Brynnley and I kicked off our domestic afternoon with a baking session, intending to get a freezer stash of toddler-friendly breakfasts for my postpartum season coming up!
My two year old is very picky, and happily favors all food void of nutrition. You know, the toddler staples: buttered toast, tater tots, Mac n’ cheese, and chicken nuggets. And don’t you dare try to pull a fast one and sneak in those “hidden veggie” nuggets. Her healthy-detector is fine-tuned. 😉
I have found a loophole in her palette, however. The secret seems to be chocolate chips. So in an attempt to add some nutrition to her future breakfasts, we whipped up a double batch of these Sweet Potato Peanut Butter muffins – with mini chocolate chips.
She DEVOURED one with a glass of milk the moment they cooled off. Success! I found them just as tasty as she did, so we are sharing the recipe:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees & line a cupcake pan with muffin liners.
Once your roasted sweet potatoes have completely cooled, remove them from the skin and add them to a large mixing bowl.
Add peanut butter, eggs, maple syrup (or honey), baking powder, salt, pumpkin pie spice and chocolate chips.
Stir until well-combined and smooth.
Fill your muffin tins 3/4 of the way full with batter.
Bake for 18 minutes, then allow to cool completely.
Store in fridge. Enjoy with a cup of yummy coffee or milk!
I’m not sure how this recipe works because it’s nearly all wet ingredients. It must be the six eggs that really add the muffin texture!
We packaged them in individual baggies and stored them in the freezer so that we can easily pull out one at a time to heat up for Brynnley’s breakfasts over the next couple of weeks.
You can also always order my Strong Like My Coffee mugs from my little boutique page here: Strong Like My Coffee boutique. They come with a wooden topper and a golden stir spoon ☺️
In my last blog post I mentioned that I would be attending a Meal Prep class to help get my freezer stocked with some meals for those first couple of weeks after the new baby arrives (due early July.)
Overall I think the concept is really good & I got 10 different dinners all packaged up in the freezer, ready to be thrown in a crockpot or sheet pan. Each one says 4-6 adult servings, though I would say 3-4 would be more accurate. It was very rushed though – we assembled all 10 different dinners in under 75 minutes and the assembly line-style process meant you really couldn’t catch a break to wipe off your cutting board or clean up your work station throughout. I would have preferred they use all allotted 2 hours and gone a little slower.
Each dinner incorporates meat and veggies (though not as many veggies as I would have included) and I achieved my goal of getting some healthy dinner options at the ready, so I’ll call it a win. I’m not sure yet if I would attend again though; I will need to wait until we cook them up!
We have not been interested in many shows or movies on TV lately, so I’ve opted to read more instead. I’ve finished 8 books in the last 6 weeks which is really good for me! I typically always reach for thrillers or romantic comedy fictions. However during pregnancy and postpartum, I seem to develop a kind of anxiety where I just come up with the most ridiculous but scary scenarios of terrible things that can happen to my toddler or baby. I also have pretty vivid and scary dreams too, wake up easily, and take hours to fall back to sleep. So I try to limit the thrillers I read or anything disturbing on tv – even the news.
That’s meant I’ve actually been reading more non-fiction lately. I’m starting the audio version of The Anxious Generation. Most of what he’s sharing so far about the negative effects of social media and smart phones on kids going through puberty is not surprising or new at all, but there are many studies that show how strongly kids ages 9-14 specifically are impacted by living in a screen-based world rather than a traditional play-based world. Even though we have many years until we have to navigate this with our own kids, it’s still interesting to think about as a parent now!
Well that catches us up this week! Let me know if you make the muffins and if you like them :) I have a couple other picky toddler recipes to try out, but they don’t involve chocolate chips so we will see how they are received….
I am excited to share that I am currently pregnant with baby #2!
…..8.5 months pregnant, to be exact! 😁
Better late than never for my pregnancy announcement blog post, right?
I tell ya, it is a totally different ball game documenting everything when you also have a toddler too! I worked full-time for nearly all of this pregnancy, with Brynnley home with me and a husband who is out of town 4-5 days a week. So yes, I’ve been slow to keeping up with my blogs and vlogs. BUT as of this month I am now a fulltime stay-at-home-mom & I am soaking up my last couple of weeks with just Brynnley before this baby arrives.
Yesterday I was able to put together a vlog with the pregnancy highlights, including our positive test, sharing with our family, the gender reveal, our nursery, and a few other fun moments.
Finding Out
To rewind and recap in a little more detail, we found out that we were pregnant in late October 2023. Brynnley was 1.5 years old. Unlike the first time around, I didn’t surprise Zeb with the positive pregnancy test. We decided to look at the results together and were SO excited to find out that Brynnley is becoming a big sister!
Another difference this time around was telling my family much earlier. With Brynnley, we waited until after our 8 week doctor appointment to confirm the heartbeat and get an ultrasound to share the news. This time, we would need someone to watch Brynnley for us while we both attended the first appointment and we decided to share almost immediately. I picked a super cute “BIG SISTER” t-shirt for Brynnley to wear when my parents came over for dinner. My mom noticed so immediately that my dad didn’t even get a moment to see it for himself before her reaction, haha!
