Baby Room Themes

I definitely want to do a neutral theme. Not because I am impatient, but because according to all of the money saving baby pins on pinterest make it abundantly clear that one of the main penny saving ideas is to have everything neutral.  Not only that but I really don't care for gender specific rooms.

However, there are a couple gender specific nurseries that I do happen to love.

Number One: Fabrics

I love this one because it would be the simplest, and easiest to do without need of paint or anything else, and it is easily removed from the wall. Best of all, super cheap. 

You can buy squares of different fabrics at walmart or any fabric store super cheap, and use burlap or some other cheap fabric to cut out the trunk of the tree. It also accommodates multiple colors, so that other objects we might be given wont clash. 

 #2: Hot Air Balloons

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this, and it isn't gender specific. I would want simple one color bedding, red and white splashes of color.

#3: Calvin and Hobbes

As most people know, I deeply love snoopy, and Charlie brown, and my first reaction was to make the room in snoopy. But then it didn't feel right. Snoopy is my passion. Of course I will have our child grow up watching them, but another great and amazing comic is that of Calvin and Hobbes. I also read and loved those as a child, and I would very much like to create this mural. I am confident that I can. If not this one than I might choose another. This is also gender neutral, bright,colorful and gives us the nice option of a simple white bedding that is easy to bleach clean. 

I am obviously not a big fan of patterned bedding. 

#4: Nautical

I really love this. I think it is brilliant. I love nautical things, and its much easier to find as a theme. I love the warm orange accents too, it keeps the blue from being too masculine. I love that this is a style that could be transformable, for a boy it could grow up to be a pirate room, and for a girl it could grow up to peachy coral colors, and mermaids. 

#5: Gender specific- Girl

I cannot resist these girly designs. If I am going to do femine, it will be something like this in a carnival syle. 

Plus I love love love the quilt.

#6: Harry Potter

Need I say more???

The pregnant cat lady

No, as confirmed by my doctor, I do not need to get rid of my 3 cats.  I have to avoid their feces.
At first it was as simple as don't mess with the litter box.
I have spent some time contemplating this and I realized that my cats are digging their paws into their litter and then walking around on my kitchen table, my bathtub, my toilet seat... I have never felt quite so germaphobic. Go ahead and get into the habit of baby wipes, take some toilet paper and a folgers coffee container, or any container really, and soak up some toilet paper in a disinfectant that is safe like hydrogen peroxide. (I would check with more reputable pinterest sources and consult on the best home made baby wipes, this was just an example.) Keep them by your lap top, tablet, toilet, ect, the things you touch most. If you pet your cat, wipe your hands before touching a door knob for example, or wipe down your hands every time you use your lap top if your cats live in your lap while your on the computer like mine. I will mindlessly stroke them.

Grandparent names

I don't know about you, but growing up in my family, I had to have a different name for each grandparent because I have a ridiculously large family, and having the same name makes them seem unimportant to me.

My grandparents were as follows:

Grandma Charlotte, George, Paw Paw, Grandma Jamie, Memaw, Pepaw, Maw Maw, Pah-Paw, Grandpa Talley, Grandpa, Nana, and Mwa Mwa

I was the first to be born in my family,the oldest of my cousins I mean, so the names that I chose for each grandparent stuck. Or the names my parents chose more or less.

When my mom found out I was pregnant last week the first thing she said was: I AM NOT GOING TO BE CALLED GRANDMA, I AM ONLY 43.
"Okay mom, how do you feel about Nana?" She really didn't like that idea.
Then I told my dad, who told my step mom, who happily announced that she had claimed Nana. Wonderful! I was thrilled, so then I started a post on facebook where I announce who gets what grandparent name. My fiance and I both have divorced parents, so there are quite a few grandparents, so we made it a game among them to choose their names. It encourages the idea to the younger and less eager grandparents. So after a few days, my mother chose to be called G.G. for Gorgeous Grandma :). Adorable!

My mom:                                 G.G.

My step mom:                         Nana

My dad:                                   Paw Paw* Very important Heirloom name in the family. The one who gets Paw Paw wears the crown and                                                                                 volunteers to be extremely involved in teaching life values to the child

My Grandma:                          Grandma Charlotte

My Grandpa George                Grandpa George

My Memaw:                            Memaw   (Pronounced Meh-Maw)

My Mwa Mwa:                        Mwa Mwa

My PehPaw                              Pehpaw Frank

My Maw Maw:                        Maw Maw Barbara

My Pow Pow Mark:                 Pow Pow Mark

My Great Grandma Molly:      Nana Molly

His dad:                                    Grumps  I have no idea if he was kidding or not. But until he says otherwise, its there. 

His mom: __________

His step dad:__________

His Grandma Sandy: _____           Maw Maw Sandy?

His Grandpa Charlie:_____            PehPaw Charlie?    Pronounced differently than Paw Paw. 

