He's a keeper!

It's been "out" for a few weeks now...I'm expecting our second child (eeeeee!!!!! :D :D :D). But this is my fifth pregnancy. Yeah, not great odds. There was a time we really weren't sure if we would have more than one child. I learned to soak in every second of my sweet Lily Pants, and I grew up a lot. Growing up sucks, but then things start to click together and you start feeling like you aren't just out treading water anymore.

Anyway, I'm pregnant! We found out in early August after three long months of trying (I know this isn't long to some, but when I've always gotten pregnant on the first or second month, it felt like forever, plus we had been trying for over a year to keep a pregnancy) that we were expecting. Cue the insane, stomach-clutching worrying! I did blood draws, early ultrasounds, and took a bajillion different pills every night. Then I started getting nauseous. Oh, thank goodness! I loved that constant reminder that everything is ok. I still found myself keeping the baby at arm's length...trying not to think too much about it.

My midwife is amazing. I drive almost two hours to see her (the minimum around here is an hour anyway, so I figured I might as well be driving to someone who knows me, she delivered Lily, and whom I love), and I get reassurance and a hug at every appointment. I hit the second trimester and she celebrated with me when we heard the heartbeat on the doppler.

I'm 16 weeks today, and I still catch myself thinking..."I get to have another baby! Thank you Lord!" Lily will get to be a big sister, I will get to breastfeed again, I will get to have another baby!

Another awesome thing and another big announcement...we bought a house! We close the end of November and will take 2-3 weeks to paint and do some remodeling, then move in. I can't wait to NOT move again! Josh and I have been married 3.5 years, and this will be our 4th move in that time. Not cool! Hopefully this house will last us 10 years until we can save up for our forever home in the country. The house is on an acre, with apple trees, grape vines, raspberry bushes, and a massive garden. Hopefully within the next year we will add a chicken coop, more apple trees, peach trees, pear trees, and possibly a horse pen. :) Should be an interesting journey and I look forward to sharing it here!

Bench Dilemna

There's this little thing called Junk Jaunt that happens every September out here. And it's dangerous. Aside from the crazy Beverly Hillbillies-esque pickup and trailers and their insane drivers, it's dangerously easy to spend a LOT of money on...well...junk.

I spent one hard-earned dollar on a bench that is just plain ugly. I saw the potential, though, and forked over a dollar (actually, I forked over a twenty and she handed me back $19, because I was silly and didn't break down my $20s beforehand...) and tossed it in the trailer.

The top has about four layers of--something. One of the layers (the bottom on) is cane, the top layer is linoleum. Yeah, linoleum. But I just loved the legs of the bench and thought it would be cute as an end table or padded bench in the Pants' room.I finally got around to ripping off the top couple layers and found cane in horrible shape on the bottom.

It's attached in there pretty good, too, not something I can just rip out, even if I knew if I could add new cane.

So. What do I do? Here are my options:

1) Paint it white and distress it, then add a padded top (after some plywood) and use it as a bench either at the end of Pants' bed or in our small mudroom. I'd probably go with a fun print for Lily's room and brown or something equally easy to hide dirt with for the mudroom.

2) Try to find a new top that matches (?) and paint it to match the rest. If so, where would I find a new top? The bench is so cute and would prefer this option, but I just don't know where I could find a new top. Do they sell those at HD or Lowes? Hmm... Also, if I could find a new top, I could paint it pink or aqua for Pants' room.

I also picked up a *few* other gems, including this medicine cabinet-turned-message center for our mudroom. This one was my first finished project.

It was a white washed wood and not super attractive with ugly, rusted handles and hinges and chipped laminate on the side, and I fixed the laminate, changed out the hinges and knobs, and painted it white, then distressed and stained it. I'll just add some cork board in the sunken parts behind the shutter fronts to be used as a message board. Those hinges and knobs did turn my $5 medicine cabinet into a $20 message center, though. :S

And last but not least (in fact, it cost the most), is the "new" dining room table.

