Tag: wiml

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What a week it was

As you all know, last week I participated in the Week in My Life project with Mel from Adventuroo. After those 7 days of continuous posts, I figured I should do a little recap of sorts.


I took pictures (lots of pictures!). I made notes. I kept track of times. I paid attention to details I may otherwise have glossed over in the general day-to-day. I spent hours putting everything together so I could share these little moments of my life.

So what did I take away from all of this work?

  • I love being a mom. This should come as no surprise, seeing as I’ve talked about how having D has changed my perceptions in so many ways time and time again, but realizing that my posts from the week almost entirely revolved around how we spent our time with D really solidified in my mind and heart that my role as Mommy is what’s most important to me.
  • I want to be able to stay home with our children, and I’m going to work very hard these next couple years to hopefully make that happen someday.
  • After learning so many stories of SAHMs this week, I find myself trying harder to do what it would take to be a good one. More play time with D; more instructional/educational stuff for her so I could actually teach her something worthwhile if she weren’t at daycare each day; more hands-on with her toys to really be engaged with her; lots of reading books, which she now loves; lots of talking to her and with her, even without real words yet.
  • I am so blessed to have in R a partner who wholeheartedly loves raising and nurturing our little family as much as I do. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a culinary master either, so we don’t have to live on the bowls of cereal that are about the extent of my skills in the kitchen.
  • We want to take more advantage of nature. We live in an area with so many wonderful state parks, that after our little hiking adventure last week we realize we need to use them much more often. Sitting around the house on free weekends is great and all, but D loves to be outside and I think a weekly or even biweekly jaunt would be fun. Like our Saturday or Sunday morning time – head to a park, play around for a little while, come home and relax. Sounds totally doable.
  • R and I need to give each other more hugs. We’re constantly smothering D with hugs and kisses. Can’t forget about the adults in the house, too.
  • Even if I’m not continually taking pictures each day anymore, I should try to really capture the everyday mentally. Watch D’s little face because her beautiful expressions change daily. See her mouth trying to form new words and sounds and feel my heart almost explode at what an amazing little person we’ve created. Soak in her smell because nothing smells better than warm baby. Hear her contagious peals of laughter and tiny quick footsteps padding around the house. Watch in utter adoration as R picks up his baby girl and feel my heart overflow with love for those 2 – my family.

I can honestly say I never would have thought to do something as intense as this Week in My Life, but I’m so glad I did. Thanks again, Mel! You’ve helped me remember something that can easily get pushed into the background – I love my everyday, and every day of it most definitely is a blessing.

 

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Week in My Life – Day 7: Sunday

We made it! The final day in my Week in My Life with Mel from Adventuroo, and I survived. I’ll admit, it’s been hard work and some late nights, remembering to capture all the everyday moments I wanted to share with you all, figuring out what I wanted to say about everything so you got a true glimpse into our lives, and getting each picture edited and uploaded here for your viewing pleasure.

But you know what? It’s been great! I’m so glad I undertook this endeavor because I think looking back on this record of these 7 days years from now to see how we all looked, how little D was, and what our daily routine was will be pretty special. So here’s how my last day went down…

I know yesterday I said I was going to document our sports moments this weekend, but today’s Brewers vs. Cardinals game got moved to a 7:05pm start time, since the Texas vs. Detroit series ended yesterday. That meant ours was now the only game being played today, so they pushed it back to be a night game for tv.

Total boo on that, since night games are harder for D, what with the staying up late and being at the ball park way past her bedtime. Plus it totally screwed up our tailgating plans, because R was making jambalaya for it today and now we didn’t feel like lugging all the stuff for it out there.

Night games we usually park outside the park lots and walk in, which isn’t conducive for tailgating. Plus doing my post after another night game would mean staying up way late for me again, and I just got caught back up on my sleep from last week. So anyway… A change of post plans.

Instead of Brewers game pictures, I thought I’d share a little of our outside time this afternoon since it turned out to be a really nice Fall day.

D took a nap from 11:00 this morning until almost 12:30, then had some lunch and we headed outside to play with Daddy while he listened to the Packers on the radio and cooked the jambalaya in the driveway since it wasn’t going to Miller Park with us.

These were all taken around 2:00pm and prove that D was a little less enthused to be “jumping” in the pile of leaves than we expected. They were also taken with a real camera, not my iPhone this time. My treat, you’re welcome.

