LATE NIGHT MUSINGS (HELLO WORLD, I AM BACK.)

1. having a baby for the first time makes you so tired cause you have no idea what to expect. like labor and post partum recovery were no biggy but my child is what we call a micro-napper, and when she was two weeks old i remember thinking "how am i even alive right now? when was the last time i brushed my teeth? how am i supposed to keep this completely helpless human alive when i haven't slept at all?"
anyway, "this too shall pass" is now my favorite phrase. i can remember thinking "how in the world do people stay up til 8:00?!" and the other day i accidentally stayed up til 2am reading a book.
womp.

2. portland is having an indian summer, if you will, and i hate it. i've said it before, and i'll say it again, i hate hot weather. give me cold, give me snow and rain (actually just give me snow) and i will be the happiest little person.

3. how come wizards can literally regrow bones but they can't fix harry's poor eyesight and he has to wear glasses the rest of his life?

4. the first three months i had a baby i felt like i was drowning. 100% drowning. how do people decide to have more kids after their first? why am i not enjoying this as much as everybody else's instagram pictures say they're enjoying motherhood? and then my child started to smile and roll (that was actually kind of annoying cause she would roll and then get stuck) and now she has reactions to everything and she plays peekaboo. man, having a 7 month old is seriously fun.

5. i had to get a new phone and the hardest part now is deciding if i want the ringtone to be the parks and rec theme or the office theme. i mean, i know the office is old and not really trendy anymore and i just love leslie knope so much but the office is one of my first loves. erryone please cast your votes.

6. are blogs even cool anymore? i feel like i still love blogs but i don't have time for blogs.

7. i started making christmas presents like a month ago and i thought i was being awesome by getting a major head start but now when jane goes to bed instead of working on said presents i just want to turn into a slug on the couch.

from the other morning when it was cool enough to make hot chocolate. (only, this is chocolate milk in a mug because i ran out of hot chocolate mix and also regular cups.) 

JANE BABY

meet jane!
born the eighteenth of february.
five pounds and fourteen ounces of poop and crying and gassy smiles and all over perfection. (whenever she has gross diapers i'm always like "jane! good job, baby! your body works!")

jane is a tiny thing. weighs almost the same as a small sack of potatoes. everybody keeps asking how early she was born for her to be so small. "oh haha" i say, "she was only four days early. shes just a small little thing." which, i guess was to be expected if this was my baby bump at 39 weeks.

i started feeling contractions at around midnight. only they weren't your textbook contractions, it just felt like really intense gas. i didn't realize it could be real contractions until around 4am when i thought "maybe i should time these because dang this hurts SO bad."
i called labor and delivery around 6:00 to ask them if i should be coming in and they told me it was my call, but since it was my first baby, i could probably do with laboring at home for at least another hour. i hung up and was like "H NO mikie go get the hospital bag."
the whole fifteen minute drive to the hospital was excruciating. i checked in, they put me in a room to make sure i was progressing enough to be admitted.
the nurse was all "OH you're dilated to a seven!" SEVEN. can you even imagine if i had taken the advice of the nurse on the phone and labored at home for another hour!? jane would have been born at home! that would be horrible because there's no magical anesthesiologist at home. (all hail the epidural!)

jane was born about thirteen hours after i felt that first contraction. it feels like we've had her forever and i already don't even remember what we did before she was born. (its probably because we're so sleep deprived.)

welcome to earth, jane baby. we love you and we like you. (raise your hand if you're still so so so so so sad that parks and rec has ended forever.)

(ps this is my 100th post.)
(shout out to my kid.)
(sorry for all the instagram reposts. i'm too tired to take more pictures.)
(i have a kid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

SURPRISE! (I'M ALIVE!)

man, have i been the best blogger out there or what!? i think i deserve some award for being the most constant and reliable blogger out there. does anybody still read this thing!? yes? no? if the answer is yes, then please tell me what your favorite chocolate is. i won't be sending you any, but i am definitely craving some late night chocolate. (AND i just remembered i have some hidden cadbury eggs on top of the fridge. they're in a box of goodies that i was supposed to send to my friend but instead i've just been eating all the candy from it. whoops. sorry, steph.) 

SO! what has been going on in my life on my year-long sabbatical? 

well, a lot. but mostly two main things. 

1. we moved to oregon! 

once mikie's internship ended, we decided we needed to move. sorry rexburg, it's not you, it's me. (actually, a lot of it was you.) since moving out here though, i've come to really miss our little home in idaho. idahome? i miss our super cheap townhome that we rented. the snow cone shack. our friends. the taco buses. oh and living half an hour away from chick-fil-a. (something about their chocolate milkshakes!) 

even though our first non-idaho summer was spent completely roasting in our non-air conditioned apartment, we have come to really enjoy this place. (also, what is with people that live here that claim "it doesn't get hot in the pnw!" last summer was at least 90 degrees everyday for at least two months.) 

people are friendly here. when we used to have alaska plates on the car, people were ALWAYS stopping us to talk to about alaska. (also for some reason there's a lot of people from ketchikan and kodiak here. so random.) 

we LOVE getting to live by mary + christian and their kids. we especially love being able to hang out with baby peter and watching him grow. that's fun. babies are so fun. 

