tears. Well we are two nights in an there has been hardly any crying! I'm in shock. The first night Margot cried for 3 minutes, I went in laid her back down, covered her with her blanket and patted her back and a few minutes later she was out. She woke up at 10:30 and cried for 8 minutes (so I went in once to pat her back). She woke up at 4am and similar cried for another 6-8 minutes and woke up for the day at 6:20 happy as a clam. Last night she cried for a total of 20 seconds when I put her down and didn't wake up 3am, cried for 2 minutes and was out until I woke her up at 5:45 because we had to leave. I really hope this is a sign of good things to come.

Sleep and babies is always hard. As far as I can tell it's hard for everyone. And I think it's important that each family handle it in a way that works for them whatever that may be. I know I will be sad to not have Margot sleeping with me sometimes but I also think she may just be ready for her own space. I like to think that's why this is going as well as it is, that she is ready.

And hopefully I didn't just jinx the whole thing:)

Some days

I dropped Margot off at my Mom's around 7am this morning and I won't be able to go pick her up until 7pm this evening which basically means I won't see her today. I love my job and most days I do have time with my baby but the days I don't just really suck. I did however have a really productive work day. So it goes...I am starting to think that work life balance is a myth created to make women feel bad about themselves.

Also depressing about today my dinner sucks. It's really cold and rainy out and what I really want is a hot bowl of soup. Instead I am eating some mediocre cold Thai noodle salad from the deli, a yogurt and some bottled ice tea. Blah

On a good note I could not love my iPad more. I am even reading my book club book in iBooks and loving it. I spend so much time waiting for meetings or sitting through hours of testimony at council meetings and its so nice to have al this stuff at my fingertips. Like right now I am blogging while I wait for my turn to give testimony at tonight's meeting.

And on another happy note our office just finalized the vacation schedules for Christmas and I am taking the entire week of Christmas off. That is 9 straight days with my Margot.

Hope everyone else is home eating something yummy and hot!

The Family Room is Coming Together

We are starting to make some progress on our house. After 1.5 years I think it is begining to reflect our family. We find that we love it more as we continue to decorate, and work on home improvements. Our house is small, old and a bit quirky but it is perfect for us and the season of our lives we are in. We were lucky to start with a very well maintained and move in ready house. But it did start very bare. This room in particular had almost no furniture when we moved in. Here it is the day we moved in. This photo only shows one side of the room. However the rest of the room was empty. A few months later we added the couch (on clearance at West Elm), end table (Ikea), lamp (we had, from Pottery Barn), a book shelf with the stereo and speakers which you can kind of see here. But in the last couple of months this room has really come together. Here it is today:

One of the biggest improvements to this room is the framed "art" on the mantel. As you can see in the first picture there are horribly ugly vents directly above the fire place. This is a framed piece of silk fabric pulled from my grandmother's scrap fabric bin. The frame came from Ikea. The reds, oranges and purples in the fabric go wonderfully with our totally awesome southwestern chair that we inherited this year from my in laws. I love this chair. It is so comfortable and brings a lot of color and warmth into the room. Then we moved one of our yellow chairs from the living room to create more seating. And we bought a cheep basic coffee table.

We replaced our solid wood back door with this one that has a window. This adds so much more light to the space.

We're not sure about painting yet but we needed something to combat the plethora of white in this room so we put up a little mini gallery to offset the TV. These are prints we had, a wedding photo and a St. Vincent de Paul's find.

We got the TV off the floor with this basic TV stand that we also inherited from my in-laws (originally from Ikea). Margot's Tepee adds a quirky, charming quality and gives her a little space all her own.

And lastly we added this massive Ikea book shelf which I love. It takes up almost the entire back wall bringing a lot of color and texture as well as storage. And we filled the bottom row of cubbies with Margot's toys and books so she can easily access them.

There are still some things we'd like to do in this room. I'd love to replace the existing light fixtures with track lighting and possibly paint. We need to replace the molding around the back door. I think a rug would be nice in this room at some point. The coffee table and end table will be updated once we can decide and afford what we'd like. And the couch pillows need replaced with fabrics that tie the room together. The current ones were just ones we had. But overall I love this space. I think it's warm and inviting. One of my goals for our house but especially this room was for it to look like a kid lives here without looking like it had been taken over by baby gear. I think we've done that and I enjoy the personality that Margot and her toys bring to our home.