Top 5 Must Have Baby Gear

As a mama to ten, I've seen a lot of baby gear trends come and go. I've also purchased a lot of baby gear, and unfortunately, most of it was useless and a major waste of money. Meeting the needs of children can be expensive, but they can also be very affordable. To be honest I have found that most of the baby gear out there isn't even necessary. While all the cute baby stuff for sale may not be necessary, there are a few that can make the transition of having a new baby so much easier.

 Top 5 Must Have Baby Gear

1. Crib or Pac-N-Play: This first item is probably clear to everyone, but many folks are into co-sleeping these days and I'm definitely not against co-sleeping, but there are time that you may want to lay the baby down and having a place to put the baby can be a major blessing.
2. Bouncy Chair: If I had to pick only one baby item, this one would be it. I have used a bouncy chair with every one of my children and consider them to be a major 'mama's helper'. Having a place to set my baby while they're awake so I can go about my daily routine makes my life so much easier, because let's face it, we can't always carry a baby around all day long.
3. Stroller: Being able to get out of the house and do things with a baby is of major importance for helping a mama keep her sanity. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience ~ you do not want to strap yourself to the house until your baby is walking. Having a stroller will enable you to enjoy so many activities outside the home that you otherwise couldn't.
4. Baby Carrier: I've owned many different kinds of baby carriers over the years, but I've always had one for my babies. Being able to carry a baby hands-free is a huge life-safer, regardless if you're at home our out and about. There will be times when you have a cranky little one and still have to go about your business. With a baby carrier, you can continue your normal life all the while giving your baby the attention he or her needs. These are my favorite brand of baby carriers.
5. Binxy Baby Shopping Cart Sling: This is a new item that I just recently purchased with baby number nine, but I love it!! Sometimes you're just running a quick errand and using the baby carrier or stroller just isn't something you want to do. So having this awesome shopping cart sling allows you to quickly and safely place your infant car seat on the shopping cart and go about your shopping leaving plenty of room in the cart for your groceries or other items you're buying.

Yes, this is only five baby items, but I wanted to keep this post short and sweet, only sharing my top five baby items that make my life easier with a new baby. To help make the new baby adjustment as seamless as possible for me, means getting back to my normal routine and not being confined to the house. Which is exactly what the above items enable me to do. Are the above items really must have items for all mama's, probably not, but they are my most favorite baby gear for this mama to ten!

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

5 Must Have Items for a Hospital Birth

I have had the privilege of giving birth ten times in the past 20 years. All of my babies have been born in the hospital due to various reasons which I'll discuss another day. Throughout those deliveries I have learned exactly what I can live without and what I must have for my delivery and postpartum time in the hospital. Some of the items may surprise you, but others are probably a staple for every hospital birthing mama.

5 Must Have Items for a Hospital Birth

1. Chapsticks & Mints: I try to labor as long as possible at home, but eventually we head on to the hospital where I finish laboring and deliver my baby. During this time of laboring, it has been my experience that the doctor/nurses prefer you not to eat or drink anything while in labor. (I don't exactly agree with this *rule*, but I don't typically want to eat when in labor, anyways). But, I do find that a mint really helps with the cotton mouth I get during labor. And then along with the cotton mouth I always suffer with terribly chapped lips and having chapstick on hand is a major blessing.
2. Non-perishable Food: Okay I realize most hospitals do have food, but they only send it out three times a day and it's usually not very appealing much less nutritional (at least this has been my experience at the two hospitals I've used to deliver my babies). There is nothing like the ravenous hunger of a woman who just gave birth!! I literally could eat anything and everything after I give birth. Which is why I bring a bag of my own groceries to the hospital. Foods I pack include nuts, dried fruit, protein bars, dark chocolate, veggie chips, rice cakes, etc. 
3. Wipes for Mom and Baby: This one may seem like an unusual item to pack, but trust me you'll thank me later! If you have a vaginal delivery, the sandpaper toilet paper that comes standard at most hospital is the last thing you want to use on your most delicate spot after you give birth. I always bring a package of flushable wipes. Also, for some reason our hospital only provides heavy duty workhorse towels as wipes for the baby. This means that when the baby poops the horrible black tar poop, you have to hobble over to the sink, wet it, hobble back to the bassinet and try to get the yucky mess off your babies bum. Yeah, not ideal. Just bring a package of natural wipes to the hospital and save your baby a massive diaper rash at only a few hours old. 
4. Nursing Pillow: Obviously this only goes for nursing mamas, but I find myself so sore after I give birth, and having my trusty nursing pillow helps make breastfeeding so much easier. 
5. Swaddle Blankets: The hospital does provide swaddle blankets, but they're very tiny, not soft, and difficult to wrap around a baby, especially when you're exhausted, sore, and just generally not capable of using all your faculties. Having a nice sized quality swaddle blanket (or a few in case of blowouts & occasions of vomit) makes those early swaddling days so much more practical. 

