Excuse my absence the last few weeks. I’ve been working on a project.
I have a new blog site! AHHHH! Yes! SO EXCITED about it!
Check it out at familyjulius.com!!
Baby J – 21 weeks
No real update this week. Just getting bigger and enjoying feeling Baby J move around.
I’ve also just been feeling so blessed lately. With this pregnancy and lots of other things going on in our lives. How lucky I am to know where my blessings come from!
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11
Hope everyone enjoys this three day weekend! We have plans to get working on the basement!!
The Way He Is
With the new baby coming, I have been trying to soak up my time with Clark lately. Just like it was hard for me to imagine becoming a mom, it’s hard for me to imagine being a mom of two! Right now, Clark is my world, and having the blessing to be at home with him every day has given me the privilege to get to know every little thing about him. He is growing up so fast (as it seems children do…) and I just want to remember some of my favorite things about him right now.
The way he says ‘shoes’. He has started saying a handful of actual words and a couple of them just crack me up. He says ‘shoes’ a lot. When he does, for some reason his voice goes up at least 2 octaves and he drags out the ‘ew’ sound. ‘SHeeeewwwwws’ It’s so cute and funny! He’s also really into putting on both mine and Bob’s shoes lately and attempting to walk in them. 
His independence/bravery. I absolutely love spending time with Clark, but let’s just be honest… There are plenty of times that I need to be away from him to get housework done, make a quick phone call, or even take a shower! With him, it’s easy because he totally doesn’t mind playing independently. He’ll go in his room and browse through whatever books are on the floor, play with toys, or open all his drawers and rearrange stuff (not my favorite game). It’s great to get some breathing room. Now, I have to admit that I do have a love/hate relationship with this part of Clark. It makes him really brave, so he takes risks that sometimes make me sweat. I’m the type of parent that knows full well that he will get bumps and bruises and maybe even a broken bone or two some day. I’m actually totally okay with it and think that it’s part of growing up to experience those things. (Clark knows to “rub it out” when he gets a bump of some sort.) But it would not surprise me if this kid is the first of his age group to have an ER visit due to injury. Like for breaking an arm jumping off the couch or something. Just sayin’….
How helpful he is. I’ve mentioned before how much Clark loves the Swiffer. He’s really helpful with other things though too. Whenever Bob or I come home with groceries, he gets really excited. He starts pulling things out of the bags and putting them in the fridge (he thinks everything goes in there). We assist him with some things of course (eggs?), but for most of it we just point to where it goes and he puts it away. He helps me unload the dishwasher too. Unfortunately, he can’t reach where we keep most of our dishes, so he’ll hand me plates/bowls, etc. and I just put them in the cabinets. Another favorite of his is wiping things. I could give him a damp paper towel or rag and he would be entertained for at least 30 minutes wiping anything from the floor and furniture to his toys. Of course, since he’s a toddler, he sometimes thinks he’s helping when he isn’t. Like when he tries to fill Bruno’s food bowl himself and the kibble goes all over the floor. But it’s so cute that he wants to help.
His dance moves. I think a video is in order. The kid loves to dance and he puts on music every chance he gets. Hopefully he has better moves than mom and dad as he gets older.
(Yes, that’s a bottle of Jack Daniels. Don’t worry, he can’t reach it!)
His kisses. My absolute most favorite thing about Clark is that he is so lovable. He is very generous with his kisses! Even if he’s meeting someone new, we can almost always get him to at least blow a kiss. Since we converted his crib to a toddler bed a few weeks ago (more on that later), he’s able to get in and out of bed on his own. So in the mornings, he crawls out of bed and into our room and wakes us up by giving us kisses. There’s always an audible ‘muuaahh’ involved too. I just love it! Bruno is no stranger to a Clark kiss either. It’s the first thing Clark does when we go downstairs in the mornings. (Bruno sleeps on the couches in our living room.)
I don’t know how long these things will last, but I want to remember them. Love him so much and can’t wait to see what kind of little boy he’ll be in a few months from now!
Baby J – 20 weeks!
Officially halfway through this pregnancy!
I had two appointments this week. One for an ultrasound and one just a regular check-up with my OB. Both went great except that at my ultrasound, Baby J wasn’t cooperative enough to get a good picture to print out. 😦 Oh well…
We have another wedding this weekend. It’s in West Virginia, so we have a 6 hour drive tomorrow. I’m hoping Clark does well in his car seat for that long. We’re probably going to stop and “picnic” for lunch, so that’ll give him some time to stretch out. Wish us luck!!
Have a good weekend everyone!!
Chicken Enchiladas
Chicken Enchiladas is one of my go-to meals to gift. You know…the meals you make for other people. Easy to freeze and reheat. I like to make a couple different meals/casseroles for families/couples who have just had a baby, this meal is always included.
Last week, though, we had Bob’s cousin, Dave and his fiance, Christine over for dinner and this is what I made. Here’s how I do it.
