Separation Anxiety

I thought I had it bad when Piper was a babe, but Willow is another story. We like to sing, "Might as well face it, she's addicted to mom." She has always been a momma's girl, but lately, is has become out of control. I know it's the age (she will be ONE in a couple weeks) and separation anxiety is common, but it is exhausting. Literally, she is crying right now. At 10:23PM, in her bed, after I've put her to bed 3 times. I've sang to her, rocked her, scratched her back and rubbed her head, the child hates sleeping in her own bed. She was doing pretty good for a while, she finally slept through the night at 10 months. I'm tired. I've tried everything, the aforementioned routine, crying it out...you name it, I've tried it. The only thing that will make her happy is sleeping with me. We did that in the beginning, but I just can't do it anymore. I need sleep, not to mention she is SUPER mobile and could fall out of the bed at any time. It's just not working for us anymore. Night time is not the only issue. She follows me around crying, literally pulling at my pant legs. She freaks if I put her down and she isn't ready. If I'm in the room, I am the only thing that will console her. Some days are better than others and she does like to play and toddle around. It seems more often than not lately, she is Clingy-McClingerson.

I have to constantly remind myself that she is still a tiny human. She NEEDS me to be there for her and give her the attention and affection that she craves. There are times that I want to say, WTF child...what else can I possibly do for you. Then I remember that she has no control over her emotions. She does not have the mental capacity to understand what she is feeling. Piper was similar in this regard. She cried A LOT. She wanted to me hold her ALL the time. The only difference is that Piper slept like a champ (at least in her own bed). I knew with Piper that after I put her down, I was home free. Now, with Willow, I'm on my toes just waiting for her to wake up screaming; you know, right as I flick off the bedside lamp and lay my head down. I know this will pass and I probably won't remember this time in a few years just like I don't dwell on those moments with Piper (who is independent and social now), but currently it is super hard.

Sometimes I think a lot of these feelings come from the intense pressure we put on ourselves and on our kids. I think we expect a lot out of our little ones these days. What should we expect from our tiny humans? Why do we expect them to be so independent so soon. Here Willow, here's a cup of coffee and a copy of Leviathan, now leave me alone! Maybe if I cut them slack, I wouldn't be stressed and exhausted. Maybe if I didn't spend my days lamenting over the fact that I have to carry Willow around most of the day or scratch her back until she falls asleep, I could see more joy in my days spent with my kids. I mean, I'm 26 years old and I still ask Ian to scratch my back until I fall asleep. Willow has been on this earth for 347 days, why should she be any different?

This may seem like I'm complaining because I actually have to hold my child...that's not my intention. My children bring me intense joy...but as other stay-at-home-moms can attest, some days are really freaking hard. Some days are a breeze and fly by with laughter and ease! Other days are never-ending and no matter what we do our kids are just not happy. We can easily get caught up in the muck of staying at home. Lately I've been trying really hard to not focus on that muck, but enjoy every moment with my kids. Instead of being annoyed that Willow woke up...again...I focus on her chubby little cheeks pressed up against mine and her little-tiny hand falling limp on my arm, and trying to remember that she is growing and won't always need me like she does now. Someday she won't even let me rock her to sleep, like Piper. Sometimes Piper puts herself to bed and basically pushes me out of her room. I ask her to snuggle with me and she rolls over, says goodnight and reminds me to leave the door cracked.

VOTE!

Perhaps you thought this was a political related post about, I don't know, voting for the next president of the United States...nope. It's way cooler than that. JK, voting in the 2012 election is pretty dang important.

Voting is open!! Please vote for our room to win the Epic room Makeover!

Click on the button link below and vote for #41 the Adobe Living Room!

THANKS!!

A little visit

Ian and I tend to be a little spontaneous. Some would call us anti-planners. Potato - patato.  One of my closest friends from college is getting married in October and her bachelorette party was over Labor Day weekend in Las Vegas. I was planning on going, until everything in the universe happened to make it impossible. I was super bummed, as this was going to be my first time away from my kids. The first time in 2 1/2 years I was going to have a weekend alone. It was the light at the end of the tunnel for me. Well, as us moms do well, I quickly accepted the circumstances and only pouted about not being able to go for about 48 hours. Since it was a long weekend (4 days!) Ian and I did not want to sit around doing nothing. So, we decided to take a quick drive to Fort Collins to visit the sis and the rest of the Knecht's.

