Our Winter!

Christmas!
Our first Christmas as a family of three! It was an adventure. We usually combine our two families (much easier on us, and on Andre's parents since they don't have to cook), but this year Andre's parents decided they didn't want to travel. So I suggested that we go up and visit them for dinner on Christmas Eve. It ended up being a huge ordeal for us having to lug a bunch of crap for a half day there, but I felt is was important that Emilie get to experience her first Christmas with both of her grandparents.

Emilie and her Nana

Opening her new jammies!

Giving her Grandpa his present.

Santa visited our house!!

 The next morning we spent the first part of the morning together just as our little family. Listening to Christmas carols and opening presents. Emilie was a little overwhelmed by all the gifts though, so it ended up taking us the entire day to get everything opened.

Opening her stocking.

She loved her new activity table.

Opening more presents!

 After a nap in the morning we went over to my parents house to open even more presents!

Emilie and I going through our stockings.

Our day ended (after nap #2) with a turkey dinner at my parents house. I was a little nervous about how this was going to go down with a house full of people, and two active babies in my parents tiny house, but it all went really well, and Emilie did very well.

Swimming Lessons 
One thing that Andre and I felt was really important was to have Emilie get comfortable with the water, and one day be able to swim, so we started by enrolling her in a water babies swim program at the local recreation centre. The best part was that Emilie was in the same class as her cousin Joshua!

Yay, swimming lessons!

Learning the back float with Mama.

Playing with Papa.

Fun in the snow
You'd think that living in Canada that this would be an everyday occurrence, but this year, not so much at least where we live. We did however manage to get a few snapshots of Emilie having some fun in the snow with her cousin.

How can we forget...

More on the BIG ONE later!

A New Year

And hopefully a start to more regular blogging. To tell you the truth I have found having two blogs (this blog and the baby blog) to be a bit much to keep up along with work and home, and Emilie....you get the picture. But then I keep thinking about different blog post ideas, and then I think of how the people that read our baby blog may not be terribly interested in reviews of greener products, or recipe ideas, or my general rants about life in general. Sometimes it's nice to have a place that not everyone knows existed right?

I'm going to try to get back into doing little things for myself though. I really do want to get back to blogging, and back into scrapbooking as well. Two things that really do make me happy, but have fallen by the wayside first when Emilie was born, and then again when I went back to work in July. Just not enough hours in the day, and energy to get through those hours! But enough for the grumbling.

I really do want to catch you up on Christmas, what has been going on around here, the status of our marriage since I last posted about our transition into parenthood last year, and what we have been up to this winter. I also want to try out some new recipes (I found an awesome new Crock Pot recipe website!!), share with you some blogs that I love (maybe my readers will do the same?) and do a series on cloth diapering. My goal is to do a new blog entry every week, but I think a more realistic goal would be biweekly. We'll see how it goes!

The holidays are here again

With all the stress that goes along with it!

I have to confess that I'm a little Scrooge when it comes to Christmas. I find the holidays stressful, too materialistic, too rushed, the list goes on and on. I hate that it takes sometimes MONTHS to get ready for Christmas for it all to be over in a matter of hours. It's just not fair I tell you! Never mind all the family stress that goes along with Christmas.

This year is a little different. I'm dying to see Emilie on Christmas morning open her presents and play with the wrapping paper. I think it will be so exciting. We have one present in particular that I know she will just love, and I think she is just at the perfect stage developmentally for it as well, so I think she will really get a lot of use out of it. At the same time I dread Christmas dinner at my parents small home. There will possibly be about 17 people in my parents townhouse. The entire main floor is going to be transformed into a huge dining room, and their basement is a giant storage area, so is absolutely unusable. Being that Emilie is now a lean, mean, crawling machine, I am super stressed about this.

To make matters even more stressful my mother-in-law has decided that she is allergic to our cat this year and will be unable to make it for Christmas dinner. Normally I would just say it's her loss and rejoice that I don't have to put up with her eccentricities overnight, we now have Emilie, and I feel it's important for her to see both sets of grandparents for the holidays. Sigh, so I'm being the bigger person, and I suggested to Andre that we pack up everything but the kitchen sink and drive to their place for dinner on Christmas Eve. It should be a gigantic pain in the ass, and I will no doubt spend the entire visit trying to make sure Emilie doesn't get into something she shouldn't, but that's what the holidays are for right?

