The Fabulous Life of Stefanie

My little peanut turned 12 weeks old today and I really do not know how time can go so fast because I am pretty sure we just brought her home from the hospital. This baby is so sweet and gentle. She smiles from the time she wakes up until fifteen minutes later when she needs her first nap; did I mention she loves to sleep? She has just discovered her hands and spends many an hour trying to examine one and fit it into her mouth while the other kind of bounces around like a little boxer's fist. Her hair is so long and light and her eyes the most beautiful light blue with the deepest blue rim. She has at least four thigh rolls now with the most delicious chubby belly to match. Her big sister still absolutely adores her and has been showing us what an amazing team player she is by reading to Annabel and putting on puppet shows with her stuffed animals. She always wants to include "our baby" in plans and makes sure she knows where Annabel is as soon as she is up and...

It's been almost two months since I have had the time to come here and put words down, though I have done it in my head a million times, and I don't even really have the time today (I just really have a case of the Mondays). Life is BUSY, but that is stating the obvious if you didn't just randomly stumble across this blog. A newborn, a toddler, a career, a marriage, friends, running, neighborhood involvement...it doesn't end and I love it, really, every single day I feel so lucky to have it all, even when I can barely spell my name or apply lipstick with a straight hand (hello, today). Let's just use this blog as a little (big) catch up and then get back to regularly scheduled programming, shall we? Annabel is a joy. She is so sweet and snuggly and smiley and I really just cannot get enough of her. She also does one thing that Maddie didn't do, which is sleep! Like, at night , when I want to sleep. We are cosleeping with her, as we did with Maddie, so s...

It's countdown to baby number two over here (I'll be 38 weeks on Wednesday) and I'm in full nesting mode when I'm not making sweeping changes at work because, why would I ever make things easy for myself? We've made some awesome progress on my house to-do list (kitchen back splash and bathroom decor) but now we just have to wait until we can actually open the windows to do some painting projects. At some point we are redoing the bathroom into a double sink situation but that can wait until after the baby is here (or so my husband tells me). So now we wait, I wash things and make extras of dinners to freeze and hope I can get things on autopilot at work for a couple months. Here's five things I'm loving lately as we hunker down and wait to meet this baby girl:  Special time with the one who made me a Mama . As soon as I saw that positive sign on my pregnancy test and felt the thrill of getting to bring another baby into our family my thoughts immedia...

You may not have noticed, but I am not a professional blogger. No one is paying me or giving me things, and the only people that read this consistently are probably a handful of friends and my husband, but I still feel this huge obligation to post and get weird guilt when a  lot of time passes between posts. I guess it is because I so love to come back to this spot and look back on this life of mine and I feel like I am going to forget something if I don't write about it, much like my beloved Dear Diary of my teen years and my absurdly melodramatic travel journal from Europe. Also, I just like to write; I like to come here and put words to my feelings and experiences and put up sweet pictures of my little one for the few people that read this to look at.  This paragraph has nothing to do with anything I am going to write about, but is also kind of an apology for not taking time to write, to my future self reading over these posts and my friends who always read and make me fee...

Things are not well. As a matter of fact, they are pretty unwell. Work. OH work. How does one maintain an open door policy when the need to shut the door and cry is so great? Something has to give, but it hasn't. Home. My home sweet home that I do love so much but the project list is not moving because it is a daily task just to keep it together with a very energetic toddler who cannot get out and run around and be a toddler. Our commute time home has doubled, even tripled, on most nights so we get home, get dinner and get to bed. The time we spent playing and coloring and getting a few things done is spent on the road staring at brake lights and snow banks as high as the eye can see. My me time. I see the runners on the Esplanade with their millions of layers and frozen tears and don't remember my own runs against snow drifts with chapped red legs and impossible miles ahead. I just miss it. I am so, so jealous. I want to get up and layer up and go for a run in this terri...

These 'Currently' posts are one of my favorites to do but somehow I haven't done one since October...oh holidays/life/ridiculous New England winter blizzard chaos. Good thing there is so much fun stuff to catch up on...so here we go! Reading I just finished one of Damien Echol's books, Life After Death , and it was so, so good. If you aren't familiar with him, Echols is 1/3 of the West Memphis Three, a group of young men convicted of murdering three young boys in West Memphis Arkansas then sentenced to life (and death row for Echols) with absolutely no evidence outside of the WM3 being into metal and wearing black. I started following the case in high school after hearing Jello Biafra speak about them and eventually wrote my undergrad thesis on them, which included an interview that I managed to do with Eddie Spaghetti from the Supersuckers (another huge supporter of theirs). When I was pregnant with Madeleine they were finally set free through a screwy method us...