As is the usual, the weekend was a blur. With 8 kids and 2 dogs, the days fly by pretty fast and everything we touch turns into a disaster. We like to call our brood the "tazmanian devil." Restaurants are never the same after we leave. We gave up trying to make it look like we didn't completely destroy the table/floor a long time ago. If my memory serves me correctly, Jetta and Piper were tightwalking a bar-height table at one point while at Chipotle. Some would call that parental neglect...when in the presence of burritos, anything goes. We were also able to celebrate Hannah's birthday! Woohoo for sushi. I don't get sushi very often. I just don't trust sushi in the middle of the desert.

My camera didn't leave the car, but Hannah snapped a couple of great moments with all the kids. She is a talented photog and you should check out her blog and website! Not only that, but her email used to be "hlhfly@hotmail.com," take that as you will...

Here is a sneak peak of Willow's 1 Year pics! Her birthday isn't until October 2nd...the rest will come out then!

2 Cups of Sugar??!!

I love to eat. And I love to eat really good, cheesy, bready, rich foods. I freaking love pizza -- it's my favorite. I know you only say that when you are filling out a survey about yourself on the first day of 4th grade, but it's still true for me. I also really like to eat well and feed my kids well. And by well, I mean loading our meals with lean proteins, veggies, fruit, and lots and lots of greens. Don't get me wrong, because if you know me and stopped reading here, you would call me a liar. I also eat way too much crap. Do I eat McDonalds? YES! I also really love fries. Do I eat the occasional frozen corn dog? YES! Do I have a slight addiction to Diet Coke? YES! I'm trying here people. The point to all of this is that I haven't always cared about what I ate or when I ate it. I have learned better habits along the years from various sources and also from having kids. I think having Piper and having to learn to feed her the right things made me try harder than ever. I like to call our family additionalists when it comes to food (as opposed to exclusionists, of course!). As in everything I try to do in life, I like to have a balance in my food choices. So I add good things as much as possible without taking everything out that I enjoy, but know is bad for me. Sounds like a horrible excuse when I put it that way, but oh well, we aren't all perfect.

I'm sure I'm not alone as a mother of toddlers when I sneak vegetables in anything and everything possible. Ian thought it was cool at first, until I made an "ice cream treat" the other night for dessert. Did I put kale in a chocolate-raspberry shake? Why yes, yes I did. I mean, if the kids are going to have sugary ice cream I must put something in there to make me feel better about it. It's crazy that I used to think a salad was a plate filled with iceberg lettuce, drenched in ranch (ok, I still do this) and topped with a bag of croutons. I attribute a lot of my food choices to things I learned while working at a holistic dental office in Las Vegas. I learned the uber importance of eating leafy greens every day, eating protein for breakfast (not sugary cereal or nothing at all!), and what fruits and veggies are important to buy organic. I started paying attention to my sugar intake, something I never cared about before! And I especially watched my artificial sugar intake (something I still need to work on tremendously...see above Diet Coke comment). Now when I make anything, like pancakes or cookies, I search the web for healthier ways to make them. And by the way, what did anyone do before the internet? We are so flippin' spoiled.

So, tonight when I was getting ready to make some no-bake cookies for a little play group tomorrow, I thought, "Do I really need 2 cups of sugar in these bad boys?" That is a lot of sugar. I searched around for a bit and found this nice little website {http://www.eatingbirdfood.com/healthy-no-bake-cookies/} that gave me a solution to this sweet predicament. It's a great blog with tons of recipes, one of which I used tonight! I will for sure be following this blog from now on. I tweaked the recipe a little myself..

"Healthier" No-Bake Cookies

3/4 C sugar
1/4 C cocoa power
1/2 almond milk
1/2 C peanut butter
1 mashed, ripe banana (mine was frozen)
1 tsp vanilla
3 C oats
Some chopped up almonds

picture a nice ripe, frozen banana in there. 

 mix everything except the vanilla and oats in a saucepan and bring to a boil, add in vanilla and oats and almonds and VIOLA! spoon mixture into little balls, let them sit, and then eat them. A lot of them.

Please ignore my cookie sheet from 1981. When something isn't broken, don't fix  it!

You want to know my absolute favorite part about all of this? They are so easy and hardly any mess! I'm talking 10 minutes and one pan. I don't know about everyone else, but I am such a messy cook. Even if I am using my mixer to make cookies, I end up with a sink full if dishes, egg yolk on my glasses, and flour on the ceiling. It's a gift, don't ask how I make it happen. This is all I had to do after I made these cookies, and yet, there they sit --still-- They will most likely remain there until the morning, or afternoon...or dinner time...

