Home organization week ...who knows...

In January I started the home organization challenge with A Bowl Full of Lemons but got sidetracked and never finished.  So hubby and I took it upon ourselves to finish my purge of all of the extra crap in our house over the next few months.  So far we have done every room/closet in the house except the master bedroom and even then we have both taken a first pass at our own clothing.  Hubby also went through our storage shed and made a lot of cuts of the random crap we have boxed up in there.  It wen't from a disorganized disaster to about 20 or so boxes neatly stacked against the wall that I need to go through.  So my plan is to finish purging our bedroom and then on the next cool day go outside and go through the items in our shed so that next January I am able to complete the challenge in full without getting a side tracked.   

Between not having to leave town 2 weeks in and having significantly less random junk in our house I'm hoping it's a success.   

The challenges of reintegration ... with a baby...

When my husband left for deployment our sweet Little Dude was a 3.5 month old bump on a log.  He had started daycare but had spent the majority of his short life at home with mama during her maternity leave.  Daddy was great with Little Dude spending time holding and cuddling, giving bottles when mommy had milk pumped, and even changing (the occasional) diapers.  

When hubby came home from deployment our Little Dude was a 10 month old crawling machine.  His favorite pass-times were chasing puppies around the living room, screaming at the top of his lungs (Just to hear himself, not because anything was wrong/not crying) and dancing adorably anytime music was on.  

That's a big change!  Every day hubby was gone Little Dude learned something new, grew a little, and developed more into a miniature human.   Now he is eating solid food, toddling around (a little) and even says mama, dada, and hi/bye (though both really just sound like eye) when he waves.   

For hubby being gone for those 8 months in the middle didn't cause the immediate culture shock I expected upon his return (though I think COVID-19 may have caused a bit of a shock) but instead it is more of a daily struggle realizing the things that hubby doesn't know/hasn't had the chance to learn yet.

Question: What do I  feed him 

Answer: The same thing we are eating, or if we aren't eating then the same thing we would be eating otherwise at that time of day, just smaller amounts.

Question: When does he eat

Answer: Look at his daycare sheet??? Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, on snack between lunch and dinner, maybe some random cheerios thrown in there....

Question: Does he have a volume button?

Answer: Yes, but it only goes louder

Question: Are these clothes (in his dresser) the right size?

Answer: ...seriously??? You think I took the time to fold and put away clothes that don't fit...???

And so on.  My favorite so far though has to be the first night I missed bedtime (and only so far) for a meeting.   I got home about 15 minutes after hubby got Little Dude to sleep.  He had apparently had quite a night and they had gone pretty much immediately from high chair for dinner to jammies to bed; but then hubby couldn't get Little Dude to go to sleep, it was a battle, no surprise there though Little Dude had literally never gone to sleep without mommy in his life, even in the NICU I was in there most of the day if I myself wasn't eating or sleeping, so the baby was a bit out of sorts...Until the next morning when I went to pack Little Dudes lunchbox for daycare and realized that hubby forgot to give him his bedtime bottle.  Don't worry, this child drinks plenty of milk during the day and still wakes 2-3 times at night to nurse so his bedtime nursing session is 99% for comfort and my husband had fed him a big dinner so Little Dude was not hungry at all, but he did miss the comfort of his bedtime milk.  And who knows, he might have had to fight a battle anyway since it would have been a bottle instead of boob, but it will still make for a funny story 10 years from now.  

Birthday "party" recap

So I had the most epic first birthday party ever planned for Little Dude.  I had hired a DJ and invited basically everyone we know to come over for some fun and food.  I was so excited to have hubby home, celebrate my one-year old, and thought that it would be the first big event for my social circle since we started locking ourselves away for COVID.  

Unfortunately precautions still need to be followed, cases in the Hampton Roads area are on the rise because no one wants to follow the rules, and the Navy has issued very strict guidance about what the sailors are allowed to do (Basically go to work, home, and grocery store) so we had to put the kabash on Little Dudes super extra birthday party....But I wasn't about to let a little thing like a global pandemic stop me from celebrating my baby.  

For starters my mom has had a flight booked to come visit for Little Dude's first birthday for MONTHS, so obviously she is here.   Which is great because I feel kind of bad that she doesn't get to see Little Dude more often.  

We planned to start the day in true first birthday fashion - with a crib full of balloons - but I had to delay that to nap time because Little Dude decides to give me a birthday present and slept through the night for the first time! I woke up about to bust so getting milk out had to take priority over balloons in the crib.  

Then we had a yummy lunch of barbecue and a friend of mine came over to take pictures of our little family and of Little Dude's smash cake experience.   I started to order a smash cake from a bakery but once I realized how simple the cake I wanted was (white icing, lots of sprinkles) I decided to try my hand at making it myself.   The end results were great.   

