Owen's Quilt
As you can see, this post has been a long time coming. I started on a quilt for Owen in July (when he was about 3 months old). I finished it in November (when he was about 7 months old). I wanted to share some pictures of my progress and the final product, and also share the tutorials I used to make it. It definitely took longer than it would have a couple years ago, since it is hard to get any solid project time with a cute baby to play with (and feed… and generally take care of…), but I got it done!
I used this tutorial in 2016 to make a quilt for my nephew when he was born.
I loved how it turned out, so I made a pretty similar one for Owen, with a few minor changes. First, I made the squares 1/2” larger. This was honestly just due to laziness. The tutorial calls for 5 1/2” squares, but I have a 6”x24” ruler, so cutting 6” squares was much quicker for me. It meant I used slightly more batting and minky fabric, but as I had plenty of both, it wasn’t an issue.
Materials:
- Quilt
- Rotary cutter, ruler and mat
- 1/2 yard of 6 coordinating fabrics
- 1 1/4 yards coordinating Minky fabric
- Cotton batting - Baby Quilt size (34″ x 45″)
- Temporary adhesive/repositionable spray basting (such as Spray N’ Bond)
- Appliqué
- 1/4 yard fabric
- Heat n’ Bond
I assembled my quilt per the instructions in the tutorial linked above.
The other change I made was to use my Cricut to cut out letters to appliqué. I am so happy with how it turned out! I had never cut fabric with my Cricut before, and I used this tutorial as a guide.
The font I used was ‘Hiragino Kaku Gothic Std’. I made the letters right at 3” tall, which made them the perfect size to fit on the squares.
After I used the Heat n’ Bond to adhere the letters where I wanted them, I used an appliqué stitch to stitch them in place.
Once my letters were in place, I finished my quilt using the instructions in the tutorial.
I love how it turned out! The fabric on the backside is so soft, but the quilt itself is a little stiff still. Owen and I snuggle with it at night when we’re getting ready for bed; and the more we use it, the more pliable it gets. I hope it lasts him a very long time!
Owen's Arrival
Owen was born on Friday, April 7! He sure took his time though – he was 8 days late!
At my appointment on Tuesday, April 4, we made a plan to induce on the following Monday if he hadn’t made his arrival. I really didn’t want to induce, but at 41 weeks pregnant, I was getting really ready for him to make his appearance. On Thursday, I had Braxton Hicks contractions all day about 5 minutes apart. I was convinced we’d be waiting until Monday, because even though they were regular, they were painless. About midnight that night, I called Labor & Delivery to make sure, since my doctor had told me to come in when the contractions were 5 minutes apart for more than an hour. They told me to hold off until they were 2-3 minutes apart for more than a hour. So we went to bed.
I woke up about 2am actually feeling contractions. They still didn’t really hurt, just some discomfort, but I was definitely feeling more than I had been during the day. I also noticed they were about 2.5 minutes apart. I called Labor & Delivery and they said we should head in. So I woke Lee up about 2:45am, and we gathered our stuff and got in the car about 3am. Looking back, it was probably pretty entertaining. It was the middle of the night and we were completely silent the whole ride. We were both privately thinking that they were going to send us home, since I was still walking and talking through the contractions, etc.
It wasn’t until the L&D nurse got down to the ER to bring us up that I had what I’d consider my first strong contraction. I stood up to follow her and it hit me. Things flew at lightning speed for a while there. We got to the hospital about 3:10, we were in our room and hooked up to monitors by 3:30, and I had an epidural by about 4:10. Because it was the middle of the night, and I was experiencing some pretty severe nausea, they went ahead and gave me a painkiller and anti-nausea medicine through the IV thinking it may be a little while before the anesthesiologist arrived. It was not. The IV meds had just started to kick in when he arrived, so I did not feel the epidural being placed at all. In fact, Lee had to hold me up and on the bed because I couldn’t hold myself still. Or upright. It was magical! That is definitely the way to do that!
Anyway, I don’t remember most of that morning because I slept a lot (as I said, magical), but I do know they had to reposition me a lot because Owen was having heart decelerations depending on how they positioned me.
Skipping past all the super fun stuff…
I had a fever while laboring, so the first thing they did when Owen was born was take his temperature. Because he also had a fever, they took him pretty much immediately to the nursery so they could start antibiotics. We had to stay at the hospital for 48 hrs for a full course of antibiotics for both of us, but his fever was gone within a couple hours and he was otherwise very heathy.
