7 Quick Takes

Linking up with my fellow Instagram stalker, Jen, for 7 Quick Takes! 

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1. One day young. I saw this très belle series of photographs this week, and j'adore, j'adore, j'adore them. The photographer documented mothers holding their one day old babies, and the exhausted thrilling love just seeps from the photos. They make me ache for that whirlwind and wrinkly day! 


2. Bodyguard. My days are (leisurely, thanks to my mom!) spent as a baby-bodyguard. In the midst of, "I kissed him!" proclamations, Ryan seems to think it is his responsibility to show Conor some good old brotherly roughhousing even though Conor is less than two weeks old.

What did I ever do to you, bro? All I do is eat and sleep and stare. 

3. Pucker up. I've had people ask me what lip product I wear, and I guess Ryan was curious about it, too. 

It's Revlon Just Bitten Lip Balm Stain in Smitten. 

4. The Center for Ethics and Culture is having its Fall Conference this weekend, and Chris and I are tossing the idea around to go to a talk or two with baby in tow. I am not a huge conference person (at all), but Chris is all about stimulating the mind one philosophical discussion at a time and I love events where babies in slings are welcome. We will see! 

5. Soft, thick sweaters? I seem to have donated and discarded all of my soft, cozy sweaters in my latest clothing purge a few months ago, and now that the temperature has dipped and our thermostat and the winter temperatures don't have an inverse relationship, I need some. Anyone have any they purchased lately that they love? Preferably thick cardigans or wraps that are nursing friendly? I would thrift store it up, but I don't think I will be doing my hit up three thrift stores in one day routine for a while. 

I'm kind of a child when it comes to itchy sweaters so I am all about the synthetic, but if you somehow have a wool sweater that is as soft as Conor's skin, I'm all ears. 

6. Hair Help Needed. In the year of 2000, I was very touched by the millenium or something, and my New Year's resolution was to wear a different hair style seven days of the week. What a great self-improvement goal, no? What can I say, my fifth and sixth grade self was a gem (just for clarification - that is supposed to be read with sarcasm). I curled my hair so often that one of my close friends thought my hair was naturally curly. Uh, no. 

Anyway, I peaked too early in the hair department and by the time I was a senior in high school when people normally care about their appearance, I pretty much never did anything noteworthy with my hair, save for dances. To this day, I pretty much never even brush my hair because I can't shake a line I read in a magazine in high school that Gisele, "doesn't own a hair brush." I should probably get over that. 

So. What is this babbling take about? Well, I think I am ready to start sticking my split ends back into the doing my hair regularly waters so if anyone has any easy hair styles for long hair, send them my way! Hair tutorials, Pinterest boards, whatever. Extra points for updos because the baby in my arms is constantly getting his nose tickled by my wannabe-but-never-gonna-be Rapunzel hair. 

7. And we will round it out with a baby photo.

Happy Weekend! 

Seven Quick Takes

Well now that Ryan has bid, "See you 'morrow," to the almost non-existent scrape on his knee seventeen times and entered into a (hopefully) deep slumber, I can attempt to come up with seven interesting quick takes with Jen via Cari! Congratulations Cari on your book!

1. Still pregnant! 

And I'm A-okay with that. 

2. With the way I'm nesting, this baby will be sleeping in a cosleeper of 20+ cups of homemade chicken stock and four jars of homemade spaghetti sauce (made with crushed tomatoes from this helpful volunteer!) because those are bound to be super cozy. Right. I am just the worst nester ever since I haven't even washed a few blankets to make a human nest.

3. Speaking of nonsensical pregnancy babble ...my mind was wondering the other day when I was searching through the pantry for something appetizing to eat, and testing out various combinations in my mind. Then I started thinking about how recipes were invented. And of course that led me create a bunch of scenarios in my crazy head in which pregnant women created popular foods. 

Flour >>> A woman with child could have been super hormonal and mad at her hunter-gatherer-turned farmer, and just started taking her anger out on some wheat. Voila - flour.

Butter >>> repeat the angry thrashing above, but with a bucket of milk.

Bread >>> Maybe one day she decided to mix flour and water. She was in her first trimester so she was exhausted and fell asleep. When she woke up, she forgot about it. And forgot about it. And forgot about it. Until one day she came back and saw the bubbling mixture. She added more flour, and then took a nap, of course. This time when she woke up, she found it doubled in size! She punched it down. So many emotions! A bit later it had doubled in size again! Fed up with all of this nonsense, she just threw it over the fire. 

