A Fall Weekend at the Lake

We missed out on Labor Day weekend at the lake as Paul's ear infection kept us home that weekend so we made up for it by going up to the lake this past weekend. We had THE BEST time. We enjoyed home cooked meals, my mom watched Paul in the mornings so Phil and I could sleep in, and we all got a kick out of watching Paul smile and play. Here's a picture-heavy recap!


On Friday morning we waited until it was time for his first nap of the day to leave for the lake. Paul read some books...

... and played his usual game of "take off my socks."

He fell asleep about 10 minutes into the drive but only slept for about 30 minutes. He was pretty happy during the drive, though, and fell back asleep for the last 40 minutes.

When we got to the lake, we had lunch and Paul chewed a honey crisp apple slice. This is his favorite 'teething toy.'

After lunch, Paul went down for a nap and Phil helped my dad rake and haul leaves out of the yard.


After Paul's nap, he played with grandma. I captured the sweetest moment between Paul and my mom!

He enjoyed being read to!

On Saturday, Phil helped my dad with a few things around the yard and Paul and I hung out indoors with my mom. When Phil and dad were done, they joined us upstairs where Paul was playing. We have wood floors in our house and since Paul rolls so much, you really have to watch him and keep moving him back onto the rug. The upstairs at my parents is carpeted so there is so much room for Paul to roll and play!


He's gotten much better at sitting up. He's still a little wobbly but he's made a lot of progress on this skill.

He's also getting closer to crawling! he can now get up on his hands and knees and rock back and forth. I think he'll be crawling within a month or so.

We tried giving Paul some leftover spaghetti. Don't let this look on his face fool you - he would not eat it. He's just NOT into solids.

My parents have so many toys that they have collected over the years. Some are toys that my siblings and I played with. Paul really enjoyed playing with the xylophone!

After Paul's 2nd nap of the day, we bundled him up and headed out for a walk. It was so chilly outside but it felt good to get some exercise. He stayed nice and toasty in his car seat. The car seat cover has a fleece blanket attached it. That is one of the best things I registered for!

Later that afternoon, we played a game of hand and foot. Paul napped for the first couple of hands and when he woke up, he sat in the high chair and played with an apple slice, cheerios and some spoons. I tried to get him to eat some cheerios but he had no interest. Go figure.

Deal me in! I'm ready to play!

 After our final hand, my dad fed him a bottle.

Big Paul and little Paul

 On Sunday we headed out after breakfast so we could be home in time to get things done around the house. Paul once again fell asleep within the first 10 minutes but he only slept for 45 minutes.

We came home to snow which was super depressing. Luckily it melted fast but I don't like seeing snow in October. It's been unseasonably cold so far this month but it's supposedly going to warm up later this week.

The time with my parents went way too fast! We won't see them again until Christmas but given how fast time flies, Christmas time will be here before we know it!

Currently: October

Oh how I love October! The leaves are starting to turn here and it's such a beautiful season! Here's what's currently going on in my world.

Reading: The Fifth Trimester which is about returning to work after having a baby. Admittedly I should have read this before I returned to work, not ~3 months into my return to work. But it has some good nuggets of perspective for me. I'm also reading Reading People by Anne Bogel (of the podcast What Should I Read Next) in the kindle ap. It's a summary of a bunch of different personality frameworks which is something I find super interesting. So far I'm familiar with all of the frameworks I've read about so far but it's still interesting to read about her insights on each framework.




Loving: the cooler weather. It's a little bit colder than I'd like but I still prefer this weather to the heat and humidity we experienced in early September. I liked hot weather a lot more before I had a baby, but since Paul came on the scene, give me cooler weather! He did like the heat or humidity and would whine or cry when we were outside. Now I just need my schedule to slow down so we can take lots of walks before the seriously cold weather hits in November/December.





