My baby doesn’t have a red face!

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Huggies®. We have been using Huggies Natural Care® Wipes with Triple Clean to keep boogers at bay while Atlas is sick, and loved the results. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t post it. Here are the details!

It’s been 16 weeks today since Atlas was born. For 10 of those days I have been sick. For 5 of them he has been sick. For two of them Joey has been sick. It’s amazing how fast time is going. He weighs over 17 lbs and eats like a champ, which is awesome. I somehow passed my cold onto him despite my efforts to avoid germy contact and keep him healthy, and now bebe has the sniffles. We have been trying to keep from irritating his little nose and face with burp cloths and tissues because his nose has been a leaky faucet and he’s been spitting up so much, you wouldn’t believe it. Seriously, it’s an unbelievable amount.

Atlas is a good baby

As you can see, we have successfully accomplished no-red-nose-or-raw-rubbed-skin after 72 hours of straight wiping with the Huggies. Love it. Love love love.

drooling baby

I know most people who love their wipes love them to keep baby booty clean (which these obviously do a good job at, too), but we were wildly impressed with the soft and clean glowing baby face post million-wipes-a-day. He’s not only sick and snotty,  he’s teething + drooling in an unbelievable way. Gallons of drool, I kid you not. It’s a huge mess.

huggies2_2

The days are filled with this.

huggies2_3

Then this. Nom nom nom. Fingers are his chew toy of choice when Sophie is napping.

Then we repeat. 1,000 times until it’s bedtime.

We use a pack a wipes a day. Like I mentioned, it’s a huge, huge clear, gooey mess. Huggies Natural Care was given to us free by Huggies, and you can grab them free too if you want to be a Huggies Tester. I can’t resist an all natural freebie. This works for us because I can’t imagine using an unnatural product on my baby’s face all day everyday. Plus, they come in super cute packaging that works with the nursery. They have brilliant rubber grips and are way less clunky than all the other packaging we have tried. And we have tried a lot. Of course they hang out on the changing table because we use them for diaper changes as well, but trust me, they are awesome for little sensitive faces.

huggies2_5

The statement they offer is “Huggies Natural Care® Wipes with NEW Triple Clean* layers are gentle on baby’s skin and thick enough to clean their hands and faces, all the way down to their bottoms.”, and I think they are really accurate in how we use them on a daily basis.

What messes do you have going on in your home with your little one?

Huggies® is introducing parents to improved products that are designed to take on some of the messy challenges of parenting: Huggies® Snug & Dry Diapers with NEW SureFit* Design, Huggies Natural Care® Wipes with NEW Triple Clean* layers. In addition to the same trusted Leak Lock® protection parents have come to love and trust, only Huggies® Snug & Dry Diapers now have NEW SureFit® Design, to provide long-lasting fit for up to 12 hours of leakage protection.

Interested in trying out these new products for yourself? Huggies® is encouraging parents everywhere to become Official Huggies® Testers at Huggies.com/Testerand put their new and improved diapers and wipes to the test in their everyday routine – from playground play dates to messy mealtime.

To get coupons and other great rewards, visit the Huggies® Test Town!

Or check out the Huggies® Facebook fan page to learn more now!

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Huggies®.

Frozen

Hi friends! I am wrapping up a 10 day cold/3 day no voice fest that I have given to Atlas and now it looks like Joey has it too! Sorry for the lack of posts, but know we are working on some pretty great ideas for our #MAHAHKitchenReno if you want to follow along on Instagram (@makingahouseahome). Also, tomorrow is our first Instagram flash-sale! Busy and sick is no fun, can’t wait to relieve myself from both!

Wish us luck with getting the bugger out of A!

6 Tips To Get Your Little One to Sleep Through The Night

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Huggies®. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t share it. 

After Atlas was born everything changed and I suppose it’s that way for all moms. Am I picking the right products for my baby, or will it result in some major calamity if I have chosen the wrong items?  Is it OK that not everything is organic? Will he sleep through the night? The days go so quickly now with all these and many more questions spinning in my head. I just want to do this right. I never wanted anything more.

huggies on 13 week old,

One thing I have been particularly obsessed with when it comes to Atlas is keeping him clean, and keeping diaper rash at bay. Second runner up? Will he sleep long enough at night for Joey and I to get some rest?

16 lb baby buggies

We have been using Huggies for the past few months after they contacted us to try them out (which you can be a tester too, for free!) and see what we think.

