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make the most of it: goals for 2017


notebook // pen // tablecloth

This year I really want to get shit done. I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish in 2016 and well, I didn’t accomplish any of them. I think I had a pretty good excuse though, as I was kind of distracted by being pregnant all year, and all my self-care and nesting energy went into that.

Get into some sort of shape. I KNOW I KNOW A TOTAL CLICHE. But this isn’t actually a new-years-lose-weight resolution, this is actually a post-pregnancy lose weight resolution. It was just unfortunately postponed by my c-section recovery, and then the discovery that at some point in the last few years of being pregnant, being sick with an autoimmune disease and being pregnant again, I threw out all my workout clothes. When decluttering goes wrong, y’all. So I had to get all new stuff and by the time it arrived it was full holiday season and I couldn’t find the time to get started, and now it’s resolution season at the gym which makes me disinclined to go because it’s gonna be so busy! I’ve figured out that the only time I can possibly go to the gym is Monday and Friday mornings at like… 6:30. I am in NO WAY a morning person so my ACTUAL fitness goal is training my body to get out of bed at 6 so I can get to the gym, work out, get home & shower in time to start work at 8. Then the other days I can work out at home I guess? My idea is to set an alarm for an earlier time each week and slowly ease myself into it, so this week I have it set for 6:45. Tuesday I managed to get up that early, but Wednesday I stayed in bed and dozed off until my regular alarm went off at seven and today to my hame I snoozed it until like… 8. IN MY DEFENSE Gwen woke me up at 3 on Wednesday morning and I woke myself up at 5 today so I was extra tired! Honestly I feel like this is my life rn…

I can’t not work and I’m not willing to give up time with my family so I’m going to have to sacrifice some sleep if I want to make this happen. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Finish the half-done home decor projects around the house. The kitchen backsplash is half-tiled. The bathroom is half-painted. My side of the office is where unwanted furniture goes to die and the hallway has no storage so there are always bins and boxes piled in it.

Start some new home decor projects. I want to repaint the living room, dining room, hallway and half-bath. I should probably repaint the entryway (it’s the first room I painted in like… 2007? and it’s looking rough). I’ve never painted my bedroom at all in TEN YEARS and it looks just godawful, and I really want to get a headboard for my bed. I have windows that need curtains and closets I’ve taken the doors off that also need curtains.

Replace busted and/or janky furniture and appliances. Did you know I’ve never ever bought a desk for myself? It’s true. Before Taylor I shared a computer with Sym’s dad and he picked out & bought the desk. After we separated I had no desk for a while, and then had a hand-me-down desk from Sym’s room. The desk I have now I found in the trash (really). So yeah. A decent desk would be nice. We also need a new couch (ours has become basically unsittable) and the dishwasher hasn’t worked properly in years. YEARS.

Keep on top of like… basic housework. Fun fact: having a baby DRASTICALLY increases the amount AND frequency of laundry and dishes you have to do, and also cuts into the time you have to do them. It can quickly build up and spiral out of control, leaving me with even less time to do anything else. I’ve committed to getting back into using my to-do lists. I got out of the habit of making them last year but HONESTLY it help me a lot. I need to have a physical list to remind me of what I’m doing, the satisfaction of crossing things off as I complete them, and no option for things like “sit in front of Netflix for three hours while scrolling through instagram” :X I have a new notebook and pen and I’m doing monthly lists of large or irregular project as well as daily lists of everyday things. I also find it useful to break my most hated chores up into teeny-tiny daily increments; for example I don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to clean the whole of both bathrooms in one day, but cleaning one type of fixture a day is totally doable.

Reorganize & declutter. The kitchen cabinets. The bathroom cabinets & shelves. Almost every closet in the house but ESPECIALLY my craft closet. Our storage room! The entryway! It’s basically all a mess and needs serious looking into.

I know none of this follows the typical blogger new year goal list of mindfulness and personal growth (maybe that is the real cliche…), but after the total wash of last year I need to make practical choices. Maybe if I accomplish all this next year I will have goals that are more abstract (but probably not).

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shark bait hoo ha ha

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I swear I bought a new ornament this year that isn’t a deer.

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A few years ago I bought a large wicker basket to use in lieu of a tree skirt. I really liked it; tree skirts are a pita imo; always getting mussed up by pets and kids and sucked into the vacuum cleaner. However, the basket somehow vanished from my storage room after just one Christmas so I had to go buy a new one this week because fuck a tree skirt, honestly. I needed something at least 21″ in diameter to accommodate the tree stand and all I could find was one that was one miserable inch too small, and this fricking enormous one, oops.

