It’s time for me to accept that I can’t blog it all (I can’t do it all either, but I learned that lesson already thankfully). I want to write detailed how-to posts that share the things I know or have experienced (like my Once A Month Mom post) but they take forever to do and my babies are constantly growing. I don’t want to look back and kick myself for these huge gaps in our recorded life.

And so this next week is devoted to catch-up posts. They won’t be interesting to everyone, and that’s okay. They’ll show you a little bit of what we’ve been doing the last few months, and hopefully blogging about our life again will spur me to get out my camera more often and record those moments. I’m active on Instagram, but there’s nothing like a good dSLR shot. Plus I’ve been watching dSLR videos of T1 as a baby and the iphone just can’t measure up to the beautiful quality that my 5dmkii can capture. I want to make sure we have footage of both of our kids over time and writing things for my blog helps me remember to keep it up. Another thing I want to do a better job at? Capturing daily life with my dSLR! It’s fun to see what we did for Christmas, but what about a regular Tuesday? I think this week might be the right time to do another Day In The Life post so T1 can look back and see what life was like right before T2 joined our family.

Soon I’ll be sharing photos of two kids. TWO KIDS. I’m so excited for T2 to get here.

I know I’ve done several sponsored reviews lately, so I want to clarify that this is me writing a post about something I paid for and chose to do voluntarily. The people at Once A Month Mom have no idea who I am (other than the two payments I’ve sent their way over the past 6 months!) and I am writing this only because I know it’s something a lot of people are curious about and I wanted to share my experience! Just a note, in this post I frequently refer to Whole Foods grocery store and the Whole Foods menu from Once a Month Mom (OAMM). I tried to clarify each time, but I didn’t want people feeling confused!

A glimpse of my freezer filled with Whole Foods and Paleo menu items before baby comes. All made entirely from scratch!

It’s 5:11pm on a Monday as I sit down to write this post. Can you hold on a minute while I go get a made-from-scratch Chicken Pot Pie in the oven?

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5:15pm and I’m back! And that includes yet another trip to the restroom (I’ve lost count of the number of trips I take on a daily basis at this point in my pregnancy). That short interval for preparing dinner is why I love freezer meal cooking. I know there are all sorts of pins floating around Pinterest that describe how to DIY this process, but I didn’t want to spend my time making grocery lists or calculating chopping amounts. That’s why I love the Once A Month Mom site. They feature menus filled with breakfast/lunch/dinner items made with seasonal ingredients to fit all sorts of diets including Whole Foods, Paleo, Vegetarian, and Gluten/Dairy Free. So far I’ve done two different menus, the Whole Foods menu in September, and the Paleo menu in January.

Want to know why you should give them your money? Because other than the chopping/cooking/wrapping, all of the work is done for you. They put out new menus with new recipes each month, they test out all of the recipes several times to figure out how to best adapt them for the freezer, and each of the menus includes Recipe Cards (with initial cooking instructions, freezing/wrapping instructions, and defrosting/reheating instructions), a Grocery List, Instructions (this feature is indispensable as they’ve broken down the best order to make all of the recipes in), and Labels. All of these are created using spreadsheets and you plug in the number of people you want to cook for, and all of the recipe cards, instructions, chopping lists, grocery lists, etc, are updated with the correct amounts. You pay $8 for this and save yourself hours of time.

I have known about this for a long time but chose to wait until we had a larger kitchen and a bigger freezer to store it all in. You can find posts where women have made it work in small freezers, but I have a lot more counter space here in Palo Alto than we did in our apartment in Hyde Park, Chicago. We also were able to find a used stand-alone freezer to keep in the garage.

Budget

I think the question I get most frequently about this is “What does it cost?”. I’ll tell you what I paid for both rounds that I did, but keep a few things in mind. First, I live in Palo Alto which is a pretty expensive area of the country to be in. So maybe it will cost less for you. Second, I like to buy organic fruits/vegetables and “happy” meat. I was a bit more budget conscious with the second menu (the Paleo one) and decided to buy non-organic vegetables at Sprouts grocery store so the price was a bit lower, but with the first menu I bought almost everything from Whole Foods grocery store and the Farmer’s Market. Third, the cost will vary based on what you already have in your kitchen/pantry. I did the Whole Foods menu right after we moved and had to buy incredibly basic stuff like flour and olive oil because we didn’t have it on hand. Read more →

Have you pinned these pouches on Pinterest yet? I’ve been buying a similar non-reusable product at Costco filled with sweetened applesauce (apple juice concentrate is used as a form of sugar to make it sweeter than plain applesauce would be), and once I got it into my head that I could save them and somehow use a funnel to refill them. Fail. I’m guessing the same thought must have crossed the minds of Maggie and Melissa because they created this nifty little product called Little Green Pouches. Little Green Pouches are plastic reusable pouches with a spout on the side and a zipper on the top.

