I feel a world away from where I was when I last updated this blog. I’ve settled nicely into my new life as a mama and a family and can hardly remember life before this beautiful baby girl came into our home. The last 4+ months have been a blur of adjustments, challenges, joy, and tears of varying emotions. I’m eager to share some glimpses into our beautiful new life. I’m not typically one who shares intimate details of her life and heart, but this whole journey has really changed me. I’ve learned so much about who I am, the things I’m passionate about, the things that fulfill me. I want to talk. I want to ramble on about each incredible detail of motherhood and family life. It’s too good not to speak of. So be prepared for a flooding of lovely memories and strong feelings of conviction. And be prepared to never hear the end of how perfect my dear Eliana is.
It’s back to reality today. Vacation is over. Lucas is back to work. I’m back to being a nesting-nut. Now that it’s April I can officially say “I’m due next month!” which is both exciting and a tad bit scary. I feel good that we at least have a place for her to sleep and clothes to put on her, but we still have more to do in the way of cleaning and organizing.
My main focus for the last few months has been preparing for the baby, so other things have kinda gotten thrown to the wayside. One main thing I haven’t really gotten around to is sewing. Though, I have started projects and have a whole new line of things I want to sell at craft shows this Summer/Fall, I haven’t gotten very far. I’m hoping that once I adjust to life with a newborn I’ll be able to schedule sewing time back into my daily/weekly life. For now, I have gone ahead and put up all of the items I already had in stock in my store.
I will continue to make the fake mustaches, floral headbands, and aprons- though I have a new design for them all. I’ll be adding in a few new items to my repertoire as well. More on that when life finds itself somewhat normal again.
Along the lines of not having time to sew, my dear husband helped me to not drive myself insane this week trying to make a dress for my baby shower by taking me shopping. Yes, this dear sweet man endured shopping with a swollen-footed pregnant lady. And I’m happy to say that I actually found a couple of items that make me feel good. So thank you, Lucas, for making your 8 1/2 month pregnant wife feel pretty. I got me a good one.
We’re down to the wire here in baby land. It feels like it has gone so fast yet I also feel like I’ve been pregnant forever. I try to imagine what she’ll look like and how it will feel to hold my baby in my arms instead of just feeling her wiggle inside of me and it’s almost impossible. I just know that she’s going to have a little smushed up face when she comes out that I can’t wait to kiss and stare at forever.
There are all kinds of things going on that I hope to blog about. We’ve been drastically changing our diets and trying to cultivate a healthy home for this baby girl to be born into. It’s almost gardening time and I’m totally stoked on having our own homegrown fresh veggies again. I have more of an idea of what we should plant this year and what I want to can so that we can make the most of our garden and rely less on the grocery store. We’ve also started to buy some things for the baby and I’m working on some of the decor for her room. My baby shower is in a little over a week and I’m really excited about spending a lovely spring day with a room full of ladies. I have yet to find a dress for a reasonable price that I like so I’m working up an idea for one to sew myself. I think I’m in the stage of just needing to stay focused on little projects so I don’t make myself insane thinking over and over again “It’s almost time!” and obsessing over to-do lists.
As for right now, I’m on vacation with my darling husband. We’re celebrating our second anniversary at the bed and breakfast where we had our honeymoon, Woodlawn, in southern Maryland.
We’ve done more relaxing this year than we have in the past, which has been greatly welcomed. Today Lucas took some pictures of the property…
while I discovered that it is very difficult to get my whole belly into a high-angled self portrait.
It’s hard to imagine that the belly I’ve been working on growing for 8 months will be gone in just weeks. Okay, I know it won’t be fully gone but it won’t be home to a baby anymore;)
Today I turned 26 years old. Today, I am 23 (almost 24) weeks pregnant. Both of these statements blow my mind. And make me a little anxious.
I like being 26. I liked being 25. I feel like I’m finally a grown up. That probably sounds ridiculous. But, things just make more sense now. I feel overwhelmingly thankful for this life of mine with my darling husband, being all knocked up, living on this beautiful farm in our little barn apartment. I feel like I have enough experience under my belt to make a difference and enough authority to instruct and assist others. Though our marriage is still young, it is an immense blessing and something that challenges me daily. It’s something that I grow from and something I can teach others about. I’m greatly looking forward to being a mother, though every now and then I get a little jolt of “Holy crap, I’m going to be responsible for another human life in a few months”. But, I know I’ve got this. God has prepared Lucas and me for this. We’re bound to screw up from time to time and I know someday I’ll have a teenage girl on my hands (terrifying), but I know that He has a plan for our lives and that this little girl has an amazing future ahead of her. And we’re lucky enough to be the ones to prepare her for it. Since the moment I found out I was pregnant I’ve just had this peace and joy about this baby girl. I just know within me that she’s going to be so strong and beautiful and she’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. Every day of my life I want to encourage that and to empower her. This world is going to be a better place with her in it. I can’t even begin comprehend how different and more incredible OUR life will be with her in it.
