Looking at the differences....

Here I am..... Yes our baby did eventually come.  She was born March 9th.   She is adorable and an amazingly good baby.   We have enjoyed these few weeks of just hanging out and not having to go anywhere or do much.  But I can't just sit and stare at her all day long unfortunately.  I started back at work this week and it has been interesting to try to find a time of the day that works best.  That will be a work in progress for a while.

I just wanted to write about how different this delivery was from the past ones.  More specifically my previous hypnobabies delivery.  I practiced my hypnobabies this pregnancy as well as my previous one and it was different even in my practice.   Last time I felt like I fell asleep everytime I did them.  Maybe I was more exhausted last time...  or I just always did my practices at night so I was always tired by then....who knows.  This time I felt like I drifted off but not completely out.  I felt like I did it in the day time more when I wasn't quite so tired or exhausted yet.
This time I also had my experiences from last time to remember things or which tracks I liked most.  I used deepening the most last time, I listened to that one all the time.  This time I mixed it up more and rarely listened to deepening because I just didn't feel like I connected with that one or wanted that one.  There are probably 10-12 tracks to choose from.  I also purchased a few extra ones to help flip my baby from breech to head down, and the come out baby.  I thought they were well worth the money.  My baby did flip after a few times of listening to that track, and my baby was born a few days after listening to that come out baby track a few times. 

My last delivery I relaxed and sat down a lot.  I woke up at night when the waves started and I sat on the couch and relaxed through them.  This time I tried to sit down in mulitple positions and it just wasn't happening.  It was not comfortable for me.  My body was wanting to move.  I swayed a lot through the waves and it felt great.
Last time I remember once I got admitted to the hospital and they let me get in the tub it was amazing.  It felt so good.  I have always loved a warm relaxing bath. It really helped me progress and dilate.   This time I wanted to stay home as long as possible for multiple reasons. One being the hospital just had a normal sized tub this time and we have a rather large tub in our house so I figured I would use it.  I did and I was only in about 30 min and then I was done I wanted to be moving and it just wasn't working for some reason. 
This delivery was all about movement and I felt like I really was connected mind to body.  I tried different things and some worked and some didn't.  My doula brought a rebozo wrap and that was amazing it was kind of like the lift and tuck from last delivery.  It would tighten up around my belly to help lift and tighten during the waves.  We walked and did that for about 2 hours I think.  The waves weren't that bad.  I wasn't even being vocal about them.  I wasn't talking through them because I was relaxing and focusing on them.
Something else that was different this time is that I was listening to my tracks almost the whole time I was in actual labor.   Last time I stopped once I got to the hospital.  This made a big difference too.   Also this time Jared was also saying my que words.  We were more on the same page which helped a lot. 
 I had really wanted to feel my water break this time because with my previous 3 they had all broke my water.  I got what I wished for and it was nothing like I imagined.  I was standing there and just felt a little leak down my leg and it kept going like that but only during the during the waves.  I was exited that I got to finally experience that.
I just felt like I was able and willing to listen to my body more this time and that helped a ton.  It was a pretty fast and easy delivery for me.  I felt like it went by fast and it was awesome.  I was so proud that it went so well.  I didn't have to get the saline lock like my midwife had said I would have to do.  I stayed at home so long  that I was a 7 when I got to the hospital.  It was only about 90 min in the hospital before she was born.  It turned out better than I could have imagined.  She was born in the shower and I loved every minute of it.   I have written up a very detailed birth story so I can remember it all.  If you want to read more about it let me know.  Some people don't like reading and seeing crazy pictures but I love them.

Anyway  that is what has been going on here at our house.  We love having her here and her sibling love her so much.  Its crazy how fast you forget things about newborns and every stage I guess.

Birth Prep

I am in full birth prep over here  I am 38 weeks.  Even though I don't expect her to show up for another 2-4 weeks I still wanted to start to prep.  Although the other day I distinctly felt her drop and put a ton of pressure on my pelvis.  I have never had this feeling before so I take that as a good sign. I really waddle now because there is just so much pressure on my pelvis bones now. 