And there you have it - light, airy bread. And so the world was changed. 

This could go on and on, but I will stop. I'm sorry for your peek into what Chris has to hear me ponder about on a daily basis. Maybe I should go ahead and have this little one so the  pregnancy cray departs and is replaced by a sweet baby with a light sprinkle of postpartum mood swings. 

4. Since this is turning into a pregnancy-centric quick takes, I was directed by Dwija's twitter to Rhonda's incredibly moving post about how her five year old goddaughter is teaching her about redemptive suffering. It was just what I needed to read when I was in bed at two in the morning wondering how I was going to go through labor again.

5. I'm sure most people have seen this next link of a man's photos of his wife's battle with cancer, but I was bawling when Chris showed me it last night.

6. Have you seen this photo? 

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I wouldn't look like that if I were the helmet-less tackling target of eleven huge football players. 

7. And finally to seven! I still plan on hosting a Halloween link-up like I mentioned here starting early next week since I know many people have early parties or festivities already. It will just depend if this baby shows up promptly tomorrow or not :) Come one, come all, I want to see your family's costumes! 

As Ryan has come to say, "Bye-bye soon!"

7 Quick Takes

Linking up with Jen for 7 Quick Takes. Head on over to her to see some other than alma-mater-centric takes. 

In honor of the start of the the football season tomorrow (I'm talking the ND football season not NCAA in general), all seven of these quick takes will be about Ryan's obsession with our Irish. It really seems to have exploded the past two weeks, but realistically, I think it is just a word explosion coinciding with the our non-stop anticipation of the first game rather than being an ND savant. Either way, it is going to be blog-documented. 

1. When we were in Texas, Chris' Uncle Steve (Hi, Uncle Steve!) so generously gave us a framed photo of the Snow Bowl, which just happened to be Chris' very first Notre Dame football game when he was six years old. When we got home, I just propped it up on this dresser until I can hang it (at eye level, of course! Uncle Steve is a master at decorating his house and that is one tip that I remember). Ryan kept staring at the photo and then started chanting, "Game! Game! Game!" 

Chris asked me if I had told him that the frame was a football game. I had to furrow my eyebrow and think about the past events of the morning ... I actually didn't. 

2. Later that afternoon, Ryan upgraded his jabber to, "Football! Game! Daddy!" The pressure is on, Chris ... 

3. I mentioned that Ryan enjoyed my rendition of the fight song during our little road trip. When we traveled to Charlotte for Laura's wedding, he kept requesting, "Dame!" which normally means he wants me to sing Notre Dame, Our Mother, the alma mater. When I started to sing it, he would vehemently demand, "Dame! March!" After some Ryan-translator eyebrow furrowing, I realized he was asking for the fight song. Which means that he can understand words in songs even when I am not making my hands into an itsy-bitsy spider or singing about animals. Bye-bye non-censored Mumford & Sons. 

4. He has known known that Jesus was on the front of the library for a while, but during a bike ride past the mural this week, it was finally upgraded to, "Touchdown! Jesus!" The touchdown portion is said with a lot of gusto.

5. He has been bringing me this book to read to him. "Gipper!" he says. Well if that doesn't warm a Domer heart, what does?

6. We can't ride past the stadium without him seeing a football statue and then saying, "Football! Running! Fast! Tackle!" 

7. We have been practicing the phrase, "Go Irish!" 

It sounds like, "I-shit."

I'm going to be a typical, optimistic fan and say that his shoddy pronunciation is not foreshadowing the outcome of the upcoming season. Let's just hope he doesn't ask for a fork at a tailgate tomorrow right before he sees a leprechaun shirt. Oh me, oh my.

7 Quick Takes

Linking up with Jen for 7 Quick Takes and the 7 posts in 7 days challenge. Do you see that 777?

1. Taking a toddler who peaks around the division in the confessional essentially makes kneeling behind the screen useless. 

2. The other day Ryan was playing nicely in the kitchen, and I took that time to relax on the couch with my copy of Verily. Five seconds passed, and I realized that it had become eerily quiet. I sneezed a giant sneeze right. "Ryan!!" 

Bye bye, Cayenne and crushed red pepper. I sneezed on and off for the rest of the day. It was good, "Bless you!" practice for the culprit. 