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Tried to get a nice picture of her with our Christmas wreath…

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All I care about right now is my skincare regimen. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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This is just beyond. I mean come on.

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Shark-shaped baby sleeping bag from AliExpress.

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the storm before the calm

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Right before Nicky falls asleep is when he tends to have his biggest fusses. You can’t do anything about it; he’s not wet, or hungry, or in need of cuddles. He’s a really good sleeper so he’s not even overtired. It doesn’t happen every time, but usually once a day he’ll cry and yell before passing out, hard, for a good long while.

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Now that we’ve all mostly gotten back into our regular sleep/work/life routine after the drama of last week, I can focus on the holiday season! I had planned to make a spreadsheet to plan & organize the kids’ gifts but I have somehow managed to accidentally buy most of them already? With the combination of all my recent stress and being stuck in the house due to illness I’ve been doing quite a bit of online shopping, and as it turns out have gotten quite a few things for the kids. WHO KNEW. We still have to pick up a couple of things but it’s all pretty much planned out, so now I only need to decide what to get Taylor.

Sym is at her dad’s for actual Christmas this year so we’re doing Mini-Christmas with her in mid-December. My and Taylor’s Christmas pajamas haven’t arrived yet but the kids’ have (see below for a sneak peek…), so we’ll open those, and build all our holiday Lego sets (including maybe a NEW set…). We usually watch Elf on Mini Christmas but we have tickets to the Enchant Christmas light maze so we might not have time. The Christmas Elf may also stop by to leave candy in our shoes if everyone’s room is clean.

I’ll probably start setting up the Christmas tree this weekend; I like to stagger the set up and decoration over a few weeks (just tree; tree+lights; tree+lights+ornaments) to try to get the kids used to it so they are less likely to pull everything off of it. This technique has worked with every child I’ve had in my house EXCEPT for Gwen, but hopefully this year she will be a little less destructive? She’s been a little sassy lately with climbing the furniture, taking things she shouldn’t and making huge messes. Last year we couldn’t put any presents under the tree because she kept unwrapping them all, and just two weeks ago she did the same with her birthday presents so I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes.

gnome-hat-gnicky

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back home

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BC Children’s Hospital discharged Nicky this morning and he’s home now! It’s such a relief to have him back here. It has been seriously so scary and stressful, like his first car ride was in an ambulance and my first night away from him he was in the hospital with a mystery illness? NOT COOL, DO NOT RECOMMEND. After all the tests and he was diagnosed with parechovirus yesterday, and because the virus was found in his CSF he actually has meningitis. Viral meningitis usually isn’t very serious but because of his age there is a greater risk of serious complications. We have instructions to go back to Children’s right away if he gets sick again but hopefully he just continues to improve. He hasn’t had a fever in over 24 hours now and Taylor said his behaviour has been much more normal (he’s mostly just been sleeping since he got home, which is also normal behaviour for him). We have a few follow-up appointments in the coming weeks, including a hearing test (for the meningitis, it can cause hearing loss as well as other neurological problems, so keep your fingers crossed for us) this Friday afternoon, but the rest of the time I’m keeping him snuggled up right next to me, where he belongs.

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how you can help

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If you follow me on social media you are prob caught up with what’s been going on in our lives, but if you missed it, Nicky is sick and is currently being treated for a high fever caused by a mystery illness at BC Children’s Hospital. The doctors think it’s a urinary tract infection but we don’t know for sure and we don’t know when he can come home. I’m really too exhausted (in every possible way) to type everything out again but you can catch up on my instagram. Also thank you so much to everyone who has reached out to us in the past couple days. While I can’t reply to every comment and message, I read them all and it really means so much to know you are all out there rooting for our family.

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I did want to make this post because a lot of people have asked if they can donate money or giftcards to help us out. While I am super appreciative of these offers it really isn’t necessary; the only help I actually needed was with transportation here in Vancouver, and my amazing friend Mark has offered to drive Gwen and I back and forth for visits every day while Taylor stays with Nicky in the hospital. We have universal healthcare that covers 100% of Nicky’s care, and I’m only missing two days of work; Gwen needs one of us here with her so after taking Monday and Tuesday off I’m going to start work again on Wednesday. It’s actually good for me to have things to do to stay busy, I start melting down when I’m not occupied by something; this afternoon I had my 6-week post c-section check up and I started crying in the obgyn’s waiting room because a Sarah McLachlan song was playing on the radio, and then John Legend came on and it was like GAME OVER, MAN.

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Anyway. If you would like to do something for me & my family, you can help us by helping others. Instead of donating to me, making a donation in honour of Nicky to a cause that helps children in need. Two suggestions I have are the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation, because they are taking such good care of my little guy, and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, an organization in Southern California that provides pro bono legal representation to unaccompanied immigrant children in removal proceedings. Thank you.

