I've Lost That Blogging Feeling!

I am still here and I do plan on finishing the posts that date back to my birthday (April 10). I am just tired. By the time the boys are in bed, the last thing I can do is sit and write and edit pictures. Austin is STILL getting up several times a night to nurse. I have stopped nursing during the day and let him nurse before he goes to bed and when he wakes up. It is no wonder I am tired. I haven't slept a full night (meaning 8 hrs) in 6 1/2 months - maybe even before that I was so big and uncomfortable at the end of my pregnancy that I probably didn't sleep. The weekend Brian and I went away I only slept a few hours each night because of the amount of alcohol I consumed making me feel not so great. I would give anything to sleep. I have even debated going to a hotel and checking in for the night! Even if my sweet husband gets up with Austin I still wake up to hearing him cry. I am now on to reading books about sleeping and trying to schedule his day better to get him to sleep through the night. So I have lost the blogging feeling I have lost all feeling - I AM TIRED!!!!!

PS - No, I don't have time to take a nap when the babies nap - I have laundry, closets to organize for summer, a bday party to plan for a certain boy turning 2, and any moments I have left I sit and stare at other blogs wishing I had it in me to blog; anyways a 2 hour nap would be a tease.
PPS - No, I am not pregnant. All this tired talk would make you think I was in early pregnancy. Not going to happen any time soon...

Happy 6th Month Birthday Austin Michael!

Almost done rewinding, but this is important!
Happy 1/2 birthday to our sweet baby boy Austin. Where did half a year go? Feels like I was just sitting with him in the recliner at 2am nursing a sleepy newborn. I am sad and not ready for his newborn days to be over.
Austin you are a happy boy. So curious as to what is going on and wanting to be doing, going, and touching EVERYTHING! You are very amused by your brother and whenever someone is talking you smile and think they are talking to you! You are a flirt with all the ladies but your mommy is your number one. We are definitely IN LOVE! Mommy is your comfort. I have nursed you now for 6 (almost 7 months) you weighed in at 18 lbs and that is all breast milk! You are almost 27 inches long and your head circumference is in the 90th percentile (that is from your daddy - but it looks good on your chunky body). Dr. Peralstein said it is time for us to break the all night nursing fest and to push the solids even though they aren't your favorite. Mommy knows it is time to end our late night love affair, she is tired and you aren't sleeping well. Dr. Peralstein also said it was time to get you on a schedule - no more on demand feeding and nursing on and off. I know she is right, but it is hard to break a routine that isn't good for us but feels so right:)! So sweet boy even though we have stopped nursing and you now nap at 10am, 2pm, 5pm, and go to bed at 8pm sleeping through the night (yes solids and scheduling only took a few days to put into place) we are still in love and I am still your number one. Mommy LOVES YOU!!!!
PS - you are beginning to do get ready to crawl, any day now!

Parents Gone Wild!

Rewind to Mike and Cory's Wedding in Pawley's Island
What a great weekend! Brian and I dropped off the boys with my mom Friday at 12:00 and hit the road. We got to Pawley's Island 6 hours later. We had a great room for a great price at the Pawley Island Golf and Beach Resort.


We unpacked and got ready for a night out. The wedding party was having rehearsal and dinner so Brian and I headed out to dinner. We ate yummy seafood and then headed over to a bar called Dead Dog to meet up with everyone. OMG - I drank way too much but had the best time! We met a couple (Jamie and Ryan Patrick) that I just adore! They have two little girls the exact ages of our boys! Jamie and I were in the same boat - first time away still nursing our 6 month olds and missing our babies. So what are girls to do? Drink and talk about our families until the bar closed! It was a lot of fun. When we got back to our room I had a break down (too much to drink mixed with nursing hormones + missing my boys = a sad mommy)! The next day, Brian and I were going to golf (him golf me and drive the cart and drink). But there weren't any available tee times so we headed to North Myrtle and had lunch at Tommy Bahama's restaurant and went shopping. Then it was time to get ready for the wedding! It was beautiful. Mike looked great and Cory was stunning! The chapel looked out over the marsh - so pretty.





