My Mother's Day gift this year was a mini photoshoot with Kai. It was such a special way to remember this Mother's Day...my 2nd one as a mother and last one as a mother of 1. We are so excited to welcome another baby in our a family and this is also where we shot our announcement photos!

I've always wanted to be a mother but since actually becoming one, I truly know that is why I was put on this earth. To be Kai's mother. The bond I have with Kai is honestly unfathomable to me and I've actually struggled a little bit emotionally with this pregnancy at the thought of loving another human as much as I love Kai. I know I will when the baby comes, that's a given, but right now, I honestly just can't imagine it. It makes me feel guilty in many ways sometimes. I feel guilty that I won't be able to give 100% of my attention to Kai, and I feel guilty that I even have these feelings with Peanut. But deep down inside I know, growing our family is one of the most wonderful things that God has blessed us with and it is all just going to fall in to place as time goes by. There is not a love in this life that is remotely comparable to the love you feel for your children, and it is pure magic.

*Photos courtesy of Hallie Duesenberg.

Wow guys it's been quite awhile since I've been on here and not only am I sorry for that but I really miss writing on here and connecting with all of you! Life has been so crazy lately that it has forced me to slow down in some areas, which includes Tiny Dapper Fox and social media. But that's life right!? I feel like I'm finally entering that second trimester bliss where I'm getting some energy and motivation back so I plan to take full advantage of it while it lasts! So my plan is to start posting a whole lot more. This is my creative outlet and you all are truly my family. So in the spirit of getting things going again, I thought I'd just do a little post on what we've been up to the last few couple of months since we obviously have had some big changes happen!

New Jobs
Caleb and I both have started new jobs in the last few months. We're both with our same companies we've always been with but have taken steps further in our careers, and couldn't be more excited about it. Caleb is working in a more analytics based field now, which is so great for him because he is a numbers guy and loves that kind of stuff. As for me, I am now a Project Manager! This role is where I've been wanting to end up for about 2 years now. I applied for the job back in December and after a long interview process, was offered the job back in April. I had to split my time with my old job until May, and for the last couple of months, I've just dived in to my new role. I'm loving it so much and while it can be really tiring at times, it's been wonderful. I get to travel a little bit for this job now, too. I was in Phoenix, AZ for most of last week for some training/work. I'm currently running 3 projects right now and every day I'm so excited for the challenge that this new opportunity is presenting me with.

Pregnancy #2
So if you didn't see my last blog post from a couple of weeks ago, I'm pregnant again! We're expecting baby #2 around Thanksgiving, which puts me at 18 weeks right now. This pregnancy hasn't really been a cake walk, especially with having a 1 year old to take care of + starting a new job. All good things, all good things, but it can be exhausting at times. I was very sick during my first trimester and actually had to be on progesterone for about 6 weeks, which I believe made me even sicker. I'll be doing a full recap of my first trimester soon with all the deets. But it hasn't been all bad! I started feeling tiny little baby kicks around 15 weeks, I'm healthy, the baby is healthy, and Kai is fascinated by my growing belly. We're so excited to be growing our family and are really looking forward to the holidays this year!

Adventures
So we haven't been going on too many adventures with me not feeling so great the last few months, but once in awhile I try my hardest to muster up some energy and get out of the house. We went to the Chicago Botanic Garden for Mother's Day, we've been to a few Cubs games, Kai started swim lessons, and we've taken a couple of day trips up to Milwaukee. It's been really cold for summer here in Chicago with lots of rain, so honestly we've just been trying to have as much fun at home as possible with movie marathons, gardening, and letting Kai just use his imagination. Speaking of movies though, last weekend we took Kai to see his first movie in theaters...Toy Story 4! We were brave and tried it out with him and he did surprisingly well!