I would like to introduce the golden ticket of sleep. It can be found, and it can be found quickly! For us (and maybe for you too), we finally were able to let him sleep through the night when we knew we could avoid diaper rash, and “trained” him to sleep eat! The trick to it all was to let him be in his moses basket or mamaroo, and when he begins to fuss - feed him right there in it. It goes something like this:

  • Make sure a good quality diaper (like Huggies® Snug & Dry Diapers with NEW SureFit®) is on your little bean before putting them down for the night. This is key! You don’t want the diaper to leak, and you don’t want to promote diaper rash!
  • We hear him fuss a little and one of us awakes. Being we switch feeding shifts (every-other most nights), sometimes one of us sleeps all the way through!
  • If he is in the mamaroo, we stop it’s motion to feed him and cover his chest with a burp cloth. If he’s in the Moses basket, we use our foot to keep it still from rocking, and still cover his chest with a burp cloth. This alerts him that we heard his cry.
  • We then prep a bottle with a small touch light we have set up by our little food station for Atlas so we don’t turn on any lights strong enough to disturb anyone.
  • When the bottle is ready, we slowly tease Atlas’ upper lip while he is sleeping and he opens his mouth and takes the bottle.
  • Relax and feed your little one! Chances are they will continue to sleep! Brilliant!
huggies in diaper bag

First thing in the morning we do a diaper change and a diligent clean up on his parts – and we are good to go. The Huggies Snug & Dry Diapers (with SureFit) work twelve whole hours. Needless to say, they were perfect for the 3,200 mile road trip we just took too!

huggies butt photo

Point being, we want the best for our kids and we want everything to not have to be hard. Spending more or doing more doesn’t always equal more. We have tried four brands now ranging in price and quality and the most expensive was not the best for us. Everyone sleeping as much as possible with not having to worry about a booty bite – definitely best for everyone.

Interested in trying out these new products for yourself? Huggies® is encouraging parents everywhere to become Official Huggies® Testers at Huggies.com/Testerand put their new and improved diapers and wipes to the test in their everyday routine – from playground play dates to messy mealtime.

To get coupons and other great rewards, visit the Huggies® Test Town!

Or check out the Huggies® Facebook fan page to learn more now!

P.S Are we Instafriends? We are hosting a vintage flash sale in May, follow for more info!

 

Over 3,200 Miles With an Infant

11 days. 3,200+ miles. 4 hotel rooms. Two 30-somethings with their 9 week old driving from New York to Texas with a stop in Nashville seems a little nuts, and well, it is. We decided to bring our bubbling baby boy down to Houston to hang out with the grandparents, and meet the great-grandparents and the extended family. We had no idea how this was going to go. It took us 28 hours to get to Nashville alone, and that’s a 12 hour drive. Ya know what, though? It was so much fun. Yea, we stopped every 2-3 hours for diaper changes, feedings, and leg stretches  but we knew what we were getting into before we strapped on our seat-belts, and I believe that’s the key to a good family road-trip.

infant roadtrip

We started out by planning our trip in 2-4 hour increments. At each stop I replenished the diaper bag, and formula (breastfeeding while driving = not so safe) from a well supplied trunk.

Here are some tips on what kept us sane and surprisingly happy.

