40 Bags in 40 Days Challenge

This is a challenge that I found on Pinterest. It was originally meant for the 40 days of Lent however, we are hosting a big family Christmas party in mid December and thought it would be great to purge 40 bags of crap from our house. I am planning to officially start the challenge on November 1, 2011. I am hoping I will be able to get a button and stuff set up so that if you wish to join the challenge you can link your posts on your own blog to this. The bags can be any size. For me it depends on the size of the space. Cleaning out Eli's toy box may only take 1 plastic grocery bag while cleaning out the bathroom closet could take a huge trash bag. Either way it's getting rid of junk that you no longer need. Please keep in mind if it is something you think others will use to donate to Goodwill, Salvation Army, or another organization or individual who could use the item. My next post, before the challenge starts will be to post my list of 40 spaces to clean out. If I think a space needs more than one bag it will be listed on 2 days. Good luck to everyone and I hope you will join me!

Where oh Where Have I Been?

Life has been crazy and blogging has just gotten away from me. I don't even know when I blogged last but I do know it was a long time ago. Eli will be 15 months old on Friday and I still can't believe that! He is quite a challenge. He takes after his mommy in his persistence and stubborn attitude. This leads to many many face off's between Eli and I on a daily basis. It is a constant battle of the wills and who will give in first. Right now the score is about 50/50. I have a few personal posts to do as well as a few challenges. I am planning on posting about sleep in our house! Eli still is not sleeping all night and we are up at least 2 times a night. Also, I will be posting my views on what it is like to be nursing a toddler almost exclusively. That leads me to my last post about having a toddler with an Oral Sensory Disorder that is causing him to not eat most foods. We are starting to work on this at home and again with his strong will this is a daily battle. I am going to also be starting a 40 day challenge which is going to force me to blog daily. If I could figure out how to allow others to sign up and link their blogs of the challenge I will also be doing that. I am going to see if Dan will help me with that later this week. Lastly, I hope to put up some reviews for different cloth diapers that we have used on our big boy. When I was looking for reviews on what diapers work best for large babies and toddlers I couldn't find anything so I feel it is necessary to give my opinion on what we have tried.

Tickers

On the left of my blog there are 2 new tickers. They are there to motivate me to reach my goals.

The top one is weight loss. I am starting with loosing 22lbs. This gets me down to my pre-pre pregnancy weight. I have 12 pounds to go to get to where I was before I had Eli. The extra 10 will get me to a much healthier weight and where I was when we got married, before my miscarriage. I have been procrastinating long enough. It was time to take action. I have used the excuse that I am a nursing mother for 10 months now. Well the weight isn't coming off anymore. Yes, I need to eat extra calories to make milk to sustain the life of my amazing little guy. But apparently I don't need to eat as much as I have been. So today I took a big step in signing myself up for Weight Watchers. I chose weight watchers because it is the only plan that I could find that has something tailored specifically for a nursing mom. They know how much extra you need to add to your diet to keep up your milk production and stay healthy for both you and your baby. Tomorrow morning I will be doing my initial weigh in. Then I will be weighing in every Monday morning. I have told myself that I am not going to officially start until Monday. This holiday weekend would be killer on my diet.

Ticker number 2 is Traveled Miles. I have started walking and will soon move on to a combinations of walking and jogging. I have no specific goal of how many miles I want to cover and in how much time. The only thing is that I want to keep going. I picked 50 miles as a starting point because it seemed manageable. My plan is to track the miles I cover in 2011.

With the 2 tools I hope to meet my goal weight and run a 5K at the end of summer. Encouragement is always welcome.

Birthdays

As you all know, birthdays come around once a year for everyone. It's a celebration of another year passed. As the years go by, birthday's aren't quite as exciting as they used to be.

Today is my 26th birthday. I love birthdays! I woke Dan up at 12:15am to say " IT'S MY BIRTHDAY". He was so thrilled about this but he knew to expect it because I always to it. Although recent birthdays haven't been as exciting as the pizza party's and sleepovers of my childhood this on had to be one of the best ever. Why you ask? Because this year I am a mom! Eli makes everything better.

For my birthday Eli gave me sleep! He slept a 7 hour stretch last night and didn't get up for the day until 8am. He then took 2 great naps and was in an amazing mood. I really couldn't ask for anything better. Dan got me a jogging stroller since I am starting to train for a 5k that I will be running at the end of the summer. This way I can run with Eli. I was so excited when he told me I could pick one out because I thought he wasn't on board due to the cost.

After my day with my little man, we headed out to dinner with my parents and Dan's parents. We had a great time with great food and topped it off with chocolate cake from my favorite bakery.