I really went out on a limb on this one and spent $100 on it. It's pretty beat up, but I just love the legs, and I see tons of potential. I had originally planned on stripping the entire thing and restaining it to about the same tone, then adding black mismatched chairs. Then I saw this blog post at Crafty, Scrappy, Happy on her dining room table up-cycle. I loooove the white! What do you think about painting the bottom of my table white (um, hello! Wasn't looking forward to stripping those legs!) and having mismatched white chairs instead of black? My biggest concern is that I have a messy toddler and a husband who works in a blue collar field...will I be scrubbing those table legs constantly?

It's the little things

Today, I am grateful for glass jars. Doesn't sound very deep or important, but the big things in life are usually the small things, so keep that in mind. :) I have various glass jars scattered about my kitchen right now in various phases of making something. A dozen and a half old quart jars I bought at a garage sale last weekend sit on the floor by the sink ready to be put in my canning cupboard, a pint jar sits on top of the fridge with sour cream in the works, two pint jars (old ones at that, one of them is square!) are in my crock pot with yogurt in the works, two gallon pickle jars are sitting in my pantry ready to have homemade vanilla made in them, 6 large baby food jars filled with homemade citronella candles are cooling on the counter...

No, not all of my days are filled with this much homemade-ness, but today I thought about my Granny a lot, and how much she made from scratch not because she wanted to, but because she had to. It also made me really want a milk cow, or at least a source for fresh raw milk...

Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

A year down...

We started cloth diapering Lily a little over a year ago! She was 8 months, and we were talking about having another one soon, so we wanted to cut our expenses a little bit more, but seriously couldn't come up with another thing to cut out. Josh saw a segment on the local news by a cloth diaper shop and came to me later that day, "Did you know cloth diapers are cheaper than disposables?!" Um, yeah, but there was no way I was going to scrape poop!

Long story short, he talked me into it and we've never looked back. We love cloth diapering and would never go back. For the next few days I plan to go through how we do things and what works for us, but today I plan to tell you about why we switched.

Money! We did our research, and while our worksheet is gone now and I don't remember the exact numbers, it was cheaper for us to switch to a moderately priced one-size cloth diaper (we chose FuzziBunz for daytime and a combination of a Sandy's Motherease fitted with a homemade liner and doubler with Blueberry cover for nighttime) even if we only cloth diapered Lily from 8 months to potty training. In fact, if we kept to our plan, our cloth diapers would be "paid off" in 6-8 months (as in, we would spend the same amount as we would have with disposables). Well, we didn't stick to our plan because we found that Lily's sensitive skin didn't like the BumGenious suede cloth, so there's $80 sitting in the closet, along with the random fitted or cover that we used back when we tried to go cheaper.

What I'm saying is that if you're serious about saving money and willing to do a little bit more work (and really, it is only a little bit more work, not much at all!), check into cloth diapers. Your baby's bum will thank you. :)

Water works

I'm a big water drinker. Well, after coffee. But other than coffee, I drink a lot of water. I'm trying to cut back on coffee/caffeine, so my Camelbak water bottle has been my best friend. I have this one, and when I started drinking out of it, Lily decided it was the coolest water bottle around, way cooler than her sippy cups. So I checked into getting her one of her own, and though they are labeled for ages 3+, I got her this one to put in her Easter basket. She's had it a little over a week and the girl does not let it out of her sight. We are Camelbak lovers.

But just the other day I was looking into the stainless steel ones to give as gifts (they were on sale for $17ish), and one of the reviewers said to use flavorless denture tablets to clean them. Ah-ha! What an excellent idea! I clean ours every other day or so the best I can with a dish brush, but this way I "know" they are getting clean in those spots I couldn't reach before. I bought a pack of 40 denture tablets for $3.49 at our local (expensive small town) grocery store, so I'm sure you can find them cheaper on Amazon or Walmart.

So...there's another use for denture tablets. The little old lady in the grocery store looked at me like I was crazy when I asked her where the denture tablets were, but when I explained that I heard about cleaning water bottles with them, she said, "I'll have to try that!"