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sick days

Gwen is mostly on the mend from her HF&M disease, but I keep getting sicker and sicker. I can’t stop coughing and sneezing and groaning horribly, and in a super weird twist no matter how many mugs of cinnamon tea with apple and/or honey whisky I drink I continue to feel awful. I JUST DON’T GET IT. Today I had to make the huge bummer decision of cancelling the girls’ birthday party on Saturday afternoon; I just don’t feel up to playing hostess, even to our families, this weekend At All. Instead we’re going to have a birthday pancake breakfast for Sym on Saturday morning and a birthday dinner for Gwen on Tuesday evening.

Hopefully I will get over this miserable cold soon and be able to enjoy what’s left of autumn in the weeks to come. I missed most of it; the rough end of my pregnancy followed by the last four weeks of c-section recovery didn’t afford a lot of opportunities for long walks in the forest to admire the foliage. I’ve definitely been getting a little stir crazy and will take any excuse to just get outside, like on Monday when I went and bought a new broom and spent an hour sweeping and scooping and spraying all the dirt and leaves off the stairs, a chore I normally avoid like the plague. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best choice to make, health-wise, but the stairs look great!

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autumn

A few pictures from last weekend when we actually left the house…

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I’m so busy with work and parenting and homemaking these days that I barely have any time to make anything, but I did put together some new stickers this week! These “Too Sleepy to Live… Too Lazy to Die” Sleepy Skull stickers are available in the shop now.
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the grind

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We’ve been looking for a storage bench to put at the end of our bed for LITERALLY YEARS and the other week Taylor found this one on the Best Buy website of all places? Weird. Anyway it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted and when we ordered it it was on sale & therefore cheaper than all the not-quite-perfect ones I’ve seen so it’s a win.

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On the weekend I was feeling a little ~inspired and made these tiny grey suede boots for Nicky. I need to adjust the pattern a little to get a better fit but I just love them, and the little appliquéd evergreen trees on the soles are so cute.

This is my first week back at work and it has been… busy? complicated? hard? chaotic? Our original plan (Taylor works nights from home & looks after the baby while I sleep, I work days from home and look after the baby while Taylor sleeps, ugh this was such a good plan!) went out the window with my emergency c section. Why? Well, if you’re not familiar, one of the ~rules~ for looking after yourself after a c section is that you aren’t supposed to lift anything that weighs more than your newborn baby for 6-8 weeks after the delivery. You know what weighs more than my newborn baby? The daycare kids! As I mentioned previously I can do almost all of our regular activities, but I can’t pick them up, and sometimes they need picking up.

This means I need to have someone here to help me for almost the entire day. I can’t afford to hire a full-time assistant so the task falls to Taylor in the morning/early afternoon and Sym in the late afternoon. Since Taylor is awake for the first half of the day it’s not possible for him to work his regular midnight to 8am shift, so instead he’s working 4am to noon, which means I’m tasked with getting up with the kids if they wake up between midnight and 4. This makes waking up at 7 to get ready for work pretty difficult. Taylor’s sleeping hours are split completely in half: he sleeps from about 1 until 5pm, and then midnight until 4. As a result we are BOTH tired and irritable, which is kind of the opposite of what we’d hoped for, and yet another reason to hate my c section. We are still working out the scheduling kinks, so hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll get our routines down a bit better and stop being so crabby with one another. And hey, it’s only for three to five more weeks, how hard can it be? (DON’T ANSWER THAT, UNIVERSE.)

The upside of this fairly cruddy situation is the kids themselves, which I guess is the part that makes it all worthwhile. Nicky is a pretty chill & easy-going baby, Gwen has mostly been well-behaved and helpful, and Sym has ALSO been well-behaved and helpful (almost more amazing in a teen than a preschooler). They really are the bright spot in this frustrating time.

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the first day

Today is my first day looking after the little kids by myself. When we first came home from the hospital Taylor took the whole following week off, and halfway through that week his mom came down to stay with us to help out for a week. This week Taylor is back at work and his mom left yesterday afternoon. Of course, Taylor is working from home right now which means he is the one who is up with Nicky during the night and he’s around in the mornings to get Gwen up and walk the dogs and just generally be a help. But this afternoon it’s just been me and so far it’s alright. Both kids are fed and dressed and alive (as am I, sort of) and I even managed to do some cleaning.

