two months

Audrey is two months old already! I kind of feel like she was just born a minute ago, but in some ways, I feel like I've known her forever. She's definitely an old soul. Every day she's getting to be more fun. She smiles and babbles now, and is a master at holding her head up for a while before flopping wildly around in my arms.

Yesterday Julian went to kiss her, and she turned her head and licked him on the face. It sent him into fits of giggles and he spent the next few minutes intentionally trying to get her to lick him. He kept saying, "She put her baby lick on me!! Eeewww!" and then laughing like crazy.

This picture cracks me up because it totally looks like a mug shot. She is such a happy baby, but you'd never know it by the photos. In every single picture, she looks so serious, like I just explained the Darfur situation to her.




Happy 2 months, little lady. We love you like crazy.

meepcakes!

So, remember how I mentioned that I was going to start a bakery? I did it! I actually started the bakery. I know, I know. I'm a total crackhead. Only a crackhead would think that having a new baby and starting a new business at the same time was a good idea. But I did it, and it's awesomefunfantastico.

As you can see from the banner, my bakery is called meepcakes. Yes. meepcakes with a lowercase "m". Because it just looks better that way.

I'm at a farmers market right now, and the goal is to be in a real storefront one day. The market has been fun in these 2 weeks that I've been involved though, and I'm really enjoying doing this small step first.



And I'm lucky enough to have a husband who can hang out with me for his lunch hour! Audrey's snoozing pretty hard. Note the Peter Griffin double chin. She works it.


These are some of the brownies I made. They are wicked delicious and I pity the fool who doesn't eat them.

And this is not in any way meepcakes related, but look at this: Julian at around 2 months, and Audrey at 2 months. They look so much alike to me, but in these pictures you can see how very different the Genetics Fairy has made them.


Exhibit A: Pasty ghost white skin like mine. Bright blue eyes. Reddish blonde hair. (Weird that he started out kind of red haired, right? He's such a blondie now.)


Exhibit B: Olive skin from Wade's Italian side. Her eyes are that questionable color of blue/grey and look like they might turn brown. Crazy tons of dark hair. (Cute onesie courtesy of Amber, the Unlikely Mama)

this will save your ass

Happy Earth Day! In honor of Earth Day, I would like to share with you a hippie cure for diaper rash. Uh oh, I think this just officially became a mommy blog.

Just so this isn't a bunch of mommy blog rambling, here's a mommy blogg-ish photo of my two favorite tiny people:



So here's the deal: Audrey got a diaper rash. Lots of babies do. And then it turned into a rash angrier than a bunch of teabagging Tea Party members with poorly spelled signs. We tried the normal zinc oxide cream, but the rash was just too intense. And then our awesome pediatrician gave us samples of some crazy expensive cream with an anti-fungal in it, that started to heal the rash. But after a couple of days, it became ineffective. And then I turned to teh interwebz with mai research. (Sometimes, one simply must speak like a lolcat.)

What I found after doing several google searches for natural cures and asking facebook friends for help, is a process. But it works. Step by step, here it is:

1. First you cut a hole in that box
2. Then you put your junk in that box

Wait a second! Wrong process!!! Start over.

1. Start with a warm bath with about a cup of vinegar added to the water. I tried both apple cider vinegar and white vinegar, and both seem to help. The idea is that the vinegar neutralizes the acidity of the poops & peeps. In the beginning, we did maybe 3 quick vinegar baths a day. If you're not going to do several baths, it's a good idea to get a little squeeze bottle and fill it with water and a little splash of vinegar. Just use it as a rinse at diaper changes.

2. Set up a hair dryer near the baby's changing table and dry the skin at every diaper change. Moisture (eeew, I hate that word) is an enemy of baby hineys and promotes rashes.

3. Make a mixture of 2 parts olive oil and 1 part pure tea tree oil. You really don't need very much. I kept my mixture in an espresso shot glass. Use a q-tip to dip into the oil mixture and apply it to the rashy areas. I read somewhere not to double dip because of bacterial contamination, so only dip the cotton swab in once and use the other end if you need more.

4. Cover the oil mixture with a zinc oxide cream. I have found that Target's brand of diaper rash cream has 40% zinc oxide and is extremely helpful in speeding up the healing time of a rash. Also, it's crazy cheap. Under $2.

I'd also like to add that rinsing out the wipes is a good idea. Not used ones! Come on, I'm not that much of a hippie. I mean the new wipes. They've got all kinds of chemicals and from what I've read, a high alcohol content which is drying to the skin of very new and tiny people. I pull the wipes out of their container, rinse them very thoroughly in water and put them back.

Best of luck to you on your bum-keeping endeavors.