After the wedding we headed to the beach for a reception. It was in an old castle courtyard on the beach - I LOVED all the details from the tables to the photographer taking a group picture - of everyone all at once! Oh and their gift to the guests was chap stick with their labels - so cute!



Then we all headed for the after party at Hot Fish (a cool shack of a place) we closed down that bar too! Mike and Brian's friend Kevin began calling our weekend Parents Gone Wild - at that point I had to agree! Brian and I woke up at 10 the next morning and headed home, I couldn't wait to get home to see my babies. Thank you mom and dad for taking care of our boys! I missed them to pieces but didn't worry once knowing they were having a blast with you!

Easter 2009

Rewind to Easter
Our kids don't just get one basket from the Easter Bunny they get a basket from Mimi and Papa, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Ryan and Aunt Julie, and Aunt Donna! So that is 5 baskets each - SPOILED! I always say it, we are blessed beyond belief. The night before Easter we were at the Braves game and didn't get home until 11. I got the boys in their Easter pjs, put out carrots for the bunny, and read them the Easter story. We were asleep fast! We woke up Easter morning and had breakfast and went through the baskets from the bunny. Grandpa Harris came over with baskets for the boys (grandma was in NJ). Then we headed to church - the kids were soooo good! We spent the day at my parents getting more baskets and eating yummy food with family and friends. The kids were exhausted, at one point Logan feel asleep holding Julie and Mike's ears! Still we packed up the car and headed to Brian's parents to visit for a bit. Then we headed home with two very tired and cranky boys and two equally tired and cranky parents - we kill ourselves each holiday. Will holidays always be so exhausting?! My wish would be for everyone to celebrate together so we are not being pulled in different directions all day. Oh well, we are lucky that so many people love us and want to be with us. However guess who was sick the following day after Easter - yep both boys! It was time to slow down for a few days before Brian and I headed out of town.

Birthdays

Rewind - My birthday was April 10. I turned 28! It was a great birthday or birthweek I should say:) My mom came over to our house and decorated for my birthday on Tuesday, streamers, balloons, and flowers. That same afternoon Brian came home with more balloons and more flowers! The week was perfect. Wednesday mom and I went shopping. Thursday my birthday present from Brian and the boys arrived - a laptop and Vera Bradley Laptop case! That was very unexpected. Thank you to my sweet husband and beautiful boys! I went and had my hair done on Thursday also. On Friday (my actual birthday) I went and had a pedicure, manicure, and tan. When I got home, Brian had more gifts for me - little things but the things he knows I love; People and US Weekly magazines, Red Bull Sugar Free, and candy. Oh and cards - Logan picked out a giant musical card from him and Austin! When I opened it he began to dance (I love that boy)! My dad-in-law came over with a gift from him and my mom-in-law. Target gift card (they know me well) and a pretty flower arrangement that Jennifer made for me. We took a nap before we headed out to dinner with my family - Mexican of course! My parents gave me a Chi hair straightener - LOVE it! Also a martini glass (called Birthday Girl), and bday girl angel (willow tree). My brothers and sister-in-law Julie gave me gift cards to TJ Maxx (they know me well too:)! After dinner Logan went home with my parents for a sleepover! We went home and had a few more drinks;) It was a great birthday, but the weekend was just beginning...
Saturday, April 11 I went to my parents and picked up Logan and headed to see the Easterbunny with my boys and Uncle Kevin came along to help. Logan DID NOT like the bunny at all! After seeing the bunny Uncle Kevin took Logan on the choo choo through the mall (it is a $3.00 ride, but Logan LOVES it)! The boys and I heade3d home to get ready for my brother Ryan's birthday night. He turned 26. We went to eat sushi at Ru sans in Buckhead and then headed to the Braves game. It was soooo much fun!
Here is a slide show of the Birthday Weekend.

1, 3, 6, 23, 28

The Numbers above represent milestones that took place during the past two weeks.

1 - Happy 1 year to my blog! My friend Stephanie introduced me to the blogging world last April and my life has never been the same! I love to write about what is going on in our life and I also love to read up on the lives of my blogger friends. I look forward to sharing a lot more milestones, stories, and pictures with you!

