Okay.  I'm about to get real.

I can't fit in my pants.

Not a big surprise considering I just birthed a baby 6 weeks ago...and I would laugh at any other woman who expected to do otherwise (and if you're one of those women who did fit in their pants sooner than 6 weeks...go fly a kite), but it's funny how that just doesn't matter when it's YOUR butt that can't fit into your pants.

I swear that post-pregnancy is the WORST for your self-esteem when it comes to your body.  Prior to getting pregnant, I felt pretty good about myself.  I ate pretty well, worked out often and I could see the results of it.  But then I got pregnant and suddenly I couldn't fit in my pants anymore, but who cares because I have this cute little belly!  And it was so fun getting dressed in tight shirts and little belts that cinched just above it to show it off.  Towards the end the belly definitely is not your favorite...but then you have the baby and you downright despise it.

I used to get up and get dressed easily, do my hair and makeup and get out the door in a reasonable amount of time.  Now, I spend 95% of my "getting ready" time on trying to find something to wear.  All of my pants fit, but just enough where I can't button them comfortably.  All of my shirts - bought for a girl with a flat stomach - fit, but I have this new little fat roll that spills over my pants.  The pants that are just a little too tight.  Which looks really bad, by the way.

So here I am, with this new body that I have NO clue what to do with.  I don't want to buy clothes at this new size because I'm determined not to stay here, although now that I have the baby I'm not sure when I'll actually get to the gym, especially because my husband isn't home until 6ish most nights and by that point I'm ready for a bath, dinner and bed.  But on the other hand, I'm sick of getting up and pulling my whole closet and dresser out in an attempt to find something that I don't feel incredibly large and uncomfortable in.  And maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of this than I should, but I just want the "old me" back!  But with the baby, of course :)

The first early morning

It's 7:55am and this might be the first time in 6 weeks that I've been up and awake before 9am.  Sounds pitiful but getting up 3x a night to feed your newborn really takes it out of you.  However, I start back to work next week and am trying to get into a routine of getting up before 7...things that used to be so easy are suddenly SO not that easy!

Anyway, I've got my little mug of coffee, listening to the Civil Wars and enjoying my view of the fall leaves outside on this cold (29 degrees!) morning.  We've made a few purchases for the house so I thought I would share them...

The first is this barn light that we purchased from The Barn Light Electric Co.  Brad and I both had a vision of having a gooseneck barn light hanging over our mirror/medicine cabinet in the bathroom.  Here's a couple of our inspiration pictures:

We're really excited to see how it will look!  We had to do some debating on the diameter of the shade, I wanted a bigger shade but Brad felt like a big one would look silly in a small bathroom...so we went with his decision and got the 12" shade.  Hopefully it won't look too small.

The other thing we purchased this past weekend was the long awaited farmhouse sink from Ikea.  This is the Ikea Domsjo Double Bowl Sink.

And an inspiration picture with the sink...

So, that's about it so far.  OH - and the last great thing is that this past weekend we were at Home Depot and when Brad was checking out I wandered over to their Clearance Section, mainly b/c Hadley was fussing and walking with her was all that would calm her down.  Anyway, sitting right in their clearance room was this refrigerator:

Also known as my DREAM refrigerator.  Well, a french door refrigerator (any brand, LG was my favorite but this is a Maytag) was my dream fridge, but because they're pretty pricey I was going to (happily) settle for a bottom freezer with a single fridge door.  So this fridge is sitting there, looking pretty perfect, but there's no price tag on it.  We had them check, and because the woman who had purchased it didn't like it in her kitchen brought it back they had to sell it in the clearance section, and it turns out that we could purchase it for $1300 and it's normally a $2500 fridge.  WHAT.  They actually had it getting repaired when we were there cause a compressor or something wasn't working, but we're pretty sure we're going to go back and get it this week when it's back from being repaired.

Needless to say, I am absolutely dying to get into our new place!

Happy 1 Month Old, Hadley!

You can't really see the month in this shot...we were having a rough time getting these pictures!

Weight/Height/Head:  9lbs even at our 1 month appointment (50th percentile), 22 inches long (90th percentile, holy cow!) and her head measured 36 cm

Hair:  Dark brown in the back, a little lighter brown up on top.  Funny enough it's definitely got some curl to it!  Also Momma is praying that her hair grows on top of her head because at the moment, her hairline starts somewhere in the middle on the top...

Eyes: Dark blue

Diapers: We just moved up to size 1!  The newborn diapers fit but they're still a little small, and size 1 is a little big (We moved up at 5 1/2 weeks)

Clothes: Still in lots of newborn clothes but is slowly getting into the 0-3 months.  Carters Newborn sizes are getting snug, which is most of what we own!  However, she's been in size 0-3 months in her Loved Baby outfits (Momma's favorites) since she was about 3 weeks old because she was too long for Newborn!

