Rookie Moms

The last baby shower I went to, I bought up all the medicine cabinet necessities from our “dream baby registry” and put them in a multi-purpose laundry basket. Useful: yes. Adorable: not really.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never seen a diaper cake in real life. After reading about how to make this cool boozy diaper cake on alphamom, I’m sad I’ve missed out on this ritual and I hope I get a chance to build one soon.

If you’re looking for a clever shower gift that will totally impress people and be hecka useful, I suggest this (and the Rookie Mom’s Handbook of course!).

Ingredients:

• Bottle of champagne (or 6 bottles of Guinness)
• Serving platter or heavy cardboard
• Size one diapers, it’s the filling of your cake
• A whole bag of elastic bands
• White tissue paper
• Fancy decorative ribbon

For the instructions, you must read the whole photographed tutorial on Alphamom, I can’t do it justice!

I love Apartment Therapy. Probably it’s not the style of everyone who reads this blog, but it’s full of stuff I love. For the most part it’s a blog about decorating, from storage solutions to wall art to paint colors.

One of the most fun parts of the site are the tours. You can look at pictures of other people’s houses all day long. And on their baby channel, Ohdeedoh, there are nursery tours. So fun for me.

You’re already wasting away a nap on the Internet, aren’t you? Go ahead, look at the beautiful designs.

I’m gonna file this under preschooler, because Julian and I had a good time making this adorable paper flag banner for his room, but I’ll also tag it with prenatal, because I made a similar flag banner for Scarlett’s room before she was born. I made the one for Scarlett out of fabric, though.

The picture here is of the results you get if you use the kit sold by the Paper Source. The ingredients for the kit are so basic, you can really just do it on your own. Then end result is a colorful string of flags that can be tacked up on a wall for a quick, festive decoration.

What you need:

1) enough scrapbooking paper, wrapping paper, or magazine pages from which to cut 15 flags.

2) enough string to accommodate 15 hanging flags.

3) a glue stick

Cut this shape out of your selected paper.

Bend over the top portion so that the sides line up with the sides of the bottom triangle. And please excuse my Photoshopping.

Apply glue to the touching parts of the paper.

Place the flap over your string and press together so that your flag is glued in place.

Repeat.

(Originally posted in January 2007) A little confession from the Rookie Moms. We are both pregnant with #2. For our readers, we think this is great because we’ll be revisiting months 1-12 all over again. For our toddlers, this is great because they’ll become big brothers. For our bodies, well, we do it for the family. For our hearts, I honestly can’t even finish this sentence because pregnancy hormones have made me a tearful, pot-bellied mess when I think about how much love a mother of two must feel.

So fellow pregnant readers, enough about us; what about you? Leigh from New For Baby has a ton of suggestions about what to pack for the hospital. In the clothing department, however, she’s tells us that she’s got baby covered with the New for Baby “Bringing Home Baby” kit. The most exciting feature to me, is that the clothes will actually fit your newborn. FYI, pregnant rookie moms, 0-3 months does not really fit an 8 lb kid so well. It fits better when they get closer to 10 lbs, which does happen quickly, but if you pop out a 6-pounder, most clothes are going to be huge for a few weeks.

Read on for the rest of Leigh’s suggestions and some helpful links. Read the rest of this entry »