3 - This week is my 3 month (official) anniversary of becoming a Stay At Home Mom. I left teaching in October to have Austin with expectations of going back to work for the remainder of the year in January. However life happened and it was time for me to hang up my teaching hat and stay home with my babies. There will never be a better gift than this opportunity that I have to stay home with my children. I never take it for granted. As I know with the economy anything could happen. Don't get me wrong, I miss teaching. However there isn't any amount of money that could make me go back to being with other people's children all day while I was away from my own. I became a SAHM on a leap of faith and I have never looked back.

6 - My sweet baby boy Austin turned 6 months today. Where has a 1/2 of a year gone? It went by way to fast. I am so grateful that I have been home savoring each day of his life. 6 months marks a lot of milestones, Austin is sitting up, doing the superman in preparation for crawling, has learned that he can get places by rolling, loves to laugh and smile, has finally started to eat some solids (but still prefers to nurse and he would 24 hours a day if he could), and lots of drool means a tooth is probably on its way. And he is a BIG boy - we go next week for his 6 month well visit, but to let you know how big he is, clothes wise he wears 9-12 months! They are a little long sometimes, but 6 months is too small around the belly and chunky legs! I love this little boy to pieces!

23 - My sweet boy Logan is 23 months today, that means in one month he will turn 2. 2 years went by in a flash. When I think how fast they went by and that in another 2 years he will be 4! It makes me sad. I am so lucky to get to spend all day every day with him. Logan and I start swimming lessons in 2 weeks! We go to the library and pick out books and the park is by far his favorite place to be. Hearing him talk brings even more joy to our lives. He knows animals and the sounds they make, can count 1, 2, 3, tries to sing songs, I could go on and on about our big boy. We are planning his 2nd bday party - of course a Barney party! I just picked up the invites today - sooo cute.

28 - I turned 28 last week! It was a great birthday. My husband and mom did something special for me each day of that week. Brian & the boys got me a laptop and a Vera Bradley laptop case - my very own computer now he can have his computer and man room back:)! I got a lot of other great things from my family and Brian's family. I am spoiled, but VERY appreciative.

So pictures from my birthday and Easter are coming - there are only like 500 to sort through. Oh and pictures from my brother Ryan's bday (the boys went to their first Braves game) will also be included. This weekend Brian and I are going to Charleston, well actually Pawley's Island, SC for a wedding (our first time leaving the boys for a weekend and I am still nursing this should be interesting). Then on Thursday I am flying to PA with the boys and my parents to visit family for a few days. We return home on Monday. We have a free weekend then its Mother's Day weekend and the Logan's birthday weekend, and then two weeks later Brian and I are going to Las Vegas for a few days! Lots of things to look forward to, but also keeping in mind that God is all around us and our faith is the reason we have this beautiful life.

Food Network

My mom and I have been experimenting with some recipes from the Food Network. A recent recipe I tried was called S'mores Brownies. It was an easy recipe to follow and yummy to eat!

Garage Sale

I had a garage sale last weekend. Thankfully the weather was great, chilly in the morning time but warming up quickly! I ended up making $200.00! We are donating what didn't sell. I love having garage sales; it gets rid of things we aren't using, helps me stay organized, and I make some spending money. Here are a few pics from the sale.



It was a little cold for Austin so we had him bundled up!

Logan loved the garage sale. He said hi and bye to all the customers and sometimes even thank you!

Truthful Thursday

So today I took the boys to the park. Logan loves going to the park and playing on the playground. I put Austin in the baby Bjorn so I am more accessible to Logan. Well today I used my teacher voice with another child. Logan was loving climbing on the playground and then he wanted to go down the slide. So I was nearby making sure he didn't fall. There was a little girl blocking the slide so he couldn't go down. She said to him "your a baby you can't go down." Well he has no idea that she is being mean to him, so he just says "hi." Then the little girl says "shut up baby!" I wanted to push her down the slide. She just told my sweet boy to shut up. So I said to her, in my teacher tone, "if you don't go down the slide right this second, you will have to sit out and won't be able to use the playground equipment." HA! She looked at me and went right down that slide. Here's the thing, my mama claws are sharp and they will come out when needed. We will teach Logan how to stick up for himself and to handle situations when we aren't around, but truthfully if I am around I don't think I will be able to sit back and not say anything. This is something I am going to have to work on.

