10 Things to Do Before Kids: How Many Did We Actually Do?

Six months before I got pregnant, I made a list of 10 things I wanted to do before we had kids. I referred to these as ideas instead of goals since these things didn't necessarily have to be done before we had our first child.

I thought it would be fun to take a look back at what I actually did before Evan was born.

Figure out being a family of two
I feel like our marriage did get stronger in those months before I got pregnant. Sure, pregnancy and having a baby can strain any relationship, but we're still very much enjoying being married.

Go on a relaxing vacation
This one is kind of funny. I meant to write a post about this one specifically but never did. Basically, we found out we're no good at relaxing. About four months into my pregnancy, we tried to spend less than 48 hours in Nashville, IN, staying in a cabin with no agenda, and we were bored! I guess we need to find a balance between planning too many activities and not planning any.

Start buying organic food and stop buying as much processed food
I wanted to at least buy the "dirty dozen" organically. I had a setback with this one when I bought organic potatoes and one was rotten inside. Why should I pay extra for poor quality? I'm still working on buying and making healthier foods, especially now that Evan is eating a wide variety of food and we found out Nathan has high cholesterol. I'll admit I gave Evan non-organic strawberries though. It's a process.

Get a second dog
This barely happened! I got pregnant three weeks after we adopted Adyn. At that time I was thinking it could still take awhile. Had I known I would get pregnant right away, there's no way I would have gotten a second dog. I guess it was just meant to be. Adyn's like my soulmate and archnemesis all in one. It's been an interesting ride.

Get in the habit of regular exercise
Eh...this has been off and on. I wanted to keep jogging during my pregnancy, but the crazy hot spring we had two years ago along with not feeling so great during the first trimester kind of killed my progress. I'm counting this one because I did walk the third of a mile to work until I was seven months pregnant.

Move somewhere with a washer/dryer and fenced-in yard

We sure did! And then right before Evan turned one, we moved again and no longer have a fenced-in yard. We can put the dogs out on a chain at least, and it's a much nicer area to walk the dogs (when it's not a blizzard). Having a washer and dryer was the biggest requirement!

Read and Research
I tried to limit this one so I didn't get overwhelmed. The one book I'd recommend is Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn by Penny Simkin.

Have a better community
We're getting there! We finally found a church we like right around the time we got pregnant. Several of my good friends are currently living overseas, which has been rough, but I needed the push to meet new people, especially other moms.

Do some freelance design work
I didn't actually do any freelance work before Evan was born, but once I made the jump and quit my day job last May, I found clients very quickly. It all worked out!

Continue putting all my income towards student loans and savings
During 2012, I contributed $50 into our Health Savings Account each week, and the rest of my paycheck went towards paying off student loans. I'm glad we'd had nearly three years' experience of living on Nathan's income by the time I decided to quit my job. We won't get out of debt as quickly now, but we knew we would be fine without that money.


Is there anything else I wish I'd done? Is there anything I'd encourage childless women to do before they have kids? I honestly can't think of anything I couldn't do now that I have a son. I wish I could have crossed off the two remaining items on my list, but I think I needed to quit my job to have the extra time to devote to them.

Anything you wish you'd done before you had kids? If you don't have kids yet, what's on your list? 

One Year

One year...one year from a tiny, helpless newborn who can't hold his head up to an energetic toddler who can feed himself. When I was pregnant, I wasn't sure I was ready for just how quickly my baby would grow and change. After Evan was born, I would look at babies a few months older and think, I'm going to have one of those in just months? It's been a lot of fun to watch Evan reach new milestones this past year, but when I look back, the changes are just phenomenal.

Overall, I'm loving this age. I think the word that best describes Evan now is inquisitive. While he's always loved exploring, now it's less about going and more about doing. He's slowing down (at times, anyway) and figuring out how things work. He's currently fascinated by stacking things - blocks and whatever else he can find. Several times now he has sat on the floor of his room with me before bedtime and spent a half hour building towers. Considering Evan learned to crawl before he sat up on his own, for a while I didn't think he would ever sit for a half hour doing anything. At around eleven months, he become interested in stuffed animals again after totally ignoring them for about seven months. Now he babbles to them, usually in a higher voice than he uses to talk to people. He's become very interested in books. I think I could read him all his board books (around 20 now) five times each every day and he wouldn't get tired of them. He's also figured out doors recently and shut himself in his room the last two days. Let's hope he doesn't figure out locks for a while.

His language development is beginning to take off. I started teaching him a few signs when he was six months old, and while he started doing "milk" and "eat" around seven months, by nine months he wasn't signing at all and didn't even seem to respond much to me signing them. He was just too focused on mastering walking for a couple months. Now he's signing "milk" again sometimes and is starting to figure out "water." As far as spoken words, "Dada" has taken on a clear meaning lately. He also says "Day-Day" sometimes for Adyn and often says "Duh! duh! duh! duh!" when he has a rubber ducky. "Mama" has become less common, only coming out when he wants to nurse and I'm distracted with something else.