Frustrated: that the ENT we saw yesterday wants Paul to have one more ear infection before they will put in tubes. I was hoping to get the clear for tubes so we can put an end to the endless ear infections he's been battling. He's basically had an ear infection on and off for two months and he's been on 3 rounds of antibiotics (which wreak havoc on his tummy). He still has fluid in his ears which is causing a slight loss of hearing and the ENT said that the pressure from the fluid is probably the culprit for the frequent nighttime wake ups (he's up as much as every 2 hours - a good night is 3 wake ups!). We see the ENT again in 6 weeks but in the mean time I made an appointment with his pediatrician for next week so she can check for an infection.


Feeling: tired. Interrupted sleep is hard on the body. I'm also learning that the quality of sleep is almost as important as the quantity of sleep. Some nights I barely get any deep or REM sleep according to my FitBit and those are the mornings when I feel the worst. But when you are waking up often, it's hard to get deep or REM sleep.



Anticipating: spending the weekend at my parents' lake home. Phil and I took Friday off so we can drive up that morning (and miss traffic - hooray!). We'll come back Sunday morning when Paul is ready for his first nap of the dady and hopefully miss traffic on the way back, too, and have time to get prepared for the week. My mom is great about taking Paul in the morning so we can get some extra sleep. I'm looking forward to quality time with my parents. Paul is in such a fun stage so they are going to have a blast with him. I'm also looking forward to lots of delicious food as my mom always plans great meals when we are there!


Grateful: that my company has a generous time off policy. I get 6 weeks! I used about 3 weeks to extend my maternity leave and I'm using the rest of the time off to get extra time with Paul as we are not taking any vacations until Paul is a little older and sleeping better at night/napping less. As I've said before, I'm really struggling with the return to work and how little time we see Paul during the week so I'm taking a couple of Fridays off each month for the rest of the year to get extra time with my little buddy.



Working: on some organizational projects around the house. We tackled our office in September (which tends to be a place that gets cluttered). Next up I am going to work on my closet as I need to be more realistic about what clothes currently fit.


Listening: to lots of podcasts, as usual!!


Wishing: for better sleep for all of us in the near future!


Bonus Paul Pics:

Waiting to see the ENT. He loves chewing on this feet of this "cow duck" (baby toys are so weird, by the way! This toy has the head of a cow and the body/legs of a duck)

He's getting better at sitting up on his own!



Checking out one of the Halloween books my friend Heidi sent (he's wearing a hand-me-down sleeper that says "Little Brother" - I guess he is technically Oscar's little brother)

He doesn't look like such a baby anymore - he's starting to look like a little boy!

Waiting in the car for a torrential downpour to let up before looking at a listing



Smiling at daddy - his favorite person

What are you anticipating and grateful for?

Feeding a Family: Part 2

I'm back with the 2nd part of my Feeding a Family series. In my last post I talked about the challenges of getting meals on the table; in this post I will talk about my solution. Our solution isn't anything revolutionary - I've just come up with a couple of systems/approaches to simply things and reduce the mental load of meal planning.


Planning


Because I sometimes struggle and feel overwhelmed by coming up with meal ideas, I'm using a "thematic" approach to meal planning. This helps guide my recipe search. Each week I need to make one recipe to bring for lunch and 3 recipes for dinners. Since I'm just cooking for 2 people, 3 dinners is plenty to last us through the week as we both like leftovers and Phil is fine with eating cereal one night a week if we don't have leftovers in the fridge.


I'm currently making a soup or chili to bring for lunches each week. I used to eat salads every day but in this current stage of life, salads are just too much work as there is a lot of slicing and dicing. I like that I can make a soup or chili and portion it out into 4 containers. That way I'm just grabbing a container in the morning versus assembling a salad each night. I know you can make salads ahead of time if you put the toppings at the bottom and the lettuce on top but I still feel like the lettuce gets a little "icky" by the fourth day.


For the 3 dinners, my current themes are tacos, stir fries, and curries. I don't intend to keep these themes indefinitely. They will change as we get sick of the themes but this at least gives me a starting point.