I have been redoing my hypnobirthing home study course again. Just re reading and going through my book.  I really learned a lot going through it again.  I was suprised actually.  I have been trying to find time to listen and practice them.  Its even harder with three kids.  I remember when I did it when I was pregnant with Sawyer and I thought it was hard to find time.  I usually do it right at bed time or randomly find a time in the day but that doesn't happen very often.
I love how it makes me feel though. I feel so relaxed and sometimes I drift off and kind of sleep but I know its still working and getting into my subconscious.  I feel more relaxed and calm after I listen to a track.  I really feel like its going to be key to the birth process.

I also started drinking red raspberry leaf tea.  It doesn't taste good but I add a little bit of honey and that makes it bearable.  I just do one cup a day and that should help prepare my uterus to function optimally.   I figure it can't hurt, plus I have a huge bag I ordered and so I better use it up.  I also plan to continue drinking it after to help strengthen my uterus back up after delivery, since I have so much of it.

With Max and Sawyers pregnancies I took a supplement called 5W that is just a 5 week prep.  Its a herbal pill.  This time I just started with Dr. Christophers birth prep herbs.  I think they help for sure and once again it can't really do any harm so why not.  Anything that can help prepare my body so it can do its thing more efficiently is ok with me.

I have been sitting or bouncing on my birthing ball and it feels great.  I feel like she has been in a great position for a long time.  Super low and head almost all the way down.   This just is a great place to sit when I read or have work meetings I need to listen to.  The kids will steal my ball and play with it they love it too.

I have been listening to this podcast called fear free birth and it has so many good positive birth stories.  It gives me ideas on how to approach my birth and new ways to not be afraid of the pain.  I really feel like I will have a good handle on it.  I do not want her to break my water this time.  I have always had them break my water and that is when it got really intense with Sawyer.  So I want it to happen naturally this time.   I also have a lot of good ideas for positions and  things to do during the pressure waves.  I am excited to try them and see what feels good.

I really plan on staying home as long as possible since the hospital is only 8 min away.   We have a big tub in one of our bathrooms. So I will soak in there for a while.  I know that was my favorite part with Sawyer.  I hardly felt any pressure waves with him in the tub.  It also helped me dilate quicker.  It was just so relaxing.  I loved it.  I feel more comfortable in my own home too.

With my job I have been trying to work extra hours to make up for some of the time I will be off.  They are so good to work with me and I have maternity leave set up but I don't want to be off too long because I start to forget things.  Where I work from home, I am just going to take a few full weeks off then I can start working a few hours again.  I am so blessed and grateful for this job and love every part of it.

Needless to say I have been busy trying to keep up with everything and I like it.  It makes time go by faster when I stay busy.  I have tried to plan a lot of things to keep me busy and going places so it will go by even faster.  Then after she is here we can slow way down and rest and recover.  I am thrilled and ecstatic looking forward to her birth and how it will play out.

My no spend experience....

Well here is the update on the December 2017  No spend month.
 I started off great.  I had all of Christmas bought and ready because I was prepared for this.  I did have a few things left to get but they were small things.  I had been planning out meals that I could use our food storage and freezer stuff.  I really wanted to clean out the pantry stuff and it went well for a good 15 days.  That is impressive for me.
I did use a lot of food in our freezer and pantry.  We have had some really good meals out of what we have come up with.  I have started to use more of our wheat as well.  I add wheat flour into everything I make now since I have an endless supply of it.  A lot of things are surprisingly tasty with it.   It makes me feel great to know I am using up stuff I already have.
  I love seeing my freezer getting a little less cluttered.  I really need to defrost it this spring/summer. So this is a great project to have for the next few months.
Going 15 days of not spending anything was a great accomplishment for me.  I am a big impulse buyer so this was a great start.  I don't remember what exactly happened. I think I went to sams club with my husband and we bought some stuff that we didn't really need and didn't qualify as groceries so that is what started it.

I still count it as a success, just not a full success. I didn't make the goal but I did do pretty well for me.  It was an improvement for sure.

So here is what I took from that.....

I have made a chart for this whole year 2018 where you just mark the day off if you didn't spend anything.  If you did spend you leave it blank. I like being able to see it and its a fun challenge to see how many days in a row I can mark it off with a green pen.  I don't count groceries or bills, normal budgeted stuff in it.  This is just extra stuff that I don't really need.  I feel like I am a pretty hard judge on myself so I can be strict. 