House Projects
Caleb has been amazing and has kept our house running these last few months, so I don't have too much to report on house stuff. The office is still coming along (the built-ins are done but not decorated...fail on me), we're re-doing some things for our deck, and I still haven't really transitioned the house from spring to summer yet. That's kind of my goal for this weekend if I'm feeling up to it though! We have gotten outside as much as we can to do yard stuff and gardening, so our outside is really coming along. 

I think that about sums it up! Just lots of resting and trying to survive is really the name of the game these last few months, but that's ok. That's the season of life we're in and we're trying to embrace it the best we can. What have you all been up to lately? Share with me some exciting things in the comments below!

We're so excited to announce that baby #2 will be joining our little family this November! I am about 16 weeks along and due just before Thanksgiving. We found about our newest addition back at the end of March and are so excited to grow our family. Kai is going to be the best big brother and we can already tell that he's excited. We've nicknamed this little one, Peanut!

I'm so excited to back track and share all about my first trimester with all of you as well as take you along on the journey through this pregnancy and becoming a family of 5. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all the love and support you continue to give our family!

A couple weekends ago I took a short trip down to Nashville to celebrate one of my closest friend's bachelorette party! It was my first time going to Nashville and I had the best time. I flew in Friday night and left Sunday evening, so like I said, very short trip but I wanted to share with all of you some of the fun things I did while down there!

I flew in late Friday night and basically just went straight to bed that night so nothing fun and exciting there to report so let's start with Saturday! Saturday was the big bachelorette party day! We started off our day with having brunch at Suzy Wong's House of Yum. It was a brunch drag show and it was an absolute blast. The food was delicious, too! I got BBQ pulled pork with scrambled eggs and queso and yes it was just as amazing as it sounds. The drag show was of course the best part though and I highly recommend this place for any bachelorette party or girls weekend!

Our next big event of the day was the Hick Chick Pub Crawl! It was a bar crawl through downtown Nashville that   incorporated some history and comedy in to it and it was a damn good time! The woman who runs it was hilarious and it was a great way to learn a bit about Nashville, plus we got to hit up a bunch of different bars! They all had live music, which made it extra fun and all the musicians were so talented! The bars we hit up during the crawl were Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar, Layla's, Bootleggers Inn, and Whiskey Bent Saloon. After the crawl we spent some time at Ole Red, which I'm not going to lie to you guys, I wasn't super impressed by. We ended at my favorite bar of the night though, which was Florida Georgia Line House. It has 4 different levels and they are all so different. We started out in the basement which had a DJ and a big dance floor. It definitely brought me back to my college days! We headed up to the 2nd floor after we danced for awhile and grabbed a bite to eat. I had a Bavarian pretzel the size of my face that came with mustard aioli and it was SO GOOD! After we ate, the rest of our group headed out and I stayed with the bride and we had the best time dancing and singing to the live band that as playing on the first floor.

We ended our night back at our hotel, we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express right on Broadway downtown by the way and I highly recommend it, and had tacos from Jack in the Box! Guys, I love Jack in the Box so much. It's probably my favorite fast food restaurant ever, so I went to bed that night veryyy happy and so did the bride!

The next day I ended up going off and adventuring on my own because everyone headed out to go home in the morning. My flight wasn't until later on Sunday, so I rented a car and drove out to some of the neighborhoods! I started my day off with coffee and a donut at Five Daughters Bakery. I got the blueberry lavender donut and it is probably a top 5 donut of all time for me. I walked down 12th Ave a bit and wasn't finding much so I decided to reference my Nashville list (yes I'm a nerd and had a list, ha!) and noticed that the Draper James store was on 12th Ave. So I mapped it and discovered it was just down the street but in the other direction! So I headed down that way and that is where I hit the gold mine! I found the I Believe in Nashville wall, did some shopping at Draper James and imogene + willie, got some flowers from Amelia's Flower Truck, and grabbed a cookie at Christie Cookie. Get the southern butter pecan cookie, it'll change your life.

After my fun little spree down 12th Ave, I grabbed some lunch at bartaco. I got some chips and guac and a glazed pork belly taco that were both so good. I hopped back in my car after lunch at went over to the Gulch neighborhood and did some more shopping at Uncommon James, which is Kristen Calvalari's store. It's a gorgeous store and they just came out with a kids line! So naturally I had to grab Kai something. My time was up after that, so I headed over to the airport and made the journey home.

It was a nice weekend away to have a break from the #momlife but I actually can't wait to go back and take Kai and Caleb with me! Nashville or bust, friends!

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Hey friends! I hope you all had a lovely weekend. We had a wonderful one over here just spending time relaxing at home and we went to our first Cubs game of the year yesterday! We went up to Miller Park in Milwaukee for the Cubs vs Brewers game with a big group of our friends. We did an all inclusive club level package and it came with an all you can eat buffet, drinks, and a giant suite area you can watch the game from. It was really nice actually and helpful with a one year old that is running around a bunch now. We were able to take breaks from watching the game and let Kai run around the lounge area in between innings. The Cubs lost but it was still a really fun time!

So I read not 1 but 2 books last month! My spike in reading has been thanks to my amazing morning routine that I've been doing the last couple of months which I will actually be telling you all about thanks to one of the books I read last month (The Miracle Morning). So let's dive right in to our little book club chat for this month...

Lethal White is the fourth book in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling. If you haven't read the first three, I highly suggest reading them before you read Lethal White as there are a lot of references to the previous books all throughout plus the back story of Strike and his partner, Robin.

In Lethal White, Strike and Robin take on a case for a government minister who is being blackmailed. The minister won't divulge what he is being blackmailed for and wants Strike to find dirt on the people who are blackmailing him. Strike takes the job but on the side digs around for the real reason for the blackmail. There is always the outlying twist in crime novels too, of course, this one being if there is a connection to a dead little girl to the government minister. In the midst of the blackmail job, something tragic happens the minister and the family rehires Strike to find out more about it. It's a crime within a crime story and the twist at the end in unreal.

Seriously, all hail Queen Jo. Lethal White was fantastic. I don't want to give too much of it away nice it is newer and I hope all of you read it at some point but WOW I was stunned by the ending. I've never been able to guess who committed the crime throughout the books but this one really took me by surprise. It was a classic not want to put it down book and I would recommend it to everyone and anyone. The Strike series was my entry in to crime novels and I love this series so much. Also, can we talk about the sexual tension between Robin and Strike in this book!? When are they going to get together!? I'm dying over here...I guess we'll have to wait and see for the next one.

You can purchase Lethal White on Amazon.

So I started doing a revised version of the Miracle Morning at the beginning of the year thanks to the podcast, Find the Magic. Their pilot episode talked about their morning routines and how they follow the Miracle Morning structure. I really liked what they had to say about it but wasn't sure about incorporating all of it in to my morning. I do have a one year old and I work 5 days a week. But I knew I wanted to read the book at some point and really understand what the Miracle Morning was all about.

The Miracle Morning book takes you through how the author, Hal Elrod, came up with this ingenious idea for the Miracle Morning. He was a very successful guy but also has gone through plenty of trials in his life. At his lowest point, he knew he needed to figure something out of how to get out of the rut he was in. He started exercising in the mornings as well as doing some other personal self enhancement practices and thanks to all that, the Miracle Morning was born. Essentially, what the Miracle Morning is, is a morning routine that helps your personal development each and every day. There is an acronym for it and it is S.A.V.E.R.S. It stands for Silence, Affirmations, Visualizations, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing. Elrod states that if you can incorporate SAVERS in to your morning routine every day, you will bring yourself up to a level 10 life and fall within the 5% of people in this world who are as successful as they can possibly be.