2. oh yeah, so babies.

we are having one of those things. 

as much as i really wanted to just surprise social media with a baby in a few weeks, i figured i should probably document on this little blog that mikie and i are having a baby! 

it's still incredibly surreal. it probably won't even begin to feel real until after the small human child is here in my arms, crying. 

i'm due in three weeks (THREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and i'm 100% freaking out because my to-do list on my phone looks like this: FIND A PEDIATRICIAN ASAP! PACK A HOSPITAL BAG! MAKE A BIRTH PLAN! INSTALL THE CAR SEAT! (a very serious plea to to all my mom friends: please tell me w.hat you found useful in your hospital bag. or what you found to be the most useful for postpartum recovery. both, actually. please tell me both.) 

baby girl is having the best time kicking me right now. i was thinking that it would be nice to go lay down in bed but she was like "LOL you're so funny, mother." and kicks away. it's reassuring and also quite annoying. 

before i was ever pregnant, i had these plans how i would document my growing belly and make all these cute things for my baby, etc etc. then pregnancy happened and baby hid in my long torso until i was 25-ish weeks and nobody at church even noticed until i was seven months pregnant. SEVEN! so i really have no bump pictures because there wasn't anything to show for the longest time. 

also baby crafting has barely happened because apparently growing a baby is super duper tiring. apparently it means nothing when, pre-pregnancy, you are able to wake up early, take no naps, and then go to bed late.

my current sleep schedule goes something like wake up late, take an hour long nap because i had to go grocery shopping and it wore me out, and then get tired again at like nine o'clock. i'm pretty sure i go to sleep the same time as my nieces and nephews. 

anyway. that's the big news! i'm pregnant and will probably be giving birth before the next time i blog again.

here's two pictures. because i still can't finish a blog post properly, and because i'm too tired to find other pictures to post. sorry bout that.

 the goonies house! dream come true! 

I STARTED AN ETSY SHOP + OTHER THINGS.

i guess this post is a bit long time coming, but as well know i'm a terrible blogger. okay. here it goes.

i started an etsy shop!

it is terrifying and exciting at the same time. right now, it's just shoes. tomorrow, the world! (or bibs and burp clothes and quilts. sorry about the stupid joke. ugh really, that was a horrible joke.)
this little idea came to me a few months ago. i couldn't stop thinking about it- the bee in my bonnet, so to speak. fourteen pairs of sample size shoes later, i had enough to open a shop. so i did.

okay, i had this whole long post written about how i really struggled internally with sewing these little mary janes at first and how i overcame that, but i'm pretty sure it's not very exciting for others to read and i don't want to bore anybody. huge shout out to mikie, my sister-in-law lizanne, and my favorite show pushing daisies for getting me through the rough couple of weeks of sewing fourteen dang pairs of sampler shoes.

in other news:
that handsome guy mikie started to apply for jobs in different states. we really are going to move out of rexburg eventually, and this time i think i'm ready to do so. last year was so weird. i don't especially love it here but something was telling me to hold on just a bit. i'm so glad we ended up staying. we are exactly where we are supposed to be.

i want it to be spring SO desperately right now. i could do without those spring allergies, but i just want to pull out my saltwaters and shorts! i want to sit outside, read, and buy boxes of otter pops! the ever elusive springtime, you know? i also would like to go to buy a house right now. i realize that is completely unrelated to everything i've said in this post but i just thought i'd throw that out there since i'm talking about things i can't have right away. womp womp.

i guess i can't think of anything else that's worth noting on this little space of internet, which is fine by me because i think it's time to go get fruitista freezes.

esty shop here!
instagram page here! (nothing posted yet but follow if you would like! there might be some giveaways or something on there.)

PLAYING CATCH UP (SORT OF)

i thought more blog posts would come with the arrival of internet last month, but the only thing that it's really increased is pinterest productivity. and netflix. i'm so sorry.

mikie resurrected my old laptop that has been dead for two years. that sucker needed two different power cords haha but it was great to get my old pictures and music off of it. also the desktop was a picture of katniss and peeta. laugh it up, but really you know were excited for the movie too. however i still haven't seen catching fire, so apparently i'm not a very good hunger games fan.

i'm trying to think of all the fun and interesting things that we've been doing the past month and the only thing i can think of is how apparently i have a ganglion cyst and you can sometimes get rid of those by smashing it with a book. (we tried that, by the way, but my wrist bone sticks out more than the cyst does so no, it was not successful.)
oh, and this one time i tried to make stove top spanish rice to go with the chicken enchiladas i made. did i ever tell you that i am a complete failure when it comes to stove top rice? i'm not a very good asian. soooo if you ever want to eat rice thats mushy and crunch at the same time, you are invited to eat the leftovers.

our friends andrea + brandon like to say "hey we're feeling twenty-two right now." when they invite us to do something impulsive. (like to go to a movie at the last second. it's rowdy over here.) i'd like to think i'm very good at feeling twenty-two but honestly i'm not.
the other month i realized that i never ever deviate from the same food when we go out to eat at certain restaurants. i think i realized it when the guy at dickey's was all "oh, you want that? again!?" so the whole point of this paragraph is that we've seriously been eating the same menu every week because i am in a complete food rut. help me out, friends. help me feel more twenty-two, and give me links to your favorite dinner meal. we'll eat anything. SAVE US FROM MCDONALDS PLEASE.

mostly my days here have been spent sewing, crafting, and daydreaming of the day we can go drive down the coast and end up at disneyland. cause seriously, how great of a trip would THAT be. i think our time in rexburg is almost up (a day i never thought would come!) and we've been doing some serious dreaming about moving to the pacific northwest and living by the ocean. maybe in a little cottage. and we'll get a dog. have kids. oh and buy a barbecue so we can have hamburgers every night. ah yes, that sounds like the good life.
but until then, we're here and it really isn't so bad as i make it. i still visit disney's website though,
and mikie still looks at dogs for sale on craigslist.

 ^^this baby blanket took two and a half months to make. i'm actually pretty surprised that i finished it, but here it is, finished. i love how it turned out! i still haven't put it in the mail yet though, so that might be a project on its own.

^^this is how my day normally goes. sewing and movies. i loved this one. also, special thanks to pushing daisies and pandora for getting me through the boring parts of my day.