Balance

Okay so I have been thinking, I need to do something that will better myself, something that helps me feel like I am accomplishing something. I feel that through getting married and having a baby I do less things for myself, spending my time on everyone else or wasting it by doing a lot of nothings. 

In high school I was involved in sports and have always found ways to continue playing them, but I have relized I haven't played much sense being pregnant and having Ollie. I worked and now I stay home. I stayed up late hanging out with friends, reading or doing whatever and now I am lucky to make it to 11. I love being a stay at home mom, I love watching my 1 year old grow. It is one of the most amazing things to be a mom and I would never want anything different. 

I am a wife and a mother, but I am so much more. I need to take more time for myself, to find things that make me a better person. I compare myself to what I used to do, to what I do now and feel as though I am not fulfilling my full potential. 

So basically I am saying that I want to push myself to do more. To play sports, to cook more, to exercise, to keep up on cleaning the house, to gain more hobbies, making more friends and being more social, to get involved in the world around me and still be a great stay at home mom. 

I am not sure how I am going to do this yet but I am determined to find ways to make my life feel more balanced. Are there ways that you have found that help you feel more balanced? Well wish me luck!

Acceptance

Wow it has been a while sense I have been on here! With it being winter we just haven't done much that I have wanted to write about.  I have been feeling like what I do with my time is lame. No one wants to read about the lame day to day, same old boring things that a stay at home mom does. What I wanted to do with this blog is to just write about anything and everything, the same old boring day to day things. So it seems that I am just being to critical with wanting my posts to be awesome, I did this for me and not for who reads it. So no more being critical and judging myself to harshly. I will be better! 

So on the note of being better I am going to write about the thing I am struggling with the most, My body! When we got married in December 2010 I weighed 130, at my last Doctors appointment when I was pregnant June 2012 I weighed 209, and now March 2014 I weigh 155. I have lost about 60 of the 80 lbs that I gained and would really love to lose the rest of it. But the weight is only part of it. 

The weight I gained while being pregnant was a quick gain which of course gave me stretch marks everywhere. And my stomach was pretty much stretched to the max so now I have a lot of stretched out skin. The birth ended up needing to be a c-section giving me a scar and a pouch that will probably never go away. 

So I am struggling with these feelings of not being pretty or sexy. I have a pretty bad muffin top, which is hard for me to find a shirt that looks good on me. So I put on shirt after shirt, getting more discouraged and having more negative feelings about myself. Some days I feel great, self accepting and I look pretty.  On these days I think it is more, state of mind then my actual appearance. 

So on being less harsh and judgemental on myself, I want to be more accepting on me as a whole. To like me as a person and view myself as whole and not fat, ugly and broken. To accept myself on who I am and not how I look, to find talents and hobbies that better myself, to eat healthy and exercise, to be HAPPY!

Cabin Fever

Being a stay at home mom during the winter is a hard thing to be. I have found myself wasting my day with doing a whole lot of nothings. Heating our 150 year old house is kind of hard to do and pricey too, so some days Ollie and I stay in our warm Pajamas, sweats or on the couch under blankets. So those days turn into lazy days reading books, doing puzzles, coloring or watching TV.

The TV doesn't really work for Ollie because he only watches a few movies and for only a few minutes and it is not a good thing for me because I tend to watch too much of it. Once it's turned on it's hard to turn it off. I have this thing that if I start watching movies that have sequels or a TV show, I want to watch the whole series. But I turn it on because I hate my house too quiet or I am bored. It's a hard, deep rut for me to fall into, and it's harder and deeper in the winter.

Being outside is a great way to destract Oliver and me, to get fresh air and to exercise. It motivates me to be better and to fill my day with somethings rather then nothings. When it is winter it is hard to be outside with sicknesses, bad weather and being just plain cold! And a lot of the indoor places to go to cost money, so we find ourselves at home most of the time.

My husband and I only have one car and so we share. During the summer this is quite easy because we usually walk when we can and drive only when we need to, making the car available more often. Corey works about a mile from our home and a park and the library are just a few blocks away. But these close places seem much much farther away when it's 20 degrees outside or worse. So driving the car is done for all needs, big or small. 

Our cabin fevers are burning quite hot and our activities are dwindling fast. I have found myself being affected by a depression that is brought on by doing too much of nothing but have no ideas of what I should do. My poor Ollie has a lot of energy and is getting sick of the same old things. Please share what you do during these winter months that keep you sane and your children happy!

The Dreaded Chore

I have mentioned before that I am a stay at home mom. My day is full of tending to my son, cleaning the house and other such things and love it! But I have something that I hate to do, I do everything else before doing this one thing. I am sure that you guys have one too?! Mine is the dreaded DISHES!

The last place we lived had a dishwasher and it was so easy to just load it through out the day, run it after dinner and unload it in the morning. Making it very convenient to keep the kitchen clean.  Here we do not have the same luxury. I feel like I have to wash dishes all day to keep the kitchen clean. Or let the dishes build through out the day and wash them all after dinner which always takes so long. Lately I have found myself putting them off more and more and letting them build. 