So that’s that! I hope you’ve all enjoyed sharing a week of my life with me. I know I’ve discovered some great blogs and bloggers through this process, and hopefully some feel the same about me. Like I said, this has been kind of a marathon blogging experience for me, so now I need to rest my feet. I’m gonna take a little break, but I’ll be back in a few days, nice and refreshed. Stay tuned!

Week in My Life. The End.

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Week in My Life – Day 6: Saturday

Seeing as I don’t normally post on weekends, you may be wondering what I’m doing here. Well, we’re still in the midst of Week in My Life over at Adventuroo, so I decided I’d give you all a glimpse of what my weekend life is like as a little treat. I see you’re thrilled. Excellent!

I couldn’t figure out what I was going to document for today, since I really didn’t feel like doing the whole day. 1.) I don’t have enough energy to run around snapping a picture of every hour, and 2.) I’m really not all that exciting and didn’t want to bore you to tears. So I chose to capture the sporting moments of this weekend. Wisconsin sports are ON FIRE right now, and this weekend holds both a Badgers football and Brewers baseball game. We’re big fans, so I wanted to show you how we here in SM land root on the home teams.

Today the Badgers played Indiana at 11am. It was a home game at Camp Randall, and our Homecoming. Go Badgers! Unfortunately it ended up being probably the least enthusiastic Badgers cheering section in our house in a long time. It wasn’t a super important game to get all fired up about since we were favored to win by 40, but still. 2/3 of the Badger contingent spent the majority of the game doing this…

And then there was me, stuck watching a good portion from behind one of the 5 loads of laundry I did this morning. Awesome. (but remember, at least it was only laundry, no other cleaning since i did all that crap last night. wahoo!)

D woke up a little over an hour into the game, and immediately began cheering on top of Daddy. Fortunately there were plenty of “touchdowns!” to cheer about today.

Since we didn’t exactly have the most exciting Badgers game viewing party for you, here are some bonus pics of D from this morning. She was playing in the bathroom as I got ready and then was enthralled by the animals on Jack Hanna’s children’s nature show on tv. I’m not really a fan of plopping her in front of the idiot box, but she LOVES animals and I figured it was relatively educational.

Tomorrow we’re going to Game 6 of the NLCS when the Brewers come home in a must-win situation against the Cardinals, so I should have a little more to show for that one. Hopefully the right team wins. Go Brewers!

 

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Week in My Life – Day 5: Friday

Now try not to get too jealous, but I just had the most exciting Friday in the history of Fridays. This fifth day in my Week in My Life with Adventuroo was stupendous. Please come inside and share my story, won’t you?


Friday afternoons at work generally result in my leaving pretty early, and today was no exception. R went to Great Lakes Distillery for a couple drinks with one of his coworkers after work today, so I picked up D and headed home.



Here comes the juicy part of my fun. You ready for this? I spent my Friday afternoon CLEANING MY HOUSE. Yep, that’s right – dusted, vacuumed, and cleaned the bathroom. Holla! I can see you all are green with envy, so I’ll break it down a little for you.

Yeah, I was totally kidding in that first line above, in case you hadn’t sensed my sarcasm by now. But here’s the deal. I hate… no, HATE! wasting even 1 second of my precious weekend time doing chores. I would much rather spend a late-week weeknight getting all of the housecleaning for the week done than have to do any of it on a Saturday or Sunday. Especially when we have nothing planned that night, why not get it out of the way while I can?

So today when D and I got home I dialed it into clean machine mode and got started before R got home. It’s actually much easier for me to do the cleaning while he’s gone and out of my way, so I wanted to take advantage of all the time I had before his coworker dropped him off after their little happy hour. Like I’ve said, D is really pretty good about entertaining herself, so once I satisfied her little “get me” arms reaching up with a few minutes of holding and snuggling, I gave her a bottle of milk and snack tub of Cheerios and put her down to play while I got to work right about 4:00. She loves just following me around the house watching, too, so it usually works out pretty well.




These Swiffer dusters are my best friends. I don’t think I’ll ever use a cleaning spray and rag again. These babies do the trick nicely.


I love those pictures of D above with both her milk and water bottles, because it shows how she plays with her hair every time she drinks from one. Apparently it doesn’t matter what’s in it either, as long as it has a nipple the hair gets twirled.