PICK ME!

Here is my plea to Vintage Revivals for the Epic Room Makeover Giveaway Contest 2012:

My husband and I bought our first home in March. We both had different ideas of what our dream home would be and where it would be! When his job took us to Alamogordo, New Mexico, my dreams of a quaint, colonial style home with original hard wood flooring, a white picket fence, and a huge backyard covered with lush green grass flew out the window. Instead we decided to embrace New Mexico fully and go with a traditional adobe style home. This house has tons of potential, but needs help! We started working on the kitchen, and still have miles of work ahead of us. The room that I feel could be amazing (with the right help, of course!) is our family room. This room is big! It is 16 x 20 with 11 foot ceilings! Some serious awesomeness could arise from this room.

Since I grew up in the Midwest and have a pretty traditional style, decorating this home is causing me headaches! I don't want to totally go southwest, because is it way out of my comfort zone. I also know that the furniture/decor we have now isn't going to cut it. This space also needs to be mutli-functional. As you'll see in the pics, we currently use it as a family room and also an "office," or basically where my nerdy husband plays computer games and watches hours of YouTube videos about physics and space stuff...

I love DIY projects and decorating, but the kitchen zapped away way too much money and I am at a loss for this room! The corner fireplace is such a focal point, and our sectional couch is not working! Plus the brown on brown is just ugly. Can you believe these purple shades! They are super high quality, but why MAUVE?!!! As you can see, we had some issues picking a paint color. My husband wants a den-like feel, I believe he used the word, "dramatic." Yes folks, he does have considerate input on design decisions. Although, I usually prevail! MUWHAHAHA. Clearly, none of these colors are working out...

From the entry way looking in. 

The ceiling has a chevron pattern, how fortunate this pattern is ALL the rage these days!!

The fan, not so trendy... (not forget the gold plated lighting in the background!)

The windows in this room speak for themselves, the furniture...not so much.

Looking in from kitchen (Baby Willow is willing to work for snacks)

Another entry way view (again...amazingly HUGE window) Willow REALLY wants to help! 

The "office"/ dorm room furniture! At least i secretly sold the heinous swivel office chair the other day. 

Again, dorm room TV stand, it was free...like 4 years ago. Not only fugly, but huge safety hazard with littles running around. Also, Nigel the antelope will be staying somewhere in the room!

view looking out into entry/stairwell/kitchen.what were we thinking with all this BLUE?! yikes. 

bare-bones room, before we moved in.

I can see this room being fabulous and super functional. I just need your help, Mandi! Wouldn't this room be super fun?! Plus my husband is super handy, I can paint until the cows come home, and my children, well they love snacks and Dora. I have a super cozy guest room and I make killer eggs and pancakes! When will you ever have the chance of going to Alamogordo, New Mexico ever again. Am I right?! I prefer thrift store finds over new cookie-cutter furniture at all times and we have plenty of thrift store around here...though we may be missing a Starbucks. Plus you'll get to see this view every night from our balcony...

DIY Deux

SO, I've been wanting to try stenciling for a while now. I had a vision in our downstairs bathroom. I thought what a perfect place to start -- a small space, just one wall. I looked around at stencils and other blogs for inspiration. We are on a tight budget and I wasn't feeling forking out the $30-50 and up for a stencil. I eventually stumbled upon Jones Design Company, which had a tutorial and a free template! Hello FREE! I had the paint, brushes, ect...I just needed to find the time. Luckily (and also sadly) my children came down with a very strange virus that made them extremely sleepy. Like Willow took 3-4 hour naps with 30 minutes awake in between and Piper barely got off the couch, and when she did she rolled around on the floor until she fell asleep...on the floor. Of course I felt horrible for them and their misery, BUT i took full advantage of my forced hermitude (word? now it is.).

Now, as you may know, my ability to finish things with perfection is something i am working on. Kind of. I secretly enjoy my ability to not give a crap if a shelf is totally not level. Anyways, when it comes to stenciling, you kind of need to be exact. At least try, right? Well, I started off confident, sans level. Then about 3/4 of the way down the wall I had the BRIGHT idea of stepping back and checking out my handiwork. Well, handiwork it was NOT. I apparently have no baring when it comes to straight lines. It was bad. When I showed Ian he tried to supportive by saying, "Oh, you know, it's not that bad. It looks kind of rustic, like the walls have settled, but the pattern stayed the same." Thanks love muffin, I appreciate the boost. I promptly found the level and a large eraser.