  • Ziplock bags! We had a “clean” and a “dirty” bag, and that’s how we controlled the bottle, pacifier, and nipple situation so feeding in the car was a snap!
  • We booked hotels rooms with a microwave so we could sterilize the bottles no matter what. We bought 20 use sterilization bags – easy to find on amazon & worth the $6.
  • We had those roller shades on the windows, but I also brought a bunch of swaddles to drape over the car seat and protect Atlas from the sun a little extra. Also it was great to diffuse the light for napping in the car – and boy did he nap!
  • We used Huggies disposables for the road-trip (way too hard to control cloth diapers for you cloth diaper mama’s)
  • We kept a huge supply of everything baby in the trunk. Each function had it;s own bag. The food bag, the diaper bag, etc. 
  • Foursquare wound up being awesome for avoiding the fast-food places. We had taco-bell once the whole 90+ hours we were in the car! 
family road trip
I am happy to admit it took months to plan. Being a vegetarian stinks while you are on the road, and that planning is required. Once you pass Nashville (headed down to Texas) vegetarians are in no-man’s land. I used Google Drive to make an itinerary  which I shared with Joey, and also converted to a PDF so we could view a downloaded version on our phone if we didn’t have 4G working so great while on the road. We also made a 378 song playlist for us, and a 266 song playlist for Atlas on Spotify. If you are vegetarian and driving from the comfort of New York vegetarian options to Tejos, here are some tips for you:
Philly has a slew of veggie options, and a market you can quickly pick stuff up and jet. Gianna’s has closed, RIP, but grab a vegan Philly Cheese Steak at it’s replacement, Blackbird.
Once we got to Nashville, we ate at The Wild Cow, and it was fantastic! There is a little bit of a hipster scene going on with a few vegetarian stops and vegan bakeries believe it or not. They also have a great cafe scene for a coffee stop. Being we spent the night there we got to explore a few places. Taco Mamacita stands out as a great stop for Joey & me to both get what we like because they have a separate vegan menu. And margaritas. It’s on a super cute strip where we went back to the next day to check out Tweed, an amazing spot curated perfectly for the tiny tikes. We splurged and got Atlas some treats. Also, the shop owner Maggie is the sweetest and told us where to go and what to do and mapped it all out for us. In fact, everyone in Nashville is super sweet.
tweed baby outfitters, tweedbabyoutfitters, tweed nashville
See the little lady bug? I bought him, named him Moe and crossed my fingers he would happily crawl on the magnetic house Joey just built for Atlas.
ladybug magnet
Success. Moe made it home safe and does in fact magnetically attached to his new home, the magnetic house! Now I need to go back to Nashville to buy more magnetic bugs. OK, back to eating, friends  and driving.
designthoughts
I was lucky enough to meet up with a friend I met in New York, who recently moved to Nashville. Kim, who blogs over at DesignThoughts. We hung out for a few, with my round baby in the beautiful weather. Thanks for the great pic of us and our boys Kim!
A great stop for a meat-eater who has a vegetarian wife (or friend, or girlfriend, or husband….) is this cute hotdog place which has pretty great veggie dogs! Now, this is where it gets tricky to be a vegetarian.
Enter, the off-the-beaten-path-towns. First off, we wound up staying in a town that smells like dog-food. I kid you not. The whole town smells like dog food, because of the dog-food factory. We want to open a stand and sell T-shirts that read “What’s that smell? Byram, Mississippi”.  Another town that makes me laugh, we actually got a picture of the sign.
shartlesville
Yes, I know. I am five years old. Tennessee is long and pretty and once you are about the leave the state it gets boring and there are no exciting stops until you get to Houston. Houston was loaded with a ton of veggie options, and my tried and true is Baba Yaga, so we ate there the first night. But now that we typed 950+ words, we can finally get to the point of our trip! Family.
Atlas got to meet his great-great-grandma and grandpa, and it was pretty awesome. These are Joey’s mom’s parents and they are the cutest and sweetest ever, ever. She even makes me vegetarian tamales and has Joey’s mom bring them to New York when they visit.
family sip and see
Here is Atlas with Joey and his side of the family with a cake the size of the baby. They threw us a “Welcome Atlas” party, which was super sweet.
baby cake
Someone was thinking about doing snow angles in that sheet cake. And for good measure, a family photo. Hey, we have to snag one whenever someone is available to take one!
When the family festivities were over, we spent some time at the Houston Zoo. It’s a serious zoo – way more intense than we anticipated. Atlas had some open air diaper changes because no-sleep mommy forgot his changing pad. Along side the tigers and turkeys he was bare-butt and loving it. They even have a little aquarium there which was perfect because A loves to gaze at the jellyfish.
jellyfish, jelly fish, baby jellyfish, infants and jellyfish
Then we watched some giraffs pee. It’s comical. You don’t really think about zoo animals doing their business, but when a giraff goes number one, you notice. What other animal is there that you can walk under their stream? Atlas was sleeping, and too young to enjoy the silliness.
baby at zoo

It was a great and exhausting day, and I don’t think we even covered half of the zoo. I am excited to go back, especially when Atlas can fully understand where we are and I am not sneaking feedings in at the gift shop table display.

We hit up this amazing vegan joint, Green Seed Vegan. Oh my word. Some of the best vegan food we have every had. The coco taco’s and the cauliflower nuggets. I am willing to drive down to Houston again right now. I wish I took some pictures of the yummy food.

We went shopping one day with a friend of Joey’s who use to style stores and windows, so we wound up at some exciting haunts of his. One place was just a goldmine of amazing. Adkins Architectural Antiques is overwhelming and awesome, and I wish we had room in the car to buy all their patio furniture.

baby hand, stone baby hand, cement baby hand
antique keys
I totally went home with a cement baby hand by the way. We also went to this shop, New Living, which has some pretty great natural and original finds for the style and green savvy person. Wish we had something like that here in Westchester.
The week felt like a flash, and before I knew it we were packing the baby and the car up again to head back to Nashville for another night.

baby in adult sunglasses
We checked out more cafe’s and bummed around in the sunshine and hung out in one of the many cute neighborhoods in addition to getting great rest.
baby daddy sleeping
Everything went really smooth, like I mentioned. The baby got upset once on the way back, so we pulled over for ten minutes and calmed him down quickly, and back on the road we went. We didn’t really snack in the car, so it would stay clean – and I think that was a really good idea on our part. Less trash, less of a cluttery feeling. We are fully confident to take Atlas on more trips now. We are actually planning Paris, which has me doing finger dances every day. Even though things went super well, we decided to limit all road trips to eight hours or less, and fly if it’s over that, just because it cost us about 5X more to drive than fly down to Texas this trip. All in all, we are now amped up for the summer trip to begin!