Ingredients
- ≈ 1 lb. chicken, cooked and chopped
- 1/2 red onion
- 4 oz. can diced green chiles
- 1/2 cloves minced garlic
- 1 cup sour cream
- 2 can enchilada sauce
- 2 cups (or more) shredded Mexican cheese
- 10-14 small flour tortillas
First, I chopped the onion and chicken. I love this recipe to use up leftover grilled chicken, so mine was also marinated, but you could even boil/broil some chicken and shred it. Whatever you like/works for you.
To the onion and chicken, I add the can of diced green chiles and minced garlic (I use the pre-minced because I think it’s easier. 1 clove = about 1/2 tsp), sour cream, 1/2 cup of cheese (I just use a bag of the Mexican blend), and one can of enchilada sauce.
Now that we have the filling, spray a 9 x 13 casserole dish with cooking spray. (Yes, that’s my huge hand…)
Now, you want to use flour tortillas. They are much easier to roll. For some reason (pregnancy brain?!), I told Bob to get corn tortillas. This is what happened…
Corn tortillas just don’t have as much give as flour tortillas so they just cracked and fell apart on me when I tried to roll my enchiladas. So I just had Bob grab flour tortillas on the way home from work. I like to use the small ones. When you’re rolling, you want to go pretty quickly and kinda tuck them snug next to each other in the casserole dish so they don’t unroll.
Once you’ve got all the tortillas rolled (how many you end up with just depends on how much you use to fill them, I usually end up with about 12-14), pour over the other can of enchilada sauce and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top.
Cover them with foil and bake in a 350°F oven for 20 minutes, removing the foil for the last 5-10 minutes. I was so anxious to get them in the oven, I forgot to take a picture. This was after I removed the foil.
Looking so good already!! I served our’s with a side of Cilantro-Lime Rice. They were SOOOO good!
This recipe is a great freezer meal too. Freeze them for a few hours after rolling in the casserole dish, then put them in gallon size freezer bags and take out however many you need at a time. Just cover them with enchilada sauce and cheese and bake covered with foil for about 1 hour, removing the foil for the last 5-10 minutes.
Hope you enjoy these as much as I do! Olé!
Baby J – 19 weeks!
WOW!! I’m basically half-way there! (Since I’ll have to have an early C-section). It seems like in comparison to my pregnancy with Clark, this one is flying by!
Big news!! I can feel Baby J moving around in there!! Only when I’m lying down and being pretty still. Or after I’ve had something sweet to eat or drink. It’s such a cool feeling that reminds me how special this time is.
I’ve got a sonogram on Tuesday so next week I’ll share a picture.
We are off to a wedding this weekend and Clark is going to stay with Bob’s parents the night of so we’ll get some adult time. Love this bugger, but I’m looking forward to a kid-free night.
Hope everyone has a great weekend! Enjoy this beautiful weather!!!
The Master Plan
As I mentioned in this post, we recently rearranged the furniture in our master bedroom. This is what it used to look like (obviously not drawn to scale)…
The bed used to be up against the wall as soon as you walked in the door. We originally had the bed on the opposite wall, but angled in the corner. Bob likes to watch TV in bed, though and the only cable hook-up was on the wall behind the chair in the picture above. So we put the TV on the long dresser and the bed across from it for Bob’s optimum viewing pleasure.
I wasn’t in love with the layout for a few reasons.
One, the bed was directly to the left of the door when you walked in, making it visible from the hallway. It just didn’t really look right. It felt like it took away a little privacy or something.
Second, on the other side of the wall that our bed was on, is the bathroom. Not a huge deal, but again…just sorta bothered me!
So we switched it up.
Here’s the layout now (again, not to scale)…
First and foremost, I’d like to repaint the room. I’m thinking a soft, relaxing blue color. I picked the brown that’s in there now when we first moved in, thinking it would be neutral and sophisticated. It just didn’t turn out to be the color I had envisioned. On the other hand, it covered up the salmon color that was on the walls from the previous owners!
We also painted all of the trim and doors white, as well as the inside of the closets.
Okay so, here are some real-life photos of the room now. Please excuse the complete mess!
Let’s start with the bed…
When we rearranged, we took the opportunity to disassemble and get rid of our headboard. We’ve had this headboard for about 3 years now. I ordered it back when our bed was angled from the corner, thinking it would eliminate the need for night stands. The concept was great, but the product was cheap. It wasn’t a great fit and it was basically falling apart. Plus, I’ve been wanting to upholster a headboard for a while now. Bob finally agreed to help me at some point in the future (could be months), so I’m excited to tackle that project (some day…).
That means we need night stands now. I’m thinking something like this, or this so they won’t take up a lot of space (that we don’t have). We’ll see…
Next, we have the tall dresser and chair…
One issue we have in this room is that there is no overhead light. It’s just a ceiling fan. We think that it’s wired so that we could install a light, so we may do that at some point, but until then, we have needed plenty of lamps.
