life with baby

we'd had a pretty good thing going, tommy and i. we were really good at our lives; we were very organized and on top of things. we were on a pretty regular weekly schedule: i planned out our meals week by week; we did laundry and cleaned the bathrooms and went to the grocery store once a week; we even generally managed to only take out the trash once a week (we didn't have that much trash with just the two of us). this might sound conceited, but we'd pretty much mastered the whole married-no-children thing. life was pretty great.

and then this little baby came along and turned that whole routine that we'd had out the window. and it's totally, 100% okay with us.

we haven't figured out a new routine to replace that old one yet, but we're spending probably 80% of our time right now doing this:

he's only 2 weeks old and seven-ish pounds, but he's In Charge around here. luckily, he's been a pretty benevolent dictator so far. although right now, i'm sitting huddled in the dark closet (his temporary bedroom) next to his carseat with one hand poised to catch the pacifier when it falls out of his sleeping mouth, waiting for him to wake up so i can feed him, and hoping i'll get the chance to shower today.

it's lucky that he's the CUTEST BABY IN THE WORLD (as all new parents think, of course).

our great life we had before he came is just getting better.

sweet baby dane

Introducing: Dane Gregory Leininger

Born September 15, 2012

7 lbs 12 ounces, 20 1/4 inches

Dane is now 8 days old and since then we've just spent a lot of time hanging out with this great little guy and taking lots of pictures. My mom has been here taking care of us (and him) and helping everything go smoothly with her great motherly wisdom. He's a pretty nice baby--he sleeps a lot, eats a lot, and loves James Taylor. We'll post more updates later, but here are some pictures:

what i did this summer

people keep asking me, "so what did you DO all summer?" and since there's not just an easy answer like "an internship" or "working," it's tempting to for me to say, "i just hung out!" and while that's partially true, especially compared to my former grad student life and tommy's busy internship, i could NEVER just "hang out" for three months without wanting to die. i need to have projects and to-do lists or else my self-esteem crumbles and i feel like a slob.

so, lest i forget what i did all summer (other than our day trips and activities that tommy and i did together), i thought i would record it here.

project #1: make a quilt (with AMPLE support and guidance from my mom). this was truly a summer-long project, because i worked on it only about one day a week when i would drive down from santa monica to my family's house. i never spent more than a few hours at a time on it, which i think was the perfect way to be introduced to quilting--i never felt burnt out or tired of it. 

we started with this:

and ended with this masterpiece:

there were plenty of steps in the middle of those two pictures, of course. what? you want some action shots? okay, fine.

check me out! sewing machine master!

 i pretty much laughed at myself all summer long because my mom always used to try and get me to do sewing projects when i was younger and i HATED it. i'd get so frustrated so easily. but i guess i am growing up, because now i'm the one asking my mom if i can sew and voluntarily picking out messed-up stitches. it was an excellent project for this summer, and i'm oh so proud of it.

project #2: make photobooks for each year we've been married. i used the blurb book program, and it took weeks and WEEKS to go through all our photos, decide which ones deserved preserving, and organize them all into the books. i was pretty burnt out on this project by the end . . . but they just came TODAY and i'm so pleased to have done it!

project #3: exercise. i spent the first month of our time there jogging around the park we lived by, but my knees started killing me again, so i switched to swimming. and i worked up to swimming a mile (almost) every day. i would walk the mile to the pool, swim a mile, and walk back. it was so fun, because i'd never swum for exercise before, and it was the perfect pregnancy activity.

project #4: watch all of downton abbey. tommy and i got hooked, and dedicated several full evenings to marathon viewing sessions. (okay, this wasn't really a project, but we did it.)

project #5: hang out with siblings.

project #6: grow a baby. this is what i looked like when we got to california in may:

and this is what i looked like when we got back to north carolina:

and i did a lot of other things too, that weren't recorded in picture form: i read a good number of books, about babies and about other things; we took a childbirth class; we bought a fancy new camera and my mom and i took a photography class to learn how to use it more appropriately; i got into family history indexing; i went to costco and the santa monica farmer's market weekly to get as much fresh peaches and nectarines as were humanly possible; i checked out guidebooks from the library to help tommy and i be the best LA live-in tourists possible. 

okay, okay, and just so this post isn't ENTIRELY about me, this is what tommy was doing most of the summer, one block from the beach and working hard:

what a gem! and WHAT a summer.

a confession: birth

when i was in seventh grade health/science class, we watched the miracle of life.

it scarred me. SCARRED, i tell you . . . me and and all the other four hundred seventh graders forced to watch it. for years we'd joke about the miracle of life, and it was synonymous with gross, terrifying, the supreme evil of sierra vista middle school, etc.

well, when i saw it at the library in santa monica this summer, i checked it out. i figured it was about time to confront those inbred fears, you know?

turns out, the movie is 59 minutes long. and the first 55 minutes involve nothing more than pictures of cells moving across the screen. the first 11/12 of the movie is totally and completely boring, actually. it's just the last four minutes that so totally terrified all of us SVMS students back in the day: where they show a birthing scene.

and guess what? it still grossed me out and terrified me. here i am, a decade older and wiser and just a few weeks away from giving birth myself, and it still makes me shudder to watch a birth scene and to contemplate doing that myself.

