Two Nerds and a Baby

Project Life is such a great way to get my important photos and memories together and displayed in a neat and elegant way. Mike bought me the Clementine core kit, paper, page protectors, and the binder for Christmas, and now I am pleased to say I have completed most of 2011! Woo hoo! I only have one missing layout to do… and I’ve been putting it off for long enough now.

My birthday. (Eek!) Guess it’s high time to knuckle down and go for it.

I had used a Design B page protector to display Liam’s Halloween photos, but the back side was completely empty, and it looked like this:

So, here’s what I did.

Step One: The Story

There are several neat things about my birthday—other than the obvious fact that, duh, it’s the most glorious day of my birth. My birthday is Hallowen, my sister and I share a birthday, and I also found out I was pregnant with Liam on my birthday in 2010. That’s a lot of material to start with! How do I narrow it down? What’s the story?

Rather than choosing just one story, I started by listing them in order of priority, which for me, was:

1. Finding out about Liam!
2. Sharing a birthday with my sister!
3. Halloween is an awesome birthday!

Under each of those topics, I did a bit of brainstorming about how I could talk about these topics, and more specifically, what types of journaling would fit the various pocket sizes.

1. Journal on how I found out I was pregnant (4×6)
2. My sister’s thoughts about me – she always said I would be a girl, and I would be born on her birthday (3×4)
3. Top ten favorite costumes (4×6)
4. Why I dress up (3×4)

Step Two: The Pictures

Once I had a general idea of the content types and sizes, I started doodling, drawing the basic outline of the photo pockets and marking where I wanted pictures to go. I tried to place photos and related captions/journals next to each other, either beside or beneath.

Using Photoshop and the elements from the Designs by Lili digital download, I added just a few embellishments to match the photos for my layout. I’ll then have these printed by Shutterfly, either 4×6 vertical, or as two horizontal 3x4s on one 4×6 (because Shutterfly doesn’t print 3x4s, but that’s ok.

At this point, I started doodling.

Step Three: The Design

I mentioned in step two that I was using the Designs by Lili elements, and I suppose it’s not technically accurate that my planning for this layout happened in these four separate and discrete steps. It’s actually more of a merging of ideas, back and forth—one thing inspiring the journaling, which in turn might inspire the photo selection, etc. But what initially pushed me was the availability of this digital download, since the one limitation for the standard Project Life kit is the lack of portrait 4×6 journaling cards, as well as landscape 3×4 journaling cards. The items that come with the kit are set up really only to be used with the regular Design A page layout, and here I had this other layout that didn’t seem to fit. Enter: Digital scrapbooking.

The nice thing about these digital elements is that if you tweak them a bit, you can print them in these different configurations. This is the same designer who designed the Clementine kit, so it’s clear that the items will go together quite well. I’ll just resize them  or rotate the lines in Photoshop, and print them myself. And in the case of the journaling block, I just typed it out and will print it without having to hand-write my journal. (My handwriting is a bit messy for that much text.)

I also got to use the little round and tab embellishments right onto my photos; in the case of one of them (which is a photo of my siblings holding me in the hospital as a newborn) I erased out the 2012 date and replaced it with my birth year.

Step Four: The Finished Page

Once all of my items are in from the printer, and I get a chance to lay it all out and play, I will post a photo of the finished page. For now, here’s a look at the process, from doodle -

to tiny mockup -

I’m not quite sure on the placement, and I don’t know what I am going to put in that empty spot, but I am sure by the time my stuff gets here, I’ll figure it out. Yay! Go me!

We’ve been trying to eat healthier this year (I know, I know, probably the most frequently-spoken words in January of any year, but bear with me, ok?) and one of the things that’s been recommended to me by my lactation consultant is to cut out dairy and wheat. Ack! Wait, no cheese, no milk, no tortillas, no… what in the world *can* you eat?

Lots of things, it turns out. Like these delicious paleo brownies:

They are luscious little bites, made from eggs, banana, almond flour, coconut oil, vanilla, maple syrup, and spices. I used nutmeg and cardamom, and topped them with crunched up walnuts. Yum. I don’t have a mini muffin tin, like the recipe originally called for, so mine are just a touch under-done in the middle, but they are sooooo tasty.