Have you ever traveled with an infant successfully? Any great tips?

April is always a weirdo sandwich month.


See, Joey and I got married in Vegas at a Howard Johnsons with Elvis singing to us.

This isn’t a late April Fool’s joke. It totally happened, and it was very much planned. Our parents came, my best friend did too. It was a blast. We played our magic numbers, and won at roulette. It was kind of an amazing long weekend. This happened on March 23, 2009. Then in May (on the 25th), we had a big ‘ol wedding in Jamaica. April is kind of that weirdo time where we have major-things-to-celebrate-sandwich going on.

So, Jamaica was more of a “fake” wedding because we wanted all the American papers to be legit, hence Vegas. It was like a week long adult summer camp. Seriously, things looked like this most of the time:

tensingpen bridge

We even had a bus that resembled a party bus. We were in the middle of nowhere in Jamaica at a treetop resort, Tensing Pen. I had a bus take us to a secret location for a bonfire. This was everyone’s reaction when they were told about the snakes, kidnappers, and other off-the-grid dangers…

jamaica bus

There were a few hours where an actual wedding did happen, and people were’t jumping off bridges, or being taken to secret hideouts.

 

Before Atlas was born, it was the absolute best week of my life. We had an amazing wedding photographer, Jen Curties, we won a contest on OnceWed.com, and she took brilliant pictures of our chaos. She actually made things look under control. Except when she wanted to take the “hero picture”, and this happened…

tensing pen, tensing pen, tensing pen bridge

Yes, I am wildly scared of heights. Bridges. Water. You know how hard it was to find helium in Negril? I really thought I could just walk myself to the middle of the bridge and take that picture, but no. I find myself hugging the bridge, watching my tears fall through the cracks into the crashing waves below. I was scared to death. Looking back it makes me laugh – but don’t think about asking me to walk across it today.

Did you have kind of a nutty wedding? Lion’s Gate is looking for people to share their story on the Lion’s Gate fan page. They have a new movie coming out April 26th, The Big Wedding, which looks ridiculous! I’m nice, so I put the trailer below for you to check it out.

 Compensation was provided by Lionsgate via Glam Media. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author   and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Lionsgate.


Photo Project Fun

 

Hello friends! A million and one years ago in another life, I use to take photos for a living. I toured with many a band, to many of states and shot live and editorial for many of magazines. This was back when film was 35mm, and my life only focused around music. Fast forward 10 years and here I am barely able to turn on a digital camera, and I take photos of my baby, husband, and house now.

As amateur as they may be, these new pictures that my life revolves around are the most valuable to me. We have turned our instagrams into magnets, made tiny little books for Joey as a gift, and back in 2006 (before instagram) I made a Blurb book for Joey as an anniversary gift.

diy photo book

I went back to Blurb just a few weeks ago to see what their offerings were and wound up ordering another book to start a new tradition. I started with 2012 photos walking through my pregnancy and leading up to 2013.

make a photo book

reverse online publishing

I loved my 2006 books, but my 2012 book is AMAZING quality. It’s not cheap, in fact it’s pretty expensive – but totally worth the $150ish investment it will cost us annually. Remember when we use to pay to develop and print film? I am sure this is way cheaper if you break it down. 2013 is going to cost us a small fortune because we have already taken over a thousand photos of the bebe, and he’s just over two months. I have a feeling that’ the amount of photos we take daily is not going to change.

side by side weekly pictures, baby weekly photo, baby photo idea

Young House Love did this photo project when they had their sweet daughter Clara, and I absolutely fell in love with the idea when I saw them do it. With their blessing, we decided to do the same thing with Atlas – and I am so excited to add it to our 2013 Blurb book. I’m not much into scrapbooking or bulky photo books, so the fact their are so many options these days to make crisp and clean organized books excites me.

If you want to see some other things we tried with our photos and instagrams, check out this post. Are we friends on instagram? We are makingahouseahome – let’s be friends if you answered “no”!

Ready, set, vote!

Hello friends! Back in November you may remember we posted about Ikea being awesome and giving a group on need a $25K kitchen make over. Think firehouses and community centers, those people who service the public on a nickel and dime budget.

rescue remodel, ikea giveaway, kitchen renovation giveaway

I LOVE that Ikea is working with Family Handyman to giveback! The nominees are all collected and ready for your vote right here. If feeling warm and fuzzy wasn’t reason enough to vote, Ikea is giving away a $100 gift card to a lucky voter!

This post is a sponsored post, however I think what they are doing is fantastic and hope you hop over and vote for a deserving group!

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