I do find that I save up the stuff I want to get until a day that I know I spent on something else I will just say I already don't get to mark it today so I will just buy this too today.  I need to be better at that.  I guess that is good in one way.  I have time to really think about if I really need it and sometimes I take it off my list of things to buy.  I think about why do I want this?  is it just to satisfy my buying want? or is it really a need?   It has helped.

We are really trying to save back up after all of the house remodeling and upgrading.  We need to build our savings back up.  Especially since we have more projects we want to do in the back yard as well.  That is a great thing to motivate me to think about my purchases more.  Do I want this or the basketball court, horse corral in the back yard? 
I also told Max about saving money so we can build a basketball court out back and he likes to remind me to save money when we are at the grocery store. Its cute and he make me accountable.
I am excited about this Less spending year, is what I am calling it.  Since I am making a conscious effort to not spend as much and mark as many green days as I can.  I love using up our freezer and pantry food that is one of my favorite perks about this.  I find it fun to come up with random meals we can use the older food with.

Finally caught up on scrap booking

For years I have been behind on scrapbooking.  It has been a permanent goal on my list for a long time.  I finally was able to catch up on all of them.  Phew!!!.   It feels so good.

I do a few different ones.  One Riley Family ones that will be ours it will stay here at our house.  Then each of the kids have their own.  I put more of their own pictures in them, along with the family trips and stuff.  It works out nice.  Then when they grow up and move out they can take their own and have them to share with their families.  I love looking back at my scrapbooks from when I was little and its fun to compare the kids to how I looked when I was little.

I really like blurb.com, I know I have blogged about this site before but they have upgraded their programs and I love it.  They make it very simple to create a book with a ton of pictures for a reasonable price.

I can usually get a few years in each book.  I try to get between 200-270 pages before the book gets too big.  So that is usually a few years, especially in the kids books.  Not so many in the family book because it has every picture of all the kids.

I can fit so many pictures on each page in these books though so Its awesome.
I am so glad to be caught up on that life long goal.  Now I just go in once a month or so and do a few pages in their books and stay caught up.  Its much easier once you reach this point. I really am going to try to stay caught up.

The kids keep asking when I am going to get another one printed so they can look at the pictures.
I am glad they love looking at them as much as I do.

Kids incentives and rewards

We have been trying all sorts of ways to motivate and reward our kids.  Some work and some dont but this new way I read about has been working like a charm for quite a few months.  I think we started last spring.  So almost a year.  We do tickets.  I went to the dollar store and found some carnival tickets and we use these.  I use just a mason pint jar for their jars.  They decorated their own and it makes it fun.

So they each have their own jar and they earn tickets by doing things like anything nice that I didn't ask them to do.  Picking up extra stuff around the house.  I will also tell them if they do this or do that they can have a set amount of tickets.  Like if they stay in their beds at night and I don't have to tell them to be quiet and go to bed, they get so many. It was worked like a charm.  

I keep a bunch in a bowl that they can earn and put into their jars.  We reuse them.  If they turn in their tickets for something then I put them back in the bowl.  Except if they get some taken away because they were bad sometimes I will rip them up and I think it helps them realize they lost  their tickets.  

I have two different kinds of tickets they are used the same but its just fun to have different kinds.

So some of the things they can turn their tickets in for is $,  or time to watch a movie, if they get 20 then they can choose to go somewhere fun like this jump place we go with all sorts of bounce houses.  They can turn them in for money and go to the dollar store and pick somethings.  

Just this past week I noticed they had a lot in there and they hadn't been turning them in and I suggested that they could turn them in for money.  So they counted them up and they each got $4 each the older kids at least.  It was fun for them to get actual money.  They had a fun time.  Lexi wanted to go to the store and get $1 coloring book.  Max wanted to go get a .25 cent pop.  Sawyer just wanted to put coins in his pocket.  Which he usually looses.  

Its fun to see them get money and what they want to do with it.  They are just starting to ask questions and learn about money and how you get things by buying them.  How everything we bring home we bought.  We earn money by working.... Its hard work.  I think its good for them. 