I understand that every mama has their own must have items for a hospital, but these are the few items that make my childbirth and recovery experience much more comfortable. I do have other things I like to bring, but for the sake of this post, I wanted to keep it down to my top five favorites. I know how important it is to create a positive hospital childbirth experience, which is why I always plan ahead, making a point to pack and bring my personal hospital necessities. I can assure you should we be blessed with another pregnancy and impending birth, these are the first items to go into my hospital bag. 

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Abby Lou's Birth Story

I'm a little behind on getting Abby Lou's birth story on here as she just turned one month old this past Saturday. But, it's crazy how fast the time flies. It seems with each baby we add to the family, that the adjusting phase takes a little bit longer. Hopefully, I'll be able to get all the kinks worked out sooner than later, lol. 

Abigail Louise's birth story begins on Tuesday, December 17th. I was 4 days past my due date. That morning after I exercised I started having trouble stabilizing my blood pressure. I struggle with low blood pressure when I'm pregnant and have had to be given shots to bring it up before. After a few hours of my blood pressure bottoming out, I called my doctor and they just assumed I was coming down with a cold and dismissed me. Since I wasn't having any pains or bleeding I decided to wait it out. 

Around 4:30am December 18th, I woke up with fairly uncomfortable contractions and some bloody show, I knew that we were going to have a baby that day. Normally my contractions start our slow and then progress over the day and at night we have a baby. Around 8am I decided to take a shower because my contractions were intensifying. By 9am the contractions were much stronger, albeit irregular, but the pressure was severe. I told my husband I thought we needed to go to the hospital.

When we arrived at the hospital they set us up in the triage area to examine me and evaluate if I was indeed in labor. As usual I didn't 'appear' to them to be in labor, so they were very slow and nonchalant in 'working me up'. By the time we got situated, I was 8cm dilated and they could not feel any bag of water, so we assumed I had slowly lost it, without me knowing.

There were no rooms available in labor and delivery, so they began to get the triage area ready to deliver our baby. All the while my contractions were still coming strong and fierce. Around 10:30am we made it into a room. Once in the room I was able to labor on a birthing ball as well as through walking around. After about 40 minutes I had terrible pressure and asked to be examined, I was 10cm but still had a 'lip' and they still could not feel any bag of water.

The nurse said she thought it would be fine for me to start bearing down/pushing if I felt like it at this point. With my next contraction, I pushed and my water exploded everywhere!! And Abby Lou came flying down the last of the birth canal. My husband had to run to go get the nurses and my doctor. Two pushes later, Miss Abigail Louise was born, screaming at the top of her lungs, covered in poop, and a little blue. The nurses said if she hadn't been screaming so much they would have been worried, but thankfully she was okay. 

The doctor handed Abby Lou to me immediately for skin to skin kangaroo care. But as is my norm I was in shock and barely could open my eyes. There's just something about natural, unmedicated childbirth that takes me a little bit to process. 

Unfortunately, since Abigail was such a big baby reigning in at 8 pounds 15 ounces and 19 inches long my placenta was fairly large and more difficult to deliver than Abby Lou herself. Once I delivered the placenta I had to have a few stitches. The lidocaine shots with no pain medication were extremely painful and they didn't work all that well, which meant I felt every stitch. {{OUCH!}}

I am very pro unmedicated childbirth, but because my after birth contractions are so bad (actually worse than labor itself) I opted for receiving a pain medication called Toradol via a shot for the first 24 hours. This was absolutely a life saver and I have zero regrets for choosing this route. 

Once we got into a postpartum room we were able to rest and get acquainted with our precious baby girl. Two days later we were released from the hospital. My recovery has gone fairly well with no complications. Abby Lou did have two bouts with infant mastitis, but both instances resolved themselves. Thankfully, now that her mastitis has healed, she is sleeping 6 hours a night, she nurses, and then sleeps another 3 hours. I truly believe her sleeping so well has majorly aided in my quick recovery. Of course eating healthy and maintaining a decent exercise regime throughout my entire pregnancy probably helped too. 

We are truly blessed and enjoying getting to know our sweet Abby Lou. 