Evan's appetite has increased immensely in the last month or so. He never wanted to be spoon fed more than a few bites until he was ten months old and refused to be spoon fed at nine months when he was teething. Now he's much more into food, both being fed and feeding himself. Meat and cheese are probably his favorite foods right now. I'm thinking we might have to raise the grocery budget soon, and he's still nursing four times a day. 

Although Evan started walking one day shy of nine months, it took him another month to walk more than twelve steps at a time. He stopped crawling (at least 95% of the time) around eleven months and is walking very well now. He loves to run from us and be chased. Another interesting part of his physical development is he's figured out how to snap his fingers in the last month. It isn't very loud, but considering I can't snap my fingers at all (seriously) I find it crazy that my son already can. 

The night of his birthday, before I put him to bed, I was singing to Evan about how we'd had a good year and we would have even more fun in the next year. As I sang, I realized I'm really excited about having a toddler! The fact that my baby is no longer a baby really doesn't make me sad at all. I'm just looking forward to what's to come.

Evan at 9 Months

I originally started writing this post as "Evan at 6 Months," but then I blinked and three months had gone by. Yikes. I guess I'd better do at least one post before he's a year old. Here's what Evan's been up to in his first 9 months.

As a newborn, the first words I would have used to describe Evan were "laid back" and "happy." As he got a little older, I would have added "engaging" because he was so social and wanted everyone to talk to him. Now that he's become much more active, I've seen "determined" come out. This kids does not give up! He's been a little less social the last few months as he's focused more on his physical development. He does seem to be developing a goofy sense of humor though.

Evan weighs about 18 pounds now. He hasn't had his 9 month checkup yet, but at about six and a half months, he weighed 16 lbs 6 oz and was 26.5" long, which put him around 20% for weight and 40% for length. He's not nearly as long and skinny proportionately as he was as a newborn, when he was about 30% for weight and 90% for length, but we're okay with that. His clothes fit much better. He's wearing mostly 12 month clothes now.

He rolled onto his stomach for the first time at three and a half months (May 2) and it wasn't long before he mastered rolling as a means of transportation and started rolling across the living room. At five and a half months (July 5) he pushed up to his hands and knees for the first time. By the time he was six months old, he was already an excellent crawler. Sitting up on his own didn't happen as early but happened very quickly. He could sit up on his own with his hands supporting him for a few seconds by six months, but he had no interest in doing so. What's the fun of sitting when you can roll or crawl all over the place? About a week after he turned six months old, he started to push up from all fours into sitting with his hands, and at six and a half months (August 2), he was sitting up with no hands. Two weeks later (August 16) Evan pulled up to standing for the first time. He started standing on his own earlier this month and took his first steps one day shy of 9 months old (October 18). I've always thought walking at 9 months sounded crazy and by no means have I tried to push him into early development, but I'm not going to hold him back either! His record is up to 12 steps in a row.

To answer what seems to be everyone's favorite question, "Is he sleeping through the night yet?!?" Sometimes. Sometimes he sleeps 12 hours straight, sometime she wakes up after 6 or 9 and goes back to sleep after nursing. He's pretty much always slept 12 hours at night, just with fewer wakings as he's gotten older. He's also gone to bed and woken up progressively earlier as he's gotten older. At first it was midnight to noon, and now it's 7:30pm to 7:30am. These days he generally takes one nap in the afternoon. It's usually two hours, but sometimes it's as long as three. Up until a few days before he turned six months old, Evan was sleeping in a pack-n-play right next to our bed. It worked great up until that point, but once he started waking up more easily and making more noises in his sleep, I decided it was time to put him in his own room. Evan's been fine with it. If anything, he liked the change of scenery.

Evan's diet is still mostly breast milk, with solids once a day most days. I wanted to hold off on solids until he was six months old, but I had no doubt he was ready at that point. He was grabbing our food at 4 months old. We started off with avocado. I just gave him a little taste, thinking if he wasn't into this solid food thing, we'd just try again in a week or so. Well, he was totally into it! He was launching forward with his mouth open and grabbing the spoon from me to stick it in his mouth himself. By 9 months old, he decided he wanted nothing to do with spoon feeding anymore, so I've just been letting him feed himself for the most part (under close supervision). I have yet to find a food he doesn't like well enough to eat as much as I give him.

It's been a joy watching this little guy grow and change and experience the world!

Life as a Work at Home Mom

It's now been over five months since I left my job. Five months ago Evan wasn't yet mobile, and now he's crawling like a pro and has taken his first steps. It flies by so fast, and I'm thankful I've been able to stay home with him to watch him grow and develop.

