Hi, Baby, I'm Nicole.

One thing I've started to see as I see my friends and family members are starting to have children and starting families is the way in which moms so easily "lose themselves." It's like they were this person with all these interests in life, dreams, aspirations and well...personalities. And then they have children and all of the sudden all of that goes out the window and they become "blah's mom" and no longer an actual person themselves. This is kinda sad to me.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there is nothing in my mind that doubts that my children will be my number one priority in my life (other than God). I will love them immensely and they will know this. But I also don't plan on giving up Nicole, and becoming just someone's mom. Just like when I got married....I'm not just Kellen's wife: I am Nicole, and I am ever changing and ever working on me as a person.

This will be a constant thought in the next 6 months as I prepare for baby number one. What will this look like for Kellen and I? How will we help each other out to not let who WE are fade away (not to mention our marriage!).

I have to give a shout out to my friend Laura over at Life Happens. She has written two different posts on this subject, and she really says it how it is. I'm going to quote her posts below but please, if you are interested, go and check her out and follow her- she is so raw, honest, and refreshing.

From Laura's Blog:

"I've seen this a few times on facebook this week as people's status...

I traded eyeliner for dark circles, salon hair cuts for ponytails, long showers for hairy legs, late nights for early mornings, designer purses for diaper bags, nice dinners for McDonald's and I wouldn't trade a thing!! With Mother's day drawing near lets see how many Mom's repost this!

Of course this has been changed as it's gone through people and you see things like...

"Mom's don't care what we have to give up for our kids."

and

"I would give everything up for my kids without a second thought."

Ugh.

I DO CARE. And no I won't give up everything. I am a person. I have a name. I don't want to be known as Liza and Jason's mom. I am LAURA! Yes I am their mom but I am still an individual and I have things that I am not giving up. And I don't think anything is wrong with that.

Sure I might have to put a few things on hold. I know I can't do my hobbies as often as I would like. BUT... I need to keep my heart alive because some day my kids will move out and I will need to know who I am because people will no longer be calling me Liza and Jason's mommy all the time and instead they are going to want to know who Laura is.

Don't throw yourself and your dreams out the window when you have kids. Find a way to BE YOU while being a mom.

Kids are being raised these days to think they are the center of everything and the world revolves around them. This is not healthy! It's alright to have your kids sit in their bed for ten minutes and read books so you can shave your legs. It's ok to put on a video for a little while if you want to fix your hair and put on makeup. These things don't make you a bad mom... in fact they just might make you a BETTER mom (now there's a thought!) because you took time to make yourself feel better.

I know. I'm radical like that.

But you know that saying "if mama ain't happy ain't nobody happy"... I believe there is quite a bit of truth to that.

So... it's ok to change over the years. But please do not give up who you are because the world needs YOU!"

The other post of hers I loved can be found here:

http://laurablogsagain.blogspot.com/2009/10/laura-first.html

Check her out, she's a wise one :)

A Gluten Free Super Hero

Today I found out I am starting a gluten free diet. I don't have my test results back, but my doctor wants to see how my body reacts to going gf. The little boys I watch are also totally gf, and this is the following conversation I had with little Liam the four year old after I found out:

Me: Liam! Guess what? I'm going to start eating gluten free, just like you! No more gluten for me! I'm joining the GF team!

Liam: Really? WOW, cool!

Me: Yup, we could be GF superheroes!

Liam: Yes! Fighting gluten-villains from making people sick!

hehehe. I love kids. Especially these ones.

Anyway, I headed straight over to our local grocery store right after work and picked up some GF goodies. Thank goodness that there is actually A LOT of gf options out there these days! I picked up some pasta, granola bars, frozen waffles, and English muffins, all gluten free!

I'm kinda bummed, but at the same time, if this change makes me feel better, I definitely am willing to make this life change. I guess we will see!

Losing Weight...whoops?

Ok, so it's not like I've lost an unhealthy amount of weight in the last month, only a pound, but it still feels weird to not be jumping for joy about it! Normally, a reduction on the scale would leave me feeling happy and satisfied. Right now, I'm more just like: Huh. That's weird.

I haven't been trying to lose weight since I found out I was pregnant, but I guess I'm not too surprised that I haven't gained weight either. I have felt pretty nauseous lately and haven't really wanted to eat to much. I never thought that I could experience a food aversion...(this is coming from a girl who likes to EAT!), but recently there are a lot of things that just sound gross.