So I do all sorts of things trying to procrastinate doing them (like blogging). I even now like folding laundry more then dishes and would do that all day to not wash dishes. When all else is done or when the counter is getting to cluttered with dishes, I then head into the kitchen to clean in there. I stack up the dishes, clean off the counters, wash the stove, sweep and mop all before I delve into the dishes. 

I don't know why I hate doing them so much and I wish I could just get over it and do them everyday and not let them build up little by little. I love cooking and even more so when the kitchen is clean. Which of course cooking makes more dirty dishes. It's a viscous cycle that I know I can't escape.  I need to come up with some type of routine or some way to stay more on top of them. The next place we live will have a dishwasher!

New Years

Today is New Year's Eve but here at our house you would never know it. I spent the day cleaning up a bit, paid some bills and ran errands. And tomorrow will be a lot of the same.

We did celebrate a bit and went out to a local Mexican restaurant (thanks to my dad). The food was great and it was fun to go out. Ollie was pretty cute, he tried eating a lemon that came with my water and we had some fun with that (see attached video). He also insisted that he would feed himself and not let us help and made a giant mess. We got Ollie ready for bed wished him a good night and put him down at his normal time. My husband and I then looked at each other and said "now what?"

Usually we would be with my sisters and their families gathered at my oldest sister's house around a table eating treats and playing games. Most of the men would be upstairs watching a movie or some sports game and the kids would be running wild and getting into all sorts of mischief. I am sad that this year isn't the same for us, but hope they have fun.

We plan to have a low key night watching the new movies that we got for Christmas and enjoying the fact that Corey doesn't have to go to work tomorrow. Something that we do every year that we did this year was our New Years resolutions. I have never been good at keeping goals or sticking to a long term plan. I feel like I only make it through January or into February with my resolutions so this year one of mine is to keep them going till at least June (by then it will have become a habit, right?). Good luck to all of you with your New Years resolutions and I hope that it was a fun holiday for you all. 

Traditions

I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas! Our Christmas was pretty awesome! We have had 3 Christmases together before this one that have been so good and full of family. Before we have had to balance and split up Christmas so we could feel like we both had times with our families and having time with our own little one. But this year it was all different. This was our first Christmas in Virginia and our first away from our families and being on our own. We put together our favorite traditions growing up and made new ones, making our Christmas this year our own.

We built a fort on Christmas Eve and Oliver loved crawling in and out of it and playing peek-a-boo. The fort didn't last very long before Ollie started to pull down the blankets or trying to climb up on the blankets bringing them down. It was a fun way to pass the time but I'm not sure if it will be done every year. 

We opened up two presents on Christmas Eve - pajamas and a Christmas book. We changed into our pjs and then read our new book (The Night Before Christmas) and then put Ollie to bed. And the next morning it was fun to see how excited he was when he saw all the presents stacked up in the middle of the floor. 

One thing that I wanted to do was to have shrimp salad with our Christmas dinner (which has been done by my family ever since I can remember). We usually only have it on Christmas and it's so good that I just had to have it this year too. It was my first time making it so I was a bit nervous that I would mess it up. I checked everything twice and was very careful in making it but still for some reason I messed it up and it was not very good, so this year we did not have shrimp salad. But we still had a very yummy dinner with turkey, funeral potatoes, super yummy rolls and other yummy foods. 

Another tradition that both of our families have had but that we really don't like and have tried not to follow (and I am sure other families have this one too) is of course having a child sick on Christmas. We had a great day full of food, presents and fun. We enjoyed opening our presents and spending the day enjoying them and each other, but then late afternoon our little Oliver got a fever and started to be fussy. We had a rough sleepless night and early on Thursday we took him to the doctors. It ends up that he has strep throat. No fun. Another rough night leading to a morning of tired people, and Oliver just didn't want to be awake but did at the same time. So this is us still in bed at 10 am. I hope that all of you did not take part in this tradition and that your children are all healthy but if you did, I hope that they get feeling better soon and can enjoy the rest of their break and the beginning of the New Year.

The Artistic Husband

Before I started my blog I wanted it to look cool, have a good title that would sum up what I was going to write about, and attract people. This blog is for me, to write about the things in my life. It makes me excited to know people are reading it but it has been fun just writing what I want. So my awesome husband Corey did this fun illustration for my blog header and changed the font, making it more of a SUPER blog.

He is so talented it's crazy. I have no artistic abilities so it always amazes me with what he can do. He has just started his life long dream of being a book illustrator and has had the opportunity to illustrate 4 different books and is in contracts to do 3 more. I am very excited and happy for him!!! He also loves painting, mainly with oil. When he paints, his art comes alive and I love to see what he comes up with. One of his books that he will be doing this year will be done in oil, so he gets to combine both loves into one. To see more of his work, check out his website.

So thank you Corey for making it SUPER and always helping me when I need it. I love you! And thank you readers for reading my blog - it makes writing so much more exciting!