Oh, Cookie, Cookie, Cookie

I know it's not yet Halloween, and for most people it's way too early to even think about the holidays, but I'm a planner, so Christmas has been on my radar for a couple of weeks.  In fact, I'm about 25% done with my shopping.  Booyah.  I'm also a crafter, and I love to host parties, and those things take time, so even though my dad sticks his fingers in his ears and cries "LA LA LA" to avoid it, I've been talking about Christmas, too.  (My dad is of the sweet, old-school camp who thinks you shouldn't even talk about Christmas until after Thanksgiving.)

So, what am I thinking about and planning?  Well, first of course is our Christmas card.  We've gone with the Costco photo cards the last couple of years.  They're great and super reasonably priced, but since having access to my crafting supplies again for the first time in a couple of years, I'm itching to make ours this year.  I have no idea what I'll do yet, but I'm getting tres excited thinking about it.

But the thing I'm super excited about right now is the 2nd Annual Cookie Exchange my mom and I will be hosting (hence the title).  It's a little grandiose calling it the "2nd Annual", but I'm thrilled that my mom is onboard for doing this again, and I'm hoping it's a tradition that goes on for years to come. 

I love Christmas cookies.  And I love to have a bunch of different types, but who has the time (or caloric budget) to make lots of different cookies?  Not this girl.  Actually, Patrick's mom makes an amazing spread of cookies every year (they're delicious!!) but I lack the additional freezer space, and I have a cute little 17 month old getting in my way of massive cookie production.  That's where the cookie exchange comes in.  You bring one type of cookie to share, and come home with many types.  I love that you end up with cookies you've never had, or don't have the gear for (hello, krumkake!), and you have a reasonable amount of a variety of cookies.

This year my mom and I are inviting a few more people so we're thinking we'll have everyone exchange half-dozens.  But before that can happen, I've got lots to do.  First off, is designing an invitation.  I feel a trip to Pinterest in my future...  So I'm off.  Here's hoping there are many happy cookie dreams and party plans in your future, too!

Claire's First Haircut

Yesterday, I had to bite the bullet and cut Claire's hair.  I've been avoiding this, because I love the look of my baby's hair.  And baby hair is never the same once it has been cut.  But my child refuses to keep ponytails or clips in her hair, and she was beginning to look like a ragamuffin kid on a daily basis.  So something had to give.

I am not a trained professional, let's just make that clear.  But I successfully trim my own bangs from time to time, so I figured I could handle this.  And since she really only needed her bangs cut, I didn't see the point of going to a hair salon, even the ones just for kids.  So I just did it.  Here's a quick photo review of the occasion. (Note:  I did this on the spur of the moment while Patrick was at work.  So I was alone wrangling the kid, cutting the hair, and trying to take pictures.  So don't judge, lol.)

Before
This is why Claire needed a haircut.  Despite my best efforts, Claire was looking like this daily.  My daughter is too cute not to see her beautiful eyes.

The Bait
Let's be honest.  My kid does not sit still for anything, so coming at her with scissors meant she needed a distraction.  Yes, I realized after the fact that it looks like she's the newest member of the rat pack, cigar and all, but it's a pumpernickel pretzel stick, and it worked like a charm!

During
It gets better, I promise. Can't you just see how much she loved this?

The Evidence
Ends up I didn't need to take off much to see those pretty peepers again.

After
And here is what my beautiful little girl looks like now.  Aren't her eyes gorgeous?  Totally worth it!

The verdict
She seemed pretty happy with the results, too!

A few pics

We have been TERRIBLE about keeping up with our pictures lately.  The backlog of photo editing from our cruise in May has consumed so much time.  I realized that after sending monthly pics of Claire to family and friends for the first 11 months of her life, 3 months later we still haven't sent out ones from her 12th month.  Oops.  So consider this a little taster of the last 3 months.  I promise we'll get pics out to our loved ones soon.