With Love & Hope,
Jennifer

Winter Around the Homestead

It's winter on the ol' Williams homestead and we're still producing some garden veggies. We've been blessed with quite a bit of pickings from this year's fall/winter garden. It's just like our main summer garden: some years we grow more than we do in others; it all depends on what is going on and what we want to plant. With me having a baby in December, we didn't plant all that much, but it did fill in the gaps of balancing out our food budget.

We planted kale, lettuce, and spinach. Unfortunately, it was ready for picking right about the time of Abby Lou's birth and we were not really able to pick like we wanted. Sadly, we had a warm spell and the bugs came out and had themselves a grand feast. {{sigh}}

We have a few cabbages planted, but none are ready for picking just yet.

We had some nice sized turnips to come up this year. Turnips are my all-time favorite fall/winter produce! I wish we'd planted more.

My favorite way to eat turnips, is to boil them like potatoes until fork tender, drain, and then toss in butter, black pepper, and sea salt ~ yummy!!!

We had several broccoli plants and a few cauliflower plants as well. 

Broccoli and cauliflower are rather peculiar plants that can be quite finicky to grow in the South. They are super easy to attract pests and need just the right temperature.

Our favorite way to cook broccoli and cauliflower is to roast it in the oven with spices and olive oil. In this batch of veggies we added some of our bell pepper that we froze from our summer garden.

 And then we've got our little chickies which have slowed down their laying, we're averaging five eggs a day ~ which is pretty good to me. We try to let them free range a little each day. When we have our gardens in full swing, it's not as easy to let them free-range because they will eat our plants. We are just limited on space, but do the best we can.

The ol' homestead isn't all that quiet this time of year, but it's definitely a time to regroup and plan for the coming 'main' garden season. It won't be long before we're tilling up the soil and planting away. We're currently making our seed & plant wish lists and focusing on eating from the larder so we have plenty of space in the freezers and jars to fill.

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Christmas Traditions 2019

Traditions fill my love cup all the way to the tippy top ~ and Christmas traditions are extra special. There's just something about the Christmas season that makes traditions during the month of December extra special. Thankfully, my family loves all the corny traditions too. This year we all worked extra hard to get all of our favorite traditions done before Abby Lou was born.

To kick off our Christmas traditions we began our daily Advent study on the first Sunday after Thanksgiving. For our Advent tradition we light the coordinating candle(s), read our lesson, and sing a Christmas hymn. 

On December first our little elf friends arrived bringing donuts, yogurt, orange juice, and their coordinating story books and movies. Our children know they are not real, we just use them as a fun treasure hunt each day leading up to Christmas.

We started a new tradition this year with a trip to a drive-thru light display. They had an activity center set up as well with all kinds of fun holiday booths and food vendors. We went on Black Friday night and it was perfect, with minimal folks there and mild weather. Hopefully our town will continue with this seasonal attraction and we can make it a yearly tradition. 

We took a trip to The Bass Pro Shop, which is about an hour away. We pretty much only go there at Christmas and even then we don't buy much, it's more for the fun of it than the shopping experience. 

Christmas decorating is a family affair in our home. The children really got into the spirit this year and pretty much handled all of the decorating inside and out.

We have a couple of totes full of special Christmas toys that only get brought out at Christmastime. The children love setting up little villages and playing with them.

We had our Grinch Night complete with Grinch munch and hot cocoa.

The little ones especially loved our How the Grinch Stole Christmas movie night.

Every year we do a family ministry project and this year was no different. Christmastime is a great opportunity to teach children how to give to others and share the love of Christ.

We went to see the Friendship Santa. We are so blessed with a local family who volunteers their time and energy to spreading Christmas cheer. They go "all out" decorating their yard, dressing up as Santa, and passing out hot cocoa, cookies, and goodie bags to children all for FREE! They are truly a blessing to our community.

The Friendship Santa has these giant reindeer on display ~ they are amazing!! (My boys are over 6 feet tall, just to give you an idea of how tall these reindeer are.)

We had our Polar Express family movie night with cookies and hot cocoa.

We passed out homemade cookie bags to our neighbors. 

We bought our family ornament.

I made and sent out family picture Christmas cards. A dying tradition, but one I love to do. 

We went to a Christmas parade where our oldest was dressed up as "Thing One". We had no idea he was dressing up until he came strolling down the road, it was such a fun surprise.

We went on our Mini Van Polar Express light tour. Well now I guess it would be more appropriate to say "15 passenger van", but y'all get the drift, lol.

