Gotta share

these recent pictures of Brayden!



- Crawling is leading to some major sleep regression... last night I nursed him to sleep and then went to watch a show in the front room. I don't know if he "sleep-crawled" or what, but he sure didn't cry like he normally does when he wakes up at night. I found him like this when I came in the room to go to bed. I'm glad he fell asleep before he got to the foot of the bed.



This is an example of My Dadddy dressed me" day. I know I suffer from first child syndrome where I want everything to match and sometimes I go overboard, but this is SO not matching.

Ten things I love today

1- What's that you see? Could it be the boy is finally growing some hair? At this rate I'll be able to do a faux hawk in another 8 months!


2- Honey baked lentils.... yummy.

3- House, M.D.



4- Lullaby Renditions of The Beatles- It makes it so I can actually type without waking him up! And it's The Beatles music so you really can't go wrong.

5- Spring being just around the corner

6- "You are not a walking mistake. You are not a problem to be solved."
--Adyashanti

7- Mint.com- This site has helped Adam and I finally make a budget (after nearly 7 years of marriage) and mostly keep to it

8- Fan-made music video of the song "Vanilla Twilight" by Owl City


9- My new living room color- Adam painted it "cafe au lait" this last weekend and I really like it. We're slowly trying to make our condo seem more homey and not so much like an apartment.

10- Adam's birthday is next week, and I am loving that I will be able to tease him about being old for the rest of our lives (he's 2 years older than me). I don't think I would like being the older one.

Martha Hughes Cannon

I was at work shelving and noticed this book by Lynne Cheney (yes, the former VP's wife and no, I am not a fan of his). I decided to look at Utah's page where, among other things, I read a small factoid about how a woman named Martha Hughes Cannon was the first female state senator elected in the United States and that she had actually run as a Democrat against her Republican husband. Those facts alone were enough to get me extremely interested in this woman's story. So when I got home I looked her up on Wikipedia.

She was also a suffragist, a women's right advocate, a doctor, and a POLYGAMIST. One of those things is not like the other, right?!

I am still really interested in reading more about her life and am hoping my work will order this book so I don't have to buy it myself.

Review: The Eco-nomical Baby Guide

After I decided to switch to cloth diapers, I started reading up on "going green." One website I found and came to love is The Green Baby Guide. The women who run the website, Joy Hatch and Rebecca Kelley, are releasing a book called The Eco-nomical Baby Guide and I was lucky enough to receive a copy to review here on my blog.

First things first- this book is beautiful! It features illustrations by someone with the alias woolypear, and they are just plain wonderful.

Most importantly, however, is the information contained in this book. It really is a great guide for someone with a young baby who is open to the idea of giving their baby a "green" start in life. I'll start with all the info on cloth diapers, since that is a major focus of the book. I assumed it wouldn't teach me much since I had been using cloth diapers for 4 months or so. I was dead wrong. And even if you don't use cloth (I know many of you don't), these work as general laundry tips as well. I had been following the directions I received when I bought the cloth diapers- to first run a rinse cycle in cold water and then a full cycle in hot water. Well, that has now stopped. In fact, I don't wash hardly anything in hot water anymore... I wonder why I did so often. And I'm going to attempt skipping the extra rinse too, unless a diaper is really bad. The next step I'm going to take will be harder since I am in a condo, but I'm going to try to put a clothesline up on my balcony to dry some of the diapers and use the sun to get rid of stains. See, these are tips anybody could use!

One statement the book made hit me hard: "Our lifestyles have turned parenthood into an industry like anything else." Seeing as when I read this, I was beginning to plan Brayden's first birthday party in my mind (yes, the birthday that is still over 4 months away and that he won't even remember). I so fall into the materialistic trap. It's one way I'm a major hypocrite and I know I need to work on that. This book had some great and simple ideas to help the environment, your wallet and ultimately your child. Some of the ones I'm going to work on are:

buying things secondhand whenever I can
keeping our thermostat at better temps
get one of the houseplants that reduces household toxins
make my own cleaning solutions (I already do laundry detergent)

I only wish I had read this book before I had Brayden. I may have started using cloth diapers sooner, but more importantly I could have worked on being a less materialistic parent.

Cell phones

Even with all the other forms of technology out there, cell phones are the one form of technology that can keep you "connected" to the world 24/7.

We got rid of our cell phones a month ago today, and I'm here to tell you it can be done. When we decided to cancel our phones and just have a landline, I was a little freaked out. I worried about something happening to Brayden and me possibly not being able to know about it right away. I worried about how I would fill my time on my 45-60 minute commute to work. Well, I'm just fine. Turns out there's this thing called the radio that usually has songs to sing along to, or heaven forbid I can just use the time to think and actually be alone with my thoughts.

I know cell phones have some good to them, so I'm not putting them down completely. I'm sure we'll get them again at some point in our lives, especially if we start making more money. But I'm glad we don't have them right now. It can make meeting up with people and things like that more complicated, but I was utterly too dependent on the thing and we really needed to save some money (you'll find out why in about 2 weeks).

So if you're looking for big ways to cut your budget but don't think you could give it up, you might be surprised. What I thought would be a huge deal to me has turned out to be not so hard.

"Reckless Acts"

Utah's State Legislature has done it again (proved to be unenlightened Neanderthals that is). They have just passed a law that will allow charges to be filed against women who arrange for illegal abortions. That sounds good, right?

It's not though. The law's terminology says that a woman can be punished for "intentional, knowing, or reckless acts" leading to a pregnancy's illegal termination. The law was put through in response to a case where a woman who paid a man to beat her up and cause her to miscarry was not able to be charged. Do I think she should have been charged? Yes. Do I think the word "reckless" could lead to major problems? Yes.

An example from the article is about domestic abuse victims. Democrats fear that women who are beaten to the point of losing their child could end up being charged if they tell their story. One thing I worry about is women who choose to have home births (even more so with women who choose to have unassisted home births). If I chose to have a home birth for my next child, and the baby ends up being stillborn, with the wording of the law as it is I could be charged. The ACLU also gives an example of a woman who fails to wear her seatbelt and then gets into an accident causing a miscarriage.

Maybe I'm being overdramatic, but I am so against the word "reckless" being a part of this law. The Democrats tried to have it removed because of the potential problems with domestic abuse victims, but when do Democrats get their way in Utah? (Not very often.) It leaves it too vague and open to interpretation. Ultimately, I agree with the conclusion the ACLU came to:

Practically speaking however, this bill changes the presumption that abortions obtained in this state are legal. If this bill is signed into law, women in this state will essentially be in the uncomfortable and unfortunate position of having to prove that abortions they obtain (or miscarriages that they suffer) are not unlawful.

I don't have much faith that Gov. Herbert will do anything about this before signing the bill into law, but I'm still going to write to him to let my voice be heard.

Which jacket?

One jacket was bought at The Children's Place (on sale but still $10) and one was bought at Dollar Tree (for $1 obviously). Which is which... and which do I like better? Which do you like better?