One of the reasons I so badly wanted to fill my own pouches is that I’d really like to feed T1 applesauce and yogurt when we are running errands and he wants a snack, but it’s tough (impossible?) to find things that aren’t sweetened in some way. The yogurt I buy is full-fat and plain, and the stuff they make for kids is usually low-fat and sugar-sweetened (because once you remove the fat no one wants to eat the yogurt). Now I have the freedom to choose whatever yogurt brand/flavor I like, and I can browse the shelves looking for the smallest amount of sugar per portion size in the applesauce jars.

Cleaning them out is a breeze. I open the zipper top, remove the cap, and do a quick rinse of the bag. Then I place it in the dishwasher with the spout stuck on the tongs on the top shelf.

We did baby led weaning with T1 and plan on doing the same with T2, and that’s when these pouches are really going to be indispensable. I can make purees and feed our little one vegetables on the go, and I’m thinking about buying several boxes of Little Green Pouches and creating a freezer stash that I can pull from each night so that there’s something to easily grab during the day.

I have a confession: I like using these pouches even more than T1 does! It’s really convenient to keep applesauce and yogurt stocked in the fridge in a grab-n-go container that I can take with me as we run errands or when I’m running late in the morning. My favorite snack is yogurt in the Little Green Pouch accompanied by these date-sweetened squares that you can find in the bulk section at Whole Foods.

I’ve only had one setback so far with these pouches… I sent one with T1 to his school and the teachers threw it away because they had never seen one before! I explained to them that it was reusable and asked that they please not do that again. If you’re going to be using these around other people be sure to clarify that you would like to have it back. Once the pouches become more common (as they should) I don’t think that will happen as often. I posted the photo above on Instagram and one of the commenters said that her pouches came apart at the zippered top. I’ve had mine for a few weeks and put them through the dishwasher several times and this hasn’t happened to me. I’m thinking she got a bad batch and if this happened to me I would use the Contact Us link at Little Green Pouches as my guess is that every so often there are issues with the production line. They need to know so they can make sure that doesn’t keep happening!

Now that I’m down to just three pouches, instead of the four that come in each box, I think I’m going to have to put in an order for another. Thank you to Little Green Pouches for sending me this complimentary box. You can follow them on Facebook where they frequently host giveaways. I guarantee you’ll see these pouches popping up every so often in my Instagram feed from now on as they’re a normal part of our every-day routine!

I’ve been trying to sit and get this post written for weeks now, but it was always pushed aside because other things felt more important. You know, bills, emails, taxes, birth prep, etc. I know I’ll regret it if I don’t write about my pregnancy before I write about the birth though, especially if this baby I’m carrying is a girl because I think someday she will want to know what it was like for me to carry her around in my womb and birth her.

I only have about 15 minutes to write this post, and then I need to go pick up T1 from school (I decided to finish it up later in the evening because it wasn’t possible to say all I wanted in 15 minutes). That is what life is like after the first child comes, never enough time for anything. I couldn’t possibly have imagined how much more difficult and trying pregnancy would be with a toddler/preschooler in the house. But I’m getting ahead of myself and I want to start at the beginning.

We knew we wanted T1 to have a sibling, but weren’t sure what we wanted the timing to be. Our plans were for me to go back to school, bust my bum getting in shape for our trip to Thailand where I would frolic on the beach in skimpy swimwear and delight in my accomplishments over the year, and then start working toward expanding our family. Instead I found myself showing a pregnancy test to my friend Paige in May of 2012 and asking her how this was all going to work. Her response was exactly what I needed to hear: “The decision is made for you Jenna. Now all you have to do is move forward.” My graduation gift to That Husband was an etch-a-sketch with the words “T2 February 2013″ scrawled across the board. (And yes, I really did write T2 on it!)