Paleo? What is that, some other trendy thing? Well, it’s a sort of new name for an old idea—eating foods that would’ve been available in paleolithic times, and avoiding ones that weren’t. I’ve been feeling like a giant fat slug lately and I am sick of it. Plus, if Dooce is doing it, then I am contractually obliged by the internet code of mommybloggers (look it up) to give it a go.

Cue Operation: Lardass. Mike doesn’t want me to call it that, but I will anyway, because shame keeps me motivated. Of course, I don’t mind his alternate title:

I’ve been waiting to post this quilt until it was finished and photos were taken and tweaked to Hubs’ satisfaction—he’s rather the artiste, you know—and here at last I can finally talk about it!

When I found out my friend Cortney was expecting a baby girl, I knew I had to make her a quilt. I had the privilege of working with her husband, Brian, back in my former life. Cortney was so awesome and threw me a bitchin’ baby shower back in May, and her little guy, Braeden, is such a charming young lad. I went through so many different fabric “families” before I settled on Lizzy House’s Outfoxed collection, in the “Sly Fox” colorway.

The collection has cute little hedgehogs, leafy, abstract patterns, delicate pearl bracelets, sassy flora, and its all tied together in a palette of rich plums and spicy oranges. Yum! Just looking at it made me remember being a little girl, coming up with stories and playing around in the woods. As I made it, I sewed in lots of exciting daydreams and wishes for adventures for her little girl—and when I attended her baby shower, I learned that they were going to name their daughter Coraline! Hence, the Sweet Coraline quilt.

This was a really fun project to work on and, though small, is officially the first quilt that I have completed, start to finish—from piecing to hand-quilting. I’ve done pieced tops before, and sewed blankets, and done hand quilting for other people, but never actually done one like this. It gives me confidence to attempt a twin sized quilt for Liam, using the similar pattern, but different fabrics. I hope by the time he is into a twin sized bed, I’ll be finished. That gives me enough time, right?

Hubs and I are fairly nerdy (remember what you named the blog, Marie? Right.) and, as such, we have lots of cables and parts and pieces and tech things strewn about our domicile. With Bubs becoming more mobile and threatening to crawl any day now, we’re really going to have to do something about that. I’m thinking that the baby corral I mocked just a few years ago is actually the most ingenious invention known to man or womankind, because I just have no clue how to even start babyproofing our home, as it’s all one giant room downstairs and it’d just be easier if the HOA would let us install a baby-sized habitrail.

I digress.

We often bring our Macbooks with us around the house, like for example right now, I have it up on our kitchen island, which never was used as a cocktail bar for swanky parties, but does, in fact, work quite well for typing while standing up when your sniffle-nosed baby only wants to sleep in the Moby wrap.

And Mike has this habit of leaving these velcro cord-keepers on all of our power cables, which is great because you don’t ever lose them, and if you have to pack up and run to a special event somewhere* you can just wrap up your cords, and cord management is important, etc etc.

Except these little velcro tags manage to catch on every piece of clothing that I own! I walk by and suddenly I am being chased by a power cable… I try to shake it off, while not breaking the shuffle-bounce-shuffle-bounce rhythm required by Bubs in the Moby wrap, and it’s a no-go. And there’s no way to bend over and pick it off, so I try to use my other foot to sort of… unlatch it. Now it’s stuck to both feet. Crap.

Finally, through a combination of prayer and fasting, I managed to remove the velcro strip from my feet. And though we haven’t moved these power cables anywhere in the last three months, I just know that the second I remove the velcro thingy, Mike will need to take it somewhere. Oh well. First-world problems, I know. But that’s about as exciting as my life gets.

*Where exactly I am going to be running is anyone’s guess. I tend not to run at all unless being chased by bears/Amway reps/Twilight fans.

I’ve got a kid, I wear yoga pants in the grocery store, and now I am a scrapbooker. Oy. I’m officially a stay at home mom. Woo!

Ok, ok, I kid. (Partially.) But it does make me laugh how much my life has changed in the last six months. Like I told a friend of mine a few days ago, if you ever find yourself with an abundance of time, clean clothes, and money, having a child is a great way to remedy that. Yet in a way, it completely and irrevocably shifts the way you look at the world, and the way you look at life.