While working full-time outside the home as a new mom just wasn't for me, I wanted to keep working. Graphic design is part of who I am, and while I may be more selective about clients and projects down the road, I don't plan to ever completely stop. I cringed when someone listed my occupation as "homemaker." There's nothing wrong with that job title, but it's just not me. However, I did give myself two months to focus on being a wife and mom, a redo of my maternity leave if you will. I bought a domain for my freelance business and made a Facebook page, but I didn't do much with either. Once I reached my July 1 deadline of when I needed to get serious about my freelance business, I realized I really had no idea how to find clients. I invited all my friends to like my Facebook page, offered my services in a couple places, and that was about it. I submitted a logo design for a contest and browsed around Elance, but nothing really came of it.

Then, three weeks into July, something really crazy happened: someone contacted me through my website about doing design work for them. And a few weeks after that someone else contacted me. A week later, someone from a local organization contacted me about working for them on a retainer. This local client has given me so much work that I haven't even made much of an effort to find new clients, and I'm able to offer my services to others at a lower rate. And just like that, I was a work at home mom. 

Balancing the work, home, and mom parts of my job has been an interesting challenge. I've found that on any given day, it's usually a choice of 2 out of the 3. If I have a lot of freelance work, I might completely forget about dinner or run the washer through an entire cycle without putting any clothes in it (hypothetically, of course). If the house is clean, I probably didn't do any freelance work that day. On the rare occasion I manage to spend a few hours working and get a lot done around the house, I don't spend much quality time with my son, which defeats the entire purpose of why I'm at home. If I find a true balance between the three, I feel like I accomplished nothing at all. I'm still working out the kinks, but overall, I'm very happy. 

Nathan has been wonderfully supportive. When I told him I ruined dinner (it turns out mixing eggs with shredded potatoes will NOT keep them from immediately turning brown), he brought home Fazoli's. One night recently I was lying in bed reading from the book we're reading for the moms' group I go to on Tuesday mornings. This particular chapter of No Perfect Moms was entitled "No Perfect Marriages." When I saw the title, I thought, "Yeah, that's for sure," yet as I was reading, Nathan was doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. Our marriage might not be perfect, but my husband is pretty awesome. I never would have been able to handle working at home, let alone working outside the home, without a husband who cooks, cleans, and does whatever else he needs to do to take care of our family and home. I'm thankful he was never set on having a wife who stays home or a wife that works, and supports me no matter what I choose to do.

As for my main client, I think Evan likes that I'm home. He is very happy and healthy and growing well. We're still going strong with breastfeeding with no plans to stop anytime soon. We go to a moms' group, La Leche League meetings, and other places where he can be around other kids (and I can be around other adults). Sometimes I think I'm not providing him with enough stimulation or activities, but whenever I get down on the floor to play with him, he just climbs over me or cruises around me. It's pretty fun being his favorite toy. 

So, when will I be going back to work? I don't know. Some have misunderstood the fact that I actually resigned from my job and am not still on maternity leave. Depending on where the company is if and when I want to go back to work, they could rehire me, but there isn't a job waiting for me. At this point I don't have a set date or age of my child(ren) for when I'll go back to work. I look at this not as "taking a year off" but rather taking the next step in my career. I might want to go back to working full-time at some point, but at this point I'm happy being just a work at home mom.

Life as a Working Mom & The True Cost of Working

Evan usually wakes up to eat around 3:00 am. At 5:30 it's time to feed him again and get ready before feeding him again at 7:15 to ensure he's as full as possible when I drop him off at daycare. I haul my bags and my baby out to the car, drop Evan off at daycare, and then try to be productive at work for a couple hours. By the time I get into the groove, it's already time to go upstairs to a dirty, dusty, cold room to hook myself up to a machine to make my son's first bottle for the next day. A couple more hours of work, then I go feed Evan at daycare, grabbing some sort of fast food on my way back to work. I try to eat while working, and after a couple more hours of work it's time for another pumping break. I work a few more hours, then it's time to go pick up my son.

At home I barely have time to feed my dogs before I have to feed my baby again. By this point Nathan's usually home, and we try to see what we can scrounge up for dinner. I'm usually too worn out to cook anything. One of us usually ends up holding Evan most of the evening. My once easy-going, fairly independent baby is now clingy in the evenings. After spending most of his day lying on his back in a crib or on a play mat, competing with seven other babies for attention, who can blame him? I try to spend some time with my husband in between nursing sessions, but it's hardly quality time. I sterilize all my pump parts and bottles and get everything else ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

On Evan's second day of daycare, I got a call from one of the directors because he'd had all three of his bottles by noon. Not sure if he was going through a growth spurt or just being over fed, I stayed home with him on Wednesday. It was definitely a growth spurt, but hoping it would level off, I went back to work Thursday. I left him with 3 bottles and told them I would be back at noon to nurse him. By the time I arrived at noon, he had already taken all three bottles and was hungry for more. Unable to feed him, the daycare workers had left him crying on the floor. It was undeniable at this point that the best place for a baby, especially one fed exclusively breast milk, is with his mother.