I then use my bullet journal to plan out the meals for the week. Again this is just a framework and helps me figure out what days I will make meals and what days we will have leftovers. Things definitely get shifted around depending on what is going on that night but it helps to have an idea of which nights I will be cooking.

Execution


I try to have all the recipes nailed down by Thursday night so I can start making a grocery list. Right now I do our grocery shopping on Saturday mornings when Paul is down for his nap. I'm considering trying a grocery delivery service as it would be nice to use the ~hour I spend grocery shopping doing meal prep but I haven't decided on a service to use yet and I'm concerned that the produce will be disappointing. But this is something I want to experiment with this winter.


Ideally, I would grocery shop and do as much meal prep (slicing and dicing) on Saturday and Sunday so that meals come together quickly on week nights. This past weekend we had a friend visiting so I did not do any meal prep and had to squeeze it by grocery shopping on Monday night and doing meal prep on Tuesday night. For the coming week I'm making stuffed pepper soup in the instant pot for lunches later in the week + over the weekend, and for dinners I'm making Indian butter chicken and potato curry in the instant pot and chicken and vegetable stir fry. I'm only making 2 dinners this week as we had some leftovers from last weekend and are going to grill another night this week.


The next step is to scan the recipes and figure out what you can do ahead of time. For this week's meals, I chopped up all of the chicken and vegetables, except the potatoes for the curry. Not pictured is the 3 cups of brown rice that I made in the instant pot for the stuffed pepper soup.

Now I have labeled baggies of items all set to go which should make meal prep pretty quick - especially since 2 of the recipes are instant pot recipes so require very little active time.


Future Enhancements


I received a lot of great suggestions in the comments from my last post that I want to incorporate in the future. For example, I'd like to set aside one weekend a month to make something for the freezer.


***


So there you have it - there's nothing revolutionary or novel in this approach but it's a system that we are going to experiment with. It will change as our evenings change. Eventually I'll probably have to make more than 3 dinners a week, especially when Paul starts to stay awake longer and eats meals with us. But for now, this system works!

Baby Paul: 7 Months

Our little guy is another month older! Each month with our little guy keeps getting better and better. There are challenges, for sure, like the chronic ear infections he's had and the resultant lack of sleep for Phil and I, but overall he's such a wonderful, happy, sweet baby.

Firsts:


- We tried solids this month with no success. He is just not ready so we have decided to take a break until he shows more interest. Our doctor said some babies just aren't ready for solids until they are as old as 8-9 months. We did get a lot of laughs out of his reactions to the things he tried, though!

Oatmeal

Vanilla yogurt

Sweet potato

I gave him a piece of lettuce  with dressing on it from my salad one day - he was not impressed

Applesauce

 - We took him on his first hike this past weekend. It was pretty chilly - in the 40s - so we dressed him in a warm hat and mittens. He honestly did not love the hike. He was happy for about 2/3 of it maybe? I think he got too hot as we had a heavier coat over his outfit. And then at the end I think he was just tired. But we'll keep taking him on hikes but I don't think we'll go on another one until the spring as the weather has really turned here.

First family hike! This was toward the end so he was pretty tired and not in the mood to smile.

No pictures, mom! (He's sleeping in this photo)

- He also got his first tooth in mid-September and has a 2nd one coming in. The 2nd one seems to be bothering him more than the first tooth but it's hard to tell if his fussiness at night is from his teeth or his ears.

Challenges:
- We had Paul's ears re-checked on Friday and he has another ear infection. I had a feeling he did because he's been waking up more often and would cry when we laid him down after feeding him during the night. We got a referral to an ENT and he will likely get tubes put in. It's not ideal to have him undergo a procedure that requires him to be put under but he's basically had an ear infection since the 2nd week of August. The 2nd round of antibiotics was more effective and he's back on that drug but it's SO HARD on his little tummy. :( Despite being sick so much, he's been a pretty happy, smiley baby.