I made a playlist for baby girl yesterday with songs that her daddy and I love. Songs of worship and songs that have great meaning to us. Some songs just silly and some that I think are essential for her to know (as she will be hearing them constantly in our home). I want to play it every day for her to hear inside of my womb. I’m hopeful that she’ll recognize them when she’s out here with us, even though right now I’m sure everything sounds like the teacher from Charlie Brown to her. She’s a little over a pound now and I can feel her lying in my belly when she’s asleep. I also feel her kicking me and wiggling around at 2am. My little night owl.
It’s been busy busy around here lately, though we got to take a nice break over Christmas. Right after Christmas we got a better look at our precious baby (who looks more like a baby now and less like a blob) and found out that we’re having a girl! We’re thrilled. It seems all the more special and personal now that we know just who she is. Lucas and I have felt strongly for months now that our dear one was in fact a girl. I kept thinking to myself “if it’s a boy, I’ll be just as excited” and I would be, but every time I thought that I had this feeling of just knowing that there wasn’t a little boy in there. I knew it was our little girl. Our little…. ah. She doesn’t have a name yet. And, we won’t be sharing it when she does. You’ll find out in four months with everyone else;).
In four months. Wow. I’m five months pregnant already. I remember thinking at eight weeks that this is going SO slowly. But, now it’s coming along nicely. I feel good at five months… like I did at the age of 24 when I decided I didn’t want to age anymore. Of course, I’m almost 26 now and little girl doesn’t plan on staying in there for good, so I have no choice but to move on. I’m loving my “bump”. Lucas takes weekly photos and always catches me just staring at it in the mirror. It’s so neat keeping track of the size and position and being able to see that she favors my left side, which makes my stomach look slightly uneven.
It’s a little after 10:30am right now and as usual for this time, little girl is going nuts. She kicks hardest at this time of day. It still takes me off guard and makes me flinch a little. I started to wonder if I was right about her being a girl right before the ultrasound just because of how strong her kicks are. She’s tough. She loves hanging out low in my pelvis. The ultrasound tech had to keep poking her because she was nestled deep down there and they had a hard time seeing everything, like her little hand that she had tucked under her body. But, she was pretty stubborn. Like momma. Is it wrong that I was somewhat proud? Probably. I’ll regret that when she’s out here being stubborn.
I’m already starting to feel the nesting bug and I’m only 3 1/2 months pregnant. A friend of mine suggested that perhaps it’s due to the colder weather creeping in. It may also just be that I’m crazy and spend at least 10 minutes each day thinking about how I could better organize things. I want to try to make my first craft for the baby soon and my first craft for myself even sooner. I just had to pack up half of my wardrobe since it no longer fits me and I’m itching to sew myself some new things, starting with a dress for Thanksgiving, which I plan on making today. While listening to She & Him. And trying my best to not listen to the Christmas She & Him album that Lucas just got for me. Tomorrow is driving-myself-crazy-baking-lots-o-pies day. This is the best time of the year. And it’ll get even better next week when I kick into non-stop-celebrate-Christmas mode.
My current cravings include pickles, cranberry sauce, and strawberries. Ice cream seems gross to me today. If you know me at all, you know that this is VERY out of character. Hopefully this means that baby Walther will be a healthy eater. And not obsessed with sugar like momma.
Thanks to our little visit from Hurricane Irene, we have been without power since Saturday night. Other than a couple of trips searching for free WiFi, we have spent most of our time at home on the farm. My husband thinks I’m nuts, but I actually find the power outage to be kind of refreshing. Other than the whole not being able to take an actual shower and wash our dishes and clothes thing. Other than a lack of water, it’s kind of nice. It forces us to get up off of our butts and to be more productive and creative. Today I spent my time (after ridding our fridge of spoiled goods) crafting. For fun. Not stock for Sweet Pohickery and not presents for friends and family. I just had a relaxing day of painting bottles and making tissue paper flowers.
The bottles are an idea I got from Pinterest. The bottles themselves are Stewarts’ Orange Cream Soda. For the most part, my husband and I drink water. But, on occasion, we like to treat ourselves to root beer and orange cream soda. And I was happy to have a use for the leftover bottles.