Our light tour begins with mama hiding tickets under everyone's pillows during the day (without my kiddos knowing), we have an early bedtime, while one of us parents is putting children to bed the other is fixing hot cocoa and cookies to bring on the tour. Once everything is ready, my husband takes our train whistle and blows it down the hallway 'waking everyone up' with "All aboard the Polar Express, get your tickets". Once everyone is up, and loaded in the van, they trade their tickets for a cup of hot cocoa and a cookie.

We then drive around looking at Christmas lights listening to Christmas music. This is one of my most favorite family Christmas traditions!

Another new tradition this year was to make Santa pancakes on "Christmas Adam" (what we call the day before Christmas Eve). I saw a friend make these super cute Santa pancakes and I just had to 'steal her idea'.

Not that great of a picture, but the night before Christmas we read the "Night before Christmas" while drinking hot cocoa. 

And our last tradition is our Christmas stockings. Another favorite Christmas tradition of mine. You could take all the presents away, but please just leave my stockings. I've made seven of our children their own stockings, and I am planning to make the other three this year. We fill the stockings with toiletries, snacks, and small unique gift items. 

Traditions are not a necessity to celebrate Christmas, but I love the activities we do. They are so special to me and I will always treasure the memories we've made doing these traditions. I'm already making plans for how they will be adapted for when we have grandchildren, lol. Life is too short not to make every moment count, and all these traditions is just one way I try to make the most out of the Christmas season.

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Christmas Baking 2019

When I was planning for our Christmas festivities back in the summer, I was a tad bit cautious in over planning in the baking department. I decided to plan for only a few baked goodies and candy making, then reevaluate as the season progressed with my pregnancy and how I felt. I ended up feeling extremely well and we ended up adding a whole lot more baking and candy making to our Christmas schedule.

The pictures on this post are not posted in order, but I thought it would make more sense just to post the pictures in similar groups. The above picture is some peanut butter kiss cookies we baked. Sadly these were not a huge hit with my people. The cookies were excellent, but no one liked the candy kisses. Most folks picked off the candy and just ate the cookie.

We kicked off our Christmas baking with cut-out sugar cookies that we iced and loaded down with sprinkles. Of course these are a family favorite and a must for my people at every holiday.

Everyone pitched in extra this holiday baking season since I was about to have a baby any day throughout all our baking madness, lol.

Next up we had traditional cookies. We first made three different kinds and then later in the month we baked three other types of cookies. 

The first three batches of cookies were mostly packaged into goodie bags and given to neighbors. 

Since we gave away most of the first three batches of cookies, we also made these Christmas M&M cookies, as well as the peanut butter kiss cookies pictured above, and the Christmas tree spritz cookies pictured below.

Spritz cookies aren't exactly a favorite for my family, but there's just something about them that says Christmas to me, so I had to make them. 

Red velvet white chocolate was among the first batch of cookies we made.

As well as chewy oatmeal.

 Last up in the cookie baking was peanut butter white chocolate cookies.

We also made an assortment of candy.

First we made peanut butter white chocolate Krispies.

Then we made chocolate covered peanut butter ritz crackers.

As you can see by Samuel's face the children had loads of fun making candy this year. This is one of our favorites that we call chocolate peanut clusters.

And no Christmas candy making session is complete without white chocolate covered pretzels. These are always the first to be gobbled up in our family. 

We tried a few new Christmas treats this year and one of them was Christmas crack or I've heard it called saltine cracker toffee. This was an interesting candy which my family did not like. We made three different versions, one with crushed pecans, one with chocolate M&M's, and one with sprinkles. I really, really liked the one with sprinkles, even if my family didn't.

These Rolo pretzel bites were also a new treat we made this year, which unfortunately, was not a favorite either. My children ended up picking the candies out of the pretzels because the pretzels became stale, even though they were stored in an airtight container. {{sigh}}

I wasn't going to make these chocolate covered peanut butter cheese-it bites, but my kiddos said they were a must. They blessed me by making every bit of them without any of my help.

Also a new addition to our Christmas candy making were these white chocolate haystacks. 

Due to the fact that our family is so large and we decorate so many gingerbread houses; we also make the gingerbread cookies to make the actual houses.

Since it takes so long for the houses to set up; the big kids, mom, and dad assemble the gingerbread houses the night before we plan to decorate them. 

Last but not least we also made a mega batch of Doodads. Even though Doodads aren't really under the realms of baking, it is something we make especially to enjoy during the Christmas holidays. The picture above was only half of what we actually made. 

Is baking a necessity to celebrate Christmas? Absolutely, not! But it is a treasured Christmas tradition for our family. I am so glad that even though I was extremely pregnant this Christmas, we were still able to make our favorite Christmas treats and even try a few new ones.

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer