Best of Baby Stuff: Books

One thing I'm excited about in having a kid? Reading!!! I loved reading as a kid and I really hope Baby Brindle will, too.

These books contain several that I grew up loving and a few more that I have grown to love since then. Jon Klaussen's books are beautiful (he's a favorite illustrator of mine) and I remember pouring over Richard Scarry's detailed illustrations in our church nursery (as a nursery volunteer). Eric Carle's books were always fascinating to me, as were books like The Eleventh Hour - a story of a dinner party with a mystery to solve. The Gashlycrumb Tinies might be a little old for kiddos, but anything by Edward Gorey is an essential to our library as far as I'm concerned. Dr. Seuss is always a classic and colorful, interactive books like Press Here and Spot It! are perfect for wee ones. Of course, we'll need those chunky cardboard and cloth books for a while so Baby B can slobber all over them and help turn the pages, but I'm looking forward to reading time! Yay for books!

Zara is Amazing!!

Holy. Cow. I am so excited right now!!!!! Finding gender neutral baby clothing has been nigh-on impossible, but then I came across the Zara Mini lookbook today.... I love it all. So classic and amazing and adorable. I'm in love!!!

Above are images from the lookbook.
Below are some outfits from their website. I had a really hard time picking favorites - though their sweaters are too sweet for words. Eep! So cute!

"Parenting Does Not Create the Child"

A friend of mine shared this article today:

Parenting has become more complicated than it needs to be. It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night. They have to be in piano lessons before they are five and can’t leave the car seat until they’re about five foot six.

It’s all so involved. There are so many rules and expectations. Parenting may be the last bastion of legalism. Not just in the church, but in our culture. We live in a permissive society that won’t count any sin against you as an adult, but will count the calories in your kids’ hot lunch. I keep hearing that kids aren’t supposed to eat sugar anymore. What a world! What a world! My parents were solid as a rock, but we still had a cupboard populated with cereal royalty like Captain Crunch and Count Chocula. In our house the pebbles were fruity and the charms were lucky. The breakfast bowl was a place for marshmallows, not dried camping fruit. Our milk was 2%. And sometimes, if we needed to take the edge off a rough morning, we’d tempt fate and chug a little Vitamin D. 

As nanny parents living in a nanny state, we think of our children as amazingly fragile and entirely moldable. Both assumptions are mistaken. It’s harder to ruin our kids than we think and harder to stamp them for success than we’d like. Christian parents in particular often operate with an implicit determinism. We fear that a few wrong moves will ruin our children forever, and at the same time assume that the right combination of protection and instruction will invariably produce godly children. Leslie Leyland Fields is right: “One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child.”
Excerpt from Crazy Busy, A (Mercifully) Short Book About a (Really) Big Problem

Best of Baby Stuff: Blocks

I don't like big, chunky, plastic toys that light up and make noise and roll around. Kids need to use their brains, not be constantly entertained. Plus, I really don't want to listen to "Old McDonald" on a nonstop loop all day. Yikes. That would make anyone go crazy.

They're more difficult to find, but there are quite a few non-plastic, non-noisemaking toys out there. I'll probably post them as I find them, but to start, here are a few of my favorite block sets. How cool are these??

Alphabet Box / Balancing Blocks / Face Maker Wooden Blocks (We actually saw these "Face Maker" blocks for the first time in Iceland. We both loved them, but saw no point to hauling them back home with us. A month later, we found out we were going to have a kid!) / Interchangeable Dovetail Animals / Wooden Animal Block Set 

A Low-Key Weekend

It rained here all weekend so we found ourselves puttering around the house, finishing the odd project, watching football, and cleaning.

Saturday morning we assembled the rocking moose we purchased at Ikea over Labor day. It used to be red, but of course I couldn't just leave it be. I'm not sure how well the white paint will hold up, but I am so glad I painted it. I absolutely loooove it, now!

 Also this weekend.... my dear darling husband bought me a dresser! It was another Craigslist find and I was about to walk away (I'm so cheap) when Eric told the lady, "we'll take it" and promptly loaded it into our car. He is too nice to me! I must say, it is so great to have a dresser. So great! Especially one that looks this good!!!!!

