Can You Smell That?

So lately I have been in LOVE with smells. The joke around here is that I have pica, although in my defense I have no desire to eat the things I'm smelling, but I have seriously considered carrying around little scented bags so I could enjoy smells on the go. My newest favorite scent came after watching an episode of the Duggars last fall semester. On one of the episodes they talked about how they make their own laundry detergent. For some reason that really caught my attention so after Christmas festivities were over and our lives had gone back to normal I set out to try and make some detergent myself. 

Apparently I am WAY behind on this because all the trendy pinterest ladies have been making this stuff for about 3- 4 years. The biggest difference between what the Duggars do and what I was willing to do was I did not want to have to cook/ melt my soap (too much work). So I set out to find a dry version. These are the two websites I got my recipe from-

http://www.howdoesshe.com/cheaper-and-better-diy-laundry-detergent/

http://wellnessmama.com/462/how-to-make-nautral-homemade-laundry-detergent/

It was really easy and fun, but the smell! Oh it is soooo good! I made two flavors one was with Dr. Bronner's lavender soap and lavender blossom Purex crystals

 the other was pink Zote and Tropical Splash Purex crystals. 

I never did take a picture of my tropical splash mix, but this is what the lavender one looks like.

You are really only supposed to put in 1-2 tablespoons per load but I love the smell so much I'll readily admit to using 3-4 scoops. Another plus is leaving the measuring spoon in the detergent makes for easy stirring and smelling of the detergent for my occasional sniffing sessions (oh how I wish I was kidding).

I'll spare you all the directions and details because there are literally hundreds of blog posts out there about this stuff. Most of the posts had the detergent in a cute little decorated mason jar, so when I decided to give some away that was what I looked for. Turns out Mason jars were like stupid expensive so for the same price I got these much fancier little jars.

After I tested it out on my own laundry I was ready to then share it with my Visit Teachees. It seemed appropriate to give soap as a little New Year's gift. Right? A clean new start!

My other new smelly obsession is the Eucalyptus Mint wallflowers. Another SUPER clean smell that I just CANNOT get enough of! 

So now I have 5 Wallflowers (in our tiny place that probably only needs 2 or 3) all full of this flavor. I feel like its the best smell for trying to sell the house, clean and fresh! I realize this post is purely not personal and other than relating to pregnancy and my need to have clean smells it's kind of stupid but I had to share my new obsessions :)

Davie is a Bear

These photos don't need a lot of dialogue, but my baby is stinkin' cute! I hope his grandparents enjoy. Also this is the same outfit he wore on his trip home from the hospital that he was swimming in.

Tiny baby bear

 

Its not a good kiss until you get a good squish 

Towards the end of the video if you listen really close when I say he is a cute bear it sounds just like Davie is says "uhh yaaa" and agrees with me. Babies are the best toys :)

OCD Makes Me Itchy

I hate tags. I don't like them on my shirt, pants, dresses, you name it I hate them all. Over the years I have learned to live with them but when I was younger I would just cut them out. I know for a fact that drove my mom crazy. I can remember her having to sew several different things after I "helped" cut out the tag and put plenty of good sized holes in several articles of clothing as well. Not only that but when you have a growing child and they cut out the tag it makes it difficult to remember what size their clothes are. 

A small sampling of the tags I have been cutting off of everything

Now that I have my own baby I am always amazed at the amount of useless excessive packaging (aka- GARBAGE) that accompanies EVERYTHING and you guessed it tags. It is beyond ridiculous! Davie has soooo many little items that have tags on them over the last couple weeks I have started just cutting or ripping off as many as possible. The tags have been driving me crazy for quite some time. For example Davie got an awesome set of big wash clothes for bath and they came in a package and each cloth had two large tags on them. That is over kill right? That's not just me? 

Something else that has been making me itchy...

my hair! I have been shedding like crazy. Which I think is actually pretty gross and I hadn't planned on sharing but it just keeps coming out and it is EvErYwHeRe. I don't remember this happening after I had Colin but this is definitely related to post-pregnancy stuff. This picture is a teeny tiny example of how much is coming off my head just from showering, it's nuts. And yes I realize am a little (a lot) weird for lining it up end to end like this. The only thing I regret is that is only about half as big as it should be because lets face it I don't have the patience to line up every hair that falls out of my head, also even though the hair is completely clean (I just shampooed it) as soon as it is no longer on my head its just gross. And there are just a few of my OCD moments as of late :)

Reading the Instructions

When you get a new toy, appliance or piece of furniture it is important to read the instructions. Davie understands this and is constantly checking to make sure I put his bassinet together correctly. 

Sometimes he will start talking and waiving his hand while he reads.

He must be getting to the exciting part about how to keep the baby safe.

Hmmm, I think she did that part right.

However we recently rotated the bassinet so that we could use the changing table and he still looks at it but there are no longer any instructions or warning labels, just the paisley design. Maybe he misses it?

Dengus

These are the shirts that everyone got for Christmas from David's sister Jessica. I guess there is a website where you can T-shirts for family reunions that say "your last name" University. Well there is some kind of inside joke, I'm not really sure I am completely in on it, that has a guy from Taledega Nights being silly or goofy and it's about Dengus University. So Jessica called the websites phone number to tell them that they don't have her last name (Dengus). And now we all have these shirts :)

Putting little Davie in his Dengus onesie. This was one of our last days out West and by now his schedule was totally messed up (meaning poor sleep for the 3 of us), so when they woke the boy up to put the onsie on him I was sad. The kid was asleep! They woke my sleeping baby! Haha, oh well we needed a family picture with all of us in our shirts.

Brian is the star of this one

Stretching!

This is the best one

In Jessica's words "Lauren is getting a little handsy"

Everyone being silly, or at least more silly than in any of the other pictures. Also if you look David is just watching everyone and Davie is yawing haha :)

The Davie Doo

"ahhh, mom just leave me alone!"

 love

 angel baby

kinda curly after bath time

all wet

all dry, and yes I combed it straight up on purpose

I like to call this one "I have a bear inside of me"

This one is on Facebook but I love the hair

Respect the doo 

Wet Sunday

Sunday the 22nd was Little Davie's due date and he decided to make it a day to remember. So because I was not expecting such a little baby I had ONE newborn outfit set , 3 long sleeve newborn onesies (thank you aunt Lauren) and only the newborn diapers we took home from the hospital (I thought I had one package at home but later found out we had NONE) we were short on little baby stuff. Saturday night David made a diaper run and picked up some Huggies. Well in the night when I nursed Davie he was wet all through to his little blankie, we changed him and fixed him all up. 

we started the day clean and dry

Long story short is we spent ALL day changing and washing ALL of his little blankets and outfits because he was wetting through everyone of his diapers. This is also the grand day that I got pee'd on :) I am now officially his Mom, no one was safe though because Nanna got it too. By the end of the day I finally decided that it had to be the diapers we got, he hadn't had a single problem in the Pampers we brought home from the hospital. We decided that the belly button notch in the diapers was the culprit, little Davie was just leaking right through it! Because we had only used about 6 or so diapers of the Huggies I had David take them back and exchange them. I figured if I wanted to do the cloth diaper thing I can but I'm not going to buy disposables that don't hold a little pee. 

naked baby

Chillin' with Nanna

what's up?

ahhh...

About two seconds after this picture was taken Davie pee'd on Nanna :) haha, who would have thought getting pee'd on would be so funny? Or cute? Hence January 22nd's new name wet Sunday.