I love a lot of things and I really like to share these things, so I am starting a new weekly post just to talk and share and maybe hear about what other people love. Love it! First of all, I hope everyone had a chance to reflect of the life of Dr. King today, whose words never become antiquated. Today more than ever his speeches, his work and his method of non-violence are great examples of how to fight for social justice. Every year I spend some of this day talking to Maddie about Dr. King's message and I can only hope that it helps form her and inspire her to be a change agent in her world. On to much less meaningful things now: five things I am totally digging. 1. Nars blush in Orgasm . I have had this on my to-buy list for ages and was forced urged by my husband to finally buy it Saturday afternoon before a date night. I love it. It is the perfect color, the perfect amount of shimmer and actually lasts the whole day. Sold. 2. Bastille Kitchen in Fort Point. Spea...

We left Boston last Wednesday when it was hovering just under the double digit degrees and when my nerves were well under a 10 on a scale of one to having it together.It wasn't until well into the third day of our vacation when it hit me how very badly I needed to be on vacation. Something about pulling yourself out of your daily routine really gives you the opportunity to look at how things are going, what things aren't working and where more energy needs to be allocated.  I've spent a lot of this pregnancy sick, which is really difficult for me; I don't do rest well and I don't like feeling unable to give life my all, which is exactly what bronchitis, pneumonia and a bit of pregnancy induced asthma created. So we decided to take a vacation; just a week and just the three of us to get away somewhere a little warmer with no house projects or work schedules or alarm clocks. Like I said, it took a few days for me to unwind. A specialist I saw put me on an extended ...

I wish I could say that I was ending the year on a bang, but really I am ending it on my sick bed (er, at my desk at work being sick). For the second time this pregnancy I have bronchitis, which is just as fun as it sounds. Luckily, I seem to be slowly getting better and not progressing towards pneumonia like had happened in September. It has definitely been the pits feeling crummy over the holidays and I feel sad that I haven't been able to play with Maddie and her new Christmas toys as much as she wants me to, but here is hoping I will be on the mend soon. 2014 was a pretty huge year for our family and I just wanted to do a little end of the year recap to say goodbye to a wonderful year and hello to another exciting one! The Big News This year we became homeowners! This was a goal that had been HUGE for us and while the process was anything but awesome, the day that we closed and opened the door to OUR home was amazing and (almost) worth all the chaos leading up to it. Then, ...

This past weekend we made an appointment for a gender determination sonogram at one of those weird "see your baby in 3D and make a pop up video about them" places because my doctor said that she couldn't order another sonogram since I have a healthy, low-risk pregnancy (a lovely problem to have, I know). So, begrudgingly, but really wanting to know whether this is a little brother or little sister, we paid $70 and finally got a good peek at this little baby.  The sonogram tech was super nice and made it really fun by slowly typing out "it's a girl" on the big screen we were all watching and once I saw that "g" I was so excited, but at the same time felt very un-surprised. We are two families that make girls, and I just feel like I am made to be the mama of girls. Boys are awesome, and I like the one that I married an awful lot, but girls are my thing and I am thrilled to be bringing another one into the world along side my little firecracker, Ma...

Hi everyone, and happy Monday! Just kidding, I don't know why people even say that because the first day of the week, no matter what calendar day it falls on is usually pretty awful, right? Mine has not been, but I am trying not to say that out loud so nothing blows up. I spent my morning getting new tires on our car (thanks, Santa aka Mom!) and am ending it with an OB appointment to listen to this little human growing in my belly, so things are not all that bad, for a Monday. Here is a little snippet into what else has been going on in these parts: Currently... Reading I am thisclose to finishing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and foresee reading it on the car ride home tonight because I am literally in the last chapter and really need to know how this trilogy ends! This book was a little slow to start out but got really exciting in the last quarter and I am looking forward to seeing how the author wraps it all up. When I am done I have a spooky YA book recommend...

I would usually say that fall, and especially October, is one of my favorite times of the year: crisp weather, Halloween decorations and a certain winding down after the summer months. So far, though, it has been a little bit more difficult this year. The weather goes from lovely to gross, I can't seem the find the Halloween decorations in the basement (or the time to put them out) and I feel about as wound down as a spinning top filled with espresso. In just a week's time we have weathered one hospital visit, three sicknesses, one broken down car and too many hours of stressful work days than I would like to track. Buuuuuut, such is this stage in life, and with our health back, a new battery in  the car (which was the best case scenario) and some sense of calm back at work, I have decided to start enjoying October to the fullest extent. This weekend provided a great opportunity for that as we were down the Cape for some relaxation and so I could run the Harwich Cranberry Ha...

We definitely could not be anymore excited to tell everyone the news that we are adding a fourth member to our family. Not one to like to keep any sort of good news to myself, I enlisted Maddie to help spread the word to all our friends and family on Facebook. I think her face says it all! Big sister status is exciting stuff! Although we were trying, the fact that I am pregnant came as a pretty big surprise,  especially since the stress and sleepless nights of the home buying situation were not what I considered prime conditions under which to make a baby. But, lo and behold, we got exactly what we wished for and found out the first morning in our new house, which is a pretty funny story: Matty had taken a quick trip back to the old place to get the rest of our things that the awful movers couldn't fit in the truc the day before. As he did that I did a little unpacking while also getting us ready to go to the Newport Jazz Fest. I happened to be in the bathroom and came across the p...