Suddenly, things that maybe weren’t so important, now are. Looking back through pictures in my life—

—I feel a sense of sadness that, though the photos themselves are beautiful and filled with memories in and of themselves, eventually I will forget where they were taken, and when, and why… I fact, for most of those pictures, I already had to look up in their file data to recall them. How sad is that?

So, it’s time to remember. And here are the pieces I am using:

• Project Life Clementine Kit
• Clementine Binder
• Variety Pack of Pages
• Clementine Cardstock
• TItle + Filler Cards; Template view D from JessicaSprague.com
• Corner Chomper from We R Memory Keepers

Project Life 2012

With a combination of the physical kit, digital elements, and printing from Shutterfly and ScrapbookPhotos.com, I feel more than prepared to document over a year’s worth of photos—in fact, I have already bitten a sizable chunk out of 2011′s documentation, which I will share in my next post. It was so exciting to finally see the photos and memories that mean so much to me in a place where they can be preserved.

And because I had already started, I planned on using a 6×12 page protector to improvise a year divider… of course, they are out of stock, so I ended up using Design F (one horizontal 4×6, ten vertical 3×4) and just trimming it in half with my x-acto blade!

So here’s what I did: I took one of the 3×4 first page filler cards, trimmed it, rounded the edges, and mounted it on the 4×6 card below. Then I applied my numbers, which came from a sheet of number stickers I happened to have laying around—nothing fancy, I think it cost me a few bucks at Home Depot? The smaller photos below were just simple face shots, taken in our kitchen, printed at Shutterfly. (Because the order hasn’t come in yet, I made a mockup in Photoshop to show what I am going to do—the missing fourth photo is going to be a picture of our three hands. D’awww…)

Anyway. That’s my “Title page,” such as it is. I can’t wait to post a few spreads and show y’all what else I have been up to. Yay! Look at me, ma! I’m scrappin’!

Hey everybody! Wow, Christmas has come and gone, and my brain still can’t quite process that it’s not, y’know, September. The weather lately hasn’t helped; it’s been sunny and blue and cold but clear. No white Christmas for us this year. Rats.

But it was a good one. First Christmas with Bubs and of course he was adored by all who were graced with his presence. He even showed off his new baby-go-grunt noises in front of both sets of relatives. Ah, the joy of the holidays. Here’s hoping that the bit of watered-down prune juice yields something truly blog-worthy in a day or so…

“Mom, seriously? Are you going to blog about my poop now?”

This year for Christmas, I got Mike mostly photo-related things. It’s partially selfish of me to do so, though I know he loves his photography and is so very good at it. I love his photography and love the fact that we are more conscious about documenting the various and sundry adorable things that Liam does on a daily—nay, hourly!—basis.

I asked for a Project Life kit for Christmas, and Mike did not disappoint. He bought me the Clementine kit, extra papers, page protectors, and the beautiful orange binder that matches the Clementine kit! I wrote about Project Life in my last post, and I am happy to say that the kit meets about 98% of my expectations. I got a chance to really dig into the materials today and now I am so glad that I have pretty much all of my photos since July in sleeves and mostly decorated! Plus, I have little journal cards or captions written for a majority of photos, too! It’s organized enough that my inner Hermione Granger is appeased, but it’s not as overwhelming and intimidating as a huge 12 x 12 page.

Things I love about my PL kit:

• The storage boxes are really sturdy and high quality. For things you’ll be pulling out and storing away frequently, this is great that the boxes don’t fall apart.
• The papers aren’t a super-heavy cardstock, but they are good quality.
• There is a great variety of coordinated cards, and they all look good together! This is awesome for scrapping-clueless people like moi.
• The variety in page protectors is great; I mainly do View A, which has four horizontal 4×6 spots and four vertical 3×4 spots, but I use the other page protector layouts to feature special events.
• It is structured but still free-form. I know this doesn’t make sense, but what I mean is… when you know you are going to use View A, you start to take more horizontal photos, and think about a photo-a-day spread. But before I knew about PL, and when Liam was brand-new, we were just taking photos left and right and didn’t really have a plan at all. But with all the different pages, you just pop them in and write on a card and BOOM goes the dynamite. It’s very satisfying.

