MY NEW WEBSITE - Please follow me at Sincerely, A!

Since Knox was born, I've been trying to be it all - full time photographer, full time stay at home mom and longing to get back into my blog. But after months of trying to balance mom life + work life (wildly unsuccessfully, I might add), I've finally realized that my life won't bend to accommodate my work goals, so I need to change my work goals to fit into my life. And so, the brainstorming began.

I've been drinking way too many late night coffees putting together a complete rebrand of my business and this blog - one that will hopefully fit with this season of our life and grow with the next one. You can now find my writing, photography, our comical California life and an excessive amount plethora of Knox photos over at my new website, Sincerely, A. Please, please come follow along - I'd love to have you! 

The week in.

Rants:

• My head hasn't hit the bed at night this week before 1AM. My business has one hot mess of a website that needs to be up and running, and when you've got a little nugget to play with all day long you don't settle in to get your other work accomplished until after his bedtime. After a 1:30AM bedtime for Mama, night feedings every 2 hours after that and a wake up call at 7:30AM, I'm somehow feeling miraculously fabulous right now. But that may or may not be the caffeine talking. Is this still a rant? I don't even know what's happening here. 
• With just a month and a half until the LA marathon, my marathon training came to a screeching halt last week when my foot was aching so bad I could hardly walk. I'm rehabbing it out right now, but nothing is more frustrating than being injured at this stage in the training game. Also...
• TWO STRAIGHT HOURS on the elliptical to make up for missing my long run this past weekend. Two. Hours. 

Raves:

• We have a skilled army crawler and a burgeoning stander! In a short two week span, Knox has become wildly mobile. Now, if I could just get him to stop touching all of the things in the house...
• A lovely new couch is set to arrive at our house tomorrow and my living room can't wait. And Yoshi can't wait to lick it thoroughly :|
• El Nino is here and it brought us some legitimate stormy weather. Thunder and lightning and rain you can hear drumming on the roof and windows - be still, my Midwestern heart. We'll inside cuddling it out over here.

Randoms:

• Knox and I are back to class after our winter break. Bring on the shared Mama woes, the baby toy stealing and the ball pit germs. As seen above, Knox is clearly ready for it. 

Knox the fox does Christmas.

 

Hoping you all had yourselves a merry little Christmas. We sure did! :)

The week in...

Oh, yes, my favorite end-of-the-week staple is coming back...

Rants

• Amazon Prime has me as spoiled as can be. Waiting a WEEK for my package to be delivered?! Good Lord, is it coming from Mars?!
• You guys, my toes are a hot mess. After Knox was born and I discovered just how many thousands of times per second I have my hands all over that little nugget, I promptly gave up on the idea of painting my fingernails ever again in the next 5 years or so. But bare toenails freak me out. And I vowed that these toes of mine would never see the outside of our home paint-free. But right now, I'm hanging on to the last chipping-away specks of big toe paint and I haven't the slightest clue when I'll find time to fix them. HELP! 

Raves

• We're prepping for our very first California Christmas and I'm pretty pumped. We've been here 4 years now, but we've always traveled back to Missouri for the holidays but because we made the trip in the fall, this year we'll be staying put. Decorating our house, planning the menu for Christmas dinner and enjoying a 60 degree forecast for Christmas day? I'll take it! 
• Cookie butter lattes from the Coffee Bean. I needn't say more. 

Randoms

I've switched over to the dark side. After being a Mac girl for 8 years, I needed a serious upgrade for my photo editing computer and my bank account just wasn't loving the idea of an iMac the same way my heart was. So, I let that Apple-hating nerd husband of mine build me the perfect editing beast of a PC for a price my bank account could handle. We're still in the process of moving everything over to the new computer but so far, let me just say...the monitor is so big it can be seen from outer space.

Did you know that banana exits a six-month-old's behind in the form of a whole bunch of black thread-looking fibers? Yeah, that was a disturbing surprise. Thank goodness for Google, or that also would have made for a very awkward panicked call to the doctor's office.

 And on that poopy note, I believe we'll end this week. Have a great weekend, y'all!

Let's not play catch up and say we did.

I have a perfectionism problem, and it has been spewing its guts all over this blog for the past couple years now. When we were struggling to get pregnant, I spent a lot of time hanging out in my pjs (no outfit photos there, ya know), eating too much take out (sorry 'boutcha, recipes...and also, my apologies, waistline) and just generally not caring about many things aside from propelling myself from one day to the next. And If I couldn't blog perfectly (with top notch photos, super witty subject matter and a daily posting schedule that ran like clockwork), perhaps I'd just wait until I got my shizz together and I could blog perfectly. Yes, obviously that was a good idea, right? But that took quite a bit longer than I would have guessed (let's be honest, it's debatable whether or not it's even happened yet) and as the days stretched into weeks stretched into months, the pressure seemed to be growing. Because now that I'd taken this huge amount of time away from my blog, my re-entry into the blogworld felt like it had to be SPECTACULAR, right? It had to be epic and wonderful and announce itself like, "BAM. I'm back and I've been rocking at life during this hiatus." And of course that just scared me away from blogging even further.

And then there was the issue of the catch up. Do I just pretend the last two years never happened? Do I run a quick recap of my life during my absence? (Not pregnant + Sad + Doctor + Not Pregnant + I give up, I'm barren + Pregnant! + STILL pregnant + Newborn + What is Sleep?) Do I diligently try to catch you up on every life happening and photo-worthy outing that's happened since I left? Is there even anyone who still checks this blog and would read such a thing or am I worried about absolutely nothing because I could blog outfit photos in my boob-milk soaked tank and post recipes sharing the best topping combinations for a Dominos pizza and no one would even see it?

At first, I felt like I had to catch up. The perfectionist in me was just not comfortable leaving those blanks blank. But my Lord, that's a lot to catch up on. And in the meantime, of course, life just keeps passing by and I'd become trapped in an endless cycle of the catch up game.

And so. This is my blank slate. This is my massive pile of a non-catch up post. A whole bunch of super adorable photos of Knox that are 100% necessary because they're too cute to NOT receive their 5 seconds of internet fame, and a promise to share my completely imperfect life imperfectly and inconsistently for as long as we all shall live. Amen.

If you give a baby an avocado...

After subsisting on mom-milk alone for just shy of 6 whole months, Knox the fox has officially been initiated into the exciting world of solids. (I tried SO HARD to wait until this little nugget's half birthday, but my gosh it was difficult once he was sitting up by himself and grabbing at every piece of my food he could see - I'm going with the added excuse that because he spent an extra two weeks refusing to exit my belly, he should really be six months old by now anyway, right? HA). 

We began our baby-led weaning journey this past weekend with a big, fat chunk of avocado. Hilarity ensued. I would apologize for the following excess of photos, but you guys...his faces are just too much. 

A first food story, as told by Knox: 

"Oh, hi there."

"Oh! What's this you're delivering to me?" 

"Nice to meet you, avocado. I will eat you now."

"Something about this feels like a trick. Are they going to take this away from me? I'd better shove it in my mouth quickly, just in case..."

"Ohmagerd what is this foreign taste in my mouth?!"

"It's on my tongue! It's on my tongue!"

"Why have you done this to me?!"

"I don't want to taste this any longer but I can't seem to stop eating it."

"You don't expect me to FINISH this gross thing, right?"

"Look, mama, I did it!"

All done.