Growth:

- He weighs 15 pounds and is up to 4th percentile for weight. Woo hoo!
- He's still in 3-6 month clothes. I guess one upside to his slow growth trajectory is that we get a lot of use out of every outfit we own!

Sleep:

- Ugh. Sleep. It's been a huge challenge and I don't see it improving until he is feeling better. :( I'm not comfortable letting him cry at night when he's sick as I hate the thought of him being in pain and being ignored. This past weekend he was up every 2 hours so Phil and I are feeling pretty bleary eyed. Hopefully his sleep starts to improve soon.

Loves:

- Rolling around, jumping in the jumper, practicing sitting up, being read to and smiling at anyone and everyone he meets! He's such a happy little guy and he's in such a fun stage. Dad is still his favorite person!

Playing in his jumper

Working on sitting up - he's getting better but can't quite sit up unassisted.

Hanging out with his favorite person!

I think each month is just going to get better and better! I love seeing more and more of his personality coming through as he gets older. We are lucky to have such a sweet, smiley baby.

Feeding a Family: Part 1

This post has been brewing my mind for quite awhile, but I'm finally putting pen to paper cursor to screen to share my thoughts on what I've done to try to make getting (healthy) dinners on the table as efficiently as possible. I've tried a couple of different packaged "solutions" but have landed on a system that I came up with on my own.

I have a lot to say about this topic so I'm breaking it up into 2 posts. The first will focus on the challenges I'm facing and the solutions I've tried. The 2nd post will focus on our solution.

Challenges:

Meal planning/getting dinner on the table is one of those things that shouldn't seem all that hard but it is - especially when you want to eat healthy meals. Here are some of the challenges I face when it comes to meal planning.

1. Time. There's never enough of it, and this has become especially true since having a baby. We get home at 5pm and Paul goes to bed at 6pm and I do not want to spend any of that precious hour in the kitchen. This will change as he gets older and can stay awake longer but I think this is likely our reality for the first year of his life, unless he starts to magically nap better at daycare. But even pre-baby, I had limited time in the evenings to spend making meals as I would go for a run or workout after work. Also, I sit down to pump at 7:30 so that gives me 1.5 hours to make, eat dinner, and do the dishes.

2. I'm the only cook/meal planner in the house. The kitchen is my domain. Phil can take direction and help with things but he's never going to handle meal prep from start to finish. I'm also more particular about what we eat and I have a gluten intolerance which makes me more high maintenance. Phil is also not great about coming up with meal suggestions, even when I explicitly ask for meal ideas. Occasionally he will suggest something but that's the exception, not the norm.

3. We don't like to get take-out/eat out often. Eating out was a treat when I was young and that remains the case for me as an adult. I do let myself eat out one lunch a week but we rarely go out for dinner or order take-out - especially now that we have a baby that goes to bed at 6pm. I find eating out/take-out to be expensive, often unhealthy, and finding GF options that are appealing to me is challenging so it's not something that we do on a regular basis. This is totally a "you do you" type of thing, though, as some people really, really enjoy eating out or get take-out once a week to ease the burden of meal planning. But that's just not a good solution for us.

What I've tried:


1. PrepDish - I was really excited to try PrepDish after hearing countless ads for this service on various podcasts!


How it works: They send you a grocery list and a task list. The idea is that you will spend several hours at some point during the week doing lots of prep work so that meals come together quickly the nights that you make them. The weekly plan gives you 4 dinners, a salad, a breakfast, a snack and a dessert.


Pros: Takes away the mental load of mealing planning, makes grocery shopping easier since the list is already made, and it's gluten free so I didn't have to make any modifications to make the meals safe for me to eat.


Cons:  The recipes were a bit too "fancy" for our style of eating. For example, some of the recipes were for things like scallops or lamb chops. We are just a bit more basic in the Segner household.


