Hidden horrors exposed

Before I was a mom, I used to look at the highchairs of friends' children in bewilderment.

It looked mostly clean, but there were always dried bits of food clinging to the pad and crumbs jammed in the nooks and crannies.  It looked like a slightly less than appetizing, let alone healthy, place to eat.  

"I don't understand!" I would cry internally.  "These are clean people!  How is that chair not clean??"    

Now that I have my own little solid-food eater, I get it. 

It is just not possible - or reasonable - to wash that pad after each feeding.  What it is, is inevitable that the pad is going to get dirty.  Really dirty.

We wash her tray clean after each meal and that's what really counts.  That's what food meant for her mouth is going to touch before going in, so I take care to wash it well.  

The crumbs on the seat will get brushed off, but likely not until the end of the day.  This means I only have to do that activity once versus three times a day.  

My old before-motherhood self would ask, how hard is it to brush crumbs off after each meal?  You wouldn't think too difficult, right?  But consider: Rosie eats, then gets cleaned up in the chair, then gets picked up out of the chair (which means my hands are full) and taken to play or many times to go down for a nap.  At that point I get back to my full-time job, or if it's the weekend, to the 1.1 million things I have on my to do list.  

Brushing off crumbs is low on the totem pole until the end of the day when I'm finishing tidying up.

So, I get it now.  And I apologize to all my friend and family moms who I silently judged for not having a sparkling place for their kids to eat.  

   

So much

So much, soooooo much has happened since my last post!

Here's a synopsis:

We went to my old stomping grounds, Washington, D.C.!  Here are some highlights:

My favorite monument...

Sitting with mama in her old chair.  Might we have a future press secretary in the works...?

Sitting in my old boss, Sen. Enzi's chair...

On a tour of the Capitol building.  Here we are in the Rotunda...

Highlight number 2?  We bought a new couch!  FINALLY!  The couch I bought after moving back from D.C., was in pretty shabby shape.  I hadn't anticipated a husband, two black labs and a baby when I purchased it.  Now we have the couch we want: leather, nail heads, sophisticated, not shabby...

Doesn't it look like it's always belonged here?  I was sad to see the old couch go, I admit.  It was a sleeper and I firmly believe we need one of those with the visitors we get.  But Todd didn't want to try to jam it downstairs, and let's face it, it was in poor condition, so to the dump it went.

We went to Wisconsin!  And Rosie and her cousins in Omaha got to meet for the first time!

But first, we hung out with Great Grandma Kittel and Grandma Kittel...

Rosie ate in a high chair at a restaurant for the first time...

We ate lunch with Paul Bunyon and Babe...

Met Great Aunt Barbara...

And second cousin Kim...

Then on to the cousins!  Tess, Owen and Judd meeting Rosie for the first time...

Hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa Sears...

We cheered Raymond on at his all-star baseball game...

All the cousins together!

There's more, but this gives you a pretty good idea.

Sunshine and sunbonnets

We have been sooooo cooped up...

But no more!  Nice weather is here and I think it's here to stay!

What a gorgeous weekend we had!  Finally, finally, we have been able to spend some real, solid time outside.  Sure, there have been walks, runs, a handful of nice days here and there, but this weekend was the start to some serious outdoor time.

I made sure Rosie spent basically as much time outside as I did.  Since her arrival in November, I can pretty confidently say she knows exactly what each of the rooms in our house is like.  She's seen it all!  It's time she started learning about the great outdoors.

I found her a couple cute new sun hats over the weekend and Saturday afternoon she donned one of them and helped me plant some flowers...

Are you familiar with Sunbonnet Sue?  The old quilt pattern?  I have a Sunbonnet Sue quilt from when I was a little girl.  I think Rosie looks like a Sunbonnet Sue in the photo above.  Compare Rosie to the pattern here...

I also think it's quite appropriate that Rosie is playing with her giant ladybug while helping her mama garden!

Here she is modeling her new, cute hat...

We didn't spend as much time outside today.  She did, however, get some experience with lying in the grass.  She seemed to really love it.  She stayed very still and relaxed for quite some time.  I love how loung-y she looks...

Her legs, which are ALWAYS moving, were still - for several minutes...

Todd said I needed to move her around so she could mow the yard...

The poor dogs have been particularly cooped up.  They've done a number on our yard - brown spots, dead spots, bald spots - and Todd has worked hard to try to fix it.  This means the dogs have been quarantined to the house or the back "yard" which they hate.  Yard is in quotes because in its current state it can hardly be considered a yard.  It's just concrete.  No wonder they hate going back there and love to lounge like this instead.  Oh, Lulu...