May (12 months)
Looking back, I can't believe how little Claire was then. Man has she grown in 3 months!

Here's our family pic from Mother's Day:

June (13 months)
June was a BUSY month for Claire.  She learned to walk independently, and that meant she was into everything!

 Checking out mommy's cookbooks...

 and then daddy's shoes...

And then of course she had to take them for a test drive. :)

She even helped us rearrange the living room...

And discovered the joy of riding on Daddy's back!

We also got to celebrate Patrick's MBA program graduation.  Claire and I are so proud of him!

July (14 months)

July was a crazy busy month.  It flew by.  So much so we forgot to take many pictures. We did get to have some quality family time though.

 Claire loves to feed people.  Whether or not they want to be fed. :)

I can't believe she's so big now.  Where did the time go???

Claire progressed from walking to running.  Her favorite jogging track is the couch.

 

 We met friends at the farmers market.  Claire enjoyed hanging out with everyone...

 

and trying on the merchandise.  I kinda wish we had gotten this hat.  My cute little cupcake :)

August (15 months)

We went to Shakespeare in the park in August.  Claire didn't pay much attention to the play,

 but she charmed the pants off of most everyone there.

 Claire has started singing along with me and doing the hand gestures to her favorite songs.

 I love the faces she makes!

 Claire tried on Patrick's badge.  Apparently she's relishing a future in aviation!

 We never got around to getting C's 1 yr pics taken, so we decided to take some of our own.  Such a sweetie pie!

 

We went on Claire's first road trip to the Cascade Loop and the North Cascades National Park.  It was gorgeous!

 If only she'd keep the glasses and hat on...

 Claire got her first "boo boo" on this trip.  I can't believe she made it 15 months without one!

So there you have it.  I apologize to those we love for not being better about getting pics out.  Consider us abashed.

Tasty Goodness: Whole Wheat Banana Nut Pancakes

My husband LOVES pancakes.  And generally, the fluffier, and whiter, the better in his book.  I am always on a quest to convert him to whole grains, so whenever I see a recipe for whole grain breakfast treats, I give it a go.  I've had a few successes, but Patrick is rather suspicious of such things, so I've learned not to tell him when I'm trying out a whole grain recipe. :)

Yesterday was Breakfast for Dinner night at our house, sparked by a new blog I've been reading called Trainer Momma.  Trainer Momma is a health nut (I mean that in the best possible way) who has made it her mission to inspire the masses to exercise more and eat healthily.  She's posted scores of recipes on her blog (as well as exercise plans) to help us do just that.  I saw a recipe for Whole Wheat Waffles that intrigued me, so I decided to give it a go. Since I had three very ripe bananas, I decided to modify the recipe to use those, especially because I thought the added sweetness of the bananas might make the waffles more palatable to Patrick.  I did decrease the added sugar in the recipe to 2T., though, so they weren't too sweet. 

The waffles turned out great in my opinion.  Very tasty.  Patrick liked them, too--Yippee!  We used our Belgian waffle maker, because that's the only type we have, but I imagine this recipe will work well on any waffle maker.  Here's the recipe:

Whole Wheat Banana Nut Waffles
modified from Trainer Momma's Whole Wheat Waffles

3 very ripe bananas
2 c. whole wheat flour
4 T. canola oil
2 T. sugar
1/2 t. salt
3 t. baking powder
3 eggs
2 c. milk
2 t. cinnamon
3/4 c. chopped walnuts

Preheat your waffle iron.  In a large mixing bowl, mash the bananas with a fork.  Then add the rest of the ingredients and mix until just combined.  (I like to lightly whisk my eggs before adding to break up the yolks and help the eggs mix in better.  Just don't over-whisk them.)  Then spray the waffle iron with cooking spray and start making your waffles.  Trainer Momma suggest 1/4 c. of batter for a regular waffle iron.  Our Belgian waffle maker uses 3/4 c. of batter per waffle, and we ended up with 8 waffles.  Enjoy!