Now I am a year older and a year wiser, or so they say. Here is to another great year with family and friends.

Week 1 Complete

We have officially completed week one of baby sleep boot camp. We have had our ups and downs but overall are make progress. Eli is only up 2 times a night which is a lot better than 10. I would like to spread it out more but I am not sure if I am ready for that tonight. I think I will give it a few more days. Over the last week we had a great 2 night with an 8 hour stretch. The last 2 nights weren't as good. Night 6 went pretty good. Eli slept 6 hours and then 4 hours so that wasn't too bad. Last night he went down at 8:30 and woke up at 11:30. I finally nursed him at midnight thinking it would put him back to sleep. Not so much, he thought it was play time. So he played by himself in his crib until 1am. He then woke up at 4:30 and slept in until 8am. He also refused his afternoon nap today.

Tonight it was a lot of work to get him to go to bed. He was very tired and would doze off in my arms but would FREAK out when I would try to put him down in his bed. I am thinking that he is getting another tooth or something because this isn't like him at all. I will recap sleep in another week.

BSBC Nights 4 & 5

Tonight we are starting night 6 of baby sleep boot camp. This is my recap of nights 4 & 5 as the title says. It has been 2 amazing nights. I can't believe how great they have been but I keep telling myself that they were just flukes because I don't want to get my hopes up. So here is how they have gone.

Night 4:

Friday was a busy day and we spent most of it outside. Eli hadn't napped well again which made him a very tired boy. We were out watching Dan play softball until 7:30 which is bedtime so of course he fell asleep on the way home. Dan and I let him sleep in the car for awhile in the driveway with the windows open so that we could get some work done in the front yard. Finally at 8:20 I woke him up to get him ready for bed and down for the night. He was asleep by 8:30pm. At 11:oo he woke up and was not happy. I ended up feeding him at 11:30 which was earlier than I would of liked to but he was one extremely angry boy. After this Eli slept until 7:45am! That is OVER 8 hours!! I couldn't believe it. I woke up at 6 in a mild panic and had to go check to make sure he was still breathing. A mother always worries. I really couldn't believe that he had been asleep that long.

Night 5:

Saturday was a good day spending most of it outside again. I really think the fresh air helps Eli sleep. He had taken a late nap so when we tried to put him to bed at 7:45 he just sat in his crib and talked. Then he started to scream. I went in and checked on him a few times and it was apparent that he was not tired and ready for bed so we let him come out and play for a little bit. At 8:40 he was finally showing signs that he was sleepy so I nursed him again and put him in his bed. I went to bed a couple hours later and woke up in another mild panic at 5:10, yes that is 8.5 hours! I went to check on him again like a neurotic mother and accidently woke him up when opening his door. So I nursed him and he went back to sleep until 8am.

Dan and I haven't slept in until nearly 8 in months. It felt amazing. I am praying that its going to stay this way but still telling myself he is just random because I don't want to get my hopes up. Right now its 12:20am and he has been in bed since 8 so we are still over his 4 hour mark that I have set for this week so that is a great sign. I am off to bed and praying we sleep until 8 again.

Spring Garden Clean up

Today was another beautiful Spring day here in Northern Minnesota. It was about 55 out and sunny. I couldn't ask for a better day. I spent hours outside cleaning up my garden trying to get it ready for spring planing. Here the last frost date isn't until June 15 so there is still quite a bit of time but I have a lot to do.

After getting Eli up and fed and sending him off to Grandma's house with dan I tackled the front raised bed. I am planning on turning it from flowers to vegetables so there were quite a few things I needed to do. I dug and dug and dug. I took out 60+ lily bulbs that I brought in to a friend for her to plant in her flower beds. I know there are many more in there so I have now decided that we are going to have to remove all of the dirt from this bed (to be used somewhere else) and start from scratch with a great mix suitable for vegetables.

I then came inside and started planting my seed. I started tomatoes, peppers, peas, green beans, and lettuce. I will add carrots and possibly onions when I plant outside. They are now in their mini indoor greenhouse for the next 5-7 weeks until we can plant outside.

This evening after we returned home I headed to the backyard to try to tame our raspberry jungle. When we moved into our home a little over a year ago there was a huge garden in the backyard. We had no idea what was in it but as summer came we realized it was over half raspberry bushes. Now half of these are old canes that don't produce berries anymore. I started to prune them and remove dead canes last year but I was too big and too pregnant to care. This year I am hoping to tame them and then work on the other half of the garden that is a horrible eye sore. I feel like barely made a dent in the garden back there but the section that I was working on looks great.

I can promise that there will be a lot more posts on my garden because I have a lot of work to do on it and really want to make it look nice.