R got home shortly after 4:30 and played with D for awhile as I continued the dusting. Thankfully he gave D dinner tonight so I could finish vacuuming the rest of the house I didn’t do last night, Swiffer sweep under the bed and couch where the vacuum won’t reach, and wipe down the bathroom. D didn’t mind the vacuum at all tonight, and actually followed me the entire time wanting to inspect it and even touched it a couple times.




These are my second best friends, because I’m often not in the mood to do a full-on bathroom cleaning and will just wipe everything down to disinfect with them. Too bad I used my last one tonight, boo.


Hooray! House is clean! It was just before 6 by this point, so it took me right around 2 hours to get everything done. And just like that, I will not be wasting any of this weekend with a duster or broom in hand. I will need to do laundry and maybe mow the yards tomorrow, but those are easy chores to me. It’s this inside tediousness that I don’t really like. And now it was bath time for D since she didn’t have one the past 2 nights. Be prepared, because Naked Baby made an appearance after the bath and decided to do some dancing in the living room.







Tonight R and I ordered fish frys from the Legion Hall near our house, so R called those in for pick-up as I was doing a last little bit of cleaning up in the kitchen after Naked Baby was diapered and dressed. I wanted to be back in time for the Brewers game, so we nailed the timing. I left at 6:48 to go get the food and was back at 7:00, just in time for the first pitch. Go Brewers!



D played for awhile as R and I watched the game and ate our fish, with plenty of “touchdown!” arms when she heard the crowd cheering. She has an inflatable beer bottle (yeah i know, bad example, but she loves playing with it and obviously has no idea what it is) that she now likes to ride like a horsey and often bounces right off.




Around 7:30 R noticed she had puked up a little milk over in her play corner, so I went and changed her jammies to get the sour off. With a new diaper and fresh pair of pjs on, her tell-tale bedtime eye rubs prompted me to refill her bottle of milk and take her in to rock to sleep a bit. I carried her into her room at 7:41, rocked and snuggled for a few as her heavy eyelids finally closed for the night, and put the remainder of her bottle back in the fridge at 7:50.

And now, as promised, I am enjoying my glass of Hallowine. I may have to make it a little more than a glass tonight; this bottle’s almost empty, and I have another flower that could use a vase. What? It’s festive.

It’s 8:30 again, I just started the dishwasher, and I should have this post finished up and pictures added in about half an hour. Then it’s lounge, lounge, lounge for me and R the rest of the night. Hopefully the Brewers can get their heads out of their asses and pull off a comeback here, for this one’s looking pretty ugly tonight.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do a separate post for Saturday and Sunday this weekend or just combine them into one big recap, since I don’t usually post on weekends. I guess you’ll just have to come back to find out. Oh the suspense!

It’s the freakin’ weekend, baby, and I’m about to have me some fun!


 

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Week in My Life – Day 4: Thursday

Oh, Thursday, you day you. There you are, sandwiched between the hump day of Wednesday and the freedom of Friday, but you’re special in that you’re that brief moment before we hit full-on weekend mode. The anticipation, the relief, the ahh… Here’s what was the haps on this Thursday, the 4th day of my Week in My Life series with Adventuroo…


Today was crappy and rainy, so R forewent the bike taxi and I picked D up from daycare again. We had to run to the grocery store on the way home, something I always contemplate doing before I get D for ease of lugging groceries around minus the toddler, but she loves to ride in the cart and I hate leaving her at daycare longer than necessary so I got her first. On Thursdays our neighborhood grocery has milk on sale 2 gallons for $4. What the what?? This kid goes through so much milk I need that sale. Unfortunately the organic milk isn’t included in there, of course, but I have a hard time passing up getting double the milk for 2/3 the price of 1 gallon of organic whole milk. So hopefully she won’t start sprouting a third eye or suddenly double in size by next week.


However, I’m a complete space cadet and totally forgot to take any pictures of her cute little self riding in the cart. Seriously? Come on. Oh well, guess you’ll just have to settle for pics from home again. We got home around 5:30, and after making 2 trips in from the car (1 for D and 1 for the groceries), I got her up in her highchair and ready for dinner since she was getting pretty whiny. What’re we having tonight, Mom? So glad you asked! The green beans you didn’t get to eat last night, some Colby cheese, a couple banana-shaped and -flavored teething cookies, and of course Cheerios. Because what meal is complete without at least a handful of Cheerios shoved in your mouth?