Gender Reveal
Again, we opted for the NIPT genetic testing blood work which confirms if everything is chromosomally normal for the baby as well as their gender. We didn’t do a gender reveal the first time around; Zeb and I just opened the results together in our kitchen one morning. I said I’d be happy to do a gender reveal brunch with our close friends and my parents….if I could be the one to find out first and plan it all. I was too impatient to know if I was having a son or another daughter! The results came after a horrendous week of Zeb having the flu and me being terrified of catching it in my first trimester.
I opened the results and immediately did some online shopping for our baby……
BOY!
Little girls are SO fun to shop for and to dress up, with all their fun accessories and bows. But honestly I have been really pleasantly surprised with all of the boy clothes options nowadays too. I’m not the biggest fan of dressing my baby boy in all dinosaurs and dump trucks. Thankfully baby boy style has many options now. Although I’m not used to not incorporating a bow or a headband into every outfit!
When we took our family vacation to San Diego in February, I found a family photographer to take our photos on the beach while I was 20 weeks pregnant. It was the perfect time for maternity photos for me. It’s more common to wait until you have a larger, more pronounced bump, but I don’t find my body type particularly flattering in the final trimester and I preferred to document my bump while I was still in that beginning stage!
Pregnancy Symptoms & Highlights
Now that I have two pregnancies to compare to each other, I can say that there have been definite differences between Brynnley and Baby Boy! Both were thankfully very mild. Brynnley gave me no morning sickness, but this one had morning nausea from weeks 12-20, occasionally throwing up first thing in the morning but feeling fine afterwards.
My skin has been much better this go around! I can only assume it is gender-related because I had hormonal acne on my face and body with Brynnley but clear skin this time with no major difference in my skincare routine.
I’m carrying this boy much lower, which is another welcome difference. Brynnley was so high up in my ribs that they felt bruised for much of the third trimester. This little boy is so low that it does mean he’s constantly jabbing my bladder but it’s more comfortable having him inches away from my rib cage!
I had more anxiety about doing something wrong with Brynnley than this time. My first pregnancy, I was obsessive about Googling if any ingredient was safe – from self-tanning lotion to Listerine to coffee creamer and everything in between. This time I’m more confident that I know what products are off limits (although I didn’t realize that the immunity vitamins Airborne weren’t pregnancy-safe until I’d already finished a bottle during Zeb’s aforementioned winter flu).
This time, my main anxiety comes from the fact that Brynnley is two years old and isn’t always the most gentle on me when she wants to sit or lay with me. I have to constantly remind myself that women have been having babies while also caring for toddlers since the beginning of time, and he’s not the first fetus to get a few sharp elbow or knee jabs in there. I hope my ice cream trips are giving him a nice little cushion from her, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cause me to worry throughout the last few months!
Nursery
I had a ton of fun putting together this nursery! It was a long process, because we had to redo our front bonus room in order to make room for the nursery. The bonus room used to house a nice 7ft x 7ft playpen for Brynnley that was my saving grace for independent play time while I was working full-time. But we needed to move our guest bed and treadmill out of the room that would become the new nursery, so unfortunately the playpen had to go. Once the bonus room was transformed into our new guest room, the nursery was ready to put together. It was already painted a nice pale bluish-gray so we decided to keep it.
Zeb added white crown molding along the ceiling to hide some of the paint line blemishes which added a nice touch. We used the same crib as Brynnley’s, and we moved in the dresser/changing table and bookcase from Brynnley’s room as well. She was ready for a big girl dresser, and her new kitchen play set for her second birthday took the spot of her bookcase anyways.
I liked the vintage travel style of the canvas map I found, and started searching for similar neutral decoration pieces. The wooden train, white truck (Hobby Lobby), globes, suitcase boxes and Etsy art prints all tied it together. His crib sheet is a world map, and his crib mobile is crocheted airplanes and hot air balloons. The final touch was a custom wooden sign from Etsy with his name on it, which I’ll be sharing after his birth!
Final Countdown
Now is the waiting game! His due date is July 7th. Brynnley came 1.5 weeks early on her own, and statistics say the second child comes around the same or earlier but of course that’s not guaranteed. It’s normal for babies to come two weeks before their due date all the way til two weeks past their due date. I’d obviously prefer to meet him sooner than later, as long as he’s fully developed and healthy! We’ve completed the nursery, installed the car seat, upgraded to a double monitor and double stroller, put the bassinet back up in our bedroom, washed every piece of linen he’ll come in contact with, sterilized every pacifier and toy, and read lots of books with Brynnley about becoming a big sister. We are READY!
Next week I’m attending a meal prep cooking class that will supposedly stock our freezer with 40-60 dinner meal servings for the postpartum weeks. I’ve never attended it before. You sign up online for a two-hour class and pre-select up to 10 different meals to put together. Each meal makes 4-6 adult servings. All for $160. You do all of the cutting, mixing and prep work, then package them up into freezer-friendly portions and take them home with instruction cards for cooking them when you are ready. It sounded worth trying to give us a nice dinner stash for the month of July. I’ll report back on how it is!
I’m excited to share this news and can’t wait to introduce him very soon! Let me know if there’s anything else I forgot to cover :)
