Category: Bebe - Oak Tree Junction

One Onesie

11/15/2018

For months I’ve looked for the perfect pumpkin onesie for Andrew’s first birthday. I know I am picky and not normally cheap when it comes to the perfect outfit. I just couldn’t find one and could get it by the time I needed it.

So I did what I also do, I make it. I pulled out one of his white onesie and my trust iron transfer paper and got to work. After searching online for a while I found a “one” that I liked and put it into a word document. I ended up printing it in three different sizes since I wasn’t sure what one would work best on the onesie. I also planned on using the other two for another project. Next, I cut out the image, cutting off as much of the blank area I could before ironing onto the onesie.

The onesie came out cuter than I hoped and was the perfect thing for him to wear as he dug into his smash cake!

Surviving Bringing Home a NICU Baby

12/3/2017

He's finally home!! And better yet we survived the first week with him at home! I'm not even going to lie and say it went smoothly, it was rough. No one prepared us for how much harder it is bringing home a NICU baby. What do I mean? They are used to the NICU, the environment, the sounds, the schedules. Sounds great and all, but when you remove them away from the environment, the sounds, and the schedules its not only hard on them but exhausting for you.

Environment - Our house was a good 6 degrees cooler than the NICU. Poor Andrew's hands and feet kept turning blue cause they were so cold. We turned up the heater, put socks, mittens and a hat on him. Even swaddled him to help keep him warm. Finally after a few days he body temperature acclimated and he is no longer blue.

Sounds - The NICU is like any other hospital room/Intensive Care Unit. There are beeps and alarms going off everywhere. There are nurses, doctors, and family talking. In all honesty, I think I would go crazy working there because there is never silence. Going from that to a quiet nursery was really hard for Andy even though I was sleeping in there with him. I ended up playing either a podcast or turning on Netflix just so he had some noise and I could drown out all of the thoughts running through my head.

Schedule - This has been the hardest one for us and we are still working on it. The first night I don't think I got more than two hours of sleep total. He cried all night. Between all of the changes he was going through and Jack and I being new parents and just simply not knowing what to do made it even worse. The nurses kept him on a 3-4 hours schedule where they would change and feed him. We tried keeping that schedule as best as we could, but there is one big difference. They got to go home after their shift to sleep...we were getting no sleep. And yes I know that saying sleep when the baby sleeps...but what if your baby isn't sleeping more than 20 minutes at a time? Also, the nurses would do a lot of their test and other things with the babies during the night so they could spend time with the parents during the day. Again great while in the NICU, a nightmare when they are home. It took us a few days but we finally got him to sleep between 1.5 hours to 2 hours at a time during the night. Hopefully, this will continue to increase the older and more comfortable he gets.

After this week, I feel like mom's who had a C-section was discharged right away with their babies and doing it all alone need a medal. I got a few extra days in the hospital to heal, a few days home without my baby so I could sleep, and I have an amazing husband that is there when I need help. I just don't know how those women do it!

We are so Blessed!

11/23/2017

Jack and I are so thankful this Thanksgiving day to announce our little boy was born this past Saturday. Welcome to the world, Andrew Grant!

*If you notice in the pictures Andrew is hooked up to a couple of machines. I will post about labor and delivery and his stay in the NICU in a future post.

Three Unexpected Pregnancy Side Effects

11/14/2017

I have been very blessed with this pregnancy. I am currently 39 weeks and a week away from my due date. I never got morning sickness or the aversions to certain smells. My feet didn't start to swell until the beginning of last month and was even able to wear heels at my baby shower. Having to run to the bathroom several times an hour didn't even start to happen until last week. I've had relevantly high energy the whole time; however, there are three things I was not expecting, warned about, or even knew would happen. Since I never knew, I'm sharing it with you so you know what's happening if it does happen to you. Every woman experience side effects differently in pregnancy and pregnancy is different every time, but these are the three things that were the hardest on me.

1. PUPPP: Never heard of it? Neither did I. PUPPP stands for Pruritic Urticarial Papules and Plaques of Pregnancy. I'm not going to go over all of the details of what is it, you can read more about it here, but what I will tell you it is by far the most irritating side effect of pregnancy and having to pee every five minutes is a walk in the park in comparison. I started experiencing this a few days ago and it leaves me in tears. I start itching uncontrollably on my chest and under my arms. The scary thing is there is only redness from my scratching and no bumps or rash. It's basically invisible hell. I look like a mental case trying to scratch off my skin in these areas. I have tried several itch relief creams and they only help for a few minutes. The best relief I have found as of right now is a warm bath and eucalyptus body wash.

