Baby

22 weeks pregnant and I can feel the "nesting bug" start to bite. I made my first purchase (besides maternity clothes) towards motherhood. A diaper bag! Tanner let me splurge and get a Petunia Pickle Bottom one! He said it has to last me throughout all the kids. I am sure that it will. It is really nice. Since that purchase I find myself getting more excited than I have before at buying stuff for little Hazel. I am holding off until the baby shower but that doesn't stop me from looking and picking out the things that I like. This week, I have been trying to decide on nursery colors and I think I finally have them. (Thanks to Pinterest)

I had a little bit of a dilemma because my parents will let us use a changing table/dresser of theirs but they wont let us paint it..... and its bright yellow, not a color I had originally wanted in the palette. As I searched through Pinterest most of the nurseries I found all had matching furniture, which is great but not for us because we are on a budget and cant get everything new and matching. I did however find a couple nurseries that were mismatching and that I love! I draw my inspiration from them.

I love the simplicity of this nursery and decided to take my color palette from it. Plus it allows to use the bright yellow changing dresser and for the room to not look tacky.

As far as pregnancy goes, I am on the up and up. I feel A LOT better than the first trimester but it would be nice if I could stop throwing up every other day or so. My symptoms include: sciatic nerve pain, nausea, trouble sleeping (trying to get used to not sleeping on my back), heartburn, fatigue. The usual.

I am starting to show! I am excited to have a little bump that people can tell is a baby and not just fat. My favorite thing in the world is feeling her kick and I tell you what, she is an active one already! She gets most active right after I eat. I love knowing that she is doing well in there.

Pregnancy isn't anything like the cutesy blogs make it out to be. I know everyone has a different experience and I will attest to that. I have been pretty darn sick but I have had to keep my job in order to keep insurance which has made my pregnancy quite rough. I am grateful to keep busy but getting up at 6:30am every morning with morning sickness ... not ideal. I have not gotten to a point that I am grateful for the nausea because it means I am still pregnant and that little Hazel is growing strong. Also, whenever I pictured myself pregnant I saw my normal body, maybe a little bit bigger breasts and the cutest little baby bump you ever did see. Of course in my mind I only gained the minimal amount of weight that you are supposed to gain (25 lbs) and I feel fantastic. Reality: I have already gained the minimal amount of weight and I am only halfway there .. Yikes. I stopped fitting in my pants at like 6 weeks because most of the weight I gained has been in my thighs and bum. I try to stay active, I walk for about 45 mins a day and every 2 or 3 days I do a good heart pumping workout. Healthy eating has not been easy for me with my busy schedule but I do my best. I have good days and bad days. I try not to worry about it but it is hard to push from my mind after I see the scale at the doctor's office. I know I just need to focus on health and not the number on the scale but it sure is hard. This is all new for me.

I am done venting now. Besides what I have said I struggle with I love being pregnant. It is amazing and so hard to comprehend that inside my belly another human is growing. Not just any human, a little girl that has half my genetic makeup and half Tanner's. She has ten fingers and toes and a tiny beating heart. She grows everyday and as hard as it is to visualize, she will soon be out of my tummy and in our ours. The whole concept blows my mind. I can't believe Tanner and I made a baby. I can't believe that it is her little legs and arms that I feel banging on my insides. I can't believe I will be a mom. It has been my life long goal and now it is happening. It is amazing and I can't wait.

Good for the soul

Dear blog,

It's been a while.... I know.... don't hate me, but I would like to write on you again :)


I decided to write a "how to" on something I am terrible at, who knows I may learn something.

How to do more things you love and less things you don't love.

1. Don't let your "to do" list and schedule rule your life. You are not defined by all of the things you can check of each day.

2. Grill more. He will want to help because it is a manly way of cooking and you can put some veggies together. Badabing-badboom. Dinner is ready in 20 minutes. Or take some extra time Sunday morning before (1pm) church to assemble meals that can be put in the freezer, taken out, thrown in the crock pot and voila! It's ready when I walk in from work!

3. Pinning is fun but reading is more fun. Take a book from the book list to work and indulge during free time.

4. Just sew. The longer you procrastinate, the more intimidating it becomes.

5. Having one night a week designated to crafting, sewing, painting, decorating and creativity might not be a bad idea. He knows when it is and can do homework or watch sports and you get some "me time."

6. On the completely opposite spectrum, you don't need scheduled time for it. Do it in the quiet little free moments you find throughout the day/evening.

7. Give yourself a small budget for the stuff you love. Doing things you love is a necessity for your sanity, so make it a possibility.

8. Dance more. Bust out the strobe light, turn up the tunes and release all those pent up dance moves! I know you are dying to.

9. Just relax. Don't take yourself so seriously. and stop stressing. There are more benefits to being relaxed than there are to stressing. Pray for peace; the kind only the Lord can give.

Hopefully this helps. Good luck!

