grocery shopping for introverts

Here in Northwest Arkansas, home of Walmart, they like to make us the guinea pigs for their new processes, services, store layouts, etcetera. They completely remodeled the Walmart Supercenter I go to to include a lot of neat ways to shop (Scan and Go, self check-out for big orders, new store layout) which includes the wonderful thing that is Grocery Pick-up.

Here is how it works. You go to Walmart.com.

Right there in the top right corner of the page there is a link "FREE Walmart Grocery Pickup." Oh yeah. It's free. So you click on that and it has you put in your zip code to see if any of your local stores participate in this. If you have one, you get to get started! Basically you search for all the grocery items you usually buy and add them to your cart. When you're done, check out and it will have you select a pick up time. These times are typically one hour time slots on the following day.

At your self-designated time, you show up to your pick up location, sign in to the drive through kiosk (my location also allows you to pick up home and pharmacy orders) and pull in the the parking space it gives you. A Walmart associate brings out all your groceries, has you sign for your receipt, and loads your vehicle for you. Yes, this is all for free! Well, you pay for your groceries. Duh. Then you drive away happy because you didn't have to deal with any crazy people inside the store or a long line for the check out. Or anything. Because the whole pickup process takes like 10 minutes.

I also find that I save money by not being tempted to pick up all my impulse buys when I go into the store.

Let's just say. With a newborn to drag along with me to get groceries. I'm in love.

coming soon...

You may have noticed our little six week hiatus from posting... I guess I gave myself a maternity leave from the blog! Baby Girl Collett was born on her due date, 10 February 2016! She is gorgeous and perfect and everything to us! As I type, she is sleeping with the assistance of her white noise app, swaddle me, and rock 'n play.

In the next couple weeks, I hope to get around to posting on the following topics (hopefully can get these in before I go back to my day job):

Birth story

Exclusive pumping

Baby gear/essentials for the first few weeks

Walmart grocery pick-up

I hope to get back in a routine with the blog soon, so I can share stories of my precious girl and the rest of our family!

Little M says "Time to sleep! Good night, all!"

38 weeks -- waiting, waiting, waiting

This was overall an uneventful week in pregnancy. They tell me I'm "full term" now, so I'm just waiting. I have tried a couple things to stir things up, but obviously since I'm writing this, no dice. The bottom line is, the baby won't come until she's ready, I'm pretty sure, no matter what!

The first thing I have been doing is walking. I work at the hospital as a nurse, so that's not too hard. I'm working my full schedule. A hard day at work will give me some contractions and low pelvic pain. But nothing regular, and my cervix hasn't changed from last week (1.5 cm dilated, minimal effacement).

Another thing I tried, that I thought might have done it was using my breast pump. I got nothing out, of course, but I used it to get some nipple stimulation going. I did 15 minutes on each side. Nipple stimulation makes the brain release oxytocin (the very same thing they give you through the IV when you get medically induced, your body actually makes!) and can cause contractions. I had fairly consistent contractions for about 4 or 5 hours, but they tapered off as the evening wore on, and stopped by the time I went to bed.

So here I am. Still pregnant. Still waiting on my baby girl.

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A few pictures from this week:

Put myself on the monitor at work on Tuesday... Looking rough. Vitals got better by my doctor appointment, though.

Corey's new stethoscope for paramedic school!

He will hate me for posting this... At our church baby shower. Playing with the gift wrap.

Me at 37.5 weeks!

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Let me know in the comments how y'all have tried (and maybe succeeded?!) in inducing labor at home!

new year, new blog

2016 should be a pretty big year for us, so I'm going to be documenting it all here! Hopefully, I'll get my husband posting on here, too when he feels like it, so you get a couple different perspectives from us :).

I'm hoping to get a few different features integrated here like Pinterest and YouTube. I want to be able to do some recipes and product reviews (having a new baby here pretty soon, so I'll be trying a few things for the very first time!). I'll have topics including cooking, dog stuff, baby stuff, nursing/paramedic stuff, and general posts about every day life.

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So today, I'll just talk about what we have been up to this weekend. Today has been a lazy Sunday for sure. Corey and I spent a while watching YouTube videos. We like watching people eat, apparently, because we watched a few where people eat gross stuff, and then several of a sushi chef that posts a lot of his creations. Corey is an amateur home sushi chef, so we watch those, get inspired, and then hit the grocery store. I love when he gets the itch to cook, because it always turns out so delicious. Sushi is my favorite, too. I am limited to cooked sushi (for only a few more weeks!) due to being 34 weeks pregnant and raw meat being a no-no in my condition. I'll talk about our weekend cooking adventure in a sec. Right now we're working on getting ready for Corey's next semester of school. He is studying to be a paramedic and classes start back up here in a couple weeks. He is already a first responder, and I am a registered nurse, so we find his classes interesting and fun to go through!

Now to Friday/Saturday's cooking adventures. We spent a good part of New Year's Day watching cooking videos, so that evening we perused one of the local Asian markets for ingredients you just won't come across at Walmart. It got late, so we had a car full of pho and sushi ingredients, and drove through Wendy's for dinner. I would like to come out in favor of the 4 for $4 combo, by the way. I wish I had taken some pictures of us cooking this stuff, because my husband really enjoys it, and of course we destroy our *small* kitchen every time. We made Vietnamese pho for lunch Saturday (usually takes many hours to make the broth, but we cheated and used store bought beef broth). Pho has a specific mix of spices that give it that distinct flavor, and you can add pretty much any meat. A lot of authentic pho eaters add some meats a little too "exotic" for me, so we did thinly sliced sirloin, and pork meatballs. It turned out pretty good in my opinion, although Corey deemed it a little too American.

My favorite is when we got to dinner and the sushi. I love sushi, and could eat it a lot more frequently, given the opportunity, but my favorite sushi is loaded with tuna, which is against pregnancy diet rules. So last night, we were good and made tempura shrimp rolls, which were almost as good. We fried up our shrimp, added sliced avocado and cream cheese, made spicy mayo and eel sauce (which will require a tutorial video on here at some point, because it is more involved than you would think!), and rolled it all up in our seaweed papers! I have to tell you, a rice cooker is one of the best things you can buy for kitchen small appliances. They have so many uses, and no matter what kind of rice you're making, it will come out perfect every single time. Again, no pictures, because I inhaled my delicious roll of sushi before I even thought about snapping a picture of it.

We have had a nice, relaxing New Year's weekend, and I hope all of you have as well! If anyone has ideas of what you would like to see in future posts, let us know in the comments! We are game for adventures in cooking and home projects, especially, so give us some blog and video ideas! Thanks everyone and we wish you a wonderful 2016!