My new ModMum baby sling!

A few days ago I received the ModMum sling I won from the MomViews.net Scavenger Bloghunt Party! There were so many fabulous prizes that if you took the time to participate you were more than likely going to win something. (I bet you're really kicking yourself now for not entering.) Here I am enjoying the sling with Suzi:

These are the things I love about the sling, which is the Taylor sling in case you want to know:

1) Unique pattern and high-quality fabric. The sling is soft, and the cute dot pattern reverses to green on the other side. If you can only afford one sling, this one is perfect because it matches most any outfit! All their nine styles of slings are reversible, and the two layers of fabric make it extra supportive--a high priority for a sling which is holding my precious daughter!

2) Generous pouch to allow for front riders. Suzi (7 months) is still a front rider and when I put her on my hip she straightens her legs and tries to escape. I'm hoping this is just a phase. The sling I used before, while fabulous, was not as deep as this sling and she grew until her legs wouldn't fit. The ModMum sling is deeper, not just bigger; it's roomy enough for Suzi and still snug enough in the shoulder for me.

3) Best of all, I can breastfeed her in this! Woo-hoo! I used to enjoy breastfeeding Suzi in her other sling, but she grew large enough her head couldn't lay back into the sling. I know you can breastfeed an older baby in the hip position, but she isn't ready for that yet. This sling is deep enough to accommodate her whole body, which saves a lot of tears and screaming (Suzi, not me!) in the grocery store when she gets hungry. Please see picture below of me discreetly breastfeeding her at a birthday party. (The blanket is there because I had a brain cramp and forgot to wear my Bella Band.)


Since I am a Southern Belle and we are big on thank-you notes, here's my virtual one:

Dear MomViews and ModMum,

Thank you so much for this awesome sling! We love it. I already had some slings and couldn't afford to buy another one even though Suzi needed a different one to meet her needs. We're so happy to have this one from ModMum. I've always thought a baby sling is the ultimate baby present because you're not just giving a fashion statement... You're giving a new mommy the gift of closeness with her child. As she carries her baby close to her heart, she is forming the cornerstone of their future relationship. There's a lot of love in those slings.

Love,
Jenny and Suzi Harmon

Suzi's First Christmas

I'm finally posting a video of Suzi's first Christmas. The first part is Suzi playing the keyboard Christmas Eve at my mom's, and the second is her getting into her stocking from Santa. Mama Susie, Grandma and Grandpa came over to watch Suzi receive her first Christmas morning gifts. As you may have predicted, she cared more about the paper; she especially enjoyed paper of the tissue variety, but there were a few gifts she liked. Her favorite was the amazing Learn-Around Playground. Jordan and I played with it for 15 minutes while she was still asleep! It has three balls you push down a chute and it tells you what color the ball was. (We were pretty impressed until we noticed the balls were different sizes.) She also loves these maracas (a la Peanut Butter Jelly Time) and we ordered her a tambourine to match. Aiden can come over and they can start a band!

We now have so many toys for Suzi that we're going to put some of them away and cycle them in later. That way they'll be new to her! (P.S. That works for dogs and cats too!)

My next post will be about the ModMum baby sling I won from the MomViews.net Holiday Scavenger hunt! (Remember how I told you to enter?)

Yay for Christmas!

Jordan and I are home from work until after Christmas! We spent today doing laundry/cleaning and also went to our storage unit. We brought back the stable for our nativity scene and I set it up. Here's Suzi getting her first good look at it. It'll still be a year or two before she starts rearranging the people with her gummy little baby fingers. I can't wait!


I wasn't planning to bake much for Christmas because I'm trying to lose a little of my Suzi weight and certainly don't want a bunch of cookies lying around. However, my mom gave me this apron as an early Christmas gift. It's a special apron: she made it for my Grandmama Ivey (dad's mom), who used it for years and when she died it went back to my mom. She died when I was in third grade and it was the hardest loss I've ever experienced. I plan to make low-fat cookies or something in the apron tomorrow, but it makes me happy just to put it on and I wanted to be sure I got to use it this Christmas, so here I am, stirring my healthy microwave meal. (Please notice how clean the kitchen is in the background.) Tomorrow there will be cookies.

I can't actually diet yet because I'm still breastfeeding, but I've decided to stop eating so much junk food. I'm not sure how an 8-pound baby managed to put, well, way more than that on me, but she did. I still have about 15 Suzi pounds to lose because I just haven't gotten serious about it yet. It's been a week or two since I decided to lay off the junk food, and already I'm sliding right into jeans that were recently too small. Yay!