The farm has beautiful wildflowers throughout the Spring and Summer, but as summer ends (and I feel lazier about emptying vases and picking new flowers), I decided it would be a nice change of pace to have some lovely paper flowers in the window. No muss. No fuss. And I like the way the crisp white paper looks with the colored bottles.
I’ve been crazy busy these past few weeks getting ready for my first craft show experience. My lovely friend Melissa and I decided to have a booth together at the Havre de Grace Art Show this past weekend and it worked out really well. I’m pretty sure we had the girliest booth there. Everything was pink, pink, pink with a few hints of other pastel colors. It was a lot of fun. Our cutesy pink booth seemed to really draw the attention of passing families, and especially some of the cutest little girls ever. Melissa was selling some her adorable bird mobiles and each little girl that came by to see them was so gentle with the birdies. It was really sweet.
Just for fun (and at an attempt to balance out the girly-factor of my items), I decided to make some fake mustaches to sell. I had no idea at all that they’d be such a hit. All of the kids that came by instantly smiled when they noticed them. They had us cracking up all day as we watched kids hold them up to their faces and talk in funny accents. On the second day of the show I decided to put out a mirror so people could see how funny they looked in them.
I really enjoyed the overall experience of the show. It was laid back and fun and we really enjoyed interacting with everyone that came through. It rained it’s patooty off Sunday morning, but the sweet ladies that were running the show let us share the gazebo with them until the storm passed. It turned out to be a beautiful day after that. We spent a lot of time daydreaming and discussing how amazing it would be to own our own little craft store where we could set up our very own crafting stations and sell all of our creations. Maybe one day. I’m excited to see what the future holds. Lucas and I have brainstormed together a lot this weekend as well. I’m blessed to have such a supportive, helpful, and very creative husband. He came up with ideas to make my display more interesting and even more things to make. I’m excited to share them with y’all soon.
I asked Lucas take some pictures of my stuff since I forgot to take a camera with me to the show (LAME!). He said I looked like I didn’t trust him in the pictures. I’m an awkward model.
An awkward model with frizzy hair. And a mustache…
I’m going to try my darnedest to get my online shop up and running in the next week or two. For now, I do still have some items left over from the craft show that I am happy to part with if anyone is interested:) I have several aprons, hairbands, hair pins, and even a couple of mustaches left. Email me if you’re interested: starr@sweetpohickery.com. I’m also open to requests for custom orders.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to do the Bel Air craft show this year as I had hoped to since Lucas and I are shooting a wedding that weekend, which I had forgotten about:/. We’ll also be missing out on the Darlington Apple Festival since we’ll be at Unified Underground that weekend as well as attending the wedding of our dear friends Laurie and Sean:) There’s so much happening this Fall, I can hardly contain my excitement!
My niece celebrated her fourth birthday last month. Let’s start off by saying holy cow, I can’t believe she’s four already. I can still remember very clearly when her parents just started dating and I’d tag along with my brother to visit his then girlfriend at her job at Blockbuster. And now he’s married and I’m married and grandchildren are already in the picture. Time goes by so fast.
I’m excited that I have more ideas of gifts that I can make her now that she’s older. For her birthday this year, I decided that I wanted to make her an apron and give her some of her vary own mini-sized cooking tools. They actually look kinda normal sized in the picture above, but they were kid-sized and super cute. This was my first time making a child’s apron and it went a lot quicker than the adult aprons (since it’s half the size) giving me more time to focus on the details (rick rack, little dual-colored pocket, flowers). Lucas even helped me pick the colors to go with the body of the apron. He’s good at coordinating things. Artsy fartsy and what not (he won’t appreciate me saying that).
Ashlyn, my niece, got bummed when she was told she couldn’t play with her new apron just yet. I’ll take that as a sign that she liked it, which had me pretty jazzed. Not that she was sad of course, just what she was sad about. Okay, that doesn’t sound much better.
She did get to have lots of fun later on though with all of her toys, after Daddy and Uncle Silly (her affectionate nickname for my husband) painstakingly put a gazillion stickers on her toys.
But don’t feel sorry for Uncle Silly, he spent plenty of time playing with Ashlyn’s toys. Even before she did.
Lucas and I took turns being baby papparazi. I’ve been taking every opportunity I can to practice my picture taking skills. Kids are usually a real challenge with how much they run around. We were able to get some sweet shots though as she cuddled up with Grandpop (my father).
This happens to be one of my favorite pictures from the day. I wish her and her Daddy’s faces were more in focus, but I still find this picture to be perfect. My big brother and his little girl blowing out the candles on her princess birthday cake.
