A sale!

If you are a mom or a soon-to-be mom or if you are planning to one day be a mom, here is a sale you might be interested in. You can get one of these baby slings for free, you just have to pay shipping and handling, which is about $12. Go to Sevenslings.com, choose the sling that you like best and use the code "Breastfeeding." Slings usually cost a lot more than $12, so I was pretty excited when I saw this deal! I'm hoping it is super comfy to carry a baby in.

You can also get a nursing cover for free at uddercovers.com (I know, awesome name for a website), using the same code. Shipping and handling is $10 for this.

And at the same website you can get reusable nursing pads for free with the same code. Again, shipping and handling is $10. 

I'm not sure how long the sale is going on, I think it might be a week-long thing, starting yesterday, but I'm not positive about that. Several weeks ago they had a similar sale to this going on at these websites and I ordered the baby sling. It came with instructions on how to use the sling differently depending on the age of your child. Right now it is packed up in my diaper bag of cuteness-- just three more months until I have a little person to put into that sling!  

Hair blogs and crafty blogs and baby blogs

Okay, once again, let's talk about the awesomeness of blogs. Here are a few that I've been introduced to lately that I pretty much love. 

My co-workers introduced me to this blog called Hairdresser on Fire. It has lots of tutorials for super cute hairstyles. All of us girls come to work with various versions of the hairstyles on their blog. Adam loves when I do this braid in my hair, so it's the one I do most often from their blog:

(If you have shoulder-length hair, like mine, you may not think your hair is long enough to do this, but it is possible! All you do is start the braid where they start theirs and when you are about to get the end of your braid, you pick up new strands of hair around where the braid is ending and braid them into your original braid to connect them and just continue braiding with those new strands of hair. That may have made zero sense, so let me know if you need better details).

 

Since we're on the topic of hair, let's side track really quick. This is a video I found through Pinterest about how to make these absolutely gorgeous curls with a sock. You just sleep with this sock in your hair and wake up to find beautiful curls! Doesn't it sound too good to be true? My hair is to short for it work, but I tried it out anyway, and it put lots of volume in my hair and made it curl in at the ends, which was cool! I really want someone with long hair to try this out to see how well it works. Plus, this girl has an adorable accent, which makes it fun to watch.

Also through Pinterest, I found a cute blog called E Tells Tales. She is super crafty and she has a newborn baby, so it's a craft AND baby blog-- my favorite! She has a tutorial on how to make these adorable pillows:

She tells her birth story, and is not shy about sharing the nitty gritty details, which scared me half to death reading them!

And one post I liked, she talks about what she brought in her hospital bag and what she actually used and what she didn't. I just like that she shares everything, so I figure if I follow her blog closely enough, I will be semi-prepared for this baby that is coming.

Little Miss Momma is written by a lady who is gorgeous and stylish and makes crafty things and foods. I think the title makes it sound more like a baby blog than it really is, it's more of a craft and fashion blog, with occasional baby posts.

 

Cute room she decorated:

And then this blog was introduced to me by my co-worker Michelle. It's called The Rockstar Diaries. The girl who writes this blog has a little baby girl who is possibly the cutest thing you've ever seen (see picture below). 

 Could you die with how cute this face is?! 

Since we are having a little girl I unashamedly steal all sorts of pictures from this blog and stash them in a folder of ideas for how to dress our baby and what sorts of pictures we should take of our baby. I just hope our baby is half that this cute!

And then they have this adorable dog who kind of reminds me of Nigel with his grumpy face. Except that Nigel is purple and he's a fish, so I guess that makes them pretty different. 

Once again, the ultimate conclusion of this blog post is that blogs are so so awesome! How did people ever survive without them? 

Teeny Tiny Baby Shoes

On Saturday, I had a list of things that I NEEDED to do, it included things like:

1. Unpack from the 4th of July St. George trip (yes, two weeks after the 4th of July)

2. Clean the very messy living room, bedroom and kitchen (considering that the only other room in my home besides those three is the bathroom, you can imagine the awesome state of my very neglected home). 

When I get home from work I have just enough motivation to get dinner made and on the table and then after that, all good intentions of cleaning seem to be thrown out the window. So I was going to accomplish all those things on Saturday but did it happen? No it did not. But when you see what I did instead, you will understand why it took priority.