I threw in that empty paper towel roll with the new roll sitting right next to it just cuz. Does anyone else do that? Like it’s too hard to unscrew the top of the roll handle and put the new one on? I just cannot be taxed like that.

Tonight would normally have been bath night for D since she didn’t have one last night, but she didn’t wear any leftovers home from daycare today so I figured I’d just wipe her off after dinner and save the bath for tomorrow night. You know, clean up for the weekend and all. Please ignore how dirty the bottoms of her pj feet are. I apparently need to mop our floors. Twice.


Once I got her changed and her teeth somewhat brushed, she was off to play for a bit while I went back out to tackle the kitchen clean-up. I was feeling antsy and frustrated since I got 0% of the cleaning accomplished that I had hoped to tonight, so the huge mess in D’s highchair and floor underneath it made me less than pleased. So I busted out the vacuum for a few minutes because I was sick of stepping on crumbs. D wasn’t too enthused about that.


After I got D’s dinner remnants off the dining room floor and all the dirt and mud from today’s rains off the kitchen and living room floors, I turned my attention to the kitchen sink. Where I was greeted with this lovely scene…


Awesome. Fortunately D was out in the living room sitting with Daddy to start her bottle bedtime routine again, so I had some time to myself to get that mess taken care of. By now it was 6:30. And by 7:00, I had this…


And this…


And this…


Don’t worry, I won’t show you what the contents of that bag of dirty diapers look like. I’ll be nice and spare your stomachs. Normally it doesn’t take me half an hour to clean off D’s highchair tray and cut a couple flower stems to put in vases, but I got distracted for a few minutes when R came into the kitchen to heat up some dinner and D soon followed. I absolutely love watching her play and “read” her books. She’s really quite good at entertaining herself.


Now it’s 8:30, and here I sit, typing up this post and getting ready to edit all the pictures. D played for longer than usual tonight, but finally reported for sack duty about half an hour ago. My goal is to be in bed around 9:00 tonight (ok fine, 9:30 at the lastest. the brewers are on!), because I have to get up early at 5:00 tomorrow morning to do my workout with Jillian before work. Man, do I hate her because she makes my body hurt, but that means it’s working, right? Right?! And man, could I go for another glass of Hallowine tonight, but that 5:00 alarm always comes so damn quickly. Tomorrow night, I promise. I have more flowers that need vases!


Dudes, I’m so excited tomorrow is Friday, you have no idea. Come back and see how we play on TGIF!


Yes, that’s the same green pj shirt. What?

 

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Week in My Life – Day 3: Wednesday

This Week in My Life with Adventuroo is rolling right along, so let’s see how Wednesday played out, shall we? In case you need a recap, you can check out Monday and Tuesday here and here.


Just as a reminder, I’m focusing on documenting the “after work” hours of my days here, since those are what’s most important to me. However, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek as to what my desk looks like during all those hours I’m hiding from you, so I compiled this little gem today. I sit in front of 4 monitors all day, so I tried to capture that. This pic doesn’t really do my setup justice, but here is what each of my monitors looks like, in their real-life order from left to right.


Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

As we creep closer and closer to the end of our prolonged nice weather here, we decided to take advantage today and go out into the woods on the Ice Age Trail after work. Each year we like to hike up to a big lookout tower near Sheboygan called Parnell Tower, which is roughly an hour from our house. So I left work earlier than usual today to go pick up D and head north before the rush hour traffic ensued.


We left home just before 4:30 and started our hour-long hike just before 5:30. I carried D in the backpack carrier on the way up, R carried her on the way down, and she squealed with delight as she touched many trees along the way. There was even a puppy at the tower with his owners when we got up there. She was thrilled!

You’ll have to forgive the blurriness of the actions shots, because they’re, well, action shots. And taken on a phone camera. Ahem.

By the time we got back to the car, dark was settling in and we were starving, so we decided to hit up KFC on the way home. I can’t remember the last time I ate this since I’m not really a fan of fried chicken, but R got it in his head on the way there and I was so hungry I would’ve agreed to eat just about anything by then. I gave D her dish of Cheerios and a bottle of milk when we got in the car, and she was lulled to sleep by the highway rhythm within half an hour. We tuned into the start of the Brewers game, and what a dismal one it was, with Gallardo giving up 4 runs in the first inning. Eesh. Too bad it never got much better for the Crew tonight.

