To Maternity...and Beyond!!!

Did you read that in Buzz Lightyear's Voice?

Hope so. :)

Okay, last time we took half of a tank top and made a nursing shirt 

and I told you not to get rid of the rest of that tank top.  

I'm about to show you why.  

We are going to make an adorable wardrobe workhorse.  

We are going to take this skirt: 

And make it do all of this:

                           It's an Anytime-Skirt                                that jumps right on into Maternity.

And then becomes a dress ---

Loose and Beachy

And we can do another dress ---

Longer and leaner this time.  

(J's like, "How much longer do we have to do this?")  

And then we can do yet another dress ---

Shorter more draped now.  

And why not --- 

Let's wear it as a maternity dress too!  

Did you catch all that?  

Six Options from one skirt!  

Let me show you what I did.  

Easy Peasy Feeding Discreetly

I'm a puller-downer.

That sounds like some kind of dramatic life statement.

But I'm talking Nursing.

My ultimate preference in nursing-wear is anything I can pull down from the neckline, as opposed to pulling up from the waist.  

When I'm holding my baby, while I have a nursing pillow around my waist and I'm am trying to yank my shirt up from underneath that pillow --- it just feels ridiculous.  Not to mention the frustration of trying to keep that shirt from falling back down and getting in our way the whole time baby is feeding.

 So I quickly began to gravitate to any top I could just pull down below my breast.  It is a piece of cake to work with --- so fast and there is nothing getting in our way.

Knit shirts with lots of stretch are perfect for nursing this way.  That's pretty much all I wear; when I'm at the store now-a-days, I can be seen tugging at the neckline of everything on the racks. 

Crossover necklines also work well as they can be pulled to the side.  

Another benefit of this technique is that it keeps your belly covered. 

(That poor thing would like some privacy after months of hard work.)  

But what about your breast?  It's kinda just out there this way.

Here is a super easy way to nurse discreetly in public:

I'm gonna do a 'how to make a homemade nursing top' project

and you don't even have to know how to sew to do this. 

You just need some scissors.  

And a tank top.

How I lost the Baby Weight (and then some)

I've been getting asked what I did to lose the weight after having my baby so I figured I could blog about it.  

When I was 40+ weeks pregnant with J, weighing 41 pounds more than I did before getting pregnant, I would walk around my little block (hoping and praying that was all I would need to do to convince this little girl to come out into the world) and I could hardly make it around that little block without being wiped out for the rest of the day.  On one of those walks I decided that I would never weigh that much again in my whole life, not even the next time I was pregnant.  I was going to lose this pregnancy weight and I was going to keep losing weight to get myself into a healthy weight range.  

38 Weeks Pregnant