3. My friend Lauren was being a fun mom again and taking Carson blueberry picking which means that I got to hitch a ride on that bandwagon and seem like a super fun mom to Ryan. Blueberries are Ryan's absolute favorite right now so an hour surrounded by endless blueberries was quite the delight. When we got home, I baked a blueberry pie. Normally, I use a Betty Crocker pie crust, but Lauren have given rave reviews for her fellow Oklahoman lady's pie crust recipe. I will never make another pie crust again. Oh my goodness, it is flaky beyond belief! Again, maybe it was magnified by the taste buds that are in the family way like my strawberry chia seed jam, but, try it. You won't be sorry.

4. Pie was basically all that I was up to making yesterday because on Wednesday night we ate the most fabulous dinner ever. My in-law's family friend's parents invited us over for dinner at their house. We knew they gardened and were Italian, but we were not prepared for the massive three well-kept gardens, grapes hanging from an overhead trellis, fig trees (they should not survive in Northern Indiana, but this family has the magic touch!) and just so much generosity. They order two semi-trucks of grapes from Napa Valley and make 28 fifty gallon barrels of wine each year! It was their granddaughter's birthday so there were many grandkids there, and Ryan forgot he had parents.

5. So dinner. Actually appetizers. Well when we first arrived we were greeted by wine, and plates of cheese, cured meats, crackers, a goat cheese dip, olives and zucchini fritters. I found out after I had been chowing down thinking that it was the best salami I had ever eaten that they make their own salami and coppa! Wow. Later we toured their basement and they just have tubs of salami and other cured meats preserved in fat along with barrels of wine. Hmm, I know where I would want to be in case of zombie apocalypse. Then! Then we had grilled homemade sausage that was out of this world and just the perfect amount of kick.

My only photo of the food. I want it all!

6. We heard, "Pasta is ready!" She had made spaghetti with huge meatballs. The meatballs were so moist. After we ate the pasta, the kids were restless so I was in the playroom trying to keep Ryan from breaking the crib, in which he was dangerously close to doing so. I heard the clinks of silverware hitting plates and figured dessert was on the table. Chris' coworker, who happens to be the daughter of these fantastic people, asked Ryan, "Ryan, do you like steak?" "What?! Are they eating steak out there?!" came from me. She responded with, "Bacon-wrapped beef tenderloin." Seriously. Floored. With the amazingly tender beef, we had potato croquettes, grilled zucchini (from the garden) and tomato salad (ditto). Chris kept rubbing my leg and giving me an alarmed look that screamed, "My stomach is going to burst!" After that we had the sweetest watermelon, their own homemade limoncello (okay, I didn't have any), and then caramel cake and Oreo ice cream cake. Yesterday, when Chris and I woke up, we were still full. I am so glad that the host politely declined that I bring anything because I would have been so incredibly embarrassed by my mediocre cooking. 

7. Happy Weekend! Sorry for writing about food in 5 of the 6 previous takes. I guess it was food takes today.

7 Quick Takes

Linking up with Jen, no surprise.

1. Search keywords.

I thought this set of how people clicked on my blog entertaining. I am in fact barefoot and pregnant as I write this post, but luckily, my son's conehead has vanished.

 

2. Chris is always right. Well, third time is the charm. After reading many reviews, confidently purchasing and then sadly returning two child bike seats because neither fit my female bike (side note: after the second seat didn't work after the box proudly proclaimed, "fits almost all bikes!" I joked that this was the first time that I was frustrated to be a woman. Come on bike seat makers!), we finally went with the one that Chris had been pulling for from the beginning of our search at the end of May. He said it was an investment, but I stubbornly hemmed and hawed at the price. Now, I looooooooove this bike seat so much that I don't even care that Chris was right, and I was wrong. I am not off balance at all; it is like Ryan isn't even on the bike. And - barefoot-and-pregnant-mama-plus! There is tons of room for my growing belly. Yepp Mini, you are the bee's knees. Note: no worries, we adjusted the strap to fit Ryan right after Chris snapped this photo in our driveway and before we biked anywhere.

3. Thank you to everyone who has linked up to my Womb Service link-up! I think cravings are so fascinating, and you ladies have made me laugh with all of your crying stories. Makes me feel not alone in this crazy craving world. The link-up will be open for a week and a few more days so if you would like to share, please do! I'm craving more links, so don't make me cry. 

