I hope you’ve all got Madonna’s “Holiday” stuck in your head now!

Now that we’re entering the fall season, it’s almost impossible not to start thinking about the holidays. We’ll start with football, lead into Halloween, then comes Thanksgiving, and finally the December holiday season of Hannukah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. It’s such an exciting time of year, but can also lead to lots of stress if you’re a newlywed.

I’ve written about compromise before, but I think one of the hardest areas to reach a compromise is when dealing with the holidays. I’m sure no one’s going to bicker about where they’re celebrating Halloween this year, but Thanksgiving and Christmas can be very touchy subjects. Both people have their own traditions and both don’t like the idea of not getting to observe those traditions. My mom makes the best food on the planet and our celebrations are always full of tons and tons of family. My husband’s mother doesn’t love to cook and she is an only child. My husband is an only child. Holidays at his house are quiet and relaxed. They eat whatever she feels like fixing that year and then go home when it’s over. But both of our families want us to celebrate with them.

Fortunately, for us, we’re not getting any pressure from either side. My family is willing to give up Thanksgiving this year because we spent it with them last year. But I’m the one that still wants it my way and wants to spend the holiday with my family. I know I’m being unreasonable and my husband would just rather go along with me than argue about it, so we’re going to spend Thanksgiving with his family. For Christmas this year, both of our families are getting together in the mountains and renting a large house that will accommodate everyone for a week.

Now that a baby is in the picture, things have changed a little and everyone wants to be there for his first Santa Claus experience. No one wants to miss any of those moments. The whole things stresses both my husband and me out and I’m hopeful that we can get into a good routine that helps us establish our own traditions. And I hope, more than anything, that within the next few years we can establish a tradition of celebrating these holidays at our own home and our kids can spend the holidays at home.

The most important thing, though, is that we surround ourselves with people that we love. My grandmother’s thought was always, “It’s Christmas when you get here. Even if it’s February!” So I’m going to adopt her sweet little viewpoint and go with the flow!

What works for you? How did you and your significant other blend the holidays?

Do I mention a lack of time in all of my posts? When I was pregnant and dreamed of being a stay at home mom, I thought I’d have all this time to make dinner and when my husband got home from work I’d meet him at the door wearing my high heels and beautiful dress with my delicious meal waiting on the table for him. The baby would be peacefully napping and the dogs will have been fed and snoozing on the floor. But I don’t live in Stepford and I’m not perfect.

After we got married, we were pretty much on our own every night for supper. I got home a lot earlier than my husband did and I was usually ready to eat well before he ever came home. He’d come home around 8:00 p.m. and not be too hungry, so he’d eat a bowl of cereal. Unless we went to a restaurant, we usually weren’t eating together. But when the baby was born, I wanted to make family dinners a priority.

I have cooked one meal since the baby was born. One. To my credit, our friends brought meals to us for twenty days after the baby arrived. We didn’t have to think at all about what we were going to eat. It was just there.

Now that he is two months old, it’s about time I figured out this time management thing. Now, I’m not going to say anything to stir up a debate about who has more free time between stay at home moms or working moms, but I will say that I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life. My free time happens when the baby takes a nap. I know it will get a little easier as he gets older and is able to play more and entertain himself for a few minutes, but right now he needs me every second of every day.

Meal planning is the answer to my Stepford dream. On Saturday, I make a list of the meals that I want to prepare during the week and the ingredients needed for each meal. On Sunday, I grocery shop for everything I need and on Sunday night, I begin the preparations for Monday night’s meal. Having the necessary ingredients at hand is essential. I definitely don’t have time to zip down the street to the grocery store to pick up the green onion that I forgot.

Because there are only two of us, we can eat leftovers for at least one day. There’s no need for any food to go to waste. I’ve got a stack of some good recipes that can be split into two casserole dishes so one can be frozen for a later date. So while the baby naps, I get dinner started and I finish up when my husband comes in from work. As he progresses with his milestones, I will have a little more time to get back into cooking and will be able to move away from casseroles and back into fixing delicious pork tenderloin and fresh vegetables.