Nursery Progress

This weekend, we pulled carpet out of the middle bedroom and moved in all the "kid" furniture. It doesn't sound like a lot, but removing carpet, cleaning and waxing the floor, getting rid of glue-on trim and then replacing it with real trim took the entire day Saturday. We still need to paint and install quarter-round, but the quarter-round will wait until we refinish floors and I'm sure I can rope my mom into helping paint the next time they come to visit. Right, Mom? :)

We really need better lighting in this room (floor lamp, night light, and a dimmer switch, am I right?) but other than that, I'm not sure how much accessorizing we will actually do.... I don't really want to buy a lot more stuff, especially since I like the pieces we have now. We love our rocking chair - it's sooooo comfy that Eric wants to keep it in the living room until the kid arrives - and that play mat - while a bit mature for an infant - was something that we both got excited about on our trip to Ikea. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up playing with it at some point! Though right now it's being used to protect the floor from our new favorite chair.

And our crib... cute, no? Eric's aunt scored us this beauty (so nice of her!!!!!) and I am quite excited about it. It is a really quality piece of furniture! And it was super easy to put together. I'm proud to say I did it all by myself!

This dresser was mine growing up and it will be perfect for our kiddo; we're planning on just throwing a changing pad on top instead of buying an entire changing table.

I think the only piece of furniture lacking is a bookshelf. This kid is going to read/be read to a lot so it would be nice to have something to store books and random small playthings. Eventually.

Eric also installed a new blind in our bathroom this weekend. I'd like to show you a nice picture of it, but I don't have one because it hates me and refuses to roll up for me. It loves Eric, it cooperates perfectly for him, but I have not yet mastered the skill.

 Haha! It will probably stay this way until Eric gets home tonight.

Looking forward to next weekend wherein we can tackle a few more projects. And the weeks to come. I think even Eric likes "nesting" a little.

Saddest Before & After EVER

I really don't like exercising. And in my current condition, I find it to be even more excruciating than normal. Any extra…. jiggling…. is not exactly comfortable and twisting and bending become nearly impossible when you DONT HAVE A WAISTLINE. This has made my usual routine of a short jog or laid-back yoga session obsolete. I've been trying to walk a couple of miles in the mornings, but let's be honest, when you're already tired and feel like a whale, the only thing you want to do is sleep and eat cereal while watching Seinfeld re-runs. Am I right? All this complaining is to proudly say, I didn't exercise this morning! Instead, I traipsed up and down the basement stairs about forty times carrying such things as a nightstand, mattress, lamp, box spring, bed frame, side chair, etc…. I tell you what, moving furniture is SO MUCH BETTER THAN WALKING ON A STINKING TREADMILL. I worked up quite a sweat, let me tell you! So why was I carrying all this stuff downstairs? We are finally emptying out one of the guest bedrooms so as to begin furnishing a nursery. Yes. We are finally preparing for the little creature that is going to take over our lives and middle bedroom in LESS THAN THREE MONTHS. Terrifying. 

Anyway…In preparation for The Invader, we also had to find another make-shift guest bedroom. But the only space that would really work was in the Dungeon Room (we literally call it that, not even kidding). I'm about to show you some before and after pictures, but they're so depressing, I don't even want to. This is not a real renovation. Taking a nasty room and slapping a coat of paint on it does not a remodel make. Like putting lipstick on a $5 hooker - it only draws attention to the fact that she doesn't have any teeth. Ha! Whatever. Back to the story. 

So imagine a room with no windows in the back corner of someone's spider-infested basement and add the grossest brown shag you have ever seen in your life along with some weird shelving and a few cobwebs. Basically a dungeon. This is the room with which we began. I don't have a picture of it with the shag. Just imagine it. 

So here is us slapping paint on it. We sealed the floors somewhere in there too. 

And then here it is with furniture from the spare room. 

So sad. 

We'll put a rug in there to homey-fy it at some point, but folks, it's not going to get much better than this (at least not for a loooong while). So come on over, stay a while, why don't you? We'll put you up in our sparest of spare rooms….

Labor Day Weekend

We had a great time in Denver over the long weekend. We packed the car Thursday afternoon, got into town late that night, spent about four hours in Denver the following morning (barely enough time for coffee and a whirlwind trip through Ikea), and then zipped off to Grand Lake. The next few days included lots of walks, canoeing, an unsuccessful early morning fishing trip, a drive into Rocky Mountain National Park for a short hike, another drive into the Park for some star-gazing, and lots of great food. It was a gloriously relaxing trip!