Love me some ABC's

I stumbled upon this abecedarium from My Outdoor Alphabet, I believe they are all by Seth Neilson, and I just adored some of the images.  They have several different alphabet's available with more to come.  You can buy them from their website http://wasa.bigcartel.com/.

C is for Compass

 

N is for North Star

Y is for Yellowstone

 

 

 

K is for Kickstand



 

 

 

Count to Twelve!

First, I did not come up with this concept, it came from the website genkienglish.com, they focus on teaching English as a foreign language, mostly in Japan.  Anyways, I had been thinking about teaching a little class on numbers for my moms group when I stumbled upon this idea:

1 -----> 12 -----> 31 -----> 60

Teach numbers 1-12

• Each of these numbers has it's own unique name.  
• This might also be a good time to start referencing the time since you now have all the hours of the day memorized.

Teach numbers 13-31

• These numbers now begin to follow a set pattern (teens, twenties, thirties, etc).
• This number range allows you to "sneak" in some calendar time by pointing out that no month has more than 31 days.

Teach numbers 32-60

• Now you can count to 60 which is the number of minutes in an hour.

Teach numbers 61-100

• I haven't gotten this far with Jeffrey, but I think the next set I would do is 100.  That is how many pennies are in a dollar and it will naturally lead into more in depth discussions on fractions and percentages.

My Pintrest pictures

Here I am again posting pictures on my blog for pintrest, stupidly I forgot to save the links to give credit for the original originator of the idea for the nail polish and workbench.

This here is a beer fridge under a wine rack.  I don't know that we'll need wine rack storage but we could really use something like that for Jason's beer.  Perhaps a wine fridge would be good so we could put some of the larger beers in it as well, guess it would just depend on what we end up getting.  I really love refridgerated drawers like that though, always wanted to have one in my bedroom for pepsi and hiding the "good" ice cream in.

Stupid blog ate my picture!  Dang you auto save.  It was a crib with a tension rod between it and the wall creating about a 2 foot space for kids to have a cozy reading nook.

 These are marshmallows dipped in frosting with tootsie rolls on top - cute for a spa party or party for your little girl.

Workbench made from a nightstand.

http://feedingmykid.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/fireman-dress-up-tutorial/
This is a woman's shirt with ribbon and patches.  It also has velcro instead of buttons.  There is an iron-on ribbon similar to this that is about $8.  I'm thinking that or some duct tape would be fine.

Travel

  I really like these letters; I'm kinda into typography and I adore maps.  I would love to have big maps up when we get a house.  Perhaps in a hallway on thin cork so that we could place pins in it.

We travel quite a bit since Jason's family is so spread out.  We've been to all our nieces and nephews high school graduations and one college graduation.  I'm hoping we'll be able to go to the next college graduation but our finances aren't all that great and I just realized we have a high school graduation next year as well.

We are trying to plan a big vacation for 2015 that would include family and possibly friends.  We're going to go to South Dakota for Sturgis!  It's the 75th anniversary so hopefully there will be lots of cool things going on.  I'm toying with the idea of putting together a slide show or presentation of some sort that will give people an idea of what's in the area as well as travel arrangements, dates and costs.  I figure the longer in advance people have notice the better they will be able to save for the trip.

Pinterest

So of course since I'm a big ol' joiner I'm on pinterest.  I had been avoiding it because I didn't want to become obsessed.  The more I think about it though, it's really perfect for me. I'm big on favorites links and this is just another way of organizing it but visually - you know, with pictures!  It's also easier to view than a list of links.

The only problem I've discovered is that you can't put your boards into other boards. I really like to have things very organized on my computer so normally I'd have a folder titled Travel with my various travel plans inside, but you can't do that on pintrest so instead I have boards titled Travel-Montana Summer 2013, Travel-New York Summer 2014, and so on.

Anyways, the whole reason I'm making this post is that I tried to pin something the other day and it wouldn't let me because it said the pin was linked to spam or some such thing.  I figured I'd just save the picture to my computer and then pin it from there but then realized I couldn't do that, I also can't pin from facebook which is where I would normally put a picture.  Then my "aha!" lightbulb went off and I remembered I could put the picture on my blog.

Okay, that took awhile to figure out but I've got it up now.  Anyways, I love these in wall storage ideas.  I was thinking that one this size would be perfect in a hallway for linen storage.  We lived in my grandparents home for a year and there was very little storage space.  Something like this in the hallway would've been super great for linen storage.  Oooh, I just had an idea!  This would be awesome in a family room for game storage!  It would work really well at my mom's house on the wall that adjoins the garage.  It would be a little different because it would extend into the garage but it would be nice unobtrusive storage.