Not to be outdone, here's Rigby posing for his lounge lizard shot...

Everyone is enjoying our nice weather!  

Big girl food

Rosie is getting to be such a big girl!

We've started experimenting with something more than formula and oatmeal.

First up on the menu...peaches!

I loved watching Rosie's first tastes of the food.  You could just see the wheels turning, taking note of the taste, texture and overall experience of something different.  She sits in her bouncy chair while I'm in the kitchen cooking and I will bring foods to her nose to smell.  She has always stopped what she's doing to really smell what I put in front of her.  I'm hoping this will somehow make her an open-minded eater!  

I've read when starting new foods you should only offer one kind for at least three days to see how your baby does with it.  In three days we successfully finished one container of peaches and she started to act like she really loved them.  Yesterday, she began taking my hand with the spoon in it and directing it toward her mouth.  Today, with daddy, she had a death grip on the spoon, not wanting him to take it out of her mouth long enough to get another scoop!  

Next up are sweet potatoes.  If liking a food is at all based on what the baby's mom ate while pregnant, then Rosie should go bonkers for sweet potatoes.  I couldn't seem to get enough of them when I was pregnant!  

For these first experimental bites I've used the go-to Gerber foods.  In the future, however, I have aspirations of making a lot of Rosie's baby food myself and have already read through one yummy sounding cookbook we received as a baby gift.  It doesn't seem that difficult, but we'll see!  

Cloth diapering adventures have officially begun!

Our cloth diapers arrived Saturday!

I know in my previous post about our cloth diaper trial period we were quite decided on the hybrid style of diaper.  After much research on the different styles and brands we thought we really had it boiled down.

I was about to make the call to the store in Colorado to place our order when a friend told me to check out a Wyoming cloth diaper company.  I had no idea one even existed!

Out of curiosity, I looked up Baby Beduga in Pinedale, Wyo.  The company is owned by Crystal, a stay-at-home mom who believes strongly in cloth diapering and wants to make it affordable for other families to do so too.

Hers are a pocket style diaper and are one of the styles we had initially decided against.  The absorbent pad slides down the pocket in the back of the diaper.  We had opted against this style for no other reason, really, than we ultimately thought hybrids would be easier and cheaper.

We thought that until we saw her prices.  They are crazy low!  And by that I mean they are half the price of other popular brands.  Example: Rumparooz, a mainstream pocket diaper, sells for about $25/diaper and includes one insert.  Baby Beduga? Plain colored diapers are $7.99 and printed ones are $9.10!  They also include an insert.

My eyes about popped out of my head when I saw those numbers!

The low price automatically made me think they must be of lesser quality, so I did some Googling.  They have been reviewed on several "mommy blogs" and the consensus is nothing short of rave.

We ordered one to see for ourselves and discovered we really liked it! The snaps seem to be spaced appropriately for easy adjustment as Rosie grows.

The material is good quality as is the stitching.

Rosie christened the trial diaper with a big poo right off the bat, so we got to see right away how they clean up.  The diaper rinsed easily and didn't stain.  A good sign.

While it wasn't the style we wanted we were willing to go a different direction for the price.  Not to mention she is a Wyoming company and I like to patronize local small businesses.

We bought an assortment of solid colored and printed diapers.  Crystal has some diapers made of a minky material, which I was on the fence about, leaning toward not wanting them.  After talking about it on the phone she surprised us by nicely throwing in the cow print minky diaper for us to try.  It's really, really soft and I see Rosie wearing it mostly during days around the house where she won't have something on over a diaper.

I did buy one white solid colored one, which seems daring for a cloth diaper, right?  The thought was, it would be nice to have for under dresses when we might not want a bright diaper showing.

Here are the cute printed diapers we ordered.  Aren't they ADORABLE??

We got all of this - 19 diapers (we already had the one trial), 20 additional inserts, one wet bag for the nursery (the orange-y yellow bag), and one wet bag for the diaper bag (the pink bag) - all for slightly less than half of what we would have paid for the hybrid brand we were going to order.

Amazing.

To be fair, all of my initial assessments are based on a couple wears and washes.  I'll update a little later on how things are going and holding up.  I have confidence, though, that we made a great and economical decision and so far would recommend Baby Beduga to others!