Update:
Aunt Courtney wants to go by Auntie :)

and so on... for both sides of the family, or all four sides for each parent. It is another way to make a daunting task more fun and great for the baby book. When the baby is born take a picture of each grand parent holding the baby, and caption the photo with the name that grandparent chose.

Baby registry

Okay using the internet definitely has it's advantages. But knowing next to nothing about a baby and trying to decide which bottle you need when you had no idea the nipple of a bottle made a difference, makes shopping online a bit.. overwhelming.

GO ZAP THINGS AT TARGET. You read that right, go to target, on the left side usually is a help center with little computer registry things, and when you fill it out, they hand you a zapper, and you run around the store and zap them onto your registry. This accomplishes so many things at once. Looking at the baby categories online made my head spin, but when I could go look at the items, everything seemed much simpler and more tangible. Plus it was really fun to kill a couple hours shopping without spending a dime, and hey it gets your butt off the couch, and we ladies need to workout. I was so tired by the end that I almost fell asleep on the way home. This engaging activity is also a nice way to get your hubby involved in the process. They are more susceptible to it, if they can see it. It's also a great way to bond with your mom or a friend who can tell you more about the products, and you can go home and revise the list later, checking reviews for each item.

FOOD TIPS FOR PREGNANT WOMEN

Tip: Drink milk for breakfast or eat yogurt. I don't like milk so I drink banana, or vanilla, or strawberry milk. It is filling, good for you, and helps with the heart burn and morning sickness. When you are full or getting there, stop eating immediately! Never take that last bite of doom!

Tip: Do you have a sweet tooth? Go for a target trailmix. They have the most amazing archer farms variety that you can only get there. Seriously unless you have an amazing metabolism, choose healthier sweets like trail mix. Not to say that it isn't loaded with carbs, it is, but with trail mix you get protein that you wouldn't and you make better habits by avoiding the ice cream, and frickled pickles. Plus, all the fiber from the nuts, and crazy good stuff in there for you, and all you taste is the sweet goodness of archer farms. Don't forget that later on you will get constipated so eat up the fiber. AND it is re-sealable. Need I say more?  Sure, your Ben&Jerry's has a lid, but do you really expect to use it? The espresso mix is my favorite, and great on days when I am trying to switch the coffee for water. I never would have done so in the past, but after my edima episode last night, I am a different animal.

DO NOT WATCH FOOD NETWORK, OR ANY FOOD COMMERCIALS IF YOU CAN AVOID IT.

(I will add more to this as the list of tips grow.)

My Symptoms: First Trimester

Before I knew I was pregnant-

How on Earth did I not know I was pregnant? Our best guess now is that I am 9 weeks, unnoticed, even with the following symptoms:

I had what I thought was the stomach flu for a little over a week. I felt so horrible that I drank a bottle of pepto in a day. At least it was a small bottle, but when I was admitted to the hospital for parenthesia in the left side of my face, for what I later found out was a symptom of my tumor, I embarrassingly mentioned to my doctor that I had black poop. I had no idea that Pepto Bismol could cause that.  Consequently, my boobs had been sore for a while, and it was hard to lay on my stomach. This should have been a dead giveaway clue. I suppose that I was just hoping that my A cups were finally growing, after all this time. I had been dieting and losing a lot of weight, eating so many green veggies that I was attesting any pain to.

The next week I had a migraine, that left me exhausted, and motion sick. I usually play video games when I feel too miserable to move, but this time when I played minecraft, I thought I was 12 again and puking in my friends car due to motion sickness. Maybe if someone had described morning sickness as motion sickness, I would caught on.

Morning Sickness:
Okay, for those of you who would like morning sickness explained, yes mine started as motion sickness, but after a while it transformed into a smell induced sickness, accompanied by occasional heartburn, burping, gas and farting, and being generally overly bloated, and everything you eat seems to expand quickly, so it is easy to over eat. Most people vomit, somewhere around 80%, I have only felt like I needed to. If I am really hungry and I smell something, (and when I say really hungry, I mean that pain in your stomach every 5- 30 minutes that can be remedied by food.), if I smell something strong, whether the smell agrees with me or not, while I am hungry I feel unnervingly sick. It is like the hungrier I am, the more susceptible I am to smells. That pizza can smell delicious, but if your too hungry when you smell it, you will want to vomit. Other people might experience morning sickness a little differently, and I currently envy those people.

Dumbo brain: There are now times of day when people must hear me talk and wonder how in the world I will make it as a mother with a brain as slow as mine lately. Especially if they don't know me.

Crying so suddenly that you surprise yourself. I can't say that I cry over nothing, because of course while I am crying, whatever it is about, I promise it is important. I cried last night because I was so happy to lay down after my long day. Tears of joy.