Most of our family filtered through over the next couple days, but everyone but my mom left when we were released from the hospital. I was glad to have her help for a couple days, but then Lee and I had most of the 2 weeks he was off work to ourselves to figure out our new lives as a family of 3.
It was only 3 months ago but he’s grown so much since then that – looking back now – it seems like a blur of snuggles and sleepiness.
Updates
A couple times a week, I think “oh, I should write a blog post”, but then life happens and I never sit down to do it. So here’s another catch up post, and hopefully I’ll stick with it this time.
We had a baby :)
The last time I posted, I announced we would be having a baby boy. Now he is 3 months old! The rest of my pregnancy went pretty smoothly. I worked until a few days before my due date thinking he’d be born any day. In my defense, that’s what my doctor told me! But I was quite uncomfortable and very distracted, so it was really nice to have some time to relax and rest and take care of a few things before Owen arrived.
I’ll do another post about his arrival, but he was born on April 7 at 12:48pm! He is such a fun kid and we are really enjoying being parents. I am down to 2 weeks of maternity leave left and that is crazy to me. 16 weeks sounded like a crazy long amount of time, but it has flown by! I can’t believe we have a 3 month old!
Let’s see… what else has changed for us. I finally got a car in the fall, so we are now a two car family for the first time since before we moved to London. We owned one of the Volkswagens affected by the diesel scandal, so we sold that car back to VW at the beginning of April, and replaced it with a car for Lee. We did really well for 5 years (well nearly 4 in the US full-time) with only one car we could drive, but it is really nice to have the flexibility that comes with 2 cars.
Our cats have adjusted to Owen well. They are super needy when anyone comes over because they aren’t getting as many snuggles from us, but they pretty much ignore him, which is how we’d prefer it at this point. We were a little worried because we babysat my nephew when he was a few months old and they cried when he cried (very sad but very entertaining). That hasn’t happened once since Owen has been home.
I’ve really enjoyed getting to be home with Owen for the last 14 weeks. It is different than I thought it would be, but I love being a mom and I love watching Lee be a dad.
I’m also excited to get into a regular routine. Owen started at daycare this week part-time so we can get used to it before I go back to work. I’m really glad we started this early, because he had a really hard time on Wednesday. I dropped him off this morning and I’m praying he has a much better day. We’ll do gradually longer days until I go back to work full-time, but I’m hoping having him comfortable there before I start working again allows me to go back to work and not spend all day super distracted worrying about him. That’s probably wishful thinking though :)
Thankfulness
It’s been a while. I have so much to say and have sat down so many times to write a post, but most of the time I just have no idea where to start. When I started this blog, I intended to somewhat promote my store, but I also figured it would be a good outlet for me. I’ve always enjoyed getting my thoughts out on “paper” and I enjoy having a way to share that with people. But the past year has brought a lot of change – some good, some really difficult. It felt disingenuous to only share the good, but I wasn’t ready to share the rest, so I just avoided it all together. I think I am ready now.
I am so thankful for so many things. I am thankful for my husband. I am so thankful for his love and support and friendship! I am thankful for this baby BOY I’m carrying. I’m thankful this pregnancy has been healthy and – aside from some pretty good morning sickness in the first trimester – fairly easy. I am so thankful for my family; they are pretty much the best! I’m thankful for our beautiful house and our church and my job. We have so much to be thankful for!
Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite times of the year. I love the weather and the fall colors and the food! This year, it’s a little bittersweet for us though; we never really shared about our Thanksgiving last year, and that’s because we didn’t really have one.
Last year on Saturday, November 21, I took a pregnancy test and it was positive! We were overjoyed! It was planned, but we weren’t expecting for it to happen so quickly! We were planning to go home for Thanksgiving that Wednesday, so we decided to go ahead and tell my sisters via FaceTime (because I couldn’t hold it in) and then we’d tell all of the rest of our families at Thanksgiving. We told a few of our closest friends, but otherwise kept it to ourselves until we could tell our families. Over the next few days we started daydreaming about our child, wandered around the baby sections of a few stores, and discussed how much our lives were going to change over the coming few years. And then on Tuesday night, I started having some pretty severe cramping. By Wednesday morning, I knew what was happening, but we ended up at the doctor to confirm. I miscarried on Thanksgiving Day last year at exactly 5 weeks.