4.  We spent our 4th of July at Chris' best friend's family's house for a huge college graduation/high school graduation/ 8th grade graduation/4th of July party. Chris (same name, no wonder they are best friends) is the oldest of ten, and we adore visiting them. Ryan was obsessed with their playground. He kept insisting on going down the slide on his belly until finally riding down upright. It was one giant slide for Ryankind. Then he went on to eat too many cookies to count. 

5. There were numerous badminton, volleyball, soccer and frisbee games played throughout the party. Ryan had his watchful eye on his father. 

You can see how intense of an ultimate frisbee spectator Ryan is in this video. Yelling, biting his lip and all.

animated-frisbee-spectator from Katrina on Vimeo.

6. Ryan tolerated the Indiana fireworks that graced this Illinois party. Lots of commotion and screaming toddler girls created a clinging toddler in my arms saying, "Carry. Carry. Carry," even when he was already being carried. When a firework would go off, he would raise his head from under his crossed arms, look up at the sky, whisper, "Wow," with a little exasperated sigh and then bury his head again til the next one.

7. PSA: Mulan is on Netflix. I haven't been happy with Netflix since they removed Tangled so they have now redeemed themselves. Off to search for a lucky cricket.

7 Quick Takes - Meet the Fockers edition

Linking up with Jen from Conversion Diary for the weekly quick takes.
1. I'm missing my best friend's bachelorette party this weekend, which I am pretty bummed about. On Wednesday, my sister-in-law and I stopped by Aerie (I know ... so tame) so I could pick up some goodies to send so I'm not the world's worst best friend. Annie, my sister-in-law was carrying Ryan and dancing to whatever bouncy pop song was playing while I tried to not talk to the chatty sales associate because ... it's underwear. I paused from my lacy treasure hunt to look up and see Ryan smiling up at a the blown-up photo on the wall of a girl modeling a bra. And ... he was doing the milk sign with both of his hands a la Meet the Fockers. Like I said, he likes the "boooo's." I'm happy I chose to go into Aerie and not Victoria's Secret or Frederick's.

2. I don't have a photo or video of that incident, but I do have a video of him dancing at lunch later that day. Imagine the fist pumping with a smile and the milk sign. While Ryan is in the midst of showering the floor with his rice, we are showering Becca with praise because she makes the best fried rice ever. 

3. Playground maintenance man.
After I told him (only once) that a bottle was trash when he thought it was the grandest toy in the all the land, Ryan has become quite taken with pointing out, "Tash!" at the playground and then picking it up and carrying it all the way to the barrel that serves as a trashcan. Now why can't he do the same with the mess of food he leaves on the floor after every single one of his twenty meals a day since his stomach is a human form of a trash can?

4. My friend, Claire, and I studied in France together and now she is being an amazing Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda. I don't read her blog as often as I should, but her last post was very powerful.

5. David and Chris taught Ryan the other day how to pose like the Fighting Irish Leprechaun, and, although he is the right size, his arms just don't get it yet. Instead of being a menacing little man with his fists up ready for a fight,  he bunches his fists up, then quickly crosses them across his chest and leans back. Very not intimidating and not leprechaun-y.

He climbed onto the coffee table and while screaching, "Ka! Ka! Ka!" which means clementine, avocado, Basilica and now leprechaun.

6. Ignore the size two-small diaper in the photo above. My pregnancy brain got the better of me and I took the dirty diaper wet bag to the washer, went to grab the detergent and never came back. Thank goodness for baby uncle Ciarans who leave diapers behind. 

7. And I reached 7! I sat down this morning thinking that I actually had things to talk about, but lo and behold, it still stands that 7 Quick Takes are the hardest posts to write.

Happy Weekend!

7 Quick Takes - Blog Tutorials

Happy Friday! Linking up with Jen over at Conversion Diary like normal people do (I have been inconsistent for months so I guess I do not fall in the normal category).

My blog design had started to feel the way a dress I wore the other day felt. Great in the fitting room, but with some problems that I just ignored, ill-fitting during the day so I was always adjusting it and then by the end of the day, I just wanted it off. However, there were a few problems: this is a blog for fun so I didn't want to spend any money hiring a designer, and I had (have) no graphic design or programming knowledge whatsoever. Fortunately, there are many kind people out there on the triple w who do have that knowledge and are generous enough to post tutorials for free. My blog does not even begin to look like it was designed by a graphic designer at all, but I am now pretty happy with it since it is simpler and more organized than before. I'll still be changing it as I find the time to do so now that I know I can find a tutorial for almost anything.  I wanted to share some of the links that I found very helpful in tweaking my blog design.

