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.

Breastfeeding is harder than it looks

When Little Dude was first born we had a hard time with breastfeeding.  He had trouble latching and hubby had to help me entice Little Dude by dripping expressed milk or formula from a syringe onto my nipple while we tried to get hit to latch.  Then after a while of attempting to breastfeed we would have to finish off with a bottle.
This is not an unusual experience, especially when the baby starts out in the NICU and unable to breastfeeding initially like Little Dude did.  But we stuck with it and got help from the amazing NICU nurses and a lactation consultant and now we are doing great.  Little Dude is nursing like a champ on weekends and at night and I am pumping at work during the week so that he can have breastmilk bottles at daycare.
I even have a bit of an oversupply so we have been able to donate about 300 ounces of milk so far to the King's Daughters Milk Bank, which I volunteer with for Junior League.  I am so happy that I am able to put my extra milk to good use to help feed the sweet babies in need at the hospital.

So why do I say it is harder than it looks?  

First because we had trouble getting started.  Breastfeeding doesn't always come naturally.  Unfortunately many mom's are led to believe that it should happen easily and when it doesn't they give up thinking that breastfeeding is an all or nothing game.  It isn't, any amount of breast milk is good for a baby and even if future generations learn that formula is as good as breastmilk you can still save money by feeding a baby what breastmilk you can produce even if you are supplementing with formula because you don't make enough.  So don't give up if you don't want to, do what you feel is best for your self, your baby, and your family.  

The Second reason is a bit more recent.  I am currently battling a clogged milk duct on my lower producing side and it hurts like a bitch.  I apologize for the harsh language but it is awful.  I have tried salt water soaks, I have tried a heating pad, I have tried hand expression.  Thank God it hasn't turned into mastitis (yet, please let it clear up before it gets infected!) but I have even gone as far as buying a vibrating back massager thing to hold on it to try and break the clog up with little relief so far.   And since it's my slacker side having this clog slow down/reduce milk flow even more than normal has made Little Dude want nothing to do with latching on that side to help a mama out.  He will but he gets annoyed quickly and isn't nursing as long as normal on that side which I know is making it worse so I have started just walking around the house this evening with my Haaka attached to that side.

Pray for me :)

I still hate running

I realized I never gave an update about the 10K that my dear sweet hubby registered me for.
At the end of October Hubby, Little Dude, and I ran/walked the Wicked 10K in Virginia Beach.  Despite the fact that I was less than 3 months postpartum and had no intention of getting some sort of amazing time I managed to PR the race! (I've only ran one other 10K in my life so the bar was pretty low).
I was super proud of our cute outfits.  Hubby & I wore T-shirts that had dinosaurs on them and said Mommysarus and Daddysuras and Little Dude had a super cute dinosaur outfit.
I didn't purchase any pictures but looking at the official race photos I'm amazed at how different I look already, just 2(ish) months later.  

Hamilton, the musical

What a wonderful show.  It completely lives up to the hype.
For Christmas I got tickets for my mom and I to go see the touring production of Hamilton when it was in town.  I already loved the music, and I am a huge Broadway fan in general but this was probably in my top 10 shows of all time, actually my top 5.
And with that thought process...my top 5 Broadway Musicals are:
1. Thoroughly Modern Millie
2. Chicago (this was the first/only show I have actually seen on Broadway, the others have all been touring productions, though I have also seen Chicago on tour)
3. Wicked
4. Hamilton
5. Mama Mia
What is your favorite musical?  Have you seen Hamilton yet?

Home Organization Challenge Week 1 - Laundry

This weekend I started the 2020 Home Organization Challenge.  I have done this challenge a few times in the past, the first being the 21 day challenge in 2011 and the last time being in 2016 though I didn't make it through every room and didn't blog about that one as much.
This was a tough one.  I'm very glad that now that I'm in a house and have a baby this is a 14 week challenge instead of a 21 day challenge.  There is no way I could complete that again with my current life.

My laundry room is also the primary entrance we use to get into the house (aka, the back door) and by some sort of magic it never gets really out of control but lives is a state of not quite clean and not at all organized.   I followed the steps set out by the challenge kit and in doing so realized that the reason it lives in this state of just shy of chaos is because our shelves become a catch all for stuff we don't want to put in the garage/shed but don't really have a home for in the house either.  We also just kind of stacked the leftover paint from when we bought the house in a corner in there so it was in a climate controlled space but it wasn't really organized.

So here are my before pictures

As you can see the shelves are piled with random things, the deep sink is in desperate need of a scrub (though it is still stained pretty badly, it is much better) and for some reason we have 8 folding chairs just hanging out in the laundry room.  Also our ladder never made it to the shed after we cleaned the pine needles off of the roof in the fall.

This is the corner we stashed the paint cans in between our deep freezer and water heater.

And here we have more paint, and the ladder, and brooms and mops and a random box of books that I need to take to the little library at the end of our street. 

Unfortunately the jogging stroller has to stay even though it takes up a ton of space in the laundry room.  That is really the only place we have to store it and I use it frequently enough it can't really be shoved in the back of a closet.

And so after a day of pulling everything out of the laundry room into my kitchen.  Scrubbing stuff down, throwing away 1 bag of trash and loading the car up with items to donate I now have a much more organized space.   

(The ladder does still need to go out to the shed, but I couldn't find the key, so that will get done later this week.)

My shelves are neatly organized and only contain things that actually need to be in the laundry room. I do think I am going to put to gather a small in-the-house tool kit to keep on the top shelf over the deep sink.  We can never find simple things like a hammer or screwdriver when we need them, then we run out to the shed to get one and it just gets put in a random place creating a vicious cycle.  

You can't see it in this picture but all of the paint is on the bottom shelf of this unit, then I have any chemical stuff (bug treatment stuff from when we had an ant problem outside, weed killer, motor oil, windshield washer fluid, miracle grow etc) is on the second shelf.  Paper towels and small kitchen appliances (Stand Mixer, Bread Machine, electric griddle) on the middle shelf, paper plates, plasticware, and extra laundry detergent are on the 2nd to the top shelf and on the very top I have our coolers and my husbands bike stuff (helmet, bike lock, tire pump).

Overall I consider week 1 of the home organization challenge a success.  I eventually want to tear up the cracked tiles on this floor and either replace them or paint the concrete underneath.  I also want to paint the entire room white and sand/refinish the metal pipes that run along the walls so that they really pop out in either a copper or rubbed bronze finish (depends on what they are actually made of, there are too many coats of paint over them now to tell).  I don't know if any of my decorating vision for this room will ever happen since this isn't our forever home, but if we get another set of orders to Hampton Roads and stay here for a few more years I might go ahead and do it.  

Happy Monday!

Home Organization with A Bowl Full of Lemons

It has been a few years since I have completed the Home Organization Challenge from A Bowl Full of Lemons.  This year I am going to make a concentrated effort to complete the entire thing on schedule.  One of my goals for 2020 is to purge the excess junk from our house/stop buying stuff and I feel this is a good way to get me started.  
Are you interested in the change?  It starts this weekend with the laundry room!

Check it out here:
https://www.abowlfulloflemons.net/2019/12/2020-home-organization-challenge-coming-soon.html