Don't worry people, I am getting in enough well rounded calories to take care of my little one. It's just such a strange feeling to not be happy when I see the scale moving down.

In other news, I am praying and hoping that a concern of celiac disease by the naturopathic doctor I saw today is not true! I don't really want to go into details about this, but I also know how difficult a gluten free diet is and I hope that I won't have to experience this first hand. I will know in a couple of weeks once I get my blood drawn and tested.

Tomorrow I am turning 2 whole months pregnant! Yay! Not only that, but my embryo is graduating to fetus status! Go fetus, go fetus, go fetus, go!

A Sneak Peek

Yesterday I mentioned that I DO have a baby blog going, but I've decided that at least for a little while I am going to keep it private. My idea behind the blog is actually letters from me to the baby, and sometimes that can mean vulnerability and openess that I might not want to share with the public at this point.

However, I did think that today's post was so cute, I did want to share with you all. Hope you like it:

Hey My Raspberry!

This week you've grown to the size of a raspberry. That's half an inch! Seems so crazy to me that today you are 10,000 million times bigger than you were just one month ago.

Well as you may soon learn about your mommy, one of my all time favorite past times is garage sale-ing. I am taking the news of your arrival and preparing a fantastic room for you, full of treasures and knick knacks alike!

The theme to your room, I've decided, will be a mixture of antique toys and hot air balloons.These two things go really well together, as you will soon see, and I'm having a blast finding things to fill it with.

The main inspiration for the room came from the book "The Travels of Babar"which you can see, is being used as a picture for the header of this blog.

I like this print for many reasons. Firstly, it's just cute, and that's what you look for in a baby's room, right? Secondly, I think hot air balloons bring a sense of adventure and convey the thoughts of truly enjoying and experiencing life to it's fullest. This is going to be one of my main philosophies for raising you and any other little brothers and sisters that may come along!

Once I decided on this print for the main inspiration, I have been hard at work finding treasures to accommodate this somewhat unusual but definitely adorable nursery theme! So far, today was one of my biggest jackpots! I'll show you some of my favorite loot I scored:

Going along with the antique toy theme, I picked these wooden blocks up from my favorite antique store down by Nanie's house. They will eventually sit on a shelf in a room and spell out your name, but for now, you can get the idea:

Here are some more pictures of some wooden toys I picked up that some day you may enjoy. I love the look of these and the amount of detail that wooden toys often have:

Going along with the antique theme, this little mini bike will sit on a shelf and may be used by a stuffed animal of your choice eventually:

And these boots. Well, they don't really go with anything....but you can't deny that they are just adorable!

But perhaps my absolute favorite find of the day is this plaque. How amazingly does this fit the them of your room??

Can't wait till I get a chance to pull all of this together into your nursery, along with some blue sky painted walls with white clouds. You will have the cutest nursery on the block, I am determined!

Can't wait until you see it,

Mommy

A Whole Different Ball Game (Big News)

Well there's no way I can put "big news" in my title and not just come right out and say it to you all: I'm pregnant!

If you've followed me for longer than six months now, you know that I have talked about wanting babies but that we were waiting for the right time. Well, here it is! Realistically, this was not a surprise (if you are wondering). Kellen and I did a lot of thinking and talking about this big decision in the last couple of months and made some very big, and different decisions. Would you have asked me six months ago when I was going to start having children, I would have told you not for a while. But sometimes life (or in my opinion, God) has different plans.

Needless to say, Kellen and I are seriously beyond excited for our impending bundle of joy (or current "blueberry" sized baby). My due date is April 8th!

Now I want to apologize for leaving you all in the dust for the past couple of weeks. My last post discussed my plan of action to weigh in on the 1st and then put the scale away for a month. Well, the next day I found out this little news and that little plan soon went out the window!

Since I found out, I've been weighing everyday just to make sure I'm staying on track with my weight gain (yes, I said weight GAIN-AH!). After 7+months of struggling to get weight off I must come to a stop with my weight loss efforts and focus on just maintaining, and even gaining, a healthy amount of weight.

Let me tell you, this has NOT been an easy feat for me. I pretty much freaked out the first week and wrote down every calorie that went into my mouth (adding an extra 300 of course, which is recommended for pregnancy). I meticulously counted and weighed and thought about every food decision. This didn't last long.

It's not that I don't think it's a good thing for me to be very aware of what I'm consuming at this point. But what I've taken into account the last week is the amazing and natural way my body can give me "ques" as to what it needs. And often, these "ques" don't always line up with my perfect calorie pyramid.

