Children Come First

I believe this is a phenomenon that happens with all mothers, we tend to put our children's needs before our own. However, I found that not only do I put Brody's needs before my own, but my choices for him are held to a higher standard than my own. Let me explain...

--When I was pregnant, I stopped drinking my daily lattes and cut down to one caffeinated beverage a day. Brody's health came before my addiction to caffeine. Despite the fact that I was able to survive with less caffeine for 9 months and it's clearly healthier for ME to cut back...it's just not enough motivation.

--I have never taken Brody outside for more than 5 minutes without putting sunscreen on him first. Yet I seem to forget every once and awhile to put it on myself. And I have the peeling skin to prove it.

--Vegetables with dinner? For Brody? Of course! Do I make enough for myself? Not always...

--I won't feed Brody take-out/drive-thru food, yet I'll eat it myself. We go out to dinner and Brody eats grilled chicken and broccoli and I'll order a breaded chicken sandwich.

I do try to take care of myself and know that I need to live a healthy lifestyle so that I can be around to watch Brody grow old. It's just a lot easier to make the right decisions for him than it is to make them for myself.

Road Trip

Early in June we took a 4 day weekend to drive down to Kansas City. The city that started it all for us. Jason & I only lived there for about a year and a half, but fell in love with it pretty quickly. We had many firsts in that city: first time we lived together, first year of marriage, first car, first house. Not to mention, it was the first time either of us had lived outside of Wisconsin. We grew a lot that year, both together and as individuals.


We absolutely loved living there, but for my career, ended up moving quicker than we would have liked. We're now back in Wisconsin because we love being close to family and friends, but if we could convince all of them to move to KC, we'd do it!


The drive is long, but I wanted to save the money on the airfare, so we did it anyway. The first night of our trip we slept in a random hotel in Iowa after driving as far as we could make it. Back up early to get on the road, we arrived in KC mid-afternoon on Thursday. It's was a little later than we planned, but not driving too late the night before was worth it.

First item on the agenda was eating at my absolute favorite restaurant in KC. Jack Stack is a BBQ restaurant with amazing food. I was excited to eat there, and I'd say Brody enjoyed it as well!


The best part about this trip is that we had no real plans. So Friday, once we got up and ready we walked down to Country Club plaza which is an outdoor shopping plaza several blocks long. We spent all morning shopping, had lunch and headed back to the hotel for nap time.

I've already blogged about how difficult hotels can be for toddlers. Our biggest problem is that Brody doesn't sleep well in hotel rooms. He can see us up and about, so he doesn't understand why he should be napping. Every day of this trip we had a battle with him during nap and bedtime. Aside from sleeping challenges though, he handled being in a hotel room just fine.


Without the toddler-amenities of home, like a high chair, we did a lot of improvising. But it all seemed to work out.

Friday night we drove out to the suburbs for another one of our favorite restaurants and to drive through our old neighborhood. We were surprised to see a lot of boarded up windows and broken shutters. I guess that the houses were hit pretty hard with the storms that caused the tornadoes in Missouri. The only downside of Kansas was the tornados, though we were pretty lucky while we lived there.


Saturday after some pool-time, we headed to another part of the city, to another favorite shopping area. Again, everything being outdoors, we just loved walking around. We also were able to stop at a restaurant we thought Brody would love, T-Rex, which is themed around dinosaurs. We were right and he loved every minute of it. He kept "rawr-ing" like a dinosaur and making fish faces since we sat by the fish tank. The best part was, that when this restaurant opened up, Jason and I talked about how it looked like a great place to take kids and talked about taking our children there someday. I loved thinking back to what life was like just the two of us back then, and now the three of us.

We headed out of town after that and spent the night near Iowa City. Sunday was left for leisurely driving home and it worked out well enough that we stopped in Debuque, IA to watch our nephew's basketball team play in a tournament.

I'm really glad we made the trip out of town. We have a lot of vacations this year, but as last-minute as this was planned, it was great to have a relaxing but fun getaway. The rest of our travels this year include a lot of other family and friends, which we're really excited for. However, the part that made this trip special is that it was just about the three of us, and I loved it.

Why I blog

As anyone who actually still looks at this blog knows, I have barely written anything in the last few months. So I began reflecting on why I blog...

Well, it started as a way to document my pregnancy and then realized it's also a great way to keep family and friends (who I never have time to call on a regular basis) in the loop on Brody's development as a baby. He was changing daily, so it was nice to document it.

Now...Brody has gotten a little older and while he is still growing and changing at a rapid pace, it's not the same as the first year of his life. Some weeks, I don't have as many things to write as others. Then there are the weeks that I have a ton to write, but don't have the time to do it. Then when I find time, I forget some of the things I wanted to write about.

The other day I was browsing through older posts on my blog and looked at some pictures of Brody that don't seem so long ago. Yet, he looks so different today than even a couple of months ago. And I realized that I'm missing out on documenting his first summer as a toddler. And it's been a busy, adventurous summer!

So on that note, a preview of our 18 month professional photos (taken by McManigal Photography). Once again, she did a wonderful job capturing Brody and our family. These are only the first few that we've seen, but I expect the rest to be just as wonderful.