How do you make it work for your family? Do you manage to get dinner on the table every night?

Memories are very important to me. When we found out that we were expecting a baby, Todd got our family a Canon Rebel. Then we purchased a pretty good little video camera after he was born. We don’t want to miss a second of his life and want to make sure that we capture the important little moments for him to look back on later.

Scrapbooking used to be one of my biggest hobbies. In college, my roommate and I would pull out all of our scrapbooking materials on a Saturday morning and sit and watch movies while scrapbooking for two days.

I love to scrapbook and have high hopes of putting together some gorgeous albums for Hudson that will be his someday. Here’s the problem: I don’t have a lot of free time! Scrapbooking requires space, making a mess, planning, and cleaning up. It could take 45 minutes to complete one page. That’s the extent of nap time some days.

My other option is to get some beautiful leather albums where I can just slip the photo into the sleeve and move on to the next one. I still have some scrapbooks from college that I haven’t completed and would like to finish before starting a new project. I have found some beautiful leather albums that can be engraved with his name and the year.

I guess I just have some dreams of being the super mom that scrapbooks her child’s entire life and gives it to him as a gift at his high school graduation. (I had some friends whose mothers did this for them in high school and I was seriously impressed—and jealous.)

How do you store your memories? Photo boxes? Albums? Scrapbooks?

Do you set aside entire Saturdays to catch up on your project or do you just find a few minutes here and there to work on them?

Being a newlywed means that you’re going to be invited to lots of dinners at your friends’ homes and you’ll most likely be asked to bring a bottle of wine or some dessert. I always choose to bring dessert. Dessert is especially fun to make because you know that it’s going to be someone’s favorite part of the meal and because your husband gets to lick the beaters and the bowl.

If I’m making dessert for a good sized crowd I always choose to make Paula Deen’s Not Yo Mama’s Banana Pudding. It’s a great no bake dessert that is sure to be a crowd pleaser—unless those that are eating it don’t like bananas. (I made the grave mistake of bringing banana pudding to a friend’s house when she hates bananas—oops.) I like to make this recipe over and over again because I know it by heart now and it only takes about 20 minutes to prepare.

I know that Paula Deen is notorious for her love of buttah, sugah, and fried stuff, but there are ways to make this recipe figure friendly.

Ingredients:

• 2 bags Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies
• 6 to 8 bananas, sliced
• 2 cups milk
• 1 (5-ounce) box instant French vanilla pudding
• 1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
• 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
• 1 (12-ounce) container frozen whipped topping thawed, or equal amount sweetened whipped cream

Directions:

Line the bottom of a 13 by 9 by 2-inch dish with 1 bag of cookies and layer bananas on top.

In a bowl, combine the milk and pudding mix and blend well using a handheld electric mixer. Using another bowl, combine the cream cheese and condensed milk together and mix until smooth. Fold the whipped topping into the cream cheese mixture. Add the cream cheese mixture to the pudding mixture and stir until well blended. Pour the mixture over the cookies and bananas and cover with the remaining cookies. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

photo and recipe found here

This recipe is just as delicious if you use fat free everything. The only ingredient that cannot be substituted is the Pepperidge Farm Chessman Cookies.

For a really beautiful presentation, use a trifle dish instead of a 9×13 dish.

What is your go-to dessert? Care to share the recipe?

My husband and I have been car shopping for about six months. We’re looking to find something that is big enough for our growing family and that will also accommodate our two dogs. The idea of a new car is always exciting, but there is a downside. We have not had a car payment since we’ve been married and I can get used to that really quickly. I have gotten used to that.

I’d love a new car, but I’m not looking forward to having a car payment that doesn’t go away for a really long time. I also have some feelings of sadness as I think about getting rid of my car and thinking about someone else driving it.

My first car was a 1992 Ford Explorer that had belonged to my grandfather. When he passed away, my grandmother gave it to me because I was a couple of months away from getting my driver’s license. The brakes on the Exploder (my nickname for the car) went out on me a few times, but it was a good car. When it came time for me to go 14 hours away to college, my parents weren’t sure that the unreliable Exploder was the best option for me to be out on the interstate all by myself.