It certainly helps that Gwen is basically the best kid in the world. She really loves her baby brother and all morning she was asking to hug him and for him to sit in her lap! It’s so cute. She has also been tucking her lovey Elke in with him, which is pretty amazing because Elke is very special to her and is not a toy she shares with others. There have been a few small meltdowns (namely because she wanted to wear her cat-themed hooded sweatpants jumpsuit, which was in the wash) but overall I can’t complain about her behavior.

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I hate it with my life

This post contains my raw and crabby feelings about my c section; you may have different feelings about your c section and this post is not intended in anyway to invalidate your feelings.

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Not exactly the meet-cute I’d hoped for. Photos by Taylor Laramie.

I hate my c section. I hate it with my life.

I know that due to his fetal tachycardia it was the best thing to ensure Nicky was delivered safe & sound, whole and healthy, but I hate it. I hated it from the minute the on-call obstetrician told me it might be necessary if his heart rate didn’t normalize. I was scared of having surgery and afraid the recovery would be a nightmare. I didn’t want to do it and I cried “no, no, no” during my contractions. When someone (a nurse? the doctor? who can remember) asked me what I was saying “no” about I cried “this whole situation! I don’t want to do this!”

I don’t feel guilty, or disappointed in my body, or like I have somehow failed by having a c section. I mean… there wasn’t anything that my body could have done. I think if we’d had a couple more hours I could have delivered vaginally. I was 5cm dilated and I have my “proven pelvis” (a phrase I will never not find funny) thing going for me so I truly think if Nicky wasn’t in distress I would have pushed him out just like I did both the girls, but we didn’t have a couple more hours. When I think back to that night in the hospital it seems like such a long evening but really it was only a few hours: I arrived at 8pm, spent an hour walking around, spent another hour being monitored, and then my water was broken, I laboured for a while, I was taken to the operating room and prepped for surgery. Nicky was born just after midnight, so there were really only two hours between “you might need a c section” and “it’s a boy!”

I just feel… angry? Angry and frustrated. Now that I’ve had a variety of birth experiences I think I can say this one is my least fave. And the recovery is the worst! I honestly wasn’t even going to write this post about my dumb feelings but last night after my shower I noticed one end of my incision was a little open (just like.. a couple millimeters) and inflamed-looking and when I was patting the area dry it… well not to put to fine a point on it, it oozed. It’s gross! I hate it! And now I gotta worry about what if it’s getting infected? Is the whole thing gonna open up like a zipper and all my guts spill out? Ugh! (ftr I don’t think this is going to happen, it already looks less swollen/red and has mostly stopped weeping today but STILL).

But I mean, even before this latest fun development the recovery has sucked, and it’s not even as bad as I thought it would be. It’s still bad enough though. The first couple of days in the hospital when I couldn’t even sit up on my own, like I needed to raise the back of the bed up and then pull myself up the rest of the way before I could even lift my baby out of his little cot. The gas pains in my shoulders, feeling like I was gonna burst open every time I coughed or laughed or went to the bathroom or tried to lie on my side, my abdomen hurting inside and out. I still can’t stand the feeling of anything around my waist, like even my maternity leggings are too binding and I kind of wish I’d had the baby in the summer instead (like, that he had been DUE in the summer, not that he was a super-preemie) so I could just wear flowy dresses and not fuck with pants at all. I can safely say I would 100% prefer to have all the worst pain of delivering a baby BEFORE the baby is born, rather than for weeks and weeks afterwards when I’m also trying to look after a baby. Like if this wasn’t our last baby, if I was to have another I would for sure try for a VBAC because this? This sucks. Zero stars, would not recommend to a friend.

Some people would say the only important thing is that I had my baby, and he’s fine. I know I’ve been guilty of saying it myself in the past and to anyone who I might have said that to, I APOLOGIZE. Because like DUH obviously I’m thrilled to have my baby here and healthy! I was able to come home and bring him with me after just two days in the hospital. That’s amazing, I’m so lucky! But that doesn’t mean I have to also be thrilled with being in pain every day, and with the memories of the fear I felt going into surgery, and this whole stupid thing. The baby is important, but I’m important too, and my feelings matter.

Another frustrating aspect to having a c section is it’s sent all my carefully-laid plans for my return to work into a tailspin. After you have a c section you cant lift anything heavier than your baby for six weeks, and you know what is heavier than my baby? All the daycare kids. I’m pretty confident that I will be able to do most things with them (playing toys and games, preparing their food, regular daycare activities like story and song time) but what I CAN’T do is lift them into and out of their high chairs at mealtimes, and into and out of their cribs at nap time. Thankfully Taylor is going to be able to help me out in the mornings and Sym in the afternoons, but like… it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be complicated. But I am just going to have to do it and get through it. Like the c section itself, I guess.