Rest for mom?

I'm about a year behind on reading my magazines, but yesterday I ready "Rest for the Weary" in my Parents magazine, it's from March 2012.

The article gave some good suggestions on getting some quiet breaks during the day. The breaks they suggest are about doing nothing, or just about nothing, and I think that's one thing I don't often think about doing.

The first suggestion was what caught my attention. The article indicated that "people who close their eyes for eight minutes and let their minds wander show measurable brain activity in the area where long-term memories are formed." The plan is once your baby is down for a nap, don't rush to check Facebook or to change the laundry, take 10 minutes and relax on the couch, but be sure to close your eyes while you do it. The point isn't getting a quick nap, even though it might happen, it's to take a few minutes and have some quiet time. I definitely haven't thought about doing this. My thought has always been if I don't have time for a full fledged nap while my daughter is napping, then I better do something productive with my time, or semi-productive and catch up on my computer things, or do the dishes/laundry/clean, etc. But I have started trying to at least lay down on the couch for part of her nap and I have definitely felt better after; rather than if I ran around trying to get everything done.

What type of crib? Conclusion!

As we were settling on what crib we might want, I decided I wanted to change things up and get at white crib! It was totally out of the ordinary for me since all of our other furniture is black. I think the biggest factor was when I found the perfect dresser for the room (I'll post about that soon), it's green and "vintage." I decided the other furniture should be white.
I was surprised at how few options of white cribs were out there. Most cribs were either dark or a natural colored wood. Then one day we were super lucky! We went to Babies R Us and saw a crib design we loved, but it had this one green stripe on the top. Talking to Joe I said how frustrated I was that they had to ruin the crib with a green stripe, what if you couldn't ever match that green! Then when we talked an employee and he revealed to me that the green stripe was changeable! The crib came with 2 slats, each side a different color. By changing the accent slats the crib could have green, pink, blue, or white (!) accents! This changed everything. Not that I would change the slats often or at all, the option was there, a bonus I had never considered. The best part was that the crib had not been selling well and it was way marked down. The original price was $500, which is way out of our budget, but they marked it down to $200! Plus when we put it on our registry we could get 10% off when we did the registry completion!