For my high school graduation, my parents gave me a Volkswagen Jetta. I was so in love with that car. I nicknamed it The Muppett because when the headrests are raised up, it reminds me of Beaker from The Muppetts. I drove that car to college, then from college to grad school, then to my first job, to my second job, and to the hospital to have my baby. The Muppett has been there for the most significant moments of my life thus far and I hate to see it go.

It runs fine, it doesn’t even have 100,000 miles on it yet—more like 98,000, and it does what a car is supposed to do and gets me from point A to point B. But it’s just not big enough to accommodate our two dogs and baby. I’m sure we’ll make the decision within the next year about which car we’ll purchase, but it’s not going to be an easy decision. And the day I say goodbye to The Muppett will be a sad day.

Is anyone else still driving the car that drove them to high school or college? Did you give the car a ridiculous nickname? Will you be sad to see it go when the time comes?

Oh my word. I had such high hopes of remaining normal after having a baby. I committed to keeping all baby-related items in the nursery and my house that I’ve worked so hard on would remain an “adult house” and there would be no sign of baby outside of the nursery. Psha!

We’ve got the swing and the gym in the living room, the pack ‘n play in our bedroom (for when I’m getting ready in the mornings), bottles and the bottle warmer always on the kitchen counter, and a bouncy seat that seems to travel from room to room. I almost forgot to mention that our stroller is so heavy that I have trouble putting it back in its place on my own, so it often just sits in the living room floor. Our family room is not large, so these large baby items take up a lot of space. I feel claustrophobic and like these things have taken over my house.

We live in a 2400 square foot bungalow. The attic was transformed into the master suite, so about 700 of those 2400 square feet are the master suite– the bedroom, sitting area, bathroom, closet, and laundry area. The baby and I rarely travel to the second floor and the last thing I want to do is lose my master bedroom to baby gear. We love our house and have no plans to move anytime soon, but I do find myself designing my dream room for all of this stuff. If I had it my way, I’d have a kitchenette and a bonus room where the baby and I would spend the day. All of his gear would be in there and the rest of our house would not have to be overrun with my entire baby registry!

These are some of my dream room ideas for all of this stuff. (My real dream room is a giant craft room with slate floors, but I’ll touch on that later)

photos from Pottery Barn Kids

Ideally, this room would be very, very large. Large enough to accommodate two sofas and a rocking chair. We’d have a large television and plenty of space for the huge baby swing that we have and all of the other baby gear. This room would also double as a media room for watching football games or the Academy Awards. We’d have one chalkboard paint wall that the baby could do whatever he wanted to when he gets older. Storage in this room is the most important thing.

Do you have a problem room? Do you have a dream room? What is it? What would it look like?

When you get married you gain a partner, a husband, a best friend, a new family… and lots of stuff.

We closed on our house and moved out of our bachelor and bachelorette pads about five months before our wedding in May 2008. We had each been out of grad school and law school for three years so we each had lots of furniture and plenty of stuff to fill our own houses. We moved into a precious bungalow that was built in the 1930s and had recently been updated. The attic was turned into a giant master suite and we have tons of space in our bedroom. The only down side is that we don’t have an attic– or any storage. The closets are still the same old 1930s closets and all of my craft supplies fill up an entire closet. It was clear that we needed to get rid of some unnecessary objects.

My sweet husband is a bit of a pack rat. He doesn’t hold onto things because they’re important to him. He holds onto things because he doesn’t want to take the time to go through everything to decide what should be purged. I throw things away all the time. If there’s a mess I’d like to just pick it all up and dump it in the trash rather than hoard more stuff– which often leads to throwing away important things.

The item that I was forced to give up in the move was my massive collection of wedding magazines. I had every issue of Martha Stewart Weddings dating back to 1999. I would spend entire Saturdays pulling out the magazines and flipping through each one looking for inspiring images that I may not have seen the other 20 times I looked at the magazine. We can call it my secret single behavior, but I loved it. When we got engaged I started tearing things out of all of the magazines and filing them by category into a huge binder. So I was a little bit sad to give up so many beautiful issues of the magazine, but I made sure to go through and tear out any gorgeous pages before tossing them all in the dumpster.