Thoughts

I hate having to sign in to make comments on blogger.com blogs, so I usually don't do it.  But today I found myself wanting to connect with someone and I decided to bite the bullet and just sign in.  Then I realized I hadn't written on this blog in over a year.  Oh well, it's not like anyone reads this.  In fact I just saw a timeline with how often my blog has been viewed and the high point was 1.

I think I might occasionally start blogging again, especially since I am wanting to do a little homeschool preschool with my little guy.  His name is Jeffrey, I don't get all these bloggers who don't name their children in their posts and instead give them cutesy nicknames.  Seriously you are showing us their faces in photographs and if someone really wanted to stalk you they would already be doing it.  It's like these idiot women I was reading about a few years ago who were worried about kidnappers and child molesters and someone pointed out that these same women have bumper stickers proclaiming their kid's star student status and those little stick people on their back windows.

Also I might blog about travelling with Jeff Jeff.  We love to travel and mostly do road trips and it was hard to find good resources about travelling in a car for an extended period with a little one.  We're planning a trip this summer in which one of the main things we'll be doing is travelling all over the state of Montana.  We'll be going to Glacier National Park (driving in from North East Washigton) and then, well that's as far as I've gotten in the planning.  Not quite sure where we'll go after that but I know we want to drive to eastern Montana and then south to visit Little Bighorn.  I've toyed with the idea of then driving south through Wyoming at that point but I'm not sold on that idea.

Constantly reminded

So many of our friends are struggling with infertility and recently a friend posted on facebook about how the clock is ticking.  Of our friends we only know one couple that did not have trouble conceiving within a year. Everyone else is struggling.

One of the problems is, no one talks about infertility. We only told our parents and my best friend, we know the pain of trying to conceive and having nothing happen. That struggle does not need monthly reminders from friends, we get that in the form of blood.

I didn't really think about life with baby once we got pregnant; I think it's some sort of protective measure for my heart. My heart grieves for our friends that have lost children, such pain and sorrow after the feeling of jubilation. I made plans for how to deal with my dysthymia, how to combat potential post-natal depression; but nothing concrete. Of course prior to even trying we talked about what we wanted to give our children, how many we wanted to have and how we wanted to adopt or do foster care.

Once you enter the minefield of fertility treatment though you have to slow down and consider your options, there are only so many rounds of drugs you can take so timed intercourse and IUI are somewhat limited. You can find someone to carry your baby for you or use someone's eggs or sperm. You can spend money for IVF or adoption. This all weighs heavily. At some point in our journey to parenthood, while lying in our bed at night, I up and announced to my husband that if we couldn't have biological children I didn't want children at all. That was a hard realization to come to.

We were very lucky to get pregnant the first time we did IUI. Three blood tests later I was realizing that this was actually happening. I remember our first ultrasound at six weeks, I wished the nurse would've printed a picture of tiny Guster. I was afraid that that might be the only picture we would get, especially given what happened next. I complained about some pain and after a blood draw we found that my hormone levels were very low, the nurse ordered medication and a more detailed ultrasound. The next day we sat in the waiting room of the imaging department waiting for my name to be called, the tech came and told Jason he couldn't come in with me. She had a lot of trouble finding the baby and getting good images, but she finally gave me some peace when she said that she found the heart and that it was beating. Later the nurse called to say everything looked fine with Guster.

When sharing the news of our pregnancy we called some people because I wanted them to be able to process the news privately. I remember being at church when the pastor announced yet another woman was pregnant and I couldn't contain my tears. The feelings of unfairness and inadequacy. I wanted to spare people the pain of having to hide their emotions.

So, moral of the story and your take away:

• Fertility starts to decline at age 30 and once you hit 35 you only need to wait six months instead of twelve to seek out infertility treatment.



• Talk with a specialist.



• Consider your options and realize your plans are going to have to change, you may no longer be able to have the four or more children you planned on.



• Don't be afraid to ask your doctor what Plan B is, at the insemination I asked a whole bunch of questions about what we would be trying next.



• Don't be afraid to share your story, lots of people are struggling and sometimes it's nice to read the success stories (especially if they share a diagnosis), let's you know someone is experiencing this too - you are not alone.