The beautiful girl in this picture (aka: the lovely Marnaloah)

helped me make these cutie-patootie baby girl shoes:

Do you see why cleaning my home seemed suddenly to not be important? Look at how adorable these shoes are! Of course I would spend the day making them instead of cleaning! I kind of die with happiness every time I see how tiny and adorable they are. 

I got the pattern from here.

I might be slightly obsessed with baby shoes. Our baby now has FOUR pairs of shoes, for someone who won't even be walking for about a year, that's a lot of shoes. I just got a pair of these cute-o baby loafers from here.

Oh my heavens, the cuteness of these tiny shoes-- I just can't get over it! And when they are actually on the feet of a tiny person, especially my tiny person, I really might die with how adorable it all is.  

Adam's sister, Lindsay, got our baby a pair of these super adorable flowery Mary Jane shoes, with some darling striped stockings to match-- so perfectly feminine and dainty! Image from here. 

And we also have a pair of little Nike shoes for her that look sort of like this (but not this tiny, this was just the biggest image I could find on google).  Our neighbors decided that no child of Adam's could be without Nike shoes and so they gave them to us long before we were even pregnant!

Unless I decide to start making clothes for our baby girl instead of shoes, don't be surprised if you see her crawling around in only cute shoes and a diaper. But with the cuteness of these shoes, it will hardly matter what else she is wearing!

Diaper Bag of Cuteness

You know you are a soon-to-be mom when...

... you ask for diaper bag for your birthday. And it arrived yesterday afternoon on our doorstep! It's not technically made to be a diaper bag, it's a messenger bag, but it is ridiculously adorable and it will work perfectly as a diaper bag. After much searching I found this bag and loved it, but it was out of our price range to justify buying it just because we needed a diaper bag, so I decided to ask Adam for this bag for my birthday and that sweet boy got it for me! (He also made me eggs benedict for breakfast and gourmet french dip sandwiches for dinner-- those are not easy things to make and they were so yummy!)

(images from fossil.com)

I've already stuffed the few baby things we own into this bag, anticipating the day that she finally arrives- it's kind of ridiculous.

Ella

I thought that we would be contemplating the name of our baby for a long time, maybe even up until the time that she's born. At first we were leaning towards Brighton because we both like that name and it's original, but whenever we would refer to our little girl as "Brighton," it didn't seem right, which is weird, since we've never even seen her, so how could it not seem right? So we started playing around with the name Ella and for some reason it's perfect! We still like the name Brighton and want to name a future daughter that name, but this little girl is supposed to be Ella. I know that sounds funny, but it's totally true! So we've pretty much officially decided that her name is Ella. We always refer to her as Ella now and I think she approves! Now to find a middle name... what do you think of Ella Mae?

One of the highlights of my life

One thing that I cannot get over is how much I love feeling her move! I LOVE feeling her squirm around and kick. The other day I was sitting at my computer at work and I suddenly burst out laughing, completely out of the blue because she had kicked me at just the right place in my ribs and it tickled like crazy! It's not quite as fun when she kicks my bladder. The other night I woke up coughing for some reason, the kind of coughs that shake your whole body, you know? And I must have scared the daylights out of her because she went positively insane, kicking and punching and squirming as hard as she could. Adam could feel her as well. At the time, it kind of scared me that she was hurt, but she seems fine now so I think she was just scared, or she just had the sudden urge to dance.  And I love when I sometimes will rest something on my tummy and she kicks back at it. Since she can hear now, I love turning up the music in the car and singing with it--okay, so I kind of loved doing this before I was pregnant, but it's even better now because I know she can hear it!

And how awesome is Pinterest with all the adorable pictures of baby nurseries and cute things that you can make for your baby? 

Several years later

A few years ago, when I first started doing illustrations for Laura, I did this drawing for one of her patterns. I hadn't started the art program at BYU yet. 

Now, about three years later, I've finished the art program and I've been doing a lot more illustrations for Laura in the meantime. Laura decided to make a change to the pattern for this particular dress and asked me to redo the illustration to fit the new pattern. The arms of the girl in the original drawing had always bothered me and so I was excited to redo the illustration to fix those arms. When I finished this drawing and put it next to the original to see if there was anything I liked better about the original, I was so excited to see the difference between the two drawings. It looks like going through the art program has actually made a difference. It's a relief to know that stressing about multiple paintings and drawings every week for months on end has paid off!