Eating: All.the.time.   Seriously.  The girl loves to eat.  Right now she's getting a mixture of breastmilk and formula.  Story behind that - my milk took about 6 days to fully come in so I had to supplement with formula, and because I was supplementing I never really made enough to keep up with what she needs.  We spent about a month where I fed her formula, and then would pump and feed that to her in a bottle.  But the past two weeks we've worked on taking out the pumping and just breastfeeding directly, and it's been going great!  I'm still not producing enough for her, though, so she's still taking a lot of formula.  Right now she's taking anywhere from 2.5-4 ounces at a time, and usually every 2-3 hours.

Sleeping: Well.  She's not the best sleeper, I'll be honest.  Right now our routine is that I get up with her for her nighttime feedings, usually at 10:45, 1:45 and 5ish, and Brad will get up with her for her 6 or 7am feeding.  Most nights I will feed her and she'll fall right back to sleep but there are the random nights where she's wide awake at 2am.  In the mornings after Daddy feeds her he'll put her back in her little Rock N Play Sleeper next to me and we'll sleep til about 8 or 9am and then start our day.  During the day she's usually awake in the morning (let's be real, unless I decide I'm still really tired and we fall asleep on the couch watching Momma's DVR'ed shows) and then will sleep pretty good in the afternoon thru the evening.  She's usually pretty alert around dinner time (7ish) until we feed her around 10 and then she's down for the night.

Milestones:  Hmm...can't say she's had too many quite yet!  I think the biggest ones are her visiting her Grandma and Grandpa's house, going on her 1st dinner out when she was 6 days old (I was going CUH-RAZY in the house), and last night she went to a few minutes of her first outdoor football game to see her Uncle David's freshman team play!

And just to keep it real and show you the kind of day we had today (where she cried all day long unless she was being held or sleeping)...

And I still can't get enough of her.  

The new house!

I've got a few minutes before I've got to get me and the peanut to bed...I go back to work (from home) in 2 weeks and I'm trying to get us in bed before midnight so the early mornings aren't too much of a shock for me when I start back!

I had mentioned before that Brad and I had plans to build this summer, and while we still do have plans to build one day and are so in love with our house blueprints, we had the opportunity to purchase a foreclosure this summer.  Lately we've really been trying to evaluate our goals for life and my biggest one is to be able to stay home with my babies.  While I love my job more than any other job I've had and know that I would never find another boss or company like the one I work for, my heart is now with Hadley and focusing my attention on being her Mom.  So while we would've loved having a brand new home, we recognized that having that brand new home would mean I would be working for a number of years longer than I really wanted to.  

When this house came along, I think we held our breath because it seemed too good to be true...it was very cute and needed minimal large repairs done, the price was unbelievable, and we could completely "see" what the house could be if some TLC was given to it.  So we made our offer, it was accepted and that was that.  

Okay, onto pictures...there's a ton of them!

The outside of the house - we're putting on a new roof and the window trim is all being painted the color of the trim on the screened in porch - that off white color.  We'll also paint the wood posts of the little entryway to match the trim.  I'm looking forward to filling that planter bed with pretty flowers!

This is the view right when you walk into the house - there's a small room , sort of like a foyer?  Then the bigger room in the back is the living room

This will be Hadley's room...pardon the ugly ceiling fan that Brad told me  I was free to paint cause we weren't replacing it :(

This will be our bedroom.  It is HUGE.  There's still a whole big section you don't see here.  Lots of windows.

Bedroom...the doorway on the left goes to the  closet (the only one in the house, might I add...) and the doorway straight on goes to the bathroom

The bathroom.  Brad put up the paneling on the ceiling, as well as paneling with a rail trim above it.  When I took this photo we were experimenting with paint colors but we eventually decided on white

The sink.  Not sure what mirror/medicine cabinet we're going to do over that, but we're doing a white top with  an oil rubbed bronze faucet and black cabinet hardware.  

Bathroom...this door basically goes right out to the kitchen, which is to the right of the hallway

The kitchen!  My favorite room!  Doesn't look like much now, but our plans is to put in dark wood flooring in the  kitchen and breakfast nook (this flooring is gorgeous and is normally around $9/sq ft but we got it for half that cost!).  We're doing dark stained wood countertops, black hardware, and my favorite part...putting in a farmhouse sink!  The whole room has since been painted white, and we're doing white subway tile on the backsplash.  Also doing stainless steel appliances.