A little perspective

Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality.  I vacillate between being grateful to have a solid roof over our head that we can afford on one income, and maniacally looking for ways to get out from under said roof.  We live in a nice 3 bedroom condo.  Our complex was converted from apartments into condos 4 years ago, and when they did so they updated the finishes and did any necessary repair work.  That's a big reason why we bought this place-- because it was move-in ready.  It is a perfectly functional, adequate home.  And with only 3 of us, we do have enough space.  But the trouble is I never thought we'd be here once we had a kid, and now that my kid is super mobile, the small space is really getting to me. 

I know that in many, many places, 1038 sq. ft. for a family of three is spacious.  I also know that it is adequate.  But the trouble is that I long for more.  Is that terrible?  I know that I should be grateful for what we have, and find ways to make it work, and most days I am and I do.  But other days, I just can't take it.  And the thought of adding another person into this space (no, I'm not pregnant, just thinking of the future) makes my head spin.

Having said all that, looking at the new IKEA catalog makes me realize that there are many ways to make this space work even with another little one running around.   So I'm planning to make some changes.  But I'm going to make them small changes that can come with us.  Because I don't want to be here forever, and I think it is ok to plan for a time when we'll live in a bigger house.  I think that's practical, not ungrateful.

Better Late Than Never

You know how pregnant women are supposed to enter a nesting phase and suddenly, in a fit of organization, put together the nursery before the baby comes?  Yeah, that never happened to me.  I got the furniture in place, and had the basics set up, like a changing station, the crib, a rocker for nursing and bedtimes, and a diaper setup, but I never got around to making it look pretty.

It's not that I didn't think about it.  In fact, the sad part is that I had almost everything I wanted to put on the walls by the time Claire was born, but by then I was too exhausted from teaching all day to be bothered to hang anything.  And once I was on maternity leave, I was huge (I swear I provided Claire with a 3-bedroom condo of her own in there), and didn't have it in me to hang things on the wall.  Besides, have any of you tried to hang things straight with a baby bump sticking out in front of you?  Not so easy.

I told myself I would do it once the baby was here.  After all, I'd be able to stand straight and move much more easily (ha!  First-time mom naivete showing!).  But the reality is that once Claire was here, the nursery was the last thing on my mind.  Or what mind I had left at that point.  I tell ya, between my sieve-like trap of a memory, sleep deprivation, and pregnancy/nursing hormones, I was pleased to remember how to take care of Claire most days.  I had no mental capacity left to care about what was on the walls in her nursery.

Then life kept happening, and I stopped worrying about her nursery.  Afterall, she only slept and got dressed in there.  She certainly didn't care and I had bigger fish to fry.  Right around her first birthday, though, it began to bug me.  I realized that what was once an excusable delay was now just plain embarrassing.  So I started working on it.  In fits and starts at first, because let's be honest, a toddler keeps you just as busy as a newborn, but I puttered away at it bit by bit.  And about a month ago, we got it done.  Well 95% done, anyway.  Here are some shots of what we did:

This was the first area that was setup, because, as you can imagine, we spent LOTS of time there when Claire was an infant.  This was our feeding, rocking, singing, soothing station, and it worked wonders.  Happily today, as seen below, Claire still loves it and has turned it into her bible reading station:

That's Claire's look of pure delight.  This kid is such a character! :)

 

This part of her room was completed last summer, because I used this area all the time.  Her closet has a dresser in it that I use as a changing table.  I DIY'd the letters hanging above using artist canvases, mod podge, and scrapbook paper.  Fun fact:  During Claire's first year, Patrick liked to randomly rearrange the letters to see how long my mommy-brain would take to notice.  :)

The rest of the room waited a LONG time to finish.  The pieces we collected were stacked against the wall for months.  When Claire started picking them up and spreading them around the house, I knew I needed to do something about it... 

