I have learned a few things since having a baby. 1) It’s f*cking hard and 2) It’s f*cking awesome. I feel like I had heard talk of sleepless nights but didn’t really get it until that first night when we brought HPR home. I had no idea what I was doing (still don’t 99.9% of the time) and when he woke up to eat a few hours after he had fallen asleep that first night, I freaked out. OHHHH NO. Oh, no. I knew this was going to happen. He’s nocturnal. Welp, I better entertain him, I thought, in my infinite wisdom. I took him into the nursery (hands down the most stimulating room in our house the universe) and proceeded to try to teach him the alphabet (I’m not kidding). Thank goodness my adorable husband suggested we get a night nurse, because that woman saved my life. I still had to wake up in the middle of the night to pump (sorry for the intimate sharing), but I could function as a slightly normal human every other day, and was able to learn things from her that I could have never figured out on my own, especially in my sleep deprived state. So once I regained a little sense of reality, it was back to work. Working for yourself is great in the sense that you have so much control over your schedule and creativity, but difficult when you have a little baby around that needs you (and that, honestly, you just want to cuddle all. the. time!). I’m so lucky that I don’t have to go to work in an office and leave him, but some days I wish I had that easy separation of “I’m at the office working now” and “I’m home and I’m a mom now”. Grass is always greener kind of thing. So, baby has been toted around in the Baby Bjorn to all sorts of meetings, and it’s only slightly embarrassing when I go to grab my iPad and hit the trigger on a toy that starts singing “Old MacDonald”. Anyway, the point I’m getting around to is WOW having a baby is a big adjustment that I was in no way prepared for. How did I not understand my life would be 100% different? There are NO words to describe how amazingly blessed I feel every single time he looks at me or even just crosses my mind. When he smiles, my mind literally empties and nothing but happiness bursts through my body, and when he cries (which isn’t that often *knocking on wood even though I probably just jinxed myself*), I love scooping him up in my arms and trying not to laugh at the funny expression he makes when his little lips turn down in the stereotypical “sad face”. I am almost obsessed with watching him learn to roll and read and discover things daily. Putting him down at night and going into his room in the morning are the best times of my day (Disclaimer: since he has been sleeping through the night. Before that, they were the most stressful times of my day). I have a wonderful, supportive, loving, interesting, intelligent, fun husband who is the greatest father I could ever have imagined, and a business working with people and designing all sorts of wonderful paper and events for happy times in their lives. Life is sweet and God is so so good. That being said. Things that used to take me hours now take me days. How did I not take advantage of all of my free time pre-baby?!  Could NO ONE have sat me down, looked me in the eye, and said, “Enjoy just locking your door and jumping in your car and running errands when you feel like it. Because that will be gone. Gone.” Or, “Do you like to shower? Because luxuries like that are a thing of the past. Think you’re going to brush your teeth every morning? Who are you? The Queen of England?” There was a particularly difficult balancing situation in the Target bathroom last week. Naps have become my freedom, and I am learning to PRI-oritize what needs to be done in those few precious hours. It’s all a balancing act that is so FREAKING frustrating when I need to get things done, but also so FREAKING satisfying when I learn how to work it all in. Seriously. I feel like a badass some days. And some days I feel like a gutter rat. Babies, huh?  Even though we have established a pretty good schedule, I never know what each day is going to bring. It has taken me months to get back to this blog, because my current clients and projects take priority during naptime, and at the end of the day, all I want to do is crawl into bed. So I made myself compromise. I will blog at least once a week. That’s all. If I hit 2 days, awesome. 3 days, I’ll pretty much be a super hero. Bar. Lowered. I am also going to be blogging more frequently about my life than I used to, along with all the fab things I come across that inspire me. So! May I introduce my little man–the adorable time sucker that he is– and say that I am happy to be back!Â

Letterpress baby announcements that I designed for Press. I wanted them to be different than the norm, and notably masculine, but still refreshing and sweet! I love how they turned out, and I finally sent (most of them) last week. Yes, he was born November 7th. It’s just one of those things.