We did do some fun things though, starting with a little photo shoot with a local photographer. Considering the price (only $40) I am happy with the images. They looked great on our photo Christmas card, so that is a plus. Emilie would not smile at.all the entire time we were with the photographer, and I felt really disappointed when we left, but I think they turned out well regardless. Here are some of the shots that we had taken:

Pictures two, three, and five were used on our Christmas cards this year, which are currently sitting on my dining room table waiting to be written out and mailed sometime this weekend. I am sooooo behind this year.

Last weekend we went to my church's annual Breakfast with Santa. I had helped as a server in the past, and it was something I always thought would be fun to do once I had a family of my own. It was, and we ended up getting some great shots with Santa with Emilie, and Emilie and Joshua. Here are a few:

Emilie bored with breakfast, wanting to see Santa.

Checking him out.

Apparently very happy with her new story book.

Emilie and Santa.

Emilie, Santa, and Josh

Making sure Josh realizes how cool this is.

Josh with Santa

The Working Mother Debate

Anyone who is a mother has an opinion on this very subject.

I am no different.

Now I live in Canada, the home of hockey, and the one year maternity leave. That is for everyone that is not self-employed. (Now they do have maternity leave benefits for Self Employed people, but it started too late for me to benefit from this.) So Andre and I saved and built up a savings so I could stay home for four months full time with Emilie. Then when Andre was headed home for the summer from work I would head back to work since there was no way we could afford to stay home with half an income over the summer while Andre was off work!

Now I will start by saying that I am incredibly fortunate that I am self employed in that I have a flexible schedule and can bed my schedule. Most people with a traditional job do not have this option. One con to my specific field is that my income relies on the availability of people, ie. working evenings and weekends. My dream would be an 8am-4pm or 9am-5pm work day, but unless the work day of everyone else changes, this just isn't my reality.

I thought I was prepared for being a working mother*. I knew it would be difficult and not without challenges...I had no idea how difficult. I had no clue how isolated I would feel. Aside from one woman I know (also an RMT) no one knows what it is like. It is an incredibly blessing to get to be home with your child for an entire year. I will freely admit that I am envious of everyone who has the opportunity to do so.

There are a lot of women out there that will tell you that it is easier to be a working mother*. I do not agree. For me it is harder, much harder. I cannot be the best mother, the best wife, the best employee all at the same time. Something has to suffer. If someone has figured out how to do everything perfectly I would like to know their secret. I feel like I'm being pulled in every direction at the same time. I have no time for myself. I will admit that this is of my own accord. If I have free time I want to spend it with my daughter. I will never ever get this precious time back. You can't get back their first word, their first laugh, their first crawl, their first anything. Maybe when she is older it will be easier to leave her, until then I don't want to miss anymore firsts than I have to.

I found it easier to get things done when I was at home. When my daughter napped I would tidy the kitchen, throw in a load of laundry, clean the living room. I can't do that when I'm at work. So now my evenings weekends are spent playing catch up. Those days that Emilie would be up screaming for whatever reason throughout the night, I would :gasp: sleep when she was sleeping. Yet another thing that is hard to do when I am at work. I find out about a work function and the first thing I think is "I'll miss more time with Emilie".

I feel overwhelmed all the time. I feel like I'm playing catch up all the time.

For me, being a working mother* is harder, much harder.

*Please note that every time I use the term "working mother" I refer to a mother who works outside of the home. I don't want any nasty comments about how stay at home mothers work too. I am aware of that.

Here I am.

There have been many moments over the last few months where I have sat where I am sitting at this exact moment, thinking, to myself about how I should get back to blogging. I've found myself craving that release of thoughts like I used to when I was journaling years ago. I even found myself tempted to grab a pen and notebook and start scribbling down thoughts, but then reminded myself that I have a BLOG.

So here I am, again.

I think part of the reason I have resisted blogging is my fear that maybe people will find what I have to say boring, but then I remind myself that I started blogging for me, so I shall continue blogging for me. Hopefully the occasional entry will strike a chord with someone out there along the way.

So here, I am. I hope you'll have me back.