My Review of Honest Diapers

Like many expecting mamas, I received a closet full of diapers at my baby shower, which was awesome! However when my son was born, his skin was very sensitive. Switching to fragrance and dye free laundry soap did the trick for his clothes, but diapers were a struggle for the first few months. His poor little butt was always red! It didn't matter what product we used on it. My MIL would not stop putting a 1/4 inch thick layer of desitin on his rear which I then had to scrub off the next time he pooped making his butt even more red. He however never seemed to be too bothered by the redness so eventually we just accepted it.

However after around 4 months, we finally ran out of the diapers we got as gifts, and when we were about to go buy a box of pampers (the brand we liked best), I saw an add on Facebook for chemical free diapers that came in adorable patterns! As you may know, I am a costume designer, and the idea of having different patterns of diapers to match to his outfits was amazing. So I ordered our free trial of diapers.

I believe the trial came with 7 diapers and a travel pack of wipes, which I used mixed in with his remaining diapers because I didn't want to use all the cuteness all at once. We mainly decided to switch because we liked the idea of having diapers and wipes delivered every month and I liked the cute patterns, we weren't that concerned with the chemical free-ness. It was worth the extra $15 compared to huggies brand.

We were however pleasantly surprised when a few days after exclusively using these diapers, his butt redness entirely went away, and has never come back!

Obviously, because we are still subscribing, we are pleased enough with the company and diapers that we don't even consider switching back to store bought diapers. So here is what I do an don't like about the diapers.

Do Like:

• The patterns! Here is what we currently have for our pattern assortment (it comes from two shipments).

• The lack of diaper rash.
• The fact that they are delivered before need them. For those curious about the amount you get, for us it is WAY more than we enough. We actually have put off our next shipment by a month and a half because we have so many left over. The extras added up over the months so that we are just now starting to use a box we received over a month and a half ago. And that is after giving a bag full to my boss who mainly cloth diapers, because she uses disposable when they travel and seventh generation is hard to come by in this town. The same goes for wipes, we have four big packs left, plus the travel ones we bought as extras. And we use the wipes for EVERYTHING. We wipe his butt with them, we wipe his face after meals, we wipe down his toys when they need a quick swipe, we have used them to clean our cars...
• How easy it is to update your preferences, everything from size and pattern, to when you want to have your next shipment delivered.
• Absorbancy. When he first started going all night with no diaper change we had some leakage, and just when we were considering getting a different diaper for nighttime, it stopped. Not sure why, but it did. Hasn't happened in a couple months.

Don't Like:

• I wish the wipes were able to go into a plastic pop-up container. I missed that about our huggies brand wipes (which were also fragrance free and didn't bother his bum). However now I have adjusted, and while it would still be nice, I don't mind as much.
• While it is awesome that they come out with new patterns quite often, it is sometimes sad when you get attached to a certain design and only have it a couple months (I LOVED the comic book design, which isn't offered anymore).

With our next baby we are going to put that we don't want any diapers if we have a baby shower, and just start using Honest Diapers from the start. That is if we don't decide to cloth diaper, in which case I believe we will try gDiapers because I have heard so many good things about them. I always recommend Honest to friends who are having diaper rash problems. They also have reusable swim diapers, which we don't use anymore, but we did when he was too little for the disposable ones.

My Nerdy Little Wedding Ceremony

The biggest part of the wedding for me was the ceremony, I wanted it to be perfect, but not "traditional". As some of you may know, Caleb and I were already legally married for seven months before we had our ceremony. We only had one member of the wedding party ask why we were having a wedding, I think the look I gave him shut him up real quick. I spent weeks searching the internet for a wedding ceremony I liked and finally found this one:
 http://offbeatbride.com/2012/04/silly-ceremony-wording-with-zero-religion

I absolutely loved it, so I tweaked it a bit, and then sent it off to our officiant who said it was great and Voila! Here is our version of the script we used for our ceremony!

Officiant:
Good evening friends, family, and you back there. Not sure who you are. We've got this little detail of a marriage to take care of before we can start the party. We have all been invited here today to share a very important moment in Caleb and Hayley’s lives. No, not the premiere of Game of Thrones season 4, or the second Hobbit movie which for some reason has Orlando Bloom in it, but that their love and understanding for each other has grown and matured, and they have decided to live their lives together as husband and wife.

