Bit by bit

Chris and I bought our house a year and a half ago. We are making progress on it bit by bit. You can see the original house posts here and our move in photos here.

Over the past year we have been focusing on decorating with what we have plus a few pieces of new furniture to fill the house out and a few other modest upgrades. In the short term we are trying to focus as much of our financial resources as possible to pay off law school loans. Once we have paid those off we do plan to do a little bit of remodeling to the bathrooms, pull up the carpet and put down new flooring and do some landscaping outside. We also have some big plans to improve storage in our house which is pretty limited.

So far we've really only made progress in three rooms, our bedroom, Margot's room and the family room. These rooms still aren't complete but I thought I'd share some updates we've made to our room.

Here is our room when we moved in. It's a pretty small room and it has a very awkward master bath which you can see in the link above. 

                                              

 As you can see it's very bland. Between white walls, neutral carpet and tan bedding/curtains it was very blah. We wanted to add more color but weren't ready to add wall color. Here's what it looks like now:

We love the iron bedstead. It's classic yet modern. I like how it reminds you of the "olden days" without feeling country. It's also not too big which was necessary in our very small room. We replaced the night stands with these smaller black ones. They are simple and give added contrast against the white walls. We added colorful bedding and accent pillows which add a lot of color to the space. Raising the curtain rod and adding longer lighter weight curtains makes the room feel larger and lighter.*

This space still needs a lot of TLC. I'd like to add something to the wall above the bed and matching bedside lamps. In the long term we will probably paint this room. We also have long term plans to redo the master bath and add closet space. And when we redo the floors down the road we will add some great area rugs.

While we still have lots to do here I do really like this space. It's calm and relaxing as all bedrooms should be. I also like having projects to get to.

*The total cost of this redo was $360 and 3 trips to ikea.  The bed, night stands, bedding, curtains and accent pillows all came from ikea.

Tuesday night dinner: Barley Risotto with Corn and Basil

I still haven't printed a single photo of Margot. I have taken over 1500, aahhhhh! Over the weekend I started the process of sorting through them. I am trying to sort them onto two discs, one of photos I want to print and the second of all the others that I just can't bring myself to delete. Then I can print photos and store the discs. In the process I realized that I have a number of great weeknight recipes that I never got around to blogging about. I am afraid I have neglected my Tuesday night dinner series. Le sigh...I will try to do better.

This recipe is wonderful for summer. It uses corn and basil both of which I seem to have in abundance right now. It's also much easier than a traditional risotto but really yummy. You can find the original recipe here. I used homemade chicken stock and fresh corn off the cob. I served this with fresh spinach sauteed with bacon and garlic whistles. This would be a great dish for entertaining vegetarians. Made with vegetable stock and served alongside a green salad and chilled white wine it would be a delightful summer meal. It did take slightly longer than 30 minutes clocking in at 50 but since it was pretty hands off once it started cooking I was able to fold laundry and play with Margot. A big win for a weeknight.

9 Months!

Dear Miss Margot Pants,

On August 16th you turned 9 months old. You may note that today is August 30th and it has taken me two weeks to write your 9 month post. The thing is this...this milestone has been really hard for me. All of the sudden you are so big and such a grown up baby. Recently I packed away all of your 9 month clothes (tear) and the hardest thing was packing away all those sweet baby pajamas. Your 12 month pajamas are just different. They seem less like baby pajamas and more like toddler pajamas. They have rubber on the feet to help you walk. And something about those pajamas just sent me into a state about your quickly passing babyhood. It is so fun to watch you learn and grow but at the same time I know I will miss your little cuddly baby self. Such is life I suppose.

Well now that I have shared my crazy overemotional sentiments we can move on to what an exciting month you have had. Oh my goodness Miss Margot this has been such a fun month for you. In just one month you have started to move, filled your little mouth with teeth, started chomping away at all sorts of new foods and developed so much independence. At the beginning of the month you only had 3 teeth and now you have 8! Those teeth seem to have no problems tearing through all sorts of food. You love to eat especially when you can feed yourself.

 

You are a very happy and easy baby right now. Sure you don't like to be left alone and you have some serious separation anxiety, but generally you smile, laugh, and talk away. You like to be around people and especially love other babies and kids. You love to sing and play with your toys. And you especially seem to enjoy books this month. You sit with a stack of board books and entertain yourself for a good 20 minutes with turning the pages and looking at pictures. Daddy bought you a Margot phone which you LOVE. You also love Sophie, your owls and "special kitchen toys".

 While you still haven't crawled per say you are moving. You can easily move from sitting to crawling position and back. You can pull yourself up. You can scoot forward and backward and you have taken a few little crawl steps. I think in a matter of days you'll be booking it across the house no problem.