1.

Free Social Media Icons. I didn't like the icons that Instagram and Twitter offered on their websites, but I had them on my blog because I had no clue how to design new ones or install them. Carrie at Carrie Loves Design offers 19 social media icons in 30 colors! I didn't even know that there were 19 forms of social media. I downloaded the icons in the color Confetti. Scoot on over there and grab some! 

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2.

How to Install Social Media Icons. I used this tutorial from Brandi Girl Blog to install the icons from #1. It really was so simple because Brandi spelled it out so easily.

3.

Customizing Your Tabs and Gadget Titles. I finally have an about page after writing on this blog for seven and a half months. I couldn't figure out how to make the tabs transparent even though I kept clicking "transparent" for the tab background in the Blogger designer so I just didn't have any tabs. I'm sure there is some easy fix, but as I have stated a million times in this 7 Quick Takes, I have no programming knowledge. I found a tutorial on how to customize your tab and gadget titles at Third Grade in the First State and went with that route. It is a very detailed tutorial, which is great! I used Paint to create the images for my tabs because I'm seven years old (okay maybe I'm ten since I've moved on from just using the spray paint feature).

4.

Create a Rollover Image Effect (Change Image on Mouseover).  So, I had tabs like any normal blogger. I noticed that a lot of blogs have tabs that change color or images with you mouse over them. Would I be able to do that myself?! No, but I was able to google. I found a tutorial by Helplogger and voila black-to-gray-black-to-gray. (You can go ahead and try it out just to give me a virtual pat on the back for copying and pasting some html and image links. Thanks so much.).

5.

Transform a Blogger Label Into a Page.  Do you want to have a tab that your readers can click on and find all of your posts that were labeled "sewing" or "sorry if my posts are boring for a bit - you can join my middle finger and blame anonymous" (Leave it to Grace to come up with the best label created ever)? There were many tutorials available thanks to, you guessed it, Sir Google. I'm betting that most people had figured out how to do this one since I see them everywhere, but if you haven't, here you go. 

Oh, and if your labels have spaces in them, go ahead and type them in that way in the html. You don't need to put any hyphens in between the words.

6.

How to Put a Gadget Above Your Header.  I wanted my new-with-a-hover page tabs above my header, and the tutorial from Blogger Hints and Tips was easy to follow. 

7.

Sumopaint. There is a 0% chance of purchasing the almost $700 Photoshop CS6 in the Harrington Family Spending Forecast. Not only is it crazy expensive, I have no time to learn how to use it well enough to justify spending that much if we even had the power to do so. I once tried to use it in the basement of Lafortune, the school student center, to design our wedding invitations and spent about an hour trying to figure it out before I went running to Word and PowerPoint. I wanted to make the background of my new header image transparent, but Paint and PowerPoint were failing me. Enter Sumopaint, a free image editor that is very similar to Photoshop. I still had to look up a lot of other tutorials on Sumopaint until I was able to get the look I wanted, but it was freeeeeeeeeeeee.

There you have it! Seven helpful links for tweaking your blog design. I'm sure most of you are rolling your eyes at me and thinking, "Get in the twenty-first century, Katrina! Don't you know HTML?!" My apologies, but my computer classes in grade school and high school pretty much only made me able to type without looking at the keyboard. I hope that I was able to point someone in the right link direction ... if there is someone as clueless as I am out there. 

Head on over to Jen's for more quick takes! 

And because what's a blog post written by me without a superfluous photo of Ryan?

Posts from this week: 
- 20 Weeks with Krakens
- What I Wore For My Sunday Best
- No Trick Pony
- I'm Not Touching It!
- The Chicken Salad Story

7 Quick Takes, Volume 8

Coming out of a brief 7 Quick Takes hiatus to join Jen and the rest over at Conversion Diary. Happy Friday, all!