Caleb and Hayley thank you for your presence here today, and now ask for your encouragement and lifelong support in their decision to become a family.
Marriage is perhaps the greatest and most challenging adventure of all human relationships. As good as I may be… and believe me, I am very good… No ceremony can create your marriage; only you can do that – through love and patience; through dedication and listening; through supporting and believing in each other. By fighting through the zombies and vampires; through the Sith and bounty hunters. By learning to make the important things matter, and letting go of the rest. What this ceremony can do is to witness and affirm the choice you make to stand together despite the occasional urge to run away.
To make a marriage work, we learn to overlook and forgive the things that may frustrate us. Like Caleb being absent-minded and always forgetting what Hayley says two minutes after she says it. Or Hayley being stubborn and getting angry due hunger because she was too lazy to make lunch. These two are promising to stick together through all the poopy diapers, unfolded laundry, and dirty dishes. To support one another through all the bad traffic, annoying co-workers, and airport security lines.

Now we will have the maid of honor read you the poem Love by Roy Croft.

Brittany:

“I love you

Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

0I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple.

Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good.
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.

You have done it
By being yourself.”

Officiant:
Caleb take Hayley 's right hand and repeat after me.

Hayley, I choose you to be my wife.
I promise freely from this day forward
To be worthy of your trust and deserving of your confidence;
To be generous with my time, my energy and my love;
To be patient with you and with myself,
To trust you;
To be devoted to you and our life together.
These things I pledge before you, our friends, and our family.


Hayley take Calebs 's right hand and repeat after me.
Caleb, I choose you to be my husband.
I promise freely from this day forward
To be worthy of your trust and deserving of your confidence;
To be generous with my time, my energy and my love;
To be patient with you and with myself,
To trust you;
To be devoted to you and our life together.
These things I pledge before you, our friends, and our family.


Their beautiful son will now present the rings which represent their bond.

Officiant: Will you, Caleb, love Hayley with all your heart and keep her as your wife for the rest of your life?

Caleb: I will

Officiant: Will you, Hayley, love Caleb with all you heart and keep him as your husband for the rest of your life?

Hayley: I will

Officiant:“In the sight of the Seven, I hereby see you these two souls, binding them as one for eternity. Look upon one another and say the words.”

Caleb & Hayley: Father. Smith. Warrior. Mother. Maiden. Crone. Stranger. I am his/hers, and s/he is mine, from this day, till the end of my days

Officiant:What love has joined together, no power in the 'verse can stop.

I now pronounce you more officially married. You may kiss the bride!

Other Random Wedding Items

I don't feel like any of these deserve their own post, so I am grouping them all together.

First, Silverware!! We bought a bunch of plastic silver cutlery and wrapped them in dollar tree napkins, put some ribbon around it, sealed with a hot glue gun, and here they are!

 Next, aisle decorations. The plaques were less than a dollar each at walmart, I just stained them with a cheap stain purchased at the same place and painted on the verses. These aren't done, I am still needing to have Caleb drill a hole in the top of each one so I can put some ribbon through them and tie them onto chairs going down the aisle (assuming that we have chairs.. we still need to figure that out..)

On the note of chairs, we currently have ten waterproof picnic blankets for people to sit on. I ordered them on a website called called aliexpress.com which to me seems like a cross between amazon and ebay. It took around 20 days for them to get here, but it was only $60 including shipping for all ten, which is a pretty good deal. We have already been using one on our various outings and we love it. At least one other friend getting married this summer is going to use them after us.

We also ordered a wagon for Rohan to ride in since he is definitely not going to start walking in the next week and a half. It was around $70 on ebay, which is a good deal considering that the radio flyer equivalent is close to $140. I made a blanket out of fabric and batting scraps that I had in a bin, put some ribbon around it and called it good.

 

And lastly, to go with the wagon I painted another walmart plaque to attach to the back of it :)

 

Wedding Program Fans

Our wedding is outdoors, in the middle of summer, no naturally it is probably going to be pretty hot. So I really liked the idea of having a wedding program that was also a fan. I looked at a bunch of different variations of this, and the one I liked the best is the one featured in this tutorial:
http://www.intimateweddings.com/blog/easy-diy-wedding-programs-tutorial/

I don't want people at my wedding to be bored out of their minds, so I have been trying to come up with little ways to entertain people, and the idea of having puzzles on the backs of them seem like the perfect idea! I chose to do the letter puzzle and word search like on the blog, but I did a crossword puzzle instead of the madlib. Here are the examples of mine.

 

The crossword and wordsearch puzzles  were made using online generators, and the word making puzzle was made using paint in about five minutes. Next was the front with the program, I again did a google search and looked at images from a ton of different wedding programs and chose what I liked best from them, found a pretty swirly image for the side, and TADA! This one took me closer to ten minutes on paint, but that is still pretty painless.

 

 

I printed the puzzles out on plain white paper, and the program side on purple paper and used my rotary cutter to cut them to the appropriate size (destroyed the blade, but those are cheap enough, and I use that thing maybe five times a year). Next I folded 80 pieces of turquoise card stock in half. I used double sided sticky tape for the edges of the paper and a hot glue gun to attach the jumbo popsicle sticks.