We skipped Thanksgiving. We told our family over the next few days why we weren’t there, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to anyone else really. Very few people knew we were trying and it all happened so quickly, that it seemed like such a hard thing to bring up out of nowhere. We only knew we were expecting for 5 days, but we had built up such excitement and hope that the loss was a big blow to us.
In January, things in my professional life took an unexpected turn – I got laid off. Given everything else that had been going on, I took it harder than I might have otherwise. And, although it was a crappy situation, it did allow me some freedom to do some things I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, like spend a few weeks throughout the Spring in DFW – including the week my nephew was born. Even though I knew I was in a much better place professionally than I had been before (I had actual marketable skills and experience at a tech start-up to add to my resume), I was back to feeling directionless. That, combined with everything I felt about the miscarriage, made the months from November 2015 to April 2016 some of the hardest I can remember.
All that to say: this year has been different for us, and I had a really tough few months. The miscarriage was a hard thing to mourn; we barely had a chance to be excited before it was over. Losing your job is never easy. There had to be an upside though, right?
I started an awesome new job in May with Indeed. I love it! The job is not something I ever really saw myself doing, but I’m enjoying it and I’m constantly learning new things, which is great. I am finally at a place I can see myself staying for a long time. I am also thankful that I landed somewhere that is so family friendly. They have an awesome maternity leave policy, and for the first time ever, it actually makes sense for me to go back to work after our baby is born.
Speaking of our baby… we were finally at the point this summer where we started talking about being ready to try again. I want to say it was maybe 2-3 weeks after we started having those conversations that we found out I was pregnant. Once again, it happened so much faster than we planned but God’s timing is not ours obviously, and we are so excited!! July 28, 2016 was the due date for the pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. I expected it to be a difficult day for me, and it was a little. But it was also exciting. And terrifying. We had just found out we were pregnant again, and I was exactly 5 weeks along.
I will never understand why this year turned out the way it did, but despite all the saddness, I am so thankful for where we are now and I cannot wait to see what the next year brings!
Spring Vacation 2016 - Part 2
We had a great time on our cruise! We’ve been on a couple cruises together and I have been on a couple with my family, but they’ve all had pretty similar itineraries because we tend to leave from Galveston and Florida. I’ve been to Cozumel every single time - which is fine, because I enjoy Cozumel - but we wanted to do something a little different this time. We ended up picking a 5 night cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda, and it was wonderful! I added a few pictures here, but Lee posted them all on Flickr!
Our cruise was on the Anthem of the Seas, which is one of Royal Caribbean’s newer ships. It is a very technology heavy ship – a lot of which seemed kind of gimmicky – and I don’t think we’d choose this class of ship again, but it definitely still enabled us to have our completely unplugged relaxation time which was the goal!
We spent the first day at sea getting familiar with the ship, eating (of course), and just hanging out. Coming out of New Jersey, it was so very cold the first night and a good part the first day, that we didn’t spend a ton of time outside.
The second and third days were spent in Bermuda. We’ve never been on a cruise that had an overnight in a port before, but we really enjoyed it and would definitely do it again. We didn’t have to rush to get back to the boat the first day, so it was a much more relaxing time, and we felt like we got to see so much more than we would have with 2 short days at different stops.
The first day we took the ferry to the opposite side of the island - St. George - and spent our day there. We had lunch at Wahoo’s (a local seafood restaurant – no affiliation with the national chain in the US), which was delicious, and then we took a long walk to the Unfinished Church, and then to Fort St. Catherine, before finishing our day at Tobacco Bay Beach.
The next day we took a ferry to Hamilton, which is the capital of Bermuda. We spent a couple hours walking around (all the while noting how very “British” everything was) and then we took a taxi to Horseshoe Bay to spend our last few hours there on the beach. There is a reason Horseshoe Bay is the most popular/well known beach in Bermuda - it was beautiful! We were there right at the very beginning of the high season, so the weather was perfect, but there weren’t a whole ton of tourists yet (aside from all of the other cruise guests).
The boat headed out that evening and we had one more day at sea before arriving back in New Jersey. It rained for a good part of the day, but that gave us some time to do some of the fun amenities on board like iFly and bumper cars. We also spent some time vegging in the Solarium, reading, and seeing a really neat projection of an orchestra concert. The boat had a cafe on the back with a huge wall of windows that they turn into a screen. It was almost like being there live.
We were back in New Jersey when we woke up the next morning. We made our way to Newark, and then eventually back to Austin. It really was a great vacation: a perfect mix of relaxation and activity!