"Mommy Play, Mommy Play

"Mommy Play, Mommy Play," is what Logan will say while pulling me into the play room so I will play with him. How could I turn that down.

So today I didn't do this:




Instead I did this:




The laundry still needs folded, but I have learned that with a blink of an eye the boys are growing and changing fast. I wish I could stop time, but since I can't I have decided to treasure the time I have with them.

My Cup Runneth Over

Here are the three reasons my life is so full of love and joy...



Sunday afternoon my boys were taking a nap. I LOVE them!!!

Watching Trains

BK (before kids) I would wait at a railroad crossing for a train to pass very impatient! To me trains were annoying and slowed me down! I remember avoiding Buford Hwy (where the railroad runs parallel to) at all cost around the times each day when the train would pass. That was until Logan came along. To see the look on his face and to hear him say, "chuga chuga choo-choo" as the train passes. Now I make it point to be near Buford Hwy around 4pm when we are out and about. Logan loves trains and I love him so much that I would spend seconds, minutes, hours watching trains go by. Sometimes it takes something like a train to remind you how exciting and new life is in the eyes of a child. I love being a mom.

The Secret Lives of Moms

Before I begin my post on motherhood, I am proud to announce that I made it to the gym and did cardio for 35 minutes!!!While doing cardio I was even able to watch Oprah. I know it may come as a big surprise, but no, even as a SAHM I do not watch Oprah daily! However going to the gym worked out around the time Oprah was on and the topic of today's show - Motherhood! Something I know ALL about now. From the show "The one universal truth about motherhood seems to be that no one ever tells you what to really expect." How true is that? I have found myself so many times saying, no one ever told me it was going to be like this! A women on the show commented that, "she could no longer control everything in her life. "You can no longer choose your activities, your down time, when you get to sleep," she says. "No matter what you do or where you go, you're always tethered to this other human being in this unbreakable, incredibly fragile way. Anything you do will affect this child potentially for the rest of their life."
One of my favorite quotes that I really need to focus on was from an author Oprah had on the show she said, "mothers need to accept that they cannot reclaim the person they were before they had kids." "You have to reinvent yourself," she says. How true is that. I think this was particularly true for me right after I brought Logan home from the hospital. I definitely had post partum BAD, I just remember thinking how am I going to get my life back. I thought that the baby would just slip into all the things I liked to do. I had to learn to accept and let go of the life I had before and reinvent myself just like this author said.
Another mother, started a blog after she had her baby and then post partum - www.Dooce.com and guess what? She has so many advertisers on her blog that she brings in $40,000 a month! She supports her family (her hubby no longer works) by writing on her blog!
Then as the show was coming to a close - working moms vs. stay at home moms (the following is taken from Oprah.com, I wanted to share it)

In a studio full of moms, one audience member says her biggest complaint regarding motherhood is the unspoken competition between working moms and stay-at-home moms. "It is a war. It's a kind war, but still a war," she says. "I'm a working mom, so it's important that my family comes first and that I still do everything that a stay-at-home mom does, plus have a career. That means every single one of my vacation days are used for [my kids]—mommy day at school, a playdate or mommy and me things. … We don't want it to seem as if we love our career more, so we try to do it all and get two hours of sleep."
Dee-Dee is currently a stay-at-home mom, but she was a working mother once too. "The competition is there because we create it for ourselves," she says. "There's really no reason to compete, because [stay-at-home moms] are just as busy as the working mom. The working mom is just as busy as we are. We just tend to sometimes put the focus on the wrong things. We're all busy 24/7. I consider myself an at-home working mother."

Amy (the author of "I would trade my husband for a housekeeper" - a book I plan on reading)says these wars arise out of our own uncertainties as mothers. "We're insecure about the choices we're making—that's why we're judging each other," she says. "We need to give ourselves a collective break."
"Have compassion for each other," Trisha says. "Realize we all have issues, and we're all doing the best we can."
How true is that?