Perhaps one of the sweetest things about this month is that you have started to say ma ma and da da. I don't know that it's terribly in context but it's still so sweet to hear you talking away at us. You are cute, sweet and funny. You make us so happy and bring so much joy to everyone around you. We love our baby so much! Love Mommy

 9 month stats

Weight: 18.1 lbs

length: 26 inches

clothes: size 12 months

Lately

• I turned 27
• Among other things I got cherry red skinny jeans for my birthday
• I love my birthday. To celebrate we had a little party with ceviche and margaritas
• Work has been crazy
• Margot is just about to crawl which means I need to baby proof this weekend
• It has been in the high 90's all week which means our house has been over 80 by the end of the day
• My house is a freaking mess because I simply cannot clean house when temperatures are that high
• So besides baby proofing I will be spending my weekend cleaning house and spray painting ceramic artichokes glossy yellow
• Along with everyone else on the interwebs I also read Gone Girl, I have mixed reviews
• Now that my birthday is over I am looking forward to fall
• This is all--happy Friday

Hot days and cold eats

It's been hot. And I don't know about all of you but one thing I don't like to do when it's hot is cook anything hot. So this weekend while temperatures were 101 and 96 we ate cold leftovers, salad, and fresh fruit for dinner and nice cold smoothies for breakfast. These smoothies are good, easy, and healthy. They are the perfect summer snack, breakfast, lunch or dessert.

 Just 3-5 simple ingredients: frozen banana*, frozen berries (these featured fresh blueberries and raspberries from the farmers market that I stuck in the freezer for an hour before making the smoothies) and whole milk Greek yogurt--it must be whole fat that's what makes these creamy and delicious

 Simply place all ingredients into food processor and blend until smooth. 

 Enjoy! Chris and I drank these for breakfast in a glass while Margot enjoyed hers with a spoon

*Once my bananas are ripe I just stick the whole banana in the freezer for smoothie making. I have to cut the peel off with a knife which is fairly easy. If I have frozen berries in the freezer (which I usually do) I use those or if I have fresh berries floating around I just pop some in the freezer for at least an hour before smoothie making. I find any berries work here, peaches and mangoes would also be good.

Latch On

It is world breastfeeding week. Our birth instructor, Katharine wrote this article in our local paper this week. In this article she talks about the disparity between the number of women who hope to breastfeed and those who are still nursing months later. She says, "Although most Oregon mothers set out to breastfeed, barely half are exclusively breastfeeding at three months and fewer than 25 percent at six months postpartum. A closer look reveals stark disparities by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic characteristics and geography. These statistics suggest a stark disconnect between what new mothers want and what actually happens." These numbers really struck me.

Breastfeeding is hard in many ways and for many reasons. Every new mother has her own story. I was adamant about breast feeding from the Beginning. I researched all I could about nursing, latch and milk supply. But I soon learned that there are things you simply can't learn from books. Breastfeeding was extremely painful for me. Between what my lactation consultant referred to as Margot's "barracuda suck" and a long painful course of introductal thrush, breastfeeding was painful for the first 4 months. More recently I have had a lot of issues with my milk supply. Even with as much knowledge and support as I am blessed to have I simply can't pump enough milk for Margot while I am at work. However, I have a very kind and supportive friend Valerie who gives us extra milk for Margot. Valerie has a baby a few days younger than Margot and is able to pump more milk when she's at work then her baby can drink. She has been so generous to give us her extra milk allowing Margot to keep having breast milk.

I feel very blessed to be able to give Margot breast milk, yet I can easily see how and why so many women aren't able to continue nursing. Until society understands the value of breastfeeding AND fully supports mothers in this endeavor we will continue to see these kinds of statistics.

Tomorrow is the Big Latch on which Margot and I will be attending along with my friend Valerie and her baby. It will be a great reminder of the community of breastfeeding mothers we have in our town and how important it is to support one another.

Bye Bye July

How is it already August? Where does time go? I keep thinking of summer as something that's ahead of us and now it's already halfway behind us. August first brings me to another month of photos. However, I didn't quite make each photo this month. But here's what we did manage to capture in the fleeting month of July.

 Self portrait

 Taking a break from a busy day to eat lunch--Chinese bamboo leaf packet

best part of my day feeding letting Margot feed herself ma po tofu

 getting ready for a fun 4th of July

on the floor reading books

 Margot hanging out in the big awesome southwestern chair recently inherited from my in laws

 playing in the pool at our family BBQ lunch

 Margot playing with the big pile of laundry to fold

 My nails freshly painted my favorite color

A letter to Margot for her 8 month post

 texture

 a big open--eating her first watermelon

 little fingers playing with "special kitchen"

Sign

my current addiction--thrifting cute clothes for Margot this romper is the most recent example

a plate of yummy fresh summer salad

big blue eyes! 

9o'clock and sound asleep

 upside down? not really but loved shopping with my sister at the Nordstrom Anniversary sale

I heart these sweet potato chips