I tried to keep working. If I could just make it eight more months, we would be 100% debt free and have an emergency fund of at least 5 months' expenses. Evan would never remember being in daycare. I thought there had to be a way to make it work. Maybe I could do freezer cooking on the weekends and clean after Evan's gone to bed. Maybe if I gave up breastfeeding and gave him formula

After four weeks back at work, I gave my two weeks' notice. It was by no means easy to do. I'm not a quitter. I'd been working there almost four years. I got comments on Facebook telling me it would get easier, to just hang in there. I just couldn't. I admire women who can make it work, but it wasn't for me.  I wasn't giving my best to anyone: not my job, not my son, not my husband, not myself.

I had to stop crunching the numbers and look at the big picture. Quitting my job was not a good move from a purely financial standpoint. Even after daycare and increased costs related to me working, I was still bringing home a decent amount of money. The thing is, there's quite a bit more to life than money. I could relate to a lot of what Amy from The Finer Things in Life wrote in a blog post about what working outside the home was costing in terms of her time, her marriage, and her health. It just wasn't worth it to me.

A lot of it came down to this: At the end of my life, what will I regret? Will I be more likely to regret having less money during this time in our lives and being in debt a little longer, or missing out on the first year of my son's life?

I don't think I'll regret this decision.

I'm a Mom?

A year after finding out I would soon be a mother, and nearly four months after meeting my baby, it still seems unbelievable that I actually am a mother. I was reading a book to Evan today about a Mama Bear and her Little Cub and in my mind, Mama Bear is still much older and wiser than I am. Even though he looks like my family and I see his dad's personality in him, it's still hard to believe that this amazing little boy who gets bigger and smarter each day is my son. I find myself constantly thinking, and sometimes saying out loud to Nathan, "We have a baby!" or "I made that!" 

Happy Mothers Day to all the moms. Does it ever sink in?

5 Favorites from the First Few Weeks of Motherhood

I have to admit, these first few weeks haven't been quite what I expected. I guess I was just naive, but I had no idea recovering from childbirth would take so long. I thought I'd bounce back after three days or so, but it took three weeks before I started to feel better. I still can't stand very long before I start to feel sore. However, some things went better than expected, like the fact that I lost most of the baby weight in two weeks, despite barely being able to move. Plus, taking care of a newborn hasn't been nearly as bad as I expected. Evan is a pretty easy-going baby. It's all kind of balanced out I guess. Who knows, maybe next time I'll have a better recovery and a high maintenance baby.

Every mother has a different opinion about which baby items are essentials and which you can live without. I wouldn't call any of these five items essential, just things I was really happy to have as I stumbled through these first few weeks.

1. Boppy Pillow 

The tag on the Boppy depicts four uses of the pillow: feeding at 0 months, propping at 2 months, tummy time at 4 months, and sitting at 6 months. I discovered a fifth use: sitting during the first week...not for the baby, for the mother recovering from childbirth. It's also been great for nursing. I can manage without it, but it helps me sit with better posture.

2. Graco Swing

Sometimes Evan just wants some kind of movement, which was difficult to give him when I could barely move. Evan loves being in his swing. Sometimes he goes to sleep, and sometimes he just sits there awake, looking at the elephants and whatever else is around.

3. WebMD Baby App

If you want to use a smartphone app to track things like feeding times and diaper changes, I recommend finding one you like before the baby is born. I downloaded at least 5 others before finding this one. It's still not perfect, but it works for what I needed. It also has other nice features like information about your baby's development, a growth tracker, and even a baby book to add photos and milestones. 

Having a smarthphone in general has been useful for these weeks of not doing much other than resting and nursing. I've liked having the OverDrive Media Console app so I can check out ebooks from the library for one-handed reading. 

4. Lamaze Panda's Pals Book

This book for ages 0+ has high contrast images of an animal on each page, along with the name of that animal. I was skeptical that a brand new baby could enjoy a book, but the first time Evan was really alert for a significant amount of time, at three days old, I decided to show it to him. Sure enough, he stared at the animals, looking back and forth between the two pages. It was a great moment for me. You could save money and just draw some shapes on paper with a black marker (which I've also done), but I love being able to "read" Evan his first book.

5. Mama Bottom Balm, from Earth Mama Angel Baby

Hemorrhoids, swelling and bruising, episiotomies...I don't think any expectant mother expects to deal with any of these things, but if you find yourself faced with all of the above, you'll be glad you bought this. I was amazed at how well it worked. It seems to be more effective than any of the stuff I got from the hospital, and it smells much better too.


I'd love to hear from other mothers about what they found fun or useful with a brand new baby and/or recovering from childbirth.