With T1 I seem to have been sick for about a weekend, with a bit of nausea off and on throughout the first trimester. This pregnancy was much different, with all-day all-night sickness from about 6 1/2 weeks to around the 17 week mark. I wouldn’t describe it as morning sickness, not in the traditional sense, as I never felt like I wanted to throw up. A better description would be 24/7 hypoglycemia, which made me feel like I had to eat all day and every night (which is difficult when you feel so awful that even heating up a cup-of-noodles feels overwhelming (yes, I ate that cheap ramen stuff, that’s how bad things were)). Running a half-marathon at the 10-week mark while barely able to get out of bed each day will forever remain one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. I was bed-ridden for the entire weekend after the race was over. During this time I lived away from TH and T1 and it was lonely and miserable. I could barely feed myself, I had to take extra classes to meet my graduation deadline, and there was no one to turn to at the end of the day to help me feel like it was all going to be okay. There were a lot of nights where I cried myself to sleep. At the 12 week mark I was sure that the sickness would reside, little did I know I still had several weeks to go. Read more →

A friend emailed me asking if I had heard of The Essential Homebirth Guide after she had spent some time on Amazon looking at upcoming book releases. I thought it sounded like something I could use before T2 comes in a few weeks since I’m giving birth at home again, so I did what bloggers do and emailed the authors asking if they’d be interested in sending me a free copy in exchange for a review on my blog. They said yes, put a copy in the mail, and I had finished the entire thing two days after I received it. Considering I average around one book per month this is pretty impressive (I couldn’t put it down!).

The book is written by Jane Drichta, CPM and Jodilyn Owen, CPM who run the website Essential Midwifery. In the United States if you’re using a midwife you’re likely going to be working with either a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) or a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM). I used a CPM with my first birth, but was able to find a CNM for the second birth (she delivers at a hospital for most of her births and does a small number of homebirths as well, which is rare). I don’t necessarily think one is better than the other, but working with a CNM means there is a higher likelihood that insurance will cover at least part of the cost! I went into more detail about the differences between a CPM and a CNM here.

The Essential Homebirth Guide is an incredibly apt title for this book because I kept looking over to That Husband saying “Why hasn’t anyone written this book yet? It’s everything women giving birth at home need to know.” This book is a practical description of the many factors that need to be addressed when giving birth at home. I could tell that the authors had worked hard to give evidence-based information, and the amount of advice they give is kept at a minimum. The section on Group Beta Strep illustrated this really well for me. This is a test I have waived for both pregnancies, and it’s a frustrating/complicated area because a woman gets the test at 37 weeks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she will have Group B Strep at 40 weeks. If she is having a hospital birth and tests positive at 37 weeks she will automatically get an antibiotic treatment when she delivers (even though technically she can test positive at 37 weeks and be negative at 40 weeks). It also means that a woman can test negative at 37 weeks but actually be positive at 40 weeks. The Essential Homebirth Guide lays all of this out very clearly, and also helps women understand what it means to be GBS positive, what it might mean for their homebirth plans, how GBS can affect the baby, and preventative measures you can take to keep GBS colonization under control.

One of the struggles I’ve had when navigating the world of homebirth is that the amount of unbiased reliable information is very small. All midwives have a particular bias that needs to be measured when advice is given, and googling things usually takes you to forums where women are giving out plenty of opinions without much evidence to back them up. In Chapter Nine: The Big Ten, I was able to read up on things like Anemia (something my midwife is watching closely with me), Rhesus Factor (I’m positive and decided to get the shot with both pregnancies) and Gestational Diabetes (a huge hurdle for women planning a homebirth because testing positive could mean that you will risk out from your midwife’s care and have to transfer to a hospital). As diabetes and large babies were discussed I read “Ultrasound has a known error rate of 13% when it comes to estimating fetal weight.” At the end of that sentence I’m pointed to a study by Nahum and Stanislaw titled “Ultrasonographic Prediction of Term Birth Weight: How Accurate Is It?” published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. This is one of the many reasons why I think this book is so awesome.

Other favorite chapters included Chapter Five:”She Said, I Said, They Said — Communication, which discusses how to talk to your midwife and how to talk to your family about your choice to give birth at home, and Chapter Ten: Labor and Birth at Home, which I need to go back and review once again because it’s time for me to start assembling towels and checking to make sure the birth tub doesn’t have any holes! There are also multiple appendices that discuss Questions to Ask During an Interview and Further Reading for the Homebirth Family.

I plan on giving a copy of The Essential Homebirth Guide to my midwife and I hope she starts recommending it to her other homebirth clients as well. If you’re giving birth at home I would rate this book as essential as Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, and I can see it being incredibly useful to women giving birth in freestanding birth centers as well. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon right now.