Thought for the day: I know when I eat a cupcake it's going "straight to my thighs," but I didn't realize if I didn't eat the cupcake it would come straight off my thighs! It's like magic!

Excellent day for sewing

Today I did a lot of sewing, mostly on little Christmas gifts. My mom taught me how and eventually I'll post pictures and tell more about them, but not now. There are people getting them for Christmas who may be reading. I also worked on Suzi's quilt. The quilt has been a long and sometimes tedious process but I've enjoyed it, except for mitering the corners on the binding. The fabric is so thick in the corners that I'm having trouble getting it folded in correctly, and I'm not even sure I'm doing that right! The book I'm using simply said "fold the fabric in to make mitered corners." (Wow, thanks a bunch!) So if anybody has tips for me, I'd love to hear them. The corner I've already attempted to finish wouldn't fold into a 90 degree angle, so it came out puckered and won't lay flat. If I do the others and they end up better, I'll probably rip that one out and do it over. I always keep a seam ripper handy because I have to use it every 15 minutes! Hopefully Suzi won't hold uneven corners against me as this is my first real quilt. I'm hoping to finish it in a couple of days and I'll post pictures then!

Here are our latest pictures of Suzi. She's sporting her adorable BabyLegs in red and white stripes, which I think are my favorites so far. She has about ten pairs but these are perfect for Christmas! She went to our local Hallmark store with her grandparents wearing these and one of the ladies told her she looked like an ornament! Ha ha! She kind of does.

Happy Anniversary!!!

Three years ago today, Jordan and I got married! It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but then again it seems like I've known him forever. No long blog tonight, just a picture...

I love you Jordy!

Daddy teaches Suzi to play ball

Suzi received this Taggie Ball as a gift when she was too little to appreciate it, but I knew she'd play with it one day! Thanks Aunt Laura and Uncle Calvin! She loves it! This video is a bit jumpy but it was taken with our digital camera, not the camcorder.

Jordan was happy she wanted to play this game with him because she's taken to saying "mamamamama" when she's upset and rarely says dada. (I wonder if she thinks mama means milk.) She's got a cold right now, probably thanks to the sudden drop in temperature over the weekend. Her nose is snotty and that makes it super hard to feed her because she can't breathe and suck at the same time! Poor little thing. I hope she's better in time for Christmas.

Don't puke on my leg and tell me it's raining

Wow, we had a busy weekend. We had my friend's rehearsal dinner Friday night, which Suzi slept all the way through, thank goodness. I don't think she even knows we went anywhere. Then Saturday morning we had rehearsal for the Christmas Cantata at church because Jordan, Suzi and I were the holy family. There wasn't much for us to do and Suzi was getting irritated, so I gave her a few Gerber Graduates banana puffs. This was great until one slipped back into her throat and made her gag and she threw them all up on my leg. It was so nasty.

We figured they had costumes for us in the closet at church, but when we went to look for them all they had was two ill-fitting, smelly old choir robes from the 70's and a couple pieces of fabric to tie onto our heads. This didn't suit our fancy because I've never been Mary, ever, and I wanted it to seem as real as possible. So Jordan and Suzi and I got some fabric and made new costumes with a lot of help from my mom. (We had no idea what we were doing.) I learned a lot about following a pattern, something I was scared to death of before. This was before we had to leave to buy me something to wear to my friend's wedding reception which was that same evening. Then we came back and finished the costumes after the reception. Here's how they turned out:

I'm grinning like an idiot because my mom jumped up from the pew in the middle of "Silent Night," ran to the front of the church and took our picture, with the flash I might add, and it surprised me. We're going to dress back up and pose for a better picture later. It may even be our Christmas card next year. Baby Jesus was a bit high-spirited after having to wait quietly in the vestibule for 20 minutes, but she did her best and I was proud of her. You see the little lamb to my left in the background? That's Suzi's boyfriend, Aiden. He was so cute and I noticed his mommy had shiny eyes while she was watching this.

I enjoyed being Mary although it wasn't perfect. It made me think about what the real Mary must have gone through, and now I'm thinking I want to go rent the Nativity movie that came out last Christmas and watch it. I wanted to see it last year but didn't get a chance.

The good news is we made the costumes one-size-fits-most, so all future Marys and Josephs will have nice costumes to wear at PPC. No more smelly choir robes.

Gosh I'm so excited about Christmas.

Cleaning night!

