Finding Happiness in Money, Habits, and Home
In case you missed it, you’ll probably want to check out Part 1.
So, where were we?? Ah yes, the emergency room check-in desk.
The receptionist gets us our wristbands, and calls up to labor and delivery to get someone to come escort us upstairs. She asks if I want a wheelchair, or if I want to walk. “I can walk,” I say (why why why? I was clearly still in denial). Jesse asks “Are you sure you don’t want a chair?”
Well, if you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time or you know me personally you may be aware of a couple of things: 1. I’m super inconsistent and slow about posting updates, and 2. We’ve added a second baby to our family. These two things are likely related. Harrison, our second boy’s birth story is, as they say, “one for the books”… so let’s just jump right in.
Being pregnant with my second baby proved to be slightly more difficult for me than it was the first time around. Granted, with Henry, I had a super easy pregnancy – I never got sick, didn’t really “show” until I was nearly halfway through, gained less than 20 pounds total, had no complications and an almost exactly on time delivery (40 weeks + 1 day). So this time, even though I dealt with some general nausea nearly every day during my first trimester, gained more weight much more quickly, and was fairly uncomfortable throughout most of my pregnancy, I still had relatively little to complain about and am thankful for that.
I’ve had several conversations with friends about “when you stop listing your baby’s age in months”, and I think we’ve determined it’s 2 years. I’ve mostly stopped counting, but I still have a tendency to specify “he turned 2 in September” when people ask. If you don’t have kids, I’m sure this is all a weird concept, but for those who do, why does it sound appropriate to rattle off that your kid is 20 months old, but now I would kind of feel like an asshole to say “He’s 29 months”? We’ll call it 2 and a half, k?
Holy shit Henry. How has it been 11 months since I’ve written about you, our sweet sweet 17 month old boy? I’ll save most of the cliches to myself, but you’ve heard the one about kids growing up before and it’s not getting any less true. Don’t blink, they said.
So, let’s see… where do I start?
I remember the distinct moment that I felt like my role changed from “keeping you, my sweet baby alive” to “raising an actual human”. You were sitting in your high chair, mostly feeding yourself banana puffs, and you reached your innocent little hand out past the side of your tray, and dropped a puff to our eagerly waiting dog. Cute. Then you did it again.
I’m not sure I can fully claim to be a minimalist, but I do enjoy our small house, love a good de-clutter/purge, and try to stick to a “less is more” attitude. With most of our purchases, we do our research, find deals when we can, and buy fewer (high quality) items that will be well worth the price. Putting together a baby registry with the sheer amount of STUFF on the baby market is an exciting… and slightly overwhelming task for a minimalist mom-to-be. So I’ve put together a list of my very favorite products from our first year with Henry that are big on functionality and relatively small on space.