This next picture is beyond terrible, as it was taken on my iPhone like all the others and zoomed in as far as possible to aim at something in our orbit, but I couldn’t not take a shot of the amazingly gorgeous harvest moon we saw on the drive home. It was huge, orange, and simply beautiful, shining brightly down on the hills and fields of the countryside. It was very Halloween-y as it peered out between leafless tree branches, and it was even surrounded by a light haze of clouds. I half expected to see the silhouette of a witch on her broomstick flying past it.

The coolest part of all, though, was the shooting star I saw on the way home. I couldn’t believe it! I haven’t seen one in ages, and it wasn’t even totally dark outside. In fact, no other stars were out yet, but this was definitely a shooting one. So I made a wish, wished again on the first real star I saw in the night sky, and hoped they both come true.

We pulled into the driveway at 7:40, and I was hoping I could just get D inside, changed, and quickly back to sleep with the aid of another bottle of milk. I was planning on giving her some green beans and mashed potatoes from KFC, but she’d been asleep so long at that point and it was past her bedtime anyway, I just preferred she go to bed as quickly as possible. Too bad my nice smooth bedtime transition didn’t turn out to be so nice and smooth. D became inconsolable as I was changing her and only took a few drinks of her bottle. She screamed harder when I tried to put her down, so I just cradled her in my arms in the glider next to her crib and patted her back while rocking. This seemed to work, and she snuggled in so hard while slowly calming down. After a few minutes she clamored up onto my shoulder in a big bear hug and fell asleep. Poor little girl. I was afraid she’d wake up at some point in the night since she had so little to eat for dinner, and I was right. Not 5 minutes after I left her room she awoke crying. R went in there and got her back to sleep with some more rocking and a little bit of milk, and fortunately we didn’t hear a squeak after that.

Now here it is, 9:20, and I need to get in the shower before uploading all the photos for this post. I’m a total greaseball after getting all sweaty carrying my 25 lb. baby rucksack on the first half of our hike. These Week in My Life posts are keeping me up past my bedtime, but I think it will certainly be worth it in the end. Stay tuned for Thursday’s antics. You know the best part about Thursday, don’t you? It’s 1 day closer to Friday, wahoo!

 

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Week in My Life – Day 2: Tuesday

We’re underway in Week in My Life, and this is pretty fun. In case you need a refresher of what this week’s all about, you can read yesterday’s recap here or check out the full guidelines over at Adventuroo. Now let’s continue…


R picked D up from daycare today on her bike taxi and took her to the park since it was another beautiful afternoon, but she was ready to be done over there before I was able to meet them after work, shortly after 4:30 again. So once I got home, D and I had some silly time together and I relaxed for a minute while Daddy watched his afternoon sports shows and she had some snacks. Then I had to make up for missing the park with some outside play time of our own. She even got to pet a puppy as it walked by – her favorite!

Dinner time for D came at 5:00 tonight and consisted of a delicious menu of mac and cheese, banana, and some fresh tomato from our garden that was leftover from Daddy’s dinner sandwich. Once sufficiently messy (and full), it was definitely time for a bath.

After her long night at the ball park last night, D started acting pretty sleepy shortly after 6:00, which didn’t surprise me at all. So I filled up a bottle, let her play a little while longer while I cleaned up the kitchen and bathroom and got changed out of my work clothes, then she got up on the couch with Daddy for the bedtime wind-down.

That didn’t last long, however, and she was soon back up and cruising around the living room – “helping” me write this post, checking out what shows we were catching up on from the DVR, and reading books.

Finally at 7:30 it was time to try for bed again, so back up on the couch with Daddy she went. She drank her milk for about 5 minutes before she started coughing again, so R just put her in bed awake (which, *fingers crossed*, has been working ok lately). We heard one small cry as he left her room, then all was silent in baby dream land. Ahh… Time for Mommy’s dinner (leftover R’s homemade sweet and sour pork – yum!) and a glass of her favorite, Hallowine.

R went to watch baseball in the bedroom at 8:00, which meant I then had the tv all to myself for the rest of the night! So I promptly turned on E! to watch Kim Kardashian’s wedding special. As you may remember, I NEVER get to control the tv in our house. So when I do, I go big. Now that’s the perfect way to end this Tuesday. Cheers!

(yes, that’s the same pj t-shirt from last night to go with the shine on my forehead. don’t hate.)