2. Numbness: The most debilitating has been hand numbness. Since a few days before my baby shower, my hands have started to become numb. I can't do anything without my hands tingling in pain after a few minutes. From what I have gathered it is because baby boy is on my spine and messing with my nerves. Since we know he is going to take after his father and be a big baby, I think that it was causing the severity of it. I can't even hold a fork and forget about writing or typing. Talk about frustrating!! There were times at dinner when I would stop eating and begin crying, poor Jack didn’t know what to do to help. Sleeping at first was a nightmare. I would wake up in unbearable pain and couldn’t get it to stop enough to fall back to sleep. Finally, I bought wrist braces and started sleeping on my back with a pillow on each side to keep me slightly tilted. It helped, but I still wake up in pain from the numbness.

3. Intimacy: Or the lack of. The most frustrating side effect has been the lack of intimacy with Jack. During the first trimester, he was too scared he would cause me to have another panic attack like what happened during our miscarriage earlier this year. Thankfully in the second trimester, it was a lot better and we were able to enjoy some quality time. Then the third trimester when the baby boy really started moving and any time together stopped. He couldn’t get over how weird it was once he could see the baby moving. I guess I don't blame him, but I'm carrying all the baby weight in the front and can't even tell I am when my back was turned towards you. Needless to say, I have spent the last few months very frustrated.

These may come to no surprise for you, but they did for me. They have made my last trimester very challenging and I am really starting to count down the days until this little one is out!

My Beautiful Americana Baby Shower Cake

10/11/2017

This cake is the perfect representation of what I wanted for my baby shower to be. It is beautiful, classy, elegant, and Americana. With the beautiful fresh strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries topping it, to it’s rich and delicious cream cheese frosting, even the simple French vanilla cake was absolutely perfect and everything I could have hoped for.

I did struggle a little the day of the baby shower with finishing the cake and the matching elegant cupcakes because my hands have started to go numb on Apparently baby boy is on a nerve in my spine and has been causing the numbness. This made it difficult to pip the cream cheese frosting and I had to take breaks to give my hurting hands a rest. Thankfully I was able to push through and was able to complete everything in time. I couldn’t be happier with how the cake and cupcakes turned out and how fabulous they looked displayed in the art gallery where the shower was held. I dare to say it all looked just like a work of art!

Elegant Baby Shower

10/9/2017

I know what about I am about to say may be sacrilege, but I don't like baby themed things. I knew as soon as I found out I was pregnant that my baby shower wasn't going to have a cuties baby theme. Sorry, no vintage Pooh Bear, Noah's Ark, Jungle, not even baby pink or blue. This sadly crushed some of my family members, but I promised them that it would be beautiful, classy, elegant, and most importantly will have alcohol. After all just because I can't drink doesn't mean my guest shouldn't.

Once our budget was in place I started looking for a location. I knew a house was going to be too small since there was a lot of people invited and I didn't want to blow the whole budget on just on the location. Randomly one day on Facebook an ad popped up for a local downtown gallery talking about their $500 package and the ad included several pictures of baby showers they had there. Immediately booked an appointment to view and put the deposit down as soon as I saw the place in person. It was perfect. Beautiful hardwood floors, concrete walls, this awesome downtown industrial feel, and it even had a separate bar area for the food! I send a few pictures of the location to my friends and they even said it was totally me: vintage, classy and elegant. Just the vibe I wanted for my baby shower.

After the location was booked, we found a great local restaurant that could cater an event on a Sunday; something that actually turned out harder than we were expecting! For the drinks, we purchased apple cider, small bottles of water, and Carlo Rossi's Moscato Sangria that we added frozen raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries to help keep it cool. And not surprisingly, I did the cake with matching cupcakes.