Little Dudes Godmothers daughter has the same birthday and turned 7 and the other friend who cames’ daughter turned 7 last week so I made each of them a special cupcake to match the smash cake.  

So happy first birthday Little Dude, and we will have an epic party next year hopefully instead.  (These pictures were all taken by me, not my friend - her pictures are way better!) 

I have a 1 year old

How in the world has it already been a year since I had my sweet Little Dude.   The past year has truly been a crazy ride but overall I am loving motherhood.  

Little Dude has been through a lot in his short life; but hopefully that means he will be a resilient adult who is able to roll with things when life decides to punch him in the face.  Here is a brief overview of what Little Dude has been through in the past year:

-A very dramatic entrance into this world followed by a 4 day stay in the NICU

-Coming home to a house with 3 puppies who love to bark whenever someone walks on the porch and scare the poor baby

-Daddy being deployed for almost 8 months

-A flight to Kentucky followed by a road trip to Indiana and Illinois with a flight back to Virginia from Kentucky to meet all of mommy and daddy's friends and family members

-Daycare

-Another flight to Kentucky

-A week hanging out in the lobby of a hospital with a constant rotation of people watching him so mommy could take care of grandma

-5 weeks at a different daycare in the middle of rural Kentucky while mommy continued helping grandma and tried to work from grandmas house

-5 more flights to/from Virginia/Kentucky while at Grandmas

-A 12+ hour one way roadtrip from Virginia to Kentucky then back again at the end of the stay at Grandmas with 3 dogs in the car

-Going back to his first daycare

-The start of a global pandemic and hanging out with mommy while she tries to work from home for approximently 2 months

-A third daycare, still during a global pandemic but with lots of extra cleaning and safety precautions

-Daddy coming home from daycare

But at least now we get to have cake!!!

And this sweet boy even gave me a gift for his birthday and slept through the night last night for the first time!!!!

SURPRISE!!!!

This afternoon I got a text message from my little sister in law telling me she was leaving after work to come visit us.  We decided to surprise hubby since she hasn't seen him since before hubby left on deployment and they are super close but I couldn't wait to tell someone - so I'm telling the whole world since I know he wont see it :)

Feeding an almost toddler

So part of sending Little Dude to daycare means I have to start packing lunches.  His daycare does offer food but he has a diary intolerance and so I feel better being able to make sure that everything he eats is 100% dairy free, plus it means I can control the quality of the food he is eating too. 
Many years ago I discovered the blog 100 Days of Real Food and I used it to help come up with healthy lunch options for hubby and myself.  Now I'm turning back to it to come up with ideas for what to pack for Little Dude.

What are some other great blogs for healthy kid-lunch friendly ideas?  (Please don't just say "check Pinterest", I get so overwhelmed when I try to find specific things on there and just end up with boards full of ideas that I never implement.)

Real Talk

So I was under the crazy idea that once I had our Little Dude that I would get back into the blogging habit because I would have something interesting to talk about...
What I failed to consider is that I wouldn't have time to sit down for five minutes to write it all down.
Then I thought I would get back into it when my husband left on deployment, but out of an abundance of caution I didn't want to talk about my husband being deployed while I was home alone with little dude.  (He's still gone, but will be home soon)
Then I thought I would complete the Home Organization Challenge with A Bowl Full of Lemons this year and blog about that...but less than 1/2 way through (and only 1 blog post in) I had to go home to Kentucky to help my mom because she was having surgery.
After about 6 weeks going back and forth between Kentucky and Virginia with an infant and working remotely while I was at my moms I made it back to Virginia full time just in time to work a full week in my office before we started shutting down and sending people home to work remotely due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Now after 70+days at home Little Dude will be returning to daycare (a new daycare, but more on that later) on Monday while I remain working from home.
Sending Little Dude back to daycare wasn't a decision I reached lightly.  COVID-19 is still a very real virus and the new mutation that hits small children so hard is very scary.  Also Little Dude was on a ventilator in the NICU for a few hours when he was first born so I do have concerns about potential respiratory problems.  However I had to weigh those risks against what was necessary for my sanity and our combined health.
The daycare Little Dude will be attending is very clean and taking precautions also I feel confident that the health system in our area has taken the necessary steps to be able to properly care for patients even if there is a second spike.
On the flip side it is almost impossible to be productive all day with a 10 month old requiring constant care.   Little Dude is crawling and climbing and constantly discovering new things.  Every day it is something different and I can't imagine how much harder it is going to get as he gets more and more mobil and more and more curious.
In the end my friend Sara and I have developed a shared mantra when it comes to the pandemic and parenting - we are living in a world with no right answers and very few wrong ones, a world full of grey and it is harder than ever to know what the right choice for your family and your kids is.  We are all doing the best we can, but dammit we are doing it. 
So to all the other mom's out there - you're doing great.