They actually are pretty motivated by the tickets.  We can bribe them pretty good with them which is nice at times.  I have really loved how simple and yet it works great for our kids.  

Tots Bots Easy fit star Diaper review

Look at those cute printed diapers.  I love them all. 

Its been a long time since I did a diaper review.  I kind of slacked on cloth diapers this past summer with camping and being gone so much plus being sick from pregnancy.  I just didn't have it in me to do it some weeks.
I am full blown cloth again even night.  I haven't done night for a really long time because Sawyer has super ammonia smelling urine and so it makes it hard with night diapers.  I really am trying to save some extra money lately.   I will write more about this later.
So I pulled out my tots bots bamboozled for night again and got them super duper cleaned again so we could start fresh.  I then started looking at other tots bots diapers.  Why?!?  I have no idea.

I just like looking at diapers and new things they have.  I think I found some newborn ones.  I wanted some AIO newborn diapers since I sold all of my easy ones that I used with Sawyer because I didn't really like them that much.  I found some good reviews on the tots bots newborn ones.  Then kept searching.

I"m a sucker I know.  haha.
I have really liked what I have used  so far.  They are super cute and easy to put on.  They don't absorb a ton so I just put a thirsties hemp small insert in the pocket they have.  I really like how thin they are for an AIO.

They have this really long tongue that you can either just fold on top or tuck back into the pocket.  I found tucking is better for cleaning, its easier to spray it off with just the one layer.
So I tuck.  I hated pocket diapers because you had to tuck but these ones its all one piece so its easy to tuck and there is plenty of room inside the pocket to fit it in.






I have really liked these diapers for a quick easy fit.  I still like my prefolds and covers the best. They are just easier to clean off.  These are great for dad though.  They are one of my favorite AIO I have tried.  Plus they are super cute.

A new way to do New Years Resolutions

In one of my podcast that I have been listening to recently they talked about new years resolutions and we all know that 90% of them don't actually work out.  That is just normal.  These ladies had a different idea and I really liked it.
They were talking about just picking a word or a phrase for that year like "rest"  or "discover"  Then they take that word and apply it into each area they are wanting to improve.  Discover new ways to live healthy or lose weight or Discover a new food.  Discover new friends.   They liked an idea better to focus on.  They used prayer and scriptures to pick there theme of the year.  I really liked this idea and I want to try this.

They also said make a list of things you want to do more of and a list of things you want to do less of.  Make that part of your resolutions. Really live life and don't just react to it.  Make sure you are deciding where your time goes and don't let life decide for you.  I love this because sometimes we do let life decide what happens or how we react to what life gives us.  We need to have a plan and be prepared to continue on with life.

I love making goals and writing them down I have been pretty good at doing that since we got married.  I didn't always do all of them but I really tried and I would see my list there next to my desk or bed and it would be a daily reminder of what I had wanted to accomplish that year.  So I like this idea of a phrase and then write a list of things I want to do more of.  I know go to temple will be one of those.  I love going but with little kids its hard to have time to go. I used to trade time with my sister watching kids so we could each go.  I know its on my list to go weekly when all of my kids are in school.  That is a ways off for me though so I need to find an alternative plan until that time has come.

Then to make a list of things I want to do less of is spend money or spend less time on my phone mindlessly reading things of no importance.  I also want to eat out less..... which in turn means cooking more.  I have always had a hard time with cooking meals consistently.  My mom was amazing at doing this.  We always had a great pretty balanced meal.  I go in streaks where I will cook for a few weeks really good then I won't for multiple reasons.   Now that I am pregnant and getting farther along the less I want to cook.  My motivation to cook now is because I want to make sure that we are eating healthier food and know what is actually in our food.

So I have made a list of things I want to do more of and less of and some actual goals too.  I also chose "Back to Basics"  for the theme.  I want to simplify so many things and I feel like that can be summed up in back to basics.  I want to apply that to all things in my life.  I will do random post that will help me be accountable for how I am using that phrase this year.

I am excited for a new year and a fresh new start, even though everyday is a fresh start but the new year is a great time to have some long term goals as well.