The view from the kitchen out to the living room.  We knocked this hole in the wall to open the room up as the kitchen didn't have any windows in it and was pretty dark.  That hole now has a countertop bar on it, and the sink will sit in the middle of the big cabinet

This is the view from the other end of the kitchen looking into the breakfast nook.  That room has been painted all white, and Brad built an L-shaped bench that extends along that entire back wall and part of the wall on the right.  The bench is white with the board paneling on the front and dark stained tops to match the countertops in the kitchen.  We came up with this idea as a way to create more storage since the house only has one closet

This is looking into the kitchen from the living room.  Because the wall that we ripped into was a  supporting wall we couldn't take the whole thing out, and we had to still have supporting beams to hold the wall up.  Brad wrapped these posts with rustic wood and we'll stain them dark to match the countertops.  The paneling in the front was to disguise where we had to tear into the wall.  That ugly brown paneling was painted white, FYI!  This is going to be the front of the little bar.

The screened in front porch...we're considering painting the entire thing white or off white.  Can I just say I'm not a huge fan of a screened in porch...in fact, something about it seems wrong!  Give me a big, open front porch any day!

The kitchen has now all been painted white, as have the boards on the front of the bar

Another view of the kitchen/living room and the bar top area.  Also, Brad "wrapped" the existing beams in the living room - meaning he put wood over them to look as though we have timbers up there.  Those will be stained dark also...he recently added white panel ceiling to the living room, similar to what is in the bathroom

The bathroom that's been painted white!  Looks good!  The floor is going to be the same dark wood that we have in the kitchen.  We went around about doing tile in the bathroom but decided that since we were getting the kitchen flooring for a good price that we would do that in the bathroom as well

A shot of the benches that Brad built - they've now been painted white on the bottom and the tops are a similar stain to the wood that's currently there.  The ugly heater that's taking up the whole right corner of the picture is getting ripped out as we're replacing the heating system in the house

I think that's it!  Brad's done some more work there recently but had to go back his real work today (AKA the work he gets paid for...) so we probably won't see a ton of progress for the next few weeks.  We're seriously SO excited for this house, though!  We're doing a lot of the same ideas in here that we had for our house that we were going to build, so it's exciting to still see some of that come to fruition.  We're hoping to be in there by November 1st, so while Brad gets the new house ready, my job is going to be getting us out of the house we're in right now.  To say I'm REALLY not looking forward to that is an understatement, but it's a good consolation to know that we're moving into a much better place!  

Happy 1 Month, Hadley!

You are my biggest blessing, sweet girl!

This post doesn't have much of a point, other than to dump some photos that I've had on my phone.  We've started working on getting up and getting dressed in the mornings after Brad leaves, and while that sounds like the easiest thing in the world, it's really not.  Especially when I've been up 2+ times during the night to feed the baby or to pump.  However, I've reached my limit of staying in my pajamas all day and watching TV til Brad gets home.  It was nice while it lasted but it's time to have some "real life."

So one unfortunate thing about having a C-Section is the incision - it's been slightly more uncomfortable this last week, and having anything rubbing on it (like jeans) is not fun and makes me sore the next day.  The only solution is to wear yoga pants.  Just an FYI about me...I do not DO yoga pants unless I'm going to the gym, to yoga, or to bed.  I just hate the feeling I have when I wear "comfy" clothes all day.  So you can imagine how thrilled I have felt about getting dressed these last few days...the only good thing about it is that I don't feel depressed because I'm not wearing my pre-pregnancy jeans.  Which speaking of, those don't fit quite yet and life is just so different these days that to eat well is tough (cause shoot, I'm lucky to eat an actual meal by the time dinner rolls around) and working out isn't an option, so I really have no clue when I'll be fitting into them.  

We're going out to dinner tonight, so I should wrap up here...Happy Friday!

She doesn't do this too often but when she does...you better fix it FAST

Her sweet little Baby Legs that don't quite fit her yet :)  Can't wait til they do! 

He's the best Daddy.

She's not too fond of her crib just yet, but she looked so sweet and tiny in there that I had to get a picture of it

Starting the demolition at the new house!  This wall (from where the demo was started on the left to the doorway) is getting torn down.  The kitchen is behind it.

I swear I have like, 3 pictures of me with my child.  So I figured I had to start taking them myself.    I never thought I'd like the Moby wrap but we LOVE it!  That would be her little hand on top of her head peeking out...and pardon the nasty hair and no makeup :)  

I'm back!

Now that I've had my sweet little baby I figured I would move back over to this blog.  No rhyme or reason, just figured I was at a good ending point for my documentation of my pregnancy and delivery!  I don't know that I ever really announced it on here, but I had Miss Hadley Kate on August 18th!  She weighed 7lbs, 9oz and was 19.5" long.  Here's some pictures of her...

As you can see, we're loving every minute with her!  She takes up 98% of my day and while it's challenging at times, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

In other news...we were planning to build a house, but we had an opportunity come up to buy a foreclosed house for less than what some people pay for their cars, so we jumped on that and started the renovation process this week.  It's been fun picking out paint colors, cabinet hardware, flooring, what walls to take out, etc.

Looking forward to being back!