Losing weight: Apparently that is quite common in the first trimester. With every appointment (for my tumor) I was losing weight, but if it weren't for the scale, I would have thought I was gaining because I have been so bloated.

Overwhelming sense of smell, but you just think everything around you suddenly stink.

And last but no least: I desperately needed a Long John from Krispy Kreme. I needed one so bad that I dreamt about them. I had a dream that there was a long john donut inside of a tiny cookie dough ball, that much like the Tardis, was bigger on the inside, and all of this was going on in an imaginary DQ blizzard. I currently live in the middle of nowhere, literally, I am not on google maps. So a few days pass and we found a truck stop that had donuts, and my favorite flavors in the world are pumpkin. They had nothing but pumpkin donuts and I cried because I needed a long john.
(he found me a long john a few days later :)

Quitting Smoking: While Pregnant

I have known many people to not succeed at this task, but the one person that I know who did succeed, and by her definition "cold turkey" for 6 years, with a smoker in the house, is my mother. Yesterday she let me in on her secret to success. One cigarette a day, until the cravings go away.
Psychologically it makes more sense than the e-ciggs that I tried, and I crave ciggs much less now that I am smoking one a day, and I don't even need the e-cigg now. I am sure that anyone who is not a smoker is judging me really harshly right now, but this post is not for you. Sorry, what is important to me is that I stop.

Why it works:

With E-ciggs, you are still exposing yourself to nicotine, and you are self injecting much more than your cigarettes. You puff the thing over and over craving more or less the habit of smoking, and the impulse to puff on it more than you need to in order to compensate for the lack of actual smoke, and you intake more nicotine than you would if you actually smoked and you never lose the cravings. Especially if you are as stressed as I am. OF COURSE YOUR STRESSED, I don't care how happy you are to be pregnant, your raging hormones combined with the knowledge that your world is about to dramatically change, as it physically changes is enough to stress out anyone, plus the added element of quitting smoking, and the world telling you how to raise your child stresses out everyone. Trust me, it's even more stressful when you have to squeeze your wedding plans into a month, being fat in your wedding dress, and finding out that you have a brain tumor that must go unattended until after the pregnancy. I was the lucky girl in the hospital to take the precautionary test before my MRI, just in case I was pregnant because of the damaging effects of the contrast fluid. I cried with tears of joy, and shock, don't get me wrong. But it is terrifying, Especially if you have PCOS and a 1/3 chance of having a stillborn or miscarriage, and knowing that people blame 10 million things for losing their babies, the only thing that becomes important, and keeping yours. 

If you are a smoker, my advice is to smoke one cigarette a day. If you know you aren't going to have one ever again, it is all you want and think about. But if you know you can have one tomorrow, you can rest easier, and think about it less knowing that time will come. My other piece of advice if you are receiving a lot of pressure about it is to keep it to yourself. One cigarette a day is not worth the fuss that non smokers will make it out to be. You are the one who has to quit, and many people never stop. So if you have tried and failed, try this. 

My super-top-secret list of BABY NAMES

THE VALUE OF NAMING:
Nope, I am not going to list my baby names to the public, or choose from a top 200 list from the bump. I recieved an awesome goodie bag from my OB/GYN yesterday full of baby magazines, and I was shocked at how many lists of popular baby names there were. I had to read them of course to eliminate any names on the list from my own. But I still find it hard to believe that anyone would read a top list of popular names to choose their baby's name from. I will stress that I was given a name that has become so common that my step sister had my name, and 10% of my all girl catholic school class. I had 3 step siblings, and all of them had the most common names. Maybe I could find plenty of key chains with my name on them, and it's not hard to find a "share a coke with Emily" bottle, but these things lose their value with their frequency. Something with a unique name custom engraved is like owning a one of a kind purse, or a limited edition x-box, it's certainly more special than that key chain with a common name.
So without further ado, I am going to hide my list of super top secret baby names, so that people like you don't have them engraved on key chains, and maybe the name will stay rare enough to become a family heirloom of a name in the future!

Thou Shalt not drink both coffee and tea while pregnant.

 The consequence is a swelling pain in your hands and feet while you are trying to sleep, after a very long day of playing zap at target with the registry, a Doctor's. Apt, and planning a wedding, cooking dinner and cleaning house, sleep will not find you well if you have drank both a cup of coffee and an iced tea, no matter how exhausted you feel. Feet swelling, body turning, steam protrudes from your ears (not literally), but an effect similar to a hot flash accompanies this already unbearable feeling of losing your limbs.  Drink some water and actually get some sleep instead of trying to sleep through it. Poor Kyle only gets as much sleep as I do it seems. 

This swelling Phenomenon is commonly known as Edema, usually triggered by dehydration. Check the thermostat too, because letting your body get too hot can also cause Edema.

** update** Apparently drinking too much water also causes the same thing. Make sure you have enough sodium with your water!