1. Chris offered to help me run a few errands last Sunday morning before we went to family hour. One of the things that I had to do was get Ryan some athletic shoes since he was wearing sweats and boat shoes (his only shoes besides boots) in preparation for the gym family hour. We headed to Once Upon a Child, and I was beyond ecstatic to introduce Chris to my most frequent and beloved shopping stomping grounds. It was kind of like how excited I was to show Chris my home back in Ohio, but instead of, "Here's the barn! And my goats!" it was, "And here are the boxes of shoes that you have to sort through!!!" and "Here are the 12-18 month button up shirts!" and "Can you believe the price?!" After we left, I realized that I probably should be embarrassed about how excited I was to show my husband a place that smells better than a thrift store, but still pretty funky. So that's wow-I'm-a-mom story of the week.

2. If you weren't convinced that Ryan has a mild (extreme) obsession with balls, we also stopped at Michael's during the errand sprint, and Chris had to drag him away from the baseball sets.

**It was a Sunday miracle that Chris came into Michael's with me since it is pretty much the closest thing to hell on earth for him. He said it was the only way to make sure that I would be out in under fifteen minutes. Someone has waited in the car for fifteen minutes an hour enough times to be more the wiser.

3. I found the icing bag cap that was missing in my miserable attempt at a lion birthday cake on Ryan's first birthday! So now maybe a lion mane will look more like spaghetti rather than shredded cheese?

4. Last week, I discovered that Hulu Plus has ALL 163 EPISODES of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Just hearing the intro song was as homey as Once Upon a Child is to me. I had forgotten how much I liked Harvey and Sabrina and how much I despised Libby. Anyway, this is now my cleaning timer! I can be a pretty slow cleaner so now I put Ryan to bed, turn on an episode of Sabrina, and then clean, clean, clean for twenty-one minutes all while reliving TGIF on ABC. You should try it.

5. Salt Angels. The snow melted yesterday so Ryan found a new way much to my dismay to make angels while I had my back turned and was washing the dishes. He really got into it, as you can see.

6. Onion hoarder. What is with this kid and onions? I found this on the toy shelf the other day.

7. Chris came up with the idea that whenever I'm boring can't think of a seventh quick take, I should show a Calvin and Hobbes comic. So you're in luck...this week I'm boring.

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7 Quick Takes, Volume 7

Well, it's Friday so I'm quick-taking it with Jen at Conversion Diary. Click on over to read more!

1. Grocery store cart swindler. When the light-obsessed baby wasn't entranced by the chandeliers (rows of fluorescents) of Martin's Supermarkets and impersonating the headless horseman, he pilfered a bag of dark chocolate chips from my cart. I thought something like, "Aww, he likes dark chocolate like his mama. Cute." I kept on pushing and returned to the task at hand: forgetting at least one thing that I needed. The next aisle over I looked down at Ryan, peered past his innocent eyes and fixated on his fingers that had discarded the chocolate chips in favor of squishing raw ground beef. Plastic wrap has nothing on curious baby fingers. Gross. Good thing I don't have a cart cover because it would be pretty useless with this explorer.

2. Sleepy pout. Despite the ground beef incident, I highly doubt that I will ever get sick of this sleepy pout.

3. Underdressed, overdressed. I love this photo of Chris and Ryan walking. You can tell one is dressed by a mom and the other makes his own decisions concerning what is proper for snow. 

4. No knots. For the first time in my 13ish years crocheting, I crocheted through an entire skein of yarn without creating a massive knot in the process. Normally at least a good chunk of yarn has to be cut out as a casualty of my overzealous unwinding. 

5. Sweaty hands. I was unpacking another box when I came across the planner that Chris gave me when we had just started dating. Before he gave it to me, he wrote a little note at the bottom of every day for the first semester! I still remember when he gave it to me in the car on a rainy day when I was absolutely exhausted. I couldn't smile any bigger as I leafed through the pages then, and I couldn't the other night when I went read them 4+ years later. These two notes made me laugh and laugh because Chris is such a goof!

6. A wordless message from Ryan about NFP? I couldn't find the stickers for my chart at the end of my NFP consult tonight so my practitioner and looked around the room only to find that Ryan had thrown them in the trashcan. Hmm, are you trying to tell us something, Ryan? 

7. Happy Weekend! Either I'm boring or I've forgotten what other potentially exciting things have happened in my life to make a real #7 because they were that exciting. I'm betting on the first option. 

7 Quick Takes, Volume 6

Joining up with Jen once again for 7 Quick Takes Friday. I absolutely loved her piece about the history of her views on abortion. As always, please send some prayers her family's way!

I'm going to set the record for how many times I can show you a photo of Ryan from this week in his too-small pajamas. I need to get some new ones...and make interesting (well, interesting to me) things happen when he is actually dressed.