No More Sweets

Tanner and I decided that we are going to stop eating sweets today. I am soooo excited! I know many of you may be thinking, you shouldn't quit all together. There is moderation in all things. But when it comes to me and sweets (at least right now in my life) I lack the self control to just eat one. I am hoping to do this fast for at least 3 months. That should be long enough to give our bodies a little cleanse from the drug that is sugar and stop those cravings for a Dairy Queen Blizzard after every meal.

I went on a "sweets fast" for about a month and I LOVED the results. I had more energy, my mind felt clearer because I was feeding it food that it could use and I felt in control. If someone was eating sweets around me I wasn't even be tempted to have some because I knew that feeling healthy felt so much better than those sweets tasted. Of course, the first couple weeks were just the opposite. I wanted everything sweets just because I had told myself that I could not have it. Once I fought through that stage I was home free!

I know it is not easy, but it will absolutely be worth it!

Plan to make it a little easier: Replace sweets and desserts with fruit alternatives.

I want to live a healthier lifestyle for myself, for Tanner, for our future children, and for family. I will treat my body like the temple it is.

(I will give myself a break on major holidays, just so I don't go crazy :)

Goals:

1. Write in my journal more. I want to be able to look back and read about our newlywed life. Also, writing out my thoughts and emotions helps me deal with them. Write about blessings from each day.
2. Get my butt out of bed 15 minutes earlier and do my personal scripture study. I have been lacking personal revelation in my life lately and feeling distance from the Lord. I know it is because I am not making doing my part to receive it. Also, I want to finish the Book of Mormon by the end of the year.
3. Decorate. I need a new hobby. I love designing, being creative, and decorating but it seems to fall by the wayside when I work full time and cook and clean etc. I want to live in place that feels like our home.
4. Do something everyday that I love. Whether that is working out, sewing, decorating, going on a walk with Tan, watching a movie, going on a hike, getting a snow cone.....whatever it is....I need to do more of it.
5. Learn to have a better attitude and like my job or find a new one.
6. Exercise more. This one speaks for itself.
7. Eat healthier. More vegetables and fruit. Less meat.
8. Help others. Search and pray for opportunities to do such.


There are plenty more where these came from but this will do for now 

Gifts

My friend Kelly Hennessey had this on her blog and I loved it and couldn't resist sharing it myself.

In my decades of practice as a psychotherapist, this is the insight that has inspired me most:
Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.
I've found that the very qualities we're most ashamed of, the ones we keep trying to reshape or hide, are in fact the key to finding real love. I call them core gifts.
It's so easy to get lost in the quest for self-improvement. Every billboard seduces us with the vision of a happier, more successful life. I'm suggesting an opposite road to happiness. If we can name our own awkward, ardent gifts, and extricate them from the shame and wounds that keep them buried, we'll find ourselves on a bullet train to deep, surprising, life-changing intimacy.
Over the years, I realized that the characteristics of my clients which I found most inspiring, most essentiallythem, were the ones which frequently caused them the most suffering.
Some clients would complain of feeling like they were "too much"; too intense, too angry, or too demanding. From my therapist's chair, I would see a passion so powerful that it frightened people away.
Other clients said they felt that they felt like they were "not enough"; too weak, too quiet, too ineffective. I would find a quality of humility and grace in them which would not let them assert themselves as others did.
Clients would describe lives devastated by codependency, and I would see an immense generosity with no healthy limits.
Again and again, where my clients saw their greatest wounds, I also saw their most defining gifts!
Cervantes said that reading a translation is like viewing a tapestry from the back. That's what it's like when we try to understand our deepest struggles without honoring the gifts that fuel them.
When we understand our lives through the lens of our gifts it's as if we step out from behind the tapestry and really see it for the first time. All of a sudden, things make sense. We see the real picture, the moving, human story of what matters most to us. We begin to understand that our biggest mistakes, our most self-sabotaging behaviors were simply convulsive, unskilled attempts to express the deepest parts of ourselves.
Susan came to therapy after her boyfriend of two years left her. She had put the whole of her heart and all her energies into her relationship, and when it ended, she felt utterly destroyed. "Why can't I let go and move on like he did, or as my friends tell me I should?" she asked me on her first visit.
As she described her relationship history, I saw a consistent quality of kindness in her; a soft-heartedness which people kept taking advantage of. Susan appreciated these qualities in herself, but she also felt like they were a curse. (That very ambivalence is one of the main indicators of a core gift.) I sensed that a key to her healing lay precisely there. Again and again, we worked at helping her reframe her sensitivity not as a weakness, but as a gift that she-as well as her former partners-didn't know how to honor.
It sounds simple, but seeing these qualities as a gift was the foundation of new dating life for her. By seeing their worth, she could learn to understand, honor, and even treasure them.
When Susan looked at her life through the lens of her gift, she felt triumphant. "I was right all along!" she said. "Those things that bothered me about my boyfriends bothered me for a reason. I wasn't crazy. I just didn't honor my gift and I found men who were all too happy to agree with me."
I've named the approach I used with Susan "Gift Theory." The easiest way to explain Gift Theory is by starting with the image of a target. Every ring inward toward the center moves us closer to our most authentic self. In the center of the target, where the bull's-eye is, lie our core gifts.
Core gifts are not the same as talents or skills. In fact, until we understand them, they often feel like shameful weaknesses, or as parts of ourselves too vulnerable to expose. Yet they are where our soul lives. They are like the bone marrow of our psyche, generating a living stream of impulses toward intimacy and authentic self-expression. But gifts aren't hall-passes to happiness. They get us into trouble again and again. We become most defensive-or most naïve-around them. They challenge us and the people we care about. They ask more of us than we want to give. And we can be devastated when we feel them betrayed or rejected.
Since the heat of our core is so hard to handle, we protect ourselves by moving further out from the center. Each ring outward represents a more airbrushed version of ourselves. Each makes us feel safer, puts us at less risk of embarrassment, failure, and rejection. Yet, each ring outward also moves us one step further from our soul, our authenticity, and our sense of meaning. As we get further away from our core gifts, we feel more and more isolated. When we get too far, we experience a terrible sense of emptiness.
So, most of us set up shop at a point where we are close enough to be warmed by our gifts, but far enough away that we do not get burned by their fire. We create safer versions of ourselves to enable us to get through our lives without having to face the existential risk of our core.
The Gift Theory model invites us to discover what our core gifts are (most of us don't really know), to extricate these gifts from the wounds that keep them buried, and to express them with bravery, generosity, anddiscrimination in our dating life. When we do this, we find healthy love moving closer.
If you're looking for love, try to discover your own gifts. They shine in your joys and strengths, but they also live-and hide-right in the heart of your greatest insecurities and heartbreaks. If you learn to lead with them in your dating life, you will find-almost without trying-- that you're experiencing mutual attractions with people who love and treasure the very gifts you're discovering. 
In future blogs, we'll explore in much greater detail how to discover your own core gifts. In the meantime, I invite you to take two or three minutes to reflect on the following question:
Are there essential qualities in you which have sometimes felt more like a curse than a gift? Perhaps you haven't known how to handle them, or maybe you've had the painful experience of other people misunderstanding or taking advantage of them. Take a minute to begin to put words on these qualities. As you name them, you'll learn to honor them, and you'll come to understand your struggles, your intimacy journey and your life story in a new way.