Although I didn't want a cuties baby theme, there was still a theme, sort of. Since we were having a little boy I wanted to have an Americana theme to match what we were doing in his nursery. The colors of the decorations, table settings, candy bar and even the cake were red, white, blue, with touches of gold and silver. Most of the decorations were provided by the gallery and we only had to bring in a few for the gift tables. All of the tablecloths I either already owned or brought on eBay, including the awesome blue and white striped table runners. It turns out it was actually cheaper to buy them than rent them! I did end up renting some candle holder that we used to put vanilla scented candles and larger holder to put the flower centerpieces in. The flowers were ordered at the local flower market and my aunt made the arrangements. To fit with the color scheme, we ordered white roses, red hypericum berry flowers, and eryngium thistle. We decided not to rent table settings and just bought nice quality plastic plates, silverware, and cups from Costco.

Yes, there were a few baby shower games, but I was very careful about the ones I picked. Sorry no, guess the candy bar for me thank you. Since I am such a detailed person, everything from the labels on the homemade shower gifts, to the game cards, to the food labels all matched the invitations. We tried to keep the prizes simple and just did four fun themed gifts baskets: movie, spa, baking, and fall. I even had background music for the shower. I found lullaby versions of some of the songs from mine and Jack's favorite bands so people had no idea they were listening to Green Day, Five Finger Death Punch, Metallica or Queen! My favorite thing from the baby shower was the guest book. I bought Dr. Seuss's Happy Birthday to You and had the guest write something special to our Baby Boy. I plan on readying it to him every year on his birthday along with all of the wonderful things people wrote to him.

The shower was incredible and was so perfect. It was everything I have ever wanted for my baby shower. Everyone seemed to have a fun time, was really impressed with the classy and elegant feel of it, just what I was hoping for!

My Awesome Baby Shower Favors

9/25/2017

I have had my baby shower favors planned out for years. I’m not kidding. Years ago I took a soap and lotion making class with my aunt and ever since I thought how fun it would be to make them as favors.

I made small bars of soap that were supposed to be red, white and blue to go along with the Americana theme of the shower, but the red turned out a little pinker. Oh well, the goat milk soap smells amazing and feels great on the skin! I also made little tubes of lotion but didn’t risk coloring them for fear they would color skin too. My wonderful aunt made the blue bath bombs and I was so happy that her first batch crumbled because I was able to take the broken ones and use them in my baths. Lastly, my sweet friend Angie made the amazing sugar scrub; it’s too rough to be used on ¬¬the face, but makes your hands and feet feel as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

4I made matching labels for all of the containers and even matched the thank you tags. These not only will match the game cards and food table labels at the shower but also save the date cards and the shower invitations. I know I am really OCD, but it was so pretty!

We used clear 4X4 boxes to put everything in and added some red basket filler and tied it all together with a blue bow. That’s one big to do off of my list to still get done before the baby shower which is only a few weeks away!!

Picture of display at the baby shower

We're Having A. . .

6/19/2017

It's a Boy! Our little bundle of joy is a boy! Last month we announced we're pregnant and yesterday on Father's Day we posted that Jack is going to be an amazing father to our son.

The day before Father's Day we hosted a Gender Reveal party for close family and friends (will post about soon) and they were the first to learn the wonderful news through a special box of treats. Everyone is excited we are having a little boy and the baby shower plans are already in the works!

We are so excited and can't wait for him to be here.

Exciting News.!!!

5/15/2017

Jack and I are so excited to announce that we're PREGNANT! This is the answer to many many prayers, we've been struggling with getting pregnant for the last several years and even started seeing specialists. We even went through a very devastating miscarriage at the beginning of the year. We are looking forward to our Rainbow Baby arrival in November!

We had some fun telling a few friends and family members over the last few weeks. We shared the news with my mom with Starbucks with Grandma on her cup, it took her over an hour to figure it out and thought I was lying when I finally told her. My aunt learned when we were on our way out of town and my mom was saying a prayer for her, me and the baby to be safe. Amber learned by getting a bottle of wine that said: "Only the Best Super gets Promoted to Auntie". We decided to make the public announcement yesterday on Facebook on Mother's Day. I posted "Jack and I wanted to wish everyone out there a Happy Mother's Day; especially to my wonderful mother, who's being promoted to Grandma!" I included a collage of photos Amber took of us announcing it.

If all goes according to plan we might just be announcing the gender reveal on Father's Day....so keep an eye out!