Of course I will admit this may just be an excuse to devour a guilt free bowl of chocolate ice cream. But don't worry. After 7 months of rigorously triple thinking my every food decision, I believe I've set myself up on a safe and healthy path for the next nine months.

It's hard not to have the thought that I just lost all this weight just to gain it back. But at the same time, this is not going to be a 15-25lb weight gain from ice cream and cookies. There is a human being growing inside me! And positively, it feels good to know I have the power to control my body, when just a mere 7 months ago, it truly controlled me.

Well I hope to be updating more often as I learn how to deal with this new part of my life and how that relates to my healthy journey. Some have been begging for a baby blog already, and it IS in the making, but I am undecided right now whether it will go public or not. We will see.

Overeating Woes

Ello Loves,

I have been avoiding this blog to no end since I left on my all girl road trip last week. Let's just say Kate and I reveled in the fact that we had both lost 30lbs and could fully embrace the freedom of eating with no regrets. Of course I knew it would be a struggle to get back into the healthy eating routine after almost an entire week of junk, but I hate to admit that it's been even harder than I expected. All I can say is I am fully hearing the healthy eating fairy in my head yelling "I TOLD YOU SO!" so please spare me if you have the urge to leave me that comment.

I hope to reign in with scale results on Sunday, August 1st, for my first official weigh in post in quite a while. After that, I'm taking some other bloggers advice and hiding that evil piece of junk from myself for a whole month. That's right- it's a pretty scary concept to go from weighing every day to once a month. But I'm hoping it's going to help me focus on a more long term goal.

I was mostly encouraged to make this choice after talking to THREE girlfriends who've lost a significant amount of weight over the last couple of years. One thing that really stuck out to me was that their weight loss was such a long term thing- like it took them on average about 1-2 years to lose 40lbs. The realistic thought of losing 2-3lbs a month makes me so much more excited to look at weight loss as a "long haul" thing.

So hopefully I will back by Sunday with an update. Maybe I will even go a little crazy and update my sidebar. We will see!

Fun in the Sun

Oh my dear little blog readers, can I just say I apologize so sincerely for my disappearance lately! But I am sure you will understand when I say that the sun brings little motivation to sit inside on a computer? Surely all our blogs have been a bit more sparse than we would have liked lately, for good reason!

SUMMER!

Summer is by far my favorite season- who does not love driving with the windows down, splashing around on the beach (or lake, depending on your location) and soaking up some much needed rays! And summer in the Pacific Northwest is absolutely perfect- a cool and breezy 70-80 degrees that makes the sun all the more bearable.

I am going to attempt to catch you up on my life in the last three weeks in no particular order, but through some pictures I've captured on my phone over the last couple of weeks.

To start, I would have to say my creative juices have been flowing. Maybe it's because I'm currently working for an artist? PS- Check her out! Rachel @ SymbioticLife --she makes AMAZING jewelry!

So here's a little sample of some projects I've been working on:

Ever heard of upcycling? It's taking something that is no longer of value to you and turning it into something that is. I like the idea of recycling things into something you will use. Kellen and I took an old dresser drawer and turned it into a birdhouse:

And the finished product:

Have I mentioned how much I love cherry blossoms? They's got to be my favorite trees. So beautiful.

And of course being a nanny comes with extreme perks. Check out the art project the boys and I did yesterday:

SO fun! I love my job.

And I'm sure some of you are wondering how my race went on 4th of July?

My friend Hollie and I totally rocked it! We almost ran the whole thing, but walked a part of an extremely large hill. We finished with a time of 36:45--quite impressive considering the amount of hills in this bad boy! I was so proud of myself! And guess what? Even hubby ran it too! We will leave about the part of him feeling pretty cruddy afterwards...he hadn't ran for a while!

Guess what other joyous occasions summer brings? BBQ'S!!! Honestly if I could BBQ my food every day of my life, I think I would. We have been experimenting with lots of different veggies:

Broccoli is delicous grilled! Who knew?

So I pretty much had abandoned hope over my veggie garden after my dog dug it up. But guess what? I visited yesterday and it seems that something has survived! Hallelujah! Yes, I realize there seems to be some bite marks from slugs on the leaves, but that can be easily fixed!

Other than that, I've just been running around with two little guys with tiny feet and going on "the messiest, dirtiest adventures" ever! (words from a four year old!)

Hope you are having a fantastic summer so far!