Men's Hearts Shall Fail Them

This Mormon message is a little intense but I love the overall lesson of living by faith. It is so easy to live by fear with how the world is going these days. This morning Tanner and I joked about the days we will be sending our kids off to school. "Here's your lunch and your bulletproof vest, good luck honey! We love you!"

I know that when I live by faith and trust in the Lord's love and hand in our lives, I feel peace. That no matter how many extra bills we have to pay, how many hospital visits we have, how close our bank account comes to empty, the Lord will always provide. I know that. Do I remember all the time? That is something I am working on. Tanner often reminds me that we are not poor, we are actually really rich. We have the love of the gospel, promises from the Lord for living it and so much Love in our little home that we don't know quite what to do with it all. My goal and motto is to "Live by Faith".

What's for dinner?

I got this recipe from Pinterest! It should be tasty! Tanner and I will probably half it seeing as we probably wont eat 6 servings.

http://www.skinnytaste.com/2008/11/turkey-stuffed-peppers-45-pts.html

These stuffed peppers are loaded with flavor and make a great dinner with a salad on the side. Not all stuffed peppers are cooked in tomato sauce. I used ground lean turkey and rice for a healthy, low point meal. Also great with brown rice. Make extra so you can have leftovers for lunch.



Turkey Stuffed Peppers
Gina's Weight Watcher Recipes
Servings: 6 servings (1/2 pepper) • Time: 55 minutes • Old Points: 4 • Points+: 5
Calories: 184.7 • Fat: 2.3 g • Protein: 20.8 g • Carb: 20.2 g • Fiber: 1.6 g  

• 1 lb lean chopped turkey meat
• 1 garlic, minced
• 1/4 onion, minced
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro or parsley
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp cumin powder
• salt to taste
• 3 large sweet red bell peppers, washed
• 1 cup fat free chicken broth
• 1/4 cup tomato sauce
• 1 1/2 cups cooked rice
• Olive oil spray
• 1/4 cup reduced fat shredded cheese
  

Heat oven to 400°. Spray a little olive oil spray in a medium size saute pan and heat on a medium flame. Add onion, garlic and cilantro to the pan. Saute about 2 minutes and add ground turkey. Season with salt and garlic powder, and cumin and brown meat for several minutes until meat is completely cooked through. Add 1/4 cup of tomato sauce and 1/2 cup of chicken broth, mix well and simmer on low for about 5 minutes. Combine cooked rice and meat together.

Cut the bell peppers in half lengthwise, and remove all seeds. Place in a baking dish. Spoon the meat mixture into each pepper half and fill it with as much as you can. Place all stuffed pepper halves on the baking dish and pour the remainder of the chicken broth on the bottom of the pan. Cover tight with aluminum foil and bake for about 35 minutes. Top with shredded cheddar cheese and enjoy.