Things that could be improved:

• The kit comes with a smattering of journaling cards, as well as plain ones with a grid on both sides. The designed journaling cards are only useable in a vertical layout—like they would be used in the View A pages. It would be super awesome if the backside of the designed journaling cards had the same design, but with horizontal lines on it, so you could use it in the other page layouts.
• Some of the designed journaling cards—actually, all of the cards—have words on them, and sometimes the words don’t quiiiiiiiiiite fit the scene or photo around them. Bu that’s a super minor nit-picky thing.
• The number stickers only go to 10! And there is no zero! But this is only annoying because I decided to use them to mark Liam’s weekly photos, so I just used an exacto to cut apart the 10 sticker and use it for weeks 20 and 11, respectively.

Anyway, overall I think the system is great for people like me who are pretty much clueless dolts about scrapbooking. It’s a good way for people to dip their toe into the water as far as they are comfortable without a huge monetary or financial investment. Scrapbooking can be a really expensive hobby, and I was always intimidated by how many tools and papers and doo-dads you need to just do one page. But with this system I can tell a story, rather than worry so much about its “artistic value” The colors of this kit in particular work well for doing all sorts of albums, and I know that in years to come I will look back and be very glad that I put this together this way. I hope in the future that the designer comes up with small 4×6 and 3×4 kits that are specific to holidays, events, whatever. I think that would be pretty cool. Once I get a few pages to a good spot, I’ll share my layouts, too, and some ideas I’ve had for using the photo pages.

Dear Liam,

My new favorite thing about you is your voice. You have a throaty laugh, almost like a song, and as you reach and grab at my cheeks and lips, you make your little owl-noises, like you have something important to say. And leftover from your tactile explorations is a fine sheen of drool. That’s right. The teething drool. It has come on in the last few days and now it’s like a faucet has been turned on in your head. We try to keep a bib on you all the time, but your poor little chin and chest now has the famous teething rash, poor babe.

And what goes with drool? Well, for you, it’s reaching for cups, plates, and every utensil that gets in a ten-inch radius around you. Once the pediatrician gave the go-ahead for trying out bananas, let’s just say… you were a fan.

You suck down those bananas in just about any form in which they are presented to you. That look right there? Bliss. It almost makes me feel a bit… second banana. (HA.) Except not at all, because you’re still all over me like I’m going out of style.

Your dad and I had our first date night since you were born. We went out to a nice restaurant and left you with the grandparents and boy did that feel weird. As much as I like having a break during the day, I really enjoyed having you back in my arms. Of course, you didn’t like the disruption in your routine, and we all slept poorly that night, but it was lovely to just be with your dad and talk about the past, the present, and the future.

We can’t believe you are getting so big so fast. You love to stand and stretch and reach and go. Every so often, you almost, almost get up on your knees. The first hints at crawling have been inchworm-style, and backwards. All of a sudden, you’ve outgrown just about every diaper in our stash, which has led to some pretty interesting, uh, accidents. Especially given the introduction of solids.There’s some pretty good photos of that particular event that I am going to not post here on the internet, but rest assured, your prom date can take a look at my proud archival poo photos if she so desires. But all in all, you continue to grow in personality, in giggles and grins, and in your wonderful exploration of the world around you. And except for the poosplosions, I can’t wait to see what else you, ahem, produce.

Love,

Mama

So, it’s been a month since shampoo has touched my head, and I have to say that, overall, I’m impressed by the No Poo routine. I have made a few changes to the initial routine, and am still fine-tuning it, but I think my hair is adjusting. The changes I made were:

• I moved the ACV rinse before the baking soda scratch during a recent wash, mostly because I had not washed my hair for four or so days, and was really super greasy. So I did the ACV+honey rinse, then baking soda scrub, then the tea wash.
• I added a boar bristle brush and scalp scrub each night before bed, which seems to really distribute the oils along my hair. While the bottom of my hair is still sort of brassy and overprocessed, that’s mostly because of a prior dye job and not anything shampoo can fix, anyway. Or lack thereof.

I now have about two inches of grow-out, and eventually plan on henna-ing my hair at some point. I hope that will help the brassy ends and make it more smooth.

Anyway, that’s my update. We’ll see how it goes!

In other news… scrapbooking? No no no, please, don’t make me! Not the S word!

