Blogger Love v.2

On Monday, after spending most of my day cleaning, making freezer meals, oh yeah, and Mommying a precious baby boy, I plopped down on our couch completely spent to catch up on blogs. When Chuck came downstairs on his dinner break, his eyes bugged out taking in the sheer number of tabs I had open on my laptop. So many good posts this week!

Without further ado, here were my favorite posts of the week:

Big Boy Room + Nursery Update by Schue Love | I need Natasha to come decorate my entire house, because her style is flawless. I love how she's designed her two boys' rooms!

20 Books by Shauna Niequist | Book posts will always have a spot in my heart, but Shauna's choices were totally on-point.

There's a Shark in the Toilet! by Running from the Law | Sara posted her favorite responses to the question of what lies parents tell their kids- some of them are downright hilarious!

Sallie & Perkins: What We've Been Up To by Love, Fun and Football | We took Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University a couple years ago, but I'd by lying if I said we've 100% applied what we learned. Erin's financial posts are so encouraging and give me the motivation to be get out of debt, FAST!

European Superlatives: Part 1 by We Took the Road Less Traveled | I've got full-blown wanderlust, but travel blogs have a tendency to bore me. I loved this cute, fun way to highlight the highs and lows of Casey's European travels.

Why Do Moms Always Talk About Coffee and Wine? by Scary Mommy | You can pretty much guarantee there will always be a post from Scary Mommy in my favorites of the week. You can also guarantee that not a morning has gone by since having Charlie that I have passed on my regular cup o' joe.

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What are your favorite posts this week?

5 Tips for Making Pre-Baby Freezer Meals

One of the best things I did to prepare for life with a newborn was to stock my freezer with easy-to-make casseroles. Life with a new baby is overwhelming, and once the food from friends and families stopped coming, I was left to my own devices. Here are a few things I learned in my quest to become that mom:

1// Invest in disposable baking pans

Whether you're making freezer meals for yourself, or for a new mom friend, whomever is on the receiving end will appreciate having virtually no cleanup! Sure, it may be more wasteful, but with a new baby, you'll be lucky if you get 5 minutes to yourself to eat, let alone wash a heavy baking pan. Personally, I bought in bulk (my local Kroger always has Buy 2, Get 1 Free sales) and skipped out on buying pans with lids. I found that the lids just take up more room in my freezer and cost more than regular ol' aluminum foil, so it really wasn't worth my while.

2// Schedule your prep time

I know this sounds seriously Type-A, and believe me, I'm not that person either. But trust me on this one, it will make your life so much easier. Before I go grocery shopping I pick about three recipes I want to make and buy all my ingredients the day before I plan to prep. Generally, Saturdays or Sundays are my best bet, and I will spend 4-5 hours in the kitchen making everything at once. It does require some commitment, but you get everything out of the way all at once and then you have enough food to last you for goodness knows how long! I make sure to clean as I go so I don't get bogged down by a messy kitchen and lose steam. 

3// Double your recipe

Why spend more time making a recipe twice, when you can spend the same amount of time making double, triple, or quadruple the original amount?! I always double my recipes and make two pans of each dish. Saves me a ton of time in the long run!

4// Substitute the healthy stuff whenever possible

If you're breastfeeding, it's important to make sure you're giving your baby the best nutrients possible! One of the drawbacks of making casseroles is that more often than not, they're not very good for you. Cream-based soups and loads of carbohydrates are all too common. I try to seek out recipes that can be both healthy and yummy. Then, I try to make healthy substitutions whenever possible. 

If a recipe calls for ground beef, I always use ground turkey instead. I also try to incorporate more veggies into my recipes. If a lasagna recipe calls for diced onions, I might also add some bell peppers, zucchini or eggplant. Greek yogurt is a great stand-in for sour cream and you can skip those packets of taco seasoning that are loaded with sodium and just opt to use your own spices.

5// Label, label, label!

Mommy brain is real, folks. When it comes time to pop one of your bad boys' in the oven, you don't want to be scouring the internet trying to recall your cooking directions. Once my pans are assembled, I tear off a piece of aluminum foil and record the type of dish, oven temperature and length of cooking time with a Sharpie before I wrap them up. This makes my job much simpler when all I had to do is pre-heat the oven!

Here are a few of my favorite freezer meals I've made:

Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole | Six Sisters' Stuff

Shepherd's Pie | True Aim

Lasagna | Happy Money Saver

Chili Dog Casserole | The Weary Chef

Tuna Casserole | Skinny Mom

>>> See more on my Pinterest board <<<

How to Create a Nursery When You Rent

Many moons ago, I made the decision to attend a private, Christian university. While I look back fondly on my college experience, my four years there left me with more than just an undergraduate degree. Yup, you guessed it. Student loan debt for the win.

Chuck and I are counting down the days until we can chip away at our debt and afford to own a house of our own, but until then...we are renters.

When the time came to think about creating Charlie's nursery, I was bummed that I wasn't going to be able to do all the fun, Pinterest-y things I wanted to. No painting. No installing new light fixtures or shelves. I felt a little bit limited, but I wasn't giving up hope.

I envisioned a not overly baby boy-ish nursery that somehow incorporated my love for Uganda and I think I did a pretty good job. Here are some of my tips for creating a fun nursery when you rent:

TEXTILES

It was amazing what a difference adding some valances and a rug made in brightening up our stark white second bedroom. To avoid being completely whitewashed, I tried to pick out bold colors and a fun crib bedding set with coordinating window coverings and changing pad cover. I like to think that my color palette complimented the white rather than working against it.

DECOR

Lucky for me, I'm a master with spackle. While we won't be installing any hardcore shelving or large decor, I figured a few small nails wouldn't hurt and can be easily filled in when the time comes for us to move. I stuck with a lot of decor I already had since we were working with a really small budget and added a few small things here and there. My favorite addition was the birth announcement canvas I made at TinyPrints.

PLACEMENT

I felt that by placing my limited decor asymmetrically, it made the bare walls appear to be a little more dynamic than they actually are.

COLOR

My number one takeaway from trying to decorate a stark-white boring room? Don't be afraid of color! I tried to infuse color wherever I could (as evidenced by the bright red paint job Hubby did on our dresser).

With those (amateur) design tips in mind, check out the finished product!

 The nursery is Charlie-approved!

As of now, Charlie still sleeps in our room and we don't have any plans to move him until he starts sleeping through the night. Which gives us plenty of time to still check a couple remaining items off our to-do list, including putting up some kind of mobile, hanging a tapestry behind his crib and finding a bookshelf or storage cubes to put against the wall near the doorway. But as someone who has never decorated a room in my life, I think it turned out pretty well!

SOURCES

Bedding Set, Changing Pad Cover and Valances // Mudhut Baby Collection @ Target (No longer available)

Jenny Lind 3-in-1 Crib // Target

Shermag Glider and Ottoman // Target (Grey, no longer available)

Rug // IKEA (No longer available)

TARVA 6-Drawer Chest // IKEA // Safety Red Paint // Sherwin Williams

Birth Announcement 12x12 Canvas // TinyPrints

Globe, Woven Baskets, Frames // Pre-owned

Chalkboard Crate and Wooden Masks // Gifted

Blogger Love v.1

Is there anything better than stumbling upon new blogs to love? That's how I felt when I discovered Meagan at All the Joys and as it happens, Meagan loves to spread the blogger love, too! I'm so excited to join up with her weekly link-up to share my favorite blog posts of the week:

We are Having a Baby BOY! by Gratefully Inspired | If you haven't noticed yet, I've got babies on the brain and I'm so happy that Denise will be joining the Boy Moms Club!

5 Resources for Free Books for Reviews by hellorigby! | I'm so thankful Jenn shared this. I immediately signed myself up with Blogging for Books.

World's Worst Mother-in-Law Ever by Coffee + Crumbs |  Yup, this will be me.

Book Pairings by Flowers in my Hair | I'm all about new book recommendations. I added Oryx and Crake to my to-read list based on her pairing with The Hunger Games.

18 Crazy Things I Said While Up With the Baby by Scary Mommy | Seeing as I apparently birthed a vampire baby who insists on waking every 2 hours to nurse, I needed this so bad. I LOLed throughout the entire thing.

What I Want You to Know about Loving your Adopted Baby by Rage Against the Minivan | As someone who has always dreamt of adoption, this is something I always wondered about. It was so brave of this Mama to put into words her bonding experience with her adopted child.

Dear Harper by Hippie at Heart | Candace is one of my favorite bloggers ever. The way in which she writes with such honesty about her journey as Harper and Finley's Mommy is the absolute best.

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Which posts have been your favorite lately?

How Pregnancy Confirmed my Faith in God

I remember sitting in the back of a Child Psychology class my junior year of college while my professor (who remains one of my favorite people ever) began talking about child development from conception. After the sperm and egg meet, the process of cell division occurs. Most of us remember from high school science what cell division looks like, but she introduced the class to an entirely new concept: cell differentiation. (Stick with me, I promise I'm going somewhere with this). Now, I'm not a science-y person by any means. But this new term stuck with me- I was fascinated by it. Basically, after the fertilized egg begins the process of cell division, cell differentiation takes place, where individual cells start taking on the characteristics of the specific cells they will become. In fact, a clump of cells will start randomly beating to form the baby's heart. No one knows how or why these cells, which are no different from any other cell, instinctively know to begin pulsing. They just do. This was the first time in my life when I thought of pregnancy as a seriously divine process.

Fast forward about six years. I found myself knocked up and experiencing all the ups and downs of this process. There were days when I hated being pregnant. Most days, if I'm being honest, I hated what I sensed as being a lack of control over my body. But every once in a blue moon, I would have this moment of clarity where I realized that my body knew exactly what to do. Without any effort on my part, my body was feeding, growing and nurturing this little child in my belly. It was as if there were some sort of divine being presiding over the process and controlling each step as it happened.

Then came the delivery. From a purely physical standpoint, the fact that every single day since the dawn of humankind, women have been able to push out a watermelon-sized human out of a grape-sized hole is a miracle in and of itself. But this was not what truly struck me about Charlie's birth. 

For weeks and months I was terrified that my lack of maternal instinct and kid-friendliness would doom me as a mother. I felt a complete disconnect with the little parasite growing inside my womb and I feared I would be the first mother in the history of ever who would never be able to figure out how to love her child. Even as I moaned, groaned and screamed my way through pushing my child out- there was zero attachment.

Then it happened. Charlie was born. He cried that first cry and I was hooked. Through absolutely no effort on my part, I was hopelessly in love. Not familial love. Not romantic love. But an all-consuming, unconditional, I-would-do-absolutely-anything-for-you kind of love. Toward a person I had known approximately one second. The only way I could describe it, is that the instant Charlie was born, it felt that someone reached into my body and grew my heart three times its original size. (Just call me the Grinch). All of a sudden, I had this enormous capacity for love, without losing the love I had for Chuck, my family, my friends in the process. It was miraculous, sublime and divine. 

I am not the kind of person who regularly recites Bible verses. I attend Church maybe once or twice a year. But becoming a Mom, experiencing the miracle of pregnancy- has been all I will ever need to convince me the presence of an all-mighty, omnipresent, loving God. I honestly wouldn't know how else to explain this new love of my life. 

By the Grace of God alone, I am one blessed Mommy.