Tips for Husbands

1. If the item was not refrigerated in the grocery store, it does not need to be put in the fridge upon arrival at home. I kept wondering where all the pasta sauce was. Oh, in the FRIDGE! Of course!

2. The hamper I bought for $39.99 is not a decorative item. It is not a stand for you to display clean and/or dirty clothes on like some kind of art piece. It does not need a layer of boxer briefs and dress shirts strewn around it to protect it. Simply lift the lid and place your dirty clothes inside. 

3. If the direction that the toilet paper unrolls matters to you, you may place it whichever way you like. I am going to just throw it on the holder, because I am not a weirdo who MUST have my toilet paper unroll a certain way. It is not magically fused to the holder, you can turn it around. I don't mind.

4. Look with your eyes before you ask me where that thing is. It is probably right in front of you.

The Pressure of Perfect Parenting

Hey, friends. Let's be honest. Parenting is hard. It isn't sunshine and giggle fests all the time. Especially bringing home a newborn. Especially being a mother and being home with said newborn 24 hours a day.

But I've noticed among my friends who are new parents (like I am old hat at this game) that more and more of them are putting on a "Everything is GREAT! I love it! SO MUCH FUN! So easy!" face that is leaving me depressed and a little self-conscious/squirmy about my own "parent of a newborn" experiences, and tales thereof.

I think that when Agatha was born, I was honest about my struggles. The first days and weeks at home were spent being exhausted, worried and panicked that I had changed my life forever and tied myself to this other human being. A human being that was making me sore and crabby with every feeding. It was hard. I didn't sleep. I cried a lot. I thought, "I never want to do this again." Nevertheless, I loved her. So much. And grew to love her even more every day, even when I didn’t think it was possible. (And for the record, I do want to do it again.)

However, my love for her did not mean that it wasn’t hard or that I wasn’t afraid of making the wrong choices or even that I didn’t find parenting a little boring and I just wanted TIME for MYSELF. You are up all night with them, bouncing them, feeding them, having poo squirt directly at your face if you are unlucky, watching them, worrying about them and desperately wishing for thirty minutes to take a shower and eat chocolate.

Am I alone in this? Or is everyone else just trying to put on a front that they are the perfect parents?
That their baby makes them perfectly content and they KNOW this is what they were MEANT for and it’s all been so easy and la di da. Dream come true.

And I am happy for them. If that is the case. But if it is NOT the case, don’t be afraid to say it. You are just going to make the next friend anxious and paranoid that her perfectly normal feelings are all wrong and SHE IS THE WORST. You don’t have to pretend with me. I’ve been there. I’ve had a baby spit up IN MY MOUTH, for Pete’s sake.

Let’s all just agree that we won’t try to out-Super Mom each other in the future, okay?

Facepalm

This is actual post I saw on someone's Facebook account today:

Will I am so existed we finely whent and talk to the paster and seat a day for ower wedding it so cool I was happy excited that he sad lets got talk to the paster a bout it :)

My head hurts just LOOKING at that mess. Pick up a book, America.

Thought for Thursday

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." -Agatha Christie

Birthday Party!

So, we successfully threw Agatha her first birthday party. I should say I successfully threw it. Chris helped with cleaning the house (an important step) and blowing up balloons (also important).

There ended up being more people and less room in our house than I anticipated, but it was a good time and everyone had fun. And cake.

Obviously, Agatha did not really know what was going on but there were plenty of little people for her to play with (children, not dwarves). So, I think she had a good time. She got tired of sitting on my lap during present opening, but she was a trooper. Does anyone like opening presents in front of dozens of people? I certainly don't.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time putting little details for the party together and wanted to share them here. I didn't really have a theme for the party, just a color scheme in mind from an image I saw on Pinterest. So, I tried to stick with orange, pink and yellow hues for the party. They just felt summery and fresh to me. And bonus - Target had a whole line of cheap dishes and serving ware in these shades this summer. I only ended up buying one thing, but it fit in well.

 Chris and stayed up late blowing up balloons and fashioning them into large banners. We made one for the outside and one for the inside. It stopped raining about 20 minutes before the party started, so I was writing this birthday message on the sidewalk as some guests arrived. "Goose" is our nickname for Agatha, and I hadn't even realized I was writing it until I finished. We call her that about 75% of the time.

 This picture did not turn out very well, but these garlands were the inspiration for the color palette of the party. I used food coloring to dye paper doilies and used double stick tape to affix them to ribbon, then hung. They looked really cute in person.

 I was so nervous about decorating the cake. I had seen a watercolor effect frosted cake online and decided I wanted to try. A few days before the party, I made a mini cake using a tin can and practiced on that. It turned out pretty well, so I felt a little more confident about decorating the big cake. I like the way it turned out. The cake was a three layer dark chocolate with buttercream frosting. Yum. I also sewed the bunting myself, using fabrics from the neighborhood sewing shop, Sewtropolis.

 

You gotta have forks to eat cake, right? I bought these bamboo forks online and dyed them using food coloring. It was so easy, as only the bottoms of the forks needed to be immersed in liquid, and then it traveled up using capillary action. They all turned out different. It was a nice little touch that maybe didn't get noticed, but I liked it.

I stole the paint chip banner idea from Lara at A Girl Named Carrots (which you should read, for realz). Easy peasy project that got lots of compliments. It was fun to see her grow up month by month. I also used additional paint chips to make another banner, but that didn't photograph well. I just used a circle cutter to cut out circles (duh) and sewed them together in a banner and hung.

Flowers from the local flower shop, Spruce. The orange and pink snapdragons were my favorite, but I wanted a mix of a lot of different ones. I stuck them in some mason jars and called it a day.

 Here's the happy family. The second balloon banner is in the background and Agatha is wearing a birthday hat I made her using one of the fabrics from the cake bunting, a Cheerios box, a yarn pom pom and a headband. My plan is to make her a new hat every year until she starts protesting. I want to keep them all for her. Sniff.

And finally, I just wanted to give a shout out to Chris' brother, Jeremy, for making this beautiful quilt for Agatha. He had each of Chris' siblings, their spouses, and his parents sew one of the Sunbonnet Sue silhouettes and choose a book that was meaningful to them. You can't see it in the picture, but each girl is holding a book (actual images of the book covers on fabric) and has the maker's signature underneath. Then he stitched it all together, with amazing detail (the font on the book in the middle is the same font used on her birth announcement! The toile fabric is Mother Goose!). And each family member also gave Agatha a copy of the book they chose and included beautiful inscriptions to her on the inside covers. It was so touching and amazing.We're big on books around here, in case you didn't know. We got married in a library, after all.

I definitely won't be doing this big of a party every year, but for her first birthday (we made it!) I wanted to do something special.