for your consideration

this week i am thankful for:

1. making it through the first month with my sanity [mostly] intact.

2. my considerate husband, who always holds the door for me, which is more than i can say for some men when i am walking into the bank with a baby in my arms.

3. a well-stocked freezer. brian isn't doing much in the way of cooking and fast food gets old very quickly.

success!

brian got a promotion!

so proud of you, honey!

these four walls are driving me insane. fresh air needed. now.

this week i am thankful for:

1. mil, who is so wonderfully supportive and encouraging and fun, and even babysat monday night so brian and i could get out and see a movie. there is life after children after all.

2. brian, for giving me time-outs when i need them.

3. mommy + me network. it's nice to be somewhere where the baby's screams aren't a bother, and where other women are going through the same things i am. plus, it gets me out of the house.

happy birthday

to the wonderful man i am lucky enough to call my husband, whom my daughter is lucky enough to call her father. i love you, sweetie.

wedding part ii

after taking all those pictures we headed up the hill to our reception. boy were we excited - we were finally married! i was on cloud 9 and brian just could not believe it. married! i was mrs. stensler! pretty amazing if you ask me. when we got to the clubhouse, one the catering staff met us outside to see if we wanted any particular drink to be waiting at our table for us. i certainly wasn't going to pass up a drink on my wedding day so i ordered myself a beer. brian declined anything. i took one look at his awestruck, semi-shell-shocked face... and ordered him a beer as well.


the dj started playing "center field" and we followed our bridal party in to our reception. i had gotten the garden wedding that i had always hoped for, but i wanted to incorporate brian's love of baseball as well. "center field" seemed like such a fun thing to walk in to. "put me in, coach!" then we got down to business: FOOD. it was lunchtime and we had just gotten married, so we were HUNGRY. and man was there a lot of food! we had a big buffet with three different entrees and eight different salads.


jimmy, alice, paul, kerry, brian, me, ed, jackie, dave, and kirsten

we had asked the photographer to pull us away during lunch for some additional photos, so we wouldn't miss out on socializing with our guests. unfortunately he didn't and i'm not sure why not. the upshot was that we got to eat at least. i was famished and scarfed down a bunch of food but brian was too nervous to eat much of anything and didn't even touch his beer.


my beautiful bridesmaids jackie, alice, kerry, and kirsten


those boys! dave, ed, brian, paul, and jimmy




brian wanted to shoot our photographer by this point.

after we took some more pictures we went back inside. it was time for the fun stuff! we got to cut our beautiful cake - with a baseball on top, just for brian. (our tables were also "named" for different ballparks instead of just numbers, and our favors were small bags of jelly bellies and baseball gumballs.)




and man was it ever yummy. chocolate with chocolate raspberry filling and vanila buttercream frosting. delicious. and there was no smashing in the faces either. my makeup and i thanked brian for his restraint.


we danced our first dance to eric heatherly's "swimming in champagne." it was so nice to have a moment together with no one else vying for our attention. we both agreed that our first dance was our favorite part of the reception.


then, sadly, it was time to go. we were both so tired from all the excitement and activity of the day, but we were having so much fun with our guests that we didn't want to go. but we still had to. our guests saw us off in a shower of rose petals and then we hopped into brian's truck, which had been detailed and then decorated by the boys for the occasion.


we were married! it was off to spend our wedding night at the pacifica beach resort hotel, and then in a couple days we were off to our honeymoon in aruba!

tired.

nothing very blogworthy this week. i'm sleep-deprived and on a weirder schedule than i've ever been on in my life. i want to get a little sewing done but i'm thinking that isn't happening in this life, at least not anytime soon. i'm trying to get the baby announcements out in the mail. hannah eats, sleeps, poops, and repeats. i am not sure how many diapers we are going through each day but it is a ridiculous amount and i am not loving the impact on our bank account nor the landfill. she has had two baths in her lifetime so far, countless car trips, and a fair number of visitors. so because of her, this week i am thankful for a lot more than three things. i'm thankful for a lot more than three people. but i'll stick to my self-imposed rules - here are my three things i am thankful for this week:

1. that we are able to afford a new car. the pt just had not been working for brian for a long time and with his back issues we were pretty much at a breaking point with that car. and then we had the baby, and the car seat pretty much did not fit in the backseat: brian had to scoot his seat forward, put the seat in or take it out, and then scoot his seat back into position. but i swear, the next new car we get is going to be mine.

2. my best girl alice, who has been here this week helping us with the baby. she loves her niece and loves taking care of her, which has given me a chance to catch up on some sleep (which will likely be lost again as soon as she goes home). we've been taking care of wedding stuff and chatting and being girls together, which has been so nice. i only wish she lived closer.

3. a perfectly normal, healthy baby. her weight was good at her checkup this morning and our other concerns were basically unfounded. the worst thing she has going on right now is a bout of diaper rash.

baby thankfulness

this week i am thankful for:

1. my beautiful, healthy kiddo. i can't say how happy she is because those rare baby smiles, i guess they're just gas for the next couple weeks. other than that... we're so in love with her. her skin is so soft, i just want to touch her and kiss her everywhere. i could rub her little belly forever. and that skin is so loose, kind of like old man skin, that she has like 12 chins and i love them all. she makes the funniest faces and the silliest sounds, little sighs in her sleep and baby farts and burps and grunts and these chirpy little squeaks. it's like we birthed a menagerie instead of a human child. she doesn't know what to do with herself when she gets the hiccups. she had them last night when she spit up for the first time. i put her on my shoulder and rubbed her back, and she turned her head and stared at me wide-eyed with her mouth hanging open, and i just about died of happiness.

2. my husband, who continues to prove that he is the world's greatest man alive. we all know that i could not have made it through labor without him. i also could not have made it through this past week without him either. he is the one who has been folding me into his arms at 3a when i break down crying because i can't get the baby to sleep. he is the one who cuddles the baby for 2 hours after i feed her so i can rest. he is the one who pushed me in the wheelchair to hannah's 2-day doctor appointment, because my belly hurt so bad that i could not walk from here to kingdom come to find where in the world pediatrics might be hiding. he is my rock, my shelter, my safe place, and i love him so much.

3. mil, who came and took care of both of us this week. my mother very suddenly and abruptly left to go home the night before i got out of the hospital. we had been counting on her help, and then suddenly she is telling me this. i sat in my hospital bed and sobbed and felt so helpless. brian said, my mother will help us. and she did. even though she doesn't cook and isn't very domestic, she did laundry for us, made lunches and dinners for us, left us a huge bowl of fruit salad when she went home (which has since been devoured). she was a third pair of hands at all of hannah's myriad (okay, only three, but it felt like a billion) appointments because she was losing too much weight, and we needed those extra hands. it's not that i doubted her desire or ability to help. i'm not sure what it was with me. but she sure stepped up and for that i am grateful.