Verdict:  Not a good fit for us. I tend to make 4 recipes/week - 3 dinners and 1 thing to pack for lunches - so I would never make all of the recipes which meant I had to go through the shopping list and figure out what to cross out. It's fairly easy to do that as there is a number behind each item on the shopping list to indicate what recipe it's for. But the main reason this wasn't a fit is that it just didn't mesh with our style of eating. We prefer simple dishes that reheat well. However, I really liked the approach of doing prep work ahead of time so week night meals come together super quickly so this is a technique I now try to employ.

2. Plated

How it works:  Plated is one of many meal kit companies. The number of companies has grown since I tried Plated 2 summers ago but at the time, Plated was the only company that I knew of that had gluten free options which is why I chose it. Meal kit services give you several meal options to try from, you select which meals you'd like, and a box shows up with the ingredients and recipes.

Pros:  No grocery shopping (aside from what you'll need outside of the 2-4 meals you receive from the service), no need to search for recipes.

Cons: If you have a dietary restriction like being gluten free, your meal options are limited and I usually found myself picking what was safe for me to eat versus what I really wanted to try/what sounded good. I also found it to be kind of pricey compared to what we would spend on groceries. For example, a box of 3 meals that serve 2 people is $71.70/week. I know I can't compare the cost of the meal service to the cost of making 3 dinners on my own because the meal service takes care of grocery shopping and the mental load of meal planning/searching for recipes but it still felt too pricey for what we were getting. Lastly, Phil thought these meals were not very filling. This is probably due to the fact that we selected GF meals that tended to be light on carbs and were less filling as a result.

Verdict: Obviously given the long list of cons, this wasn't the right fit for us either. It was fun to try this out for a couple of months but it wasn't the right solution for us. I also didn't care for how much waste it generated. All the ingredients were individually packaged and there was so much waste between that and the ice packs and insulation that kept the ingredients cold. Much of it was recyclable but it took some effort to recycle as, for example, you had to remove the gel from the ice packs before you could recycle them.

Next week I'll talk about the solution that's working for us - at least for the time being!

What short cuts or solutions have you tried to make it easier to get meals on the table for yourself/your family?

TGIF

Woo hoo, it's Friday! I really live for the weekends these days since I miss Paul so much during the week. Here's how my week shaped up.


The high of my week was going out to lunch with 3 other moms that I work with. It was nice to talk with other moms in my industry that can relate to how I am feeling now that I'm back at work. We also have some changes going on related to a reorganization that we are in the midst of so it was nice to talk shop about what is going on.
The low of my week was not getting enough sleep - as usual. Paul's first tooth came in over the weekend and there is a 2nd one coming in and I think the pain of teething has been waking him up at night. He's been up 3-4 times a night for the past week so we are feeling pretty tired.

A recipe I made was Asian noodle bowls from Iowa Girl Eats. We had already dished out our servings when I remembered to snap a photo, so this is about 1/2 of what the recipe yields. It was very good and came together pretty quickly! I'm trying to "automate" meal planning by making "themes" for the ~3 meals I make each week, like tacos, a wok dish, and a curry-type dish. That way it makes it easier for me to find recipes when I have a framework to guide what type of recipes I should be looking for. Wok dishes are great because they tend to cook really fast! This one came together in less than 15 minutes once all the chopping was done.

The best money I spent was on Paul's Halloween costume! He's going to be a hedgehog and I can't wait to see him dressed up in his adorable costume. The best part is that I got it on sale at Target for $12!

My plans this weekend include hosting a friend for dinner tonight. We are going to grill some halibut that a friend brought back from Alaska last summer. I'll top it with a pineapple salsa and serve it with this instant pot indian rice and our friend is bringing another veggie-based side. I'm going to make these maple pumpkin oatmeal bars. They are classified as a "breakfast bar" but I think they will work for dessert. On Saturday afternoon we are getting together with the parents and babies from my mom group. I haven't seen them in person since May! I can't wait to see how much the babies have all grown and changed. On Sunday I'm going to clean out my garden and then in the late afternoon we are getting together with a college friend of Phil's. It's kind of a "busier" weekend for us. I put busier in quotation marks because having 1-2 things/day probably wouldn't have been considered "busy" pre-Paul but my definition of busy has definitely changed since he was born.