The small lamps up there used to sit on our headboard. I’m not sure if we’ll use them on our nightstands yet or not. The other lamp I got way back when I first moved to Baltimore after college. It’s heavy duty. And I mean HEAVY!! I’d like to replace the lamp shade (because it is a pain in the @$$ to dust) and maybe spray paint the base oil rubbed bronze.
As for the chair, I would love to reupholster it like we did with the rocker in Clark’s room, but that might be a lot more work than we have time/energy for.
The long dresser (sorry, we’re not really going in a circle)…
The reason we had the bed against the other wall was because the TV has to be plugged in on this side. So in order to see it, we thought the bed had to be directly across from it. BUT…with the bed between the two closets, I realized we can just angle the TV a little and be able to see it just fine! I would like to move it over to the other side of the dresser (all the way in the corner), but first I need to tidy that area.
Also, we have never had curtains in this room (or any other room in the house except for Clark’s nursery), so that’s something I’d like to do sooner rather than later.
Last wall – the window wall…
Again, curtains!!
Between the windows is just a storage chest that used to sit at the foot of our bed. We use it for sweatshirts and other bulky clothes that we don’t wear that often. It’s kind of broken, so we either need to find another place for those clothes, or find something else to replace the chest. We have enough space in this area that we could definitely put some piece of furniture in it’s place, but don’t know what yet. How cool would a built-in like this be? Maybe with a bench to sit on? We’ll see…
So that’s the latest. Not sure how long it’s going to take us to get the whole room done (seeing as we’ve lived here 3 years and it still looks like this…), but those are my dreams for it eventually. I’ll share updates as they happen.
Any suggestions? Doesn’t it feel so refreshing to rearrange furniture? I just think it makes the room feel brand new!!
Baby J – 18 weeks!
Still feeling great! We scheduled our anatomy sonogram (where we would find out the gender if we chose to, but we aren’t going to). I’m really excited just to see how much the baby has grown.
On a separate note, can you tell we rearranged some furniture in our master? I’d love to repaint and I think I’ve finally convinced Bob to help me make an upholstered headboard. It’s so refreshing to move furniture around. It makes the room feel brand new. Bob and I keep commenting on how much bigger it feels now too!
I went to the Justin Timberlake/JayZ concert last night! It was AMAZING!! It was a girls night out and I had so much fun letting loose and dancing. Exhausted today since we didn’t get home till after midnight, but it was well worth it!!!
Hope everyone has a good weekend!
Deck Update
I know the blog has been very baby-centric the last few weeks, but some other cool things have been going on here at the Julius house lately!
So remember about this time last year when we stripped and re-stained our deck? Check out those posts here, here and here.
The deck looked great and we were really happy with it…from the top, that is. See, we don’t have a shed or anything, meaning we have to keep most of our outdoor tools, equipment, etc under the deck. It keeps our yard clear of junk, but it makes for a pretty bad eyesore from this view.
We tossed around a few ideas on how to cover it. We thought about planting some kind of shrubs around the deck but decided against that idea for a few reasons.
- First, Bob has to keep his mower under the deck and planting shrubs would make access to it way more difficult for him.
- Second, we wouldn’t be able to plant shrubs on one of the sides of the deck because it is paved. You can see where I mean in this picture. (through the steps)
We thought of a couple other ideas, but in the end decided to hang some lattice. We bought pieces at Home Depot that were pressure-treated pine. First we measured and cut our pieces to fit.
Before hanging it, we stained it with the same white that we used on the deck.
Here’s what we have so far.
You may notice that the piece closest to the house is unstained. We accidentally stained the wrong side (which mattered because we cut the pieces first). We’ll get to it eventually, but for now, it’s not very obvious.
Bob still has to hang the lattice on the side where he keeps his mower. He just hasn’t decided yet how he wants to attach it to make it easy access when he needs to cut the grass.
AND…we have some plans to frame out the lattice. I’ll post pictures if we ever get to that!
Lastly, we hung some flower boxes. Unfortunately, I didn’t get pictures of them yet so (once it cheers up outside), I’ll be back to post what those look like too.
We’ve come along way since THIS, don’t you think?
In other news, I’m heading to the Justin Timberlake and JayZ concert tonight!!! Girls night out!!!! I can’t wait!
Baby J – 17 weeks
Nothin’ to say about the pregnancy this week. Just the picture (which always seems to show me deceivingly smaller than I actually am – I am definitely showing!)
We have had the best time with my sister, Sally and niece, Jo staying with us this week! My mom was here most of the time too! They left this morning and we already miss them!! I just loved watching these two play together!
Don’t know the next time we get to see them, but I’m SO EXCITED that Southwest is soon going to have direct flights to Memphis out of BWI. I hope to take FULL advantage of that!
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
familyjulius 