Then the double sided tape again to attach the program to one side and the puzzles to the other side. I believe I went through around 14 rolls of tape, but luckily it was again all from the dollar tree.

 

 I ended up having to redo the program side. Our officiant decided he was too nervous to speak in front of people and would like us to find somebody else, so I had to pull all of the programs off and reprint, cut and stick new ones on once we finally found a new officiant! That felt like it took forever, but it wasn't too difficult. Definitely made me glad this was a DIY project and I didn't order them all online!

$15 Wedding Decorations

Since we are having an outdoor wedding, I don't feel like I need to over-do the decorations, but I did want something, so I browsed Pinterest and hit our local dollar tree and this is what I came up with!!

I bought mason jars, glitter and elmers glue. I already had leftover flowers and peacock feathers from when I made my wedding bouquets.

I convinced Caleb to help me with this project! He used a paint brush (also purchased at the dollar tree, a long time ago) and painted a mixture of elmers glue and water onto the inside of all the jars. After he painted it, I sprinkled the inside of it with glitter in one of our wedding colors.

I let them dry over night. They looked kind of awful when the glue was wet, just sort of foggy and messy, but the next morning they were sparkly and beautiful. I cut a bunch of my spare flowers to be on individual short stems and arranged them in each jar. Four purple roses in each one, plus either a blue lily, or little purple flowers depending on the glitter color used, and of course, a peacock feather!! The whole process was incredibly quick and simple (not counting drying time which we slept through) and I am very pleased with how they turned out.

"Splurge Coupons"

So, last week I received an email from our bank saying that our balance had fallen below $25, upon looking at the bank account, it turned out that we had $2.02 in our joint account!!

Luckily, we have a second account that all of Caleb's refund checks go into that we use to pay rent, and there is always extra money in that account at the end of each term, so we just transferred a couple hundred from that on into our main account to get us by until we get paid at the end of the month

Needless to say though, that is a very scary feeling, to only have two dollars, and it made me start thinking about everything we spend money on without thinking. The biggest culprit: Coffee.

We buy coffee a lot. Caleb used to work at Dutch Bros. here and he is quite addicted to coffee. It would not be uncommon for us to go 5-6 times a week to get coffee, which costs around $7-9 depending on what we both get. 5 times a week, and seven dollars a trip is $140 a month spent on coffee. Then we added in our "I'm too lazy to cook so we are getting fast food" trips, and the even worse "I'm too lazy to cook and don't want fast food so we are eating out" trips, and we spend a lot of money we really don't need to.

Solution? Splurge Coupons!!!

 

I went online and searched Google images for clip art pictures coffee, fast food, and dinner. Then I went on Microsoft Publisher and made "Business Cards" for each one.

We talked about how often we thought we should allow ourselves each of these treats (I am said 'need', but we don't actually need them ever), and we decided that we were allowed Fast Food 7 times a month, Coffee 5 times a month, and Eating Out 3 times a month. I printed out the appropriate number of cards to last us the rest of the year (seven months), and made envelopes for each month.

And Voila!! Our new system to start saving some money each month. We decided that we get to have roll over tickets, so if we don't use all of them one month, we can have them the next month rather than spending the last day of the month getting coffee twice and fast food and eating out. Individual trips out with friends don't count (i.e. girls night, guys night). And the rest we will just have to figure out as we go! (I will update if anything changes)

Wedding Invitations!!

So I went half DIY for my invitations. After looking into the prices of buying card stock and all the required things for making invitation completely from scratch, I decided it was cheaper for buy an Invitation Kit on Amazon. I spent $30 for 50 invitations, which I think is pretty good (not including stamps, which I will talk about).

This is the box that it all came in

 

 

It only took me about five minutes to type out the inviations and RSVP cards. I just used Microsoft Word for the invitations, making the paper size 8.5 x 5.5 however for the RSVP cards I did use the template that you can do online through Wilton since you print two cards on one page and then tear it in half. It was incredibly easy and turned out great.

 

 

Then you simply put the invitations into the sleeves and put the ribbon around it! The ribbon came with little sticky squares to hold it together with the bow, but they didn't work very well so I got out the trusty hot glue gun and just put a little dot where all the sticky squares were.

 

And tada!! Invitations!! Next, stamps. This seems pretty mundane I suppose, but I was incredibly excited when I found out the post office actually has wedding stamps!! I took an invitation in to get it weighed to see how much it would cost to ship them all and the wonderful man working there pulls out 66 cent stamps with wedding cakes on them and then forever stamps with white roses for the RSVP cards. I was incredibly happy. So I put all the stamps on my envelopes and sealed them all up using a little sponge-type tool I got for two bucks at walmart (because licking 50 envelopes is no fun).

 

And they are all ready to be dropped off at the post office! Easy, beautiful and cheap wedding invitations!!!