Bonus Paul Pics!

Reading with Grandma Joan

My happy boy before work on Thursday morning!

He's getting closer to being able to sit up on his own. He's a bit behind on this skill as babies tend to sit up around 6 months but that big head makes it hard for him to master this skill! He's smiling at daddy in this photo.

What was the high of your week? What are your plans for this weekend?

Currently: September 2018

Fall has arrived here and I am not sad. Give me cool, crisp temperatures and changing leaves! I love summer, but I really, really love fall. The changing and falling leaves reminds us that there is beauty in letting go. Those are my deep thoughts for a Wednesday morning! Here's what is currently happening in my world.

Reading: Enrique's Journey which is book about a Honduran boy's harrowing journey to reach his mom in the US. I can already tell it's going to be a very heart-breaking read. I also started The Widows of Malabar Hill, which was one of the books in Modern Mrs. Darcy's 2018 summer reading guide. I usually don't read 2 books at the same time but I'm experimenting with having an ebook and physical book going at the same time. I want to see if reading a physical book (Enrique's Journey) at night makes it easier for me to fall asleep as I've been having a harder time falling asleep lately.



Loving:  the stage that Paul is in. He is just so smiley and happy. He LOVES people, too. He's the baby in the stroller that will give the biggest grin to strangers. Maybe he's going to be an extrovert?

He loves taking selfies! This picture really shows how giant his head it. Ha!

Feeling: spread thin. This whole working mom thing is harder than I thought it would be. I mean, I always knew it would be hard but the devil is in the details. I just didn't realize how little time I would get with Paul and for myself. I keep telling myself "this is a season" over and over and over again. Hopefully it starts to feel more manageable. I've only been back to work for 2 months so it's still a very new transition for me. I'm trying to be patient and I'm trying to grant myself lots of grace right now. I've got a 'things that have been surprising about motherhood' post brewing in my head and I'll definitely be talking about the transition back to work when I get around to writing it!



Anticipating: hosting our friend Kyria next weekend! She's coming in from the Bay area to visit us. We haven't seen her since our wedding and a lot has changed since then! I'm hoping that the fall colors are pretty while she is here. We'll go to a state park on Saturday of the weekend she is here. It won't compare to the views she's used to in the San Francisco area but Minnesota in the fall is definitely beautiful!


Grateful: for the sweet ladies who take care of Paul while I'm at work. I can just tell that they genuinely love Paul. Or I should say "Pablito" because that is his nickname at daycare. Phil called him that one day at drop off and it stuck. Now everyone at daycare calls him Pablito and that's what they put on his art projects that they send home (yes, they do art projects even with the little babies - it's always footprint-based but they are adorable!). He's always happy and smiling and you can tell he's totally loved on while we are at work which assuages some of my working-mom guilt.



Working:  on incorporating more exercise into each weekday. My free time is pretty limited during the week as I get home at 5, spend time with Paul until he goes to bed at 6, and then I have until 7:30 to make/eat dinner and get things done around the house before sitting down to pump. But I'm making a conscious effort to try to go for a 30-40 minute walk 2-3 nights a week. I eat first so running is not an option as running with a full stomach is unpleasant. But walking feels good right now and I'm considering it a 'good enough' form of exercise for the time being. Some day I will be a runner again, it's just not going to happen at this stage of life.


Listening: to lots of podcasts as usual. My newest find is "Committed" which is a podcast about relationships. It features a couple who has been through something difficult. The latest episode about a woman who was hospitalized for psychosis was especially interesting.


Wishing: for a nice, long fall. I'm not ready for what comes next (snow and cold). 


What are you loving, anticipating, and wishing for?