Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Baby potpourri

It seems I have been slacking over the past two weeks, so I have quite a bit of updating to do.
We haven't had time to work on the baby's room much more, though we plan to dig in again this weekend. My husband was home sick from work yesterday and when I went back to work after lunch, he was headed up for a nap. When I came home four hours later, I got a nice surprise. He had carried most of the store room items that were still sitting in the hallway down to the basement, and had hauled out the old dresser and treadmill from the baby's room. Wow! I definitely was not expecting that. That means all I have left to do this weekend is box up those last few remaining items and we can get to the fun part.
In related news, we have changed our minds on the nursery theme again. I think we both had our hearts set on our turtle, frog, bumblebee theme that we had originally chosen. So we have gone back to that and ordered a crib sheet and some wall hangings so we could match colors. We have also chosen a paint color, called Mango Parfait. It's a light, creamy orange. We had lots to choose from—the set (we are still not buying the whole set because it's dumb to buy a quilt and bumper we're not going to use) has yellow, blue, green, and orange. I think it's really cute. I know some people are into decorating their babies' rooms with non-childish themes these days, but I'm not. I mean, come on ... she's going to be a baby! She can have a room that looks like it belongs to a 40-year-old when she's 40.
While she waits to see her new room, the baby sure seems to be enjoying the room she has now! She's moving more and more all the time, though she still seems to have quiet and active days. One day she'll move pretty much all day long, and the next day she'll be very quiet. Although sometimes I suspect that her quiet days are just my busy days, and I don't notice quite as much. On Sunday, I was reclining on the couch and could actually see her kicking from the outside. This was after what had been a day to a day-and-a-half when she was really mellow.
I've also begun to notice patterns. She's pretty active in the morning, between 8 and 9. Breakfast probably has something to do with that. During that time I generally feel the kicks/punches up high. As the day progresses she seems to move downward. Afternoons are calmer, but when she does decide to kick, it's in the middle. In the evening, she likes to get my left side. Not always, but sometimes when I go to bed she gets a few good crotch shots in. Getting punched in the crotch from the inside is not as fun as it might sound! Last night she gave me some real doozies. Thankfully, she seems to sleep most of the night. The only time I really feel her move is when I roll over. She was a bit more active during the thunderstorm we had last night, though!
I have more to say, mostly about gaining too much weight, but I think I'll save that for another time.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Making room for baby

There seems to be a bit of nesting going on around our house. Over the weekend we started on some projects so we can be ready for the baby.
We don't have the biggest house. Well, it's not small, exactly, it's just not laid out very well. The second floor has two smallish bedrooms, a bathroom, small store room, and two more rooms that we currently use for a family room and my husband's "stuff" room. We had a difficult time deciding where to put the baby's room. Our options were to clean out the extra bedroom, which was full of my clothes, or to move the master bedroom into the family room/husband stuff area and put the baby in our bedroom. There were some major things to consider. One was that my clothes pretty much took up the whole guest room (whoops) and I had nowhere to put them. It's an old house and the closets are small. So in order for me to have a place for my clothes, we'd have to clean out the store room and make it into a walk-in closet. The other consideration was that our house has two sets of stairs—weird!—and the back staircase leads right to what would have become our master bedroom. That meant trying to put in a door (we have cats and don't allow them in our room) which we weren't even sure we could do, and which could be costly.
After lots of thought, we decided to make the store room into my closet and make the guest room into the nursery. I think it was the right choice and I'm thrilled with the result, even if it did mean a weekend of busting our butts.
We started on Saturday, with my husband cleaning out the store room and me working in the guest bedroom. I'll admit, it was a project we needed to do, baby or no baby. We sorted through a lot of stuff, tossing what we needed to. I also went through all my clothes and filled two huge bags for donation.
When my husband finished cleaning out the store room he began working on installing shelves and a hanging rack for my clothes. There are two sets of shelves, one larger that holds three to four stacks of clothes apiece, and one smaller set that holds one stack of clothes. Underneath the larger shelves, he left room for two small dressers. Across from the big shelves, he built a rack for hanging clothes. He even hung up a shoe organizer on the door, and put my necklace holders on the wall. The final result is amazing and I couldn't be happier or more grateful to have a husband who not only is able to do this kind of project, but is willing to do it. We still need to put some sort of window covering up so the clothes don't get faded and I can get dressed/undressed in there, but for the most part we're all done.
I got everything moved in yesterday and it's even better than I could have possibly imagined. I kind of wanted to sleep in the new closet last night, just so when I woke up I'd know it was still there!
Now it's on to an equally exciting project—the baby's room! I've got all of my clothes out of there and just have a few miscellaneous items to box up yet. We have an old dresser and desk that need to be disposed of. There is also a double bed that I think we will leave in the room if possible. That way if one of us crashes in the baby's room during the night or if we have guests, we can put the baby in our room in a portable crib and use it as a guest room.
We're both excited to decorate. I never thought my husband would take such an interest in that part of it, but I'm thrilled that he is. I know I said two weeks ago that I had a theme all picked out. Well, that changed. We're buying a barely used set from a friend. It's girlier than we planned, but still not pink, and we both like it a lot. We've already got tons of ideas for how to paint and decorate. I can't wait to get it done and bring home our little girl!