Because I had to give up all of my magazines, I thought it was only fair that we not try to store (in our house with limited storage) hundreds of issues of Sports Illustrated– dating back to 1989! Yes, I’m serious. My sweet husband agreed to get rid of them as he had never gone back to look at any old issues.

We both were a little bit sad to get rid of such big collections, but felt better once they were gone. Interestingly, getting rid of those magazines was a much bigger deal than choosing whose sofa to keep and whose sofa to sell. We also had to get rid of one TV, one bed, and one breakfast table. We had two of everything, but those magazines left the biggest hole in our lives.

Did anyone else have to decide how to merge your stuff? Were there any major or significant compromises?

Baby gifts are so much fun and I think part of the fun is thinking about what you would have liked when you were a kid. Now that I’ve had a baby and have had a chance to use all of the gifts, I know what gifts will save your life in the middle of the night! My other favorite gifts are the ones that I think he will remember when he’s older and what items he’ll always cherish.

These are some of my favorite favorite gifts that I received that weren’t on our registry.

Fill in the Blankie

These blankets are so wonderful and such a great keepsake! A friend of ours in Dallas sent one to us after Hudson was born and it lists his full name, birthdate, time of birth, and weight.

The examples shown below are for a baby’s baptism, but these blankets can pretty much be used for any occasion and you can personalize them however you want to.

So precious! And they are perfectly packaged!

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Obviously one of the first things I thought about when I found out I was pregnant was how I would decorate the baby’s nursery. What girl doesn’t love to decorate? And to be able to go wild and have lots of fun with a room is ideal, right? You can’t use whatever color you want to in just any room in your house, but a nursery is pretty much fair game.

We waited until we found out the gender of the baby to make any decisions. When we found out we were having a boy I knew that I wasn’t going to use blue as a dominant color. I love green and yellow and wanted a bright, happy nursery that our baby boy could grow up in. I’m not saying that we won’t change anything until he’s in junior high, but I didn’t want something that screamed “baby.” I wanted something that screamed “happy boy!”

My mom is an in home consultant for Calico Corners and I went straight to her to work on the custom bedding and window treatments. We selected some really fun Annie Selke fabrics that were bright, happy, had fun prints, and a little bit modern. I wanted to mix the fabrics for the bumper pads to keep it interested and give him something fun to look at while he’s in his crib. We went with green and white polka dots for the window treatments with a fun little pom pom trim in green and white.

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Who doesn’t love a great smelling home? With two dogs, a baby, and a husband it’s not so easy anymore to keep my house smelling super yummy. I love light, flowery smells and because they’re safer I love reed diffusers. I have a diffuser in every room. Prior to a month ago I had pretty much written off candles.

Then I found Low Country Luxe. Todd and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary in Savannah, Georgia and I found this amazing little store called The Paris Market and Brocante. What an adorable shop! It truly feels like a Paris flea market with tons of amazing furniture finds, books, glassware, and gifts.

While in the shop, I discovered the most amazing candles by Low Country Luxe and they’re made in Savannah!

image via Low Country Luxe website

The brand has scents called Gullah, Charleston, Savannah, Sea Grass, Spanish Moss, and New Orleans. My favorite, though, is called High Cotton and the scent combines a creation of citrus trees and pink and white dogwoods, tea olive spiked with lemon and lime, white grapefruit and peach. Doesn’t that sound delicious and oh-so-Southern?

All of the candles come in the most beautiful packaging and the glass container that the candle sits in looks great in our living room. The only problem with the candle was convincing my husband that this candle was worth the price. It totally is!

If you can’t decide on a scent they even make a package of travel-size candles that includes one of each scent. Sounds like the perfect gift to me. Or the perfect gift for me. If anyone wants to send one to me I’ll make sure to get my home address to you!