This way of stenciling requires a steady and patient hand. Which I have for a short period of time. Needless to say, there are places where I messed up pretty bad. I need to get a smaller brush to pretty-up the lines, but as you may know, that may or may not happen some time in 2013. Please enjoy my "OOPS" spots...according to Ian, it makes it rustic.

before

What Piper did...isn't she sweet?

hell's kitchen

So remember in that last post when I said most of my projects are 82% done, well the proof is in the pudding. Some of my walls are half painted. We still have paint color splotch tests up in the living room. I mean, it's really hard to find that perfect color, come on, don't judge. But the real doosie is the kitchen. I can barely say that word without shuddering. It is such a point of joy, but it is also a major stressor.  Even before we put an offer on the house, we were discussing what we would do with kitchen. It had this majorly awkward island and the counter-tops, cabinet doors, and cabinet color had to go. Let's not even go to the appliances -- i'm almost positive my grandpa had the exact same refrigerator in his house. It was circa 1990. Can you believe we didn't even notice there wasn't a dishwasher before we bought the house?!! I probably wasted at least 2 days of my life washing flipping dishes before we had one installed. I can't get those 2 days back. I could have painted so many walls with that time.

We lived in the house about a month with the original kitchen. We tried to be patient and get bids on a partial remodel, but we didn't like what we heard. Kitchens are expense-y! One day we are sitting in the kitchen talking about how much we hated it and Ian walks into the garage, grabs a hammer, and starts demo-ing the island. There was drywall flying everywhere! I said, "So, I guess we are doing this ourselves?" Well, there was no turning back once the island was hammered to oblivion, we had to move forward. The fun part about construction is all the safety hazards. Uh, just kidding. I had the stove plugged in across the kitchen, let's play limbo kids! We had to reconnect the gas hook-up every time I wanted to cook something. We had cardboard counter tops for a minute there -- Piper don't spill that, uh, never mind. When you take on a kitchen for your first DIY project, you learn things the hard way. You learn that you need to makes lists for the things you need, instead of going to Lowes every-single-day. I know almost every employee by name at this point. You learn you need to plan ahead! We could have avoided the whole cardboard counter tops if we would have ordered our counter tops earlier (that was more of a design issue than planning, and worked out to our benefit because we got them on major sale.)

I think the most important lesson we learned is to budget. I'm going to be completely honest here, we suck at budgeting. I mean, we are epic failures when it comes to this. We talk about it, and do well for a week or so, and then just end up in the same boat -- over and over again. We wanted the kitchen done so bad that we neglected to do it smart and with a sound budget. We put too much in and are now dealing with the consequences. I'm not a pro, but I think this is one of the most typical blunders of first-time home owners. I love the progress, but that is all it is. It's not finished, and it won't be until this portion is paid off. The funny thing is when I was discussing the kitchen changes with a friend, I joked and said, "Oh, I'm sure the cabinets will be done by December." Little did I know that would be more reality than a joke.  Do I think we will have a hard time paying it off -- no. Do I think it was the right decision -- yes and no. I am a firm believer that one needs to be comfortable in their own home. We spend a lot of time at our house and the majority is spent in our kitchen. Moving to a new town and purchasing our first home were big changes for us. We needed to feel good being at home. I mean, there is not a lot to do in this town. I can tell you the attractions on one hand; the "zoo", Chili's, walmart...and I'm out of ideas. At least we know when we walk in our door, we will have a place to relax and put our feet up...someday...and not on my quartz counter tops!

Here are some before/after pics (keep in mind this is progress...NOT finished). We still need to refinish cabinets and new cabinet faces (we are thinking distressed off-white/cream), re-install cabinet faces, add back-splash, add design elements to island base, new window treatments, new lighting, new seating, and the list goes on and on....Any and all advice, design ideas and constructive criticism welcome!

Before

Current

Storage or a dishwasher, that is the question! And I lost my treasured bread-box...I've ALWAYS wanted a bread-box!!!

we took out a shelf and one drawer to add a wall oven.

stages of the island

we went ahead and replaced the vanity tops in all of the bathrooms while we we did the kitchen.

Sorry for my crappy iphone pics. it was my only option!