Truthful Thursday

Can't believe it is already Thursday again! This week I am getting "real" about losing weight from baby #2. I was walking through TJ Maxx yesterday and I said out loud "before kids I could walk in here and wear anything off the rack in size 0 or extra small." - I wouldn't dare do that now. First of all I am no longer a 0 or extra small, try a 3/4 small/medium. I know anyone reading this is thinking "she has problems that isn't big." I know more than anyone that I have problems.
It began when I was 17 after going through a break-up and losing a lot of weight, I realized that I liked being thin, REALLY liked it. So I joined a gym, took diet pills, ate maybe once a day, binged and purged (it's truthful Thursday so your getting the ugly truth). I did this for a good 4 or 5 years. I felt good about myself, but was obsessed with everything that went into my mouth. It got OLD very OLD. I began to get lazy and couldn't keep up doing all of those things listed above, so I stuck to working out daily for an hour and a very low cal diet. Still thought about food wayyyy too much.
Then I got pregnant with Logan when I was 25. Of course I worried about gaining too much weight, but realized I had to gain weight to have a healthy baby, so I quit working out and ate whatever my heart desired. I gained 45 lbs!!!! I went from 105 to almost 150 lbs! I didn't care, that was until my little bundle of joy was here and I left the hospital weighing 135 lbs! That was not going to work for me. First of all it was summer time and I had to go back to work in a few months so the dieting was full speed ahead. I was nursing so I couldn't go too much, but I really cut back the calories and started working out again. When I went back to work I stopped nursing and really dropped the calories. I managed to get back down to 107 lbs, - I could wear ALL of my old clothes, the next day I found out I was pregnant with Austin!
Again I wanted a healthy baby so I no longer worked out and I ate. However this time I ate a little less I only gained 32 lbs. After Austin was born and I was home from the hospital very sick I might add, I dropped down to 115 in about 3 weeks. I have managed to lose a few more lbs, some days I am 110 and some days I am 112. But more than the number on the scale, my body is different. My hips a bit wider, stretch marks on areas that I would rather not discuss, my butt is lower along with other things.
I joined Gold Gym in January and haven't been yet. I have been known to eat chocolate cake for breakfast and then eat mac n cheese for lunch and a cheeseburger for dinner, I like cooking sometimes(now that I am home with lots of time) and then sitting down for dinner to enjoy. I often have a snack before bedtime. All of these things I do now I would have NEVER of done in my early 20's.
I want to workout, not for weight issues, but to feel good about myself, to be strong, and to be healthy, however I need to get motivated. I want to eat healthy to pass along healthy habits to my boys. I don't want to be obsessive about food and working out so I am going to take it one day at a time, starting Monday:) My 28th bday is next Friday and I want to be able to say that I workout at least 3 times a week and have healthy eating habits before I turn 29! I'll keep you posted...

April Fools Idea or Is It?

After reading a friend's blog about what she did to "fool" her husband (wrote on their baby girl's diaper "I'm going to be a big sister!") I got to thinking...
Maybe I should write on Austin's diaper "I'm going to be the middle child" or "I'm going to be a big brother" or on Logan's diaper "I am going to have another little brother or maybe a sister!" See I was putting way too much thinking into this little joke. Then suddenly it didn't seem so funny to do. I recently, like this afternoon recently, told my mom I was done having babies! She just listened as I listed off reasons that I was done. But then a few days ago a friend asked me "Are you done having babies?" I had just read an article about knowing when you are "done." So I knew how to respond, I said, "I can't say I am done 100%, so no I don't think I am, I think I have one more in me." I know, I know, it is waaaaay too soon to be talking about a third. Heck we only have a three bedroom house, my jeep only fits two car seats - snugly, Brian is N-E-V-E-R home, Logan isn't potty trained (yet), Austin isn't even one, hell (now I am swearing) he isn't even 6 months yet & he still nurses! My point is I really think I want another baby - not right now, but eventually without too many years between him/her & Austin. Now I just have to work on Brian, whom is going to think this is a joke April 1st or not.