These shelves hold all of Claire's special mementos.  There's her custom imprinted silver piggy bank from cousin Sally and Evan, a Japanese doll that means Bright Light (also the meaning of Claire) from Grandma, one of C's ultrasound pics, her first pinecone (my kid has a thing for pinecones), and the "Saving Up for Baby" piggy bank that my mom gave us when we first started the Baby Fund years ago so I could be a stay-at-home mom.

These fun paper flowers were inspired during a internet trolling session when I was trying to find idea's for C's first birthday party.  I'll do a post later explaining the process.  They're a bit time consuming, but fairly easy to make.

The last part of C's nursery features her magnet boards (the front of our fridge is not magnetic and she needs a place to practice her letters!!), bookshelf, and a gallery wall.  But this is where the room was only 95% done.  I hadn't thought about what to put into all of the frames yet, and so I used pics of C I had printed for her birthday party.  Seemed like a good idea, especially since those are my favorite pics of her first year.  But it came out a bit shrine-like.  I love my daughter dearly, but I was a bit creeped out by a wall-o-Claire.

 So, I searched through all our pics, and came up with pics of Claire and her most important peeps instead.  It's still a work in progress, but here's what it looks like today:

Some of the frames are still empty (or still hold the fake family pics they came with).  I have plans for those, and I want to replace some of the current pics with some art pieces I have my eye on over at Etsy.  Just got to save up my pennies first. :)

In the meantime, Claire is greatly enjoying her magnet board and chair, and I'm happy to have a functioning, decorated nursery for her.

Anyone else take FOREVER to finish their child's nursery?  I know I can't be the only one, right???

Toys, toys, toys

Toys are the bane of my existence lately.  My daughter doesn't have a ton of toys, but for the life of me I can't seem to come up with a good storage system for them.  I've tried numerous ways to contain the chaos, and none of them seem to work long term.

Part of the problem is that my daughter loves to take toys out of the bins, strew them about the room, and then walk away.  Claire actually likes to organize things and put things in bins, so I need to harness that and teach her to put them back in the bins.  In order for the to happen though, I think we needed to overhaul our current system.

The lastest iteration of our toy storage system was to create a little "toy nook" for C.  It was supposed to look something like this:

But on a good day, it tended to look like this:

Not quite the orderly, easy to keep tidy space I had in mind.  I think Claire had a little too easy access to everything, so she would just pull everything out on the floor, and walk away.  (Note- I promise that Claire doesn't generally play with the cheese slicer.  It is supposed to live in the bottom drawer of the kitchen, and lately Claire has decided that's her satellite toy bin.  Time for the next phase of baby-proofing...)

So I decided that once again I needed to rethink C's toy storage.  I was trying to keep that area free from furniture, because it's only about 3 ft by 3 ft, and I wanted to keep it feeling spacious.  Instead, with the toys everywhere, it felt cluttered, so I decided to bring something in to wrangle the toys.  Enter the bookshelf from C's nursery.  I had hoped that C was at the age where we could start transitioning her play space to her room.  I set up a bookshelf in there with some bins of toys and books for her to enjoy.  However, she's more interested in the diaper pail than her toys in there (yuck!) so that's out. 

Now I'm trying the bookshelf out in the living room.  I'm hoping having the bins on the shelf will mitigate her spreading toys everywhere, because she can't see them all at once.  And, although it takes up more visual room in the space, the bookshelf definitely looks more organized and tidy, so I think that's an improvement.

Notice that I can't get a picture of an organized space without C in it?  This kid loves it when her toys are put away.  It's like suddenly she notices them again.  Oh well, at least she seems to like it.  And I'm happy to report that a couple hours later, the only toys off the shelves were the puzzles.  For now, I think we may have a winner!

Do any of you have some brillant toy storage solutions?  Please do share, because I figure the countdown on this current solution is T minus 15-ish days... :)