also, on a related note: when we went to a childbirth class in santa monica, the lady showed us a quick and relatively not-terrifying birth video. and while we were walking home, tommy said, in a voice of total seriousness: "i don't know why anyone would ever want to be an OB-GYN after watching that video."

i laughed so hard. . . . because i knew EXACTLY where he was coming from.

i sure hope, for both of our sakes, that the baby takes it easy on us when he does decide to come out.

text text text

of all the texts i send, maybe half of them are to tommy. possibly two-thirds. my texting inbox is almost full, and i have 277 texts from him sitting in there as i speak (type).

i remember the first time i texted tommy. it was in early, early 2008--right at the beginning of winter semester. sarah and i were switching out of an unsatisfactory religion class and remembered him telling us how excited he was about his professor for d&c, so i sent him a text asking who his professor was.

we'd never gone on a date; we'd never really talked or flirted or anything at this point. it still felt pretty bold to text this cute guy without ever having him text me first, but i felt pretty safe because i really just wanted to get a recommendation on a professor.

and it took him about three hours to respond. which is AGES in texting time! i felt almost foolish responding to his text.

but i asked him another question, maybe about what time his class was, and it took him another three hours to respond.

that's how our texting conversations always went in the beginning--he took FOREVER to get back to me, which is exactly the opposite of how texting is supposed to go.

we figured it all out and sarah and i actually added tommy's same class. and a few weeks later we went on our first date. and the rest is history!

later, after we were actually dating, and he responded to my text messages in a much more timely manner, i found out that he would use a "delayed-response" setting in his phone to send texts. he'd get a text message and respond, but he'd set it so that it wouldn't be sent for two or three hours, so that he didn't seem too eager and so that he did seem really busy (and important).

i'm sorry, but that still cracks me up. what a smooth operator he was (and still is, as a matter of fact).

this week

tommy started back at school on monday, and i spent all week doing what i do best: making to-do lists and slowly working through them. these to-do lists include things like getting the oil changed in both of our cars, spending hours on the phone with the insurance people asking questions, finding a pediatrician, writing and mailing thank-you notes, and figuring out what baby stuff we still need.

it feels SO GOOD to be doing everything we've been putting off for months! have i mentioned how happy we are to be back in NC so we can be back to our normal lives? yes, i think so.

here's some more proof:

i also made some pesto and sun-dried tomato pizza (and spread the pesto too thin, so it wasn't as good as we expected, but still tasty). and i even wore an apron while i did it!

we went to target yesterday and spent over $600 on baby stuff . . . thank goodness for all the gift cards we've already gotten that meant we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much. but now we are (mostly) ready for this baby to come, with everything from the carseat/stroller, diapers and wipes, crib sheets, stain remover, and so many things we knew we were going to need. then we went over to babies R us, and parked in the "expectant mothers parking"--we actually had to park farther away from the store to park there, but it was well-worth it.

then we came home and crashed for the night, and watched HP5 with our new dvd player. that's right, we finally caved and bought a dvd player to go with our free tv we got from friends in our ward . . . the tv that sat unused for almost a year because we couldn't connect our computers to it and therefore had no idea what to do with it. we figured that if we were already buying all this extra stuff for the baby, we might as well spend $30 at wal-mart on a dvd player for ourselves, right?

and then today, we were craving some dessert, and made these little brazilian brigadeiros:

they have three ingredients:

-sweetened condensed milk

-cocoa powder

-butter

and they only took ten minutes to make. DEFINITELY worth it.

productivity + easy desserts = a recipe for a great week. 

3rd anniversary celebration

last week, on wednesday, we celebrated our THIRD wedding anniversary. 

and by celebrated, i mean that tommy drove from mobile, alabama to durham with dallin, and i flew from LAX to RDU with a several-hour long delay that meant i didn't get in until 1:30 am the next day. 

so we didn't really celebrate on the actual day. or even see each other. 

but tommy did buy me some beautiful flowers. (and i didn't get him anything... as usual, i am the worst.)

okay, but knowing that our actual anniversary was going to be spent apart, we DID celebrate a few weeks ago before leaving california. we spent our last free weekend in solvang and santa barbara, just 1-2 hours north of santa monica. we booked a night at a cute little bed and breakfast in solvang (not two nights--we were too cheap!) on friday and spent saturday wandering around the two cities. 

solvang is inland a ways, back in the santa inez valley (which is BEAUTIFUL) and is a cute little danish town in the middle of spanish country. tommy was very pleased to get a good danish meal of flaeskesteg (pronounced fleskastie) and meatballs, and we visited several bakeries to stock up on danish pastries all morning long. 

santa barbara isn't too far away, and we just walked around the downtown area for a while. then we rode on the harbor's little water taxi for about half an hour and spent some time relaxing on the beach. it was so nice!

other than the horrendous traffic we got stuck on both going there and back, it was a perfect little getaway to celebrate three years of happily married bliss. because of course, it has been that.

and it was also kind of a baby-moon (within a summer that was basically just a long baby-moon) to celebrate the end of our child-free existence. no more bed and breakfasts or solitary weekend trips for us for quite a while...

because ready or not, here he comes!