Before I had read the Miracle Morning, my morning routine looked like this based on what I had learned from the Find the Magic podcast...
6am: Wake up, stretch, wash my face
6:10am: Meditation (silence)
6:20am: Make coffee, light a candle, open the windows
6:25am: Read
6:55am: Affirmations/Visualizations/Gratitude (scribe)

So as you can see I was missing exercise. I have never been a morning exercise person but after reading the book I decided to give it a try. I updated my schedule to this...
6am: Wakeup, stretch, wash face
6:05am: Mediation
6:10am: Yoga
6:20am: Make coffee, light a candle, open the windows
6:25am: Read
6:55am: Affirmations/Visualizations/Gratitude

GAME CHANGER. Just that 10 minutes of morning yoga has done wonders. I'm able to concentrate better and this way if I miss a normal workout that I usually do later in the day I don't feel as guilty because I did get my body moving at some point in the day. Let me elaborate a little bit too on my full routine in terms of the SAVERS acronym.

Meditation = Silence. I use the Headspace app every day and usually just choose to do the 3 or 5 minute daily meditation they have available. I downed my time from 10 minutes to 5 minutes to allow myself some time for yoga. I don't think it was much of a sacrifice because to be honest, I found it really hard to concentrate on mediation for 10 minutes right when I had just woken up. I was still pretty sleepy and even though I was sitting up so I wouldn't fall back asleep, I find my mind would wander off on random thoughts a lot more with the 10 minute sessions. So 5 minus of silence is perfect for me.

Affirmations. I have 3 affirmations written out in my phone that I read aloud every morning. They have to do with motherhood, my career, and taking care of myself. Prior to reading the book I use to write new affirmations every day. This really had no impact on my life because it was always changing and I would honestly just forget about them an hour later. By having 3 set affirmations now I remember them and I can concentrate on them all day every day.

Visualizations. This is supposed to be you actually visualizing what you want in life. I start small with this because my big picture of what I want in life is pretty far off, I'm not going to lie, so if I start small with visualizing how I want each day to go for myself and Kai then I'm always one day closer to that big dream that I visualize all the time. So how I go about doing this is I have a daily schedule written out for each day of the week for myself and Kai. Every day is different because some days I work from home, some days I'm in the office, some days we have a random event on our calendar, and weekends are always different. So I have a generic schedule for each day written down in my phone. I go through it hour by hour and visualize the day. It helps me to remember what needs to be done each day and I'm able to visualize how I want the day to go. By doing this I'm able to really predict and know what to expect from the day. No day ever goes according to plan but it really helps me organize my thoughts and plans for the day to make our dreams happen.

Yoga = Exercise. So like I said, I added this part in not too long ago. I do a 10 minute morning yoga session with Yoga with Adrienne on YouTube. It's a quick and easy way to get the blood flowing every day.

Reading. I've always loved waking up early and reading a book in the morning but I've never been able to consistently do it until now. I like to make a cup of coffee, light a candle, and open up all the curtains so I can see the sunrise as I'm snuggled up reading my book. It's so peaceful and it starts my day off so happen. Definition of hygge? I think so!

Gratitude = Scribing. My daily scribing is just writing down what I'm thankful for every day. It really starts my day off on a positive note and I love going back through and looking at each day and what I wrote down. I just keep a little note in the Notes app on my phone so I have it with me at all times, which is also where my affirmations and daily schedule are kept as well.

I also just want to throw this out there, ever since I've made this change our life has honestly gone up to a level 10. I 100% believe in God and that he is watching over us with my dad but I also believe that thanks to my effort for personal enhancement in the mornings, I have the energy and ability to work harder during the day to achieve the life I truly want for myself and my family. I highly recommend reading the Miracle Morning or simply just starting based off what I've told you here! If you're interested in a more in depth review of my morning routine or daily routines please let me know in the comments and I'd be happy to do some posts on them for you all!

You can purchase The Miracle Morning on Amazon. The Kindle version is free for Prime members, too!

UP NEXT: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
​What are you currently reading? Share with my in the comments!