I meant to write a long, nosy story on my blog tonight, but instead I had three cups of coffee and cleaned for about five hours. The house looks great though--I even vacuumed, so if anyone wants to come over now would be a great time! The house has to look awesome for Christmas morning, because my parents and my grandma are going to come see Baby Suzi open her gifts from Santa. I do want my grandma to be impressed.

I also have a cute picture. My mom sent it to me, and she said it was Suzi "singing to Santa." This Santa, by the way, is the one from Polar Express and he has the bell in one hand and if you squeeze the other hand he says "remember--the spirit of Christmas lies in your heart." Suzi loves him!

Next time I may talk about why women shouldn't share breast pumps, an issue that's been bothering me lately. We'll see. Good night!

My favorite pictures of Suzi

Suzi recently turned 6 months old and I decided to look back through pictures and pick out my favorites. These past 6 months have been the happiest of my life, and here are a few highlights.In our new, almost-finished house with an almost-finished baby in my belly

Meeting her boyfriend, Aiden. Yep, he was pretty excited.

Making fun of how Daddy sleeps




First football game. Nana and Papa were happy :-)


We love our beautiful daughter!

The best way to spread Christmas cheer is...

Becoming an elf and having your picture taken with your baby elf and Santa. I had such a good time I may quit working at Jennie G's and see if Jordan and Suzi want to move to the North Pole. This was at the Lights Before Christmas at AnMed Health in the Women's and Children's Hospital. You can't see it in the picture but I'm wearing tights (one leg is green, the other red) and curly toed shoes with bells on the tips. I loved the costume except the tights were too short because I guess I'm kind of big for an elf. I dressed Suzi as a baby elf and she had a hat too but I thought it might make her cry if I put it on her; she wasn't in that great of a mood anyway. It was amazing how many children were there, and it was so much fun watching them get excited over Santa. I got to answer their questions about elves, such as "Why can't we see the tops of your ears?" and "Are you going back to the North Pole with Santa tonight?"

Being there reminded me of something I read in one of my favorite books, Thomas Kincade's Come Let Us Adore Him which features his beautiful Christmas paintings and reflections about the season. A lot of people think the Santa (material) part of Christmas is sinful, but he says:

Each of the Christmas events we may be tempted to think of as worldly and wrong, in the light of Christ, point to a purpose much greater. They are the physical, tangible realities we celebrate each year that help our hearts understand the deeper, spiritual truths those traditions represent. When I was a child, I saw Christmas only through the eyes of a child. It was my joy to play with my toys and with my friends on the day when all the world seemed right. As a parent, now, I get a glimpse of the joy our Heavenly Father feels when He gives good gifts to His children.
(pp 10-11)

Suzi won't understand the idea of a gift this Christmas and probably not next year either, but when she finally does, I can't wait to tuck her into bed on Christmas Eve and hear her asking "Is it Christmas yet?" every half hour from midnight on. I remember lying in bed under my multicolored hearts comforter with butterflies in my stomach, completely unable to sleep. Would I get the Little Miss Makeup I'd asked Santa for? Games? Candy? What else? It's this first love of Christmas that over the years grows into an understanding of God's gift and a spiritual appreciation of what Christmas means.

...On that note, let's go watch The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and have some hot chocolate.

Suzi's Christmas Pictures

We went to visit Jordan's parents over the weekend and got Suzi's picture made at the best photography place, The Picture People. I love them because they take your pictures, let you look at them about an hour later, then have the ones you picked out all printed and ready to go in 30 minutes or so. The photographers are good with babies too. Suzi was in a bad mood but you can't really tell, can you? I don't blame her because we had her all dressed up in tights, new Robeez shoes, bloomers, and a dress. Not to mention a bow in her hair. Then we changed her outfit and took some more pictures--I'd have been irritable too! I don't want to brag but she looked so darn adorable that strangers were stopping to look at her through the window.

On a different subject, tonight I learned to make Christmas wreaths. I made one for a friend, one for my mom and one for us. Ours is on the front door and it looks ten times better than the small jingle bell wreath we had out before. I'm trying to learn to make more things and so far I can make wreaths and quilts. My quilt isn't quite finished though, because I still have to do the binding. It's for Suzi's Christmas so I really need to hurry. (Pictures of quilt to follow.) The next thing I'd like to learn to make is a cute sexy apron. You know, a June Cleaver apron but with a bit more oomph. Probably red, but maybe pink, in a stripe or polka dot print with a ruffle. If I had one of these aprons I could go in the kitchen and make chocolate chip cookies or chocolate pie (the two things I'm good at). I could even try something new and even if I screwed it up at least I'd look cute doing it.