There are some creative things in life that I am good with. Sewing. I’m pretty good at that, if I do say so myself. I’m ok with a few other things—but the one crafty skill that has eluded me since I first dabbled in it is scrapbooking. And I guess before having a baby, I never really thought that my life was interesting enough to be memorialized. And there’s something about scrapbooking that sort of turns me off, beyond the thought that my everyday life and boring day-to-day ‘adventures’ were not so exciting. Something about all of the papers, the inks, the stamps and coordinated stickers and the different tools. I love looking at it; I just could never make it work for me. My mother-in-law makes these amazing, beautiful cards and every time I get one I just want to sit and look at it, with the perfect little ribbon or drawing or whatnot. When I try to do that I just end up sort of scratching my head and getting ink on everything and feeling sort of lame. But I digress.

Scrapbooking. Photography.

Now that I have this wonderfully photographable little being in my life—

—I find that something sort of funny is happening. The things I thought I was sure that I would remember forever and ever are actually sort of… starting to fade. They’re starting to get that awesome fuzzy patina of time, you know? Where you look back and think, was this memory like this, or was it like that? And then you realize that time is moving forward, and the little person who you swore would be a week-old bundle of needy screaming baby is suddenly a five-month-old! How does that happen?

Anyway. Scrapbooking. I still don’t like it. But I want to remember the photos and stories in the moment. So when a friend of mine posted about using this system called Project Life, I checked it out and thought, well hell, I could do that. Take a picture, write a caption, put it in a page protector, done. Woo hoo! And there’s so many cute papers that—get this—are all coordinated, in a box, together, so that a clueless person like me doesn’t have to debate between this paper or that paper or whatever. I asked Santa for the box and we’ll see if he delivers. Tee hee. The more I think about it the more excited I get. I think about looking back at my own parents’ photos and wondering what they thought that day, that moment. And even though I’d like to believe that time doesn’t march onwards, it most certainly does.

And boy, does little man love bananas. (More on that later.)

Pregnancy tends to do interesting things to hair; Some women lose all of theirs, and some women get thick, lustrous locks. I didn’t get either during pregnancy, but the famous post-pregnancy hair walkoff is making it look like Chewbacca is sneaking in every night and using my hairbrush. My hair is fine and straight and boring, and lately it’s been so dry and full of static, even in its new short cut is getting annoying. Yet at the roots, it tends to get super oily after just a day without a shower. And honestly, it’s not doing anything that it hasn’t done before, just… moreso. I’ve never had a time when I could go a few days without a shower. You know. Ohh man, do you know.

So I heard about ‘No Poo,’ which (as I am hoping you have deduced by now) does not refer to constipation but to haircare. The logic behind No Poo is that your scalp is being tricked to over-produce oils through the frequent use of commercial shampoo and conditioners; the detergents in shampoo strip the oils, while conditioners apply a variety of artificial oils to coat the hair, making it appear soft and shiny. But for many people, this only lasts a day or so. The scalp has been signaled to produce enough oil to make up for what was stripped out, and you end up looking like a grease ball.

There are a variety of techniques, but the basic one uses baking soda for a scrub, followed by a rinse of diluted apple cider vinegar. I thought, well I can try that. So that’s what I am doing this month, just to see what happens. In researching this, I found other ideas to try for a variety of hair types and problems, including tea rinses, honey, egg, milk, and others. I tried to craft a method that seemed to address my particular hair woes.

I had two marvelous peribottles leftover from having Kiddo, and  in one of them, I poured a mixture of strong black tea and a few drops of tea tree oil. In the other, I put in around two ounces of apple cider vinegar (henceforth to be referred to as ACV) and about a blorp of honey. Technical term, I know.

Here’s my method:

• Brush hair before shower.
• Using warm, almost hot water, massage scalp.
• Make a paste of a tablespoon of baking soda and apply to scalp.
• Massage! Think about your sewing projects, and try to ignore the baby crying downstairs. Hubby’s got him; you’re good.
• Let the baking soda sit on your head while you clean the rest of your body.
• Using warm-ish water, slightly cooler than before, rinse the baking soda from your hair.
• Rinse hair with your ACV+water+honey solution. Rinse out with water.
• Rinse hair with your tea+tea tree oil solution. Rinse out with water.
• You’re done!
• Stop reading! You’re done.
• No, seriously. Get out of the shower, ok?

After towel-drying and brushing my hair, I warmed just a dab of pure, virgin coconut oil in my palms and applied it to the ends. And now, I’m going to let it air-dry, like I typically do… and we’ll see what happens!