1. Wake up, Mama! I have been with my parents for the past week. In other words, this is stay-at-home mom vacation! My parents wake up at an insanely early hour so ever since Ryan was a newborn, they basically beg me to give him to them so they can play with him. I get to actually "sleep in" until 8 or 9. Sign me up! However, now that Ryan is mobile and very vocal, things have changed. Yesterday after only being with Lola for thirty minutes or so, I heard the little munchkin yelling outside my door. He knew where I was and wanted me up! Next time, I'll move rooms.

Come out, Mama! I have a banana, and I am not afraid to use it! 

2. Mixed patterns. This morning my mom wanted to take Ryan for a very quick walk on the beach and put his coat on over his pajamas. It isn't exactly warm here so I threw some stretchy pants on him for an extra layer. When they got back, I took his coat off and burst out laughing at my baby's completely on-trend mixed patterns look. With the Deep V in the front and a monkey on his bum, the outfit is runway ready, for sure.

3. Daredevil. I looked up today after only looking down for a bit and saw this. This has happened numerous times this week. I am a mother to a boy.

4. Busting out while nursing. Not me! ;) Ryan's legs. He is a very active nurser, and today it showed.

Okay, now I promise that we are finished with those pajamas.

5. Insta! Insta! Tweet all about it. I finally put Instagram and Twitter buttons on my sidebar! But...they don't look very nice. Could anyone internet-savvy please point me in the direction of a tutorial for ones that look better or how to put custom ones in?

6. A. Rose & Her (A)Musings. One of my dearest and best friends in the whole world has started a blog, and I really think you should stop by! Aubry and I met when we lived in the same dorm at school and pretty much loved each other from the moment we found out that we had the same middle name. We made a pilgrimage to Lourdes together, she helped save me when I was stranded in Rome because of a certain volcano, we lived together for a summer, she did my wedding makeup and gave me a rosary from the Holy Land to have while I went through labor with Ryan. I have met few people with greater fervor for her faith than she has. So if you would like to hear about her (a)musings as she walks the Way of St. James, finishes up life in NYC and generally lives as an awesome person (I mean, come on...she has a pet hedgehog), start following her blog!

7. Baby feet. Those teeny tiny feet in the old ultrasound are now marching around on the beach, in the house, on the grass, in the snow, and they thoroughly love "This Little Piggie." Life is beautiful.

7 Quick Takes Volume 5, Molly Edition

Molly on our wedding day. Photo by Yue Wu

After a bit of a hiatus, I am joining up with Jen over at Conversion Diary for 7 Quick Takes Friday. As always, please send some prayers Jen's way for a smooth recovery and also some for her baby!

I have decided to devote these quick takes to Molly, my five and a half year old sister-in-law. I just spent three out of the past four weeks with her, and I realized that there are so many good "Molly" stories. So, here are seven of them!

1. When I first met Molly, she was a little over a year and a half old and her favorite word to say was, "Shoes." She would go around holding a shoe saying, "Shoes," in her little baby voice. Well fast forward to last summer when my mother-in-law had asked her to pack for the trip they were going on. When she went to check on Molly's bag, this is what she found:

Imelda Marcos in the making

2. Over the summer, she saw me nursing Ryan, and she asked me what I was doing (she was too young to remember her mom nursing Johnny). I explained to her that moms have to feed their babies. She sat up with a confused look on her face and bluntly asked, "Wait. You're a mom?! I thought you were my sister. You can't be a mom and a sister!"

3. To go along with nursing stories...over Christmas she stared at me quizzically and wondered, "Is one food milk and one for drinking milk?"

4. Molly is completely comfortable wearing a tutu anywhere, including a family dinner party.

5. And to make her even cooler, she went around wielding a sword while wearing a tutu putting on her best Gandalf voice and threatening, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS."

6. She is very observant and loves Disney princess movies so it wasn't very surprising when she saw her mom folding clothes in the laundry room and announced, "You're like Cinderella. We make messes, and you clean them up!"

7. And now my favorite story of them all: when we told Chris' family last year that we were pregnant with Ryan, we happily told Chris' sisters that they were going to be aunts! Amidst all the commotion, Molly came into the kitchen bawling and whimpering that she didn't want to be an ant. She thought she was going to be turned into an insect. I think this whole aunt thing has turned out much better than she thought.

So that's Molly in quick take fashion!