Still Preparing

We have a game plan for this weekend. A game plan that includes baby preparations! Yay! I need this game plan to take action so I can stop feeling completely unprepared for baby boy's arrival in less than two months.

So here's the plan. It starts with painting the den on Saturday. This is what its looked like for the past two weeks.





So how does that figure into baby preparation? No, baby isn't going to be sleeping in the den. Nor do I believe he will care what color the walls are, but it is a chain of occurrences.

The den gets painted Saturday.
Then, on Sunday we can move the computer desk downstairs. It will be replacing the small corner table.
Once the desk is downstairs, obviously, the computer and all its fun accessories will follow.
This will open up the upstairs room for the nursery.
And it comes back to the baby!

Once we get that desk out, I can clean out the closet. Move the cat - somewhere. Where? We haven't decided yet. Fortunately the room doesn't need to be painted. We can hopefully find a cheap dresser/changing table on Craigslist and I plan to peruse some baby stores on Monday for a bedding set.

There, done.

Sounds easy, right?

Park Fun

Contemplating the ducks

We had a park-filled weekend. Friday, we visited the park along with my friend and her husband who were in-town visiting. We figured if Grace was cute enough they'll have kids soon too. I think she passed the cute-test.

Then today we went to the big park for a birthday party. This park not only has ducks, but horses and a train! Grace went on her first pony ride. She was a little intimidated (okay, cried and yelled) at first, but once the pony started walking along she thought it was pretty neat. She doesn't say "horse", but the whole way home she made her horse-noises to tell us about her adventure.

Then we rode the train too. Its a good 15 minute ride around the park and even goes through a tunnel. It was fun.

The not-so-quite fun part of our day was the temperature. These days its doesn't take much for me to glisten (sweat like a pig), and I was hot today. I'm not talking HOT like "oh look at that hottie", but more like, "oh that poor lady is having a hot flash". I managed though. On the plus side, even with all the heat, I didn't experience much swelling. Yay!

So here's Grace's first pony ride, and yes, the round, pink, glistening lady is my 7-month pregnant self.

Domestic Day

I felt so domestic today. I got up this morning - washed, dried and folded a load of diapers, did the ironing and cooked up fun stuff in the kitchen. I made Crunchy Granola (from this site) - I am officially hooked on it. I also baked some whole wheat bread - which finally came out soft and oh, so yummy. In addition, I made a batch of lentil soup to have in the fridge for the week.

I think I figured out what I need to do with my bread. Since I couldn't manage to work with yeast the old-fashioned way, I bought a breadmaker a while back. The bread came out much better, but not fabulous like I envisioned. Doing some online reading, I found quite a few people let the machine do all the dirty work (kneading) but then do the final rise and bake the bread in their ovens. It made a huge difference in the way the bread baked. So that's that.

Oh, and in a completely unrelated subject that I can't even segue to - I can't wait for Grace to get a little bigger so we can play dress-up. I was doing some more cleaning out today and found a bunch of items that I would have been bonkers over if my mom had them for me when I was a little girl. A few of the items in this eclectic collection include: my purple 8th grade promotion dress complete with flowers and tulle under the skirt; a green velvet formal from Homecoming; a couple 60's dresses from vintage shops, reminiscent of Marsha Brady; a large girl's Hawaiian mumu; a pair of flats that have been spray-painted gold and covered in glitter; and several 40's era dresses. I hope that Grace enjoys playing dress-up as much as I do did. I'm seriously going to win some cool points there.

Nesting Continues

Not to speak for all pregnant women, but there is a reason that I shouldn't be making decisions while gestating - they aren't always the best choices.

Tonight - 7:30pm



This was Grace's room. After spending the afternoon baking cookies for Mr. D, I decided around 5pm that I would go clean out Grace's closet. Really? 5pm? You think that's a good time to start a major cleaning project.

Yes, it won't take me long. I'll get dinner around 6pm.

Really? 6pm?

And I was right. It didn't take me long. Not long to take everything out of the closet and make a mess.

At 6pm, I left the room along with my child who had stripped down to a diaper (it was hot upstairs), was wearing bunny ears from Easter and chewing on an empty bottle that was supposed to be in the Goodwill bag.

We had dinner by 6:20pm. But then instead of our evening walk, I had to go back upstairs and figure out what to do with the mess.

Some of it went back into the closet to be dealt with at a later date (hopefully tomorrow), some of it went into the office - soon-to-be nursery (mostly baby stuff that I wanted out of Grace's closet), and the rest is sitting in the hallway waiting to go downstairs into the Goodwill pile.

So I made some progress - just probably wasn't the best timing in the world. But again, let me remind you - pregnant. Pregnant and starting to worry that new baby boy is going to be sleeping in an office in pink pajamas because I wasn't ready in time!

Oh, and this was Grace's room at 8:30pm before bedtime. See, I pulled it back together.

A Hair-Raising Experience

Or should I say, a hair-ERASING experience.

Grace received her first haircut today. I know, she didn't have a whole lot of hair to begin with, but it was getting quite scruffy looking, and well, to coin a phrase, mulletey. (mullet-y). I couldn't let her continue to make that fashion faux-pas, so we pulled out the scissors this afternoon.

Before pictures. Show us that mullet baby!

So here's the thing that I should mention about me and using scissors. I really shouldn't be allowed to. I am left-handed, but I can't cut left-handed. Having grown up through public schools that only offered right-handed scissors, I learned to adapt to cut right handed. However, these cutting skills get me by, but I don't boast of my scissor wielding expertise. I still can't get over when I took Home Ec in jr. high, and my teacher had to help me cut the fabric straight.

So today I came out armed with sharp scissors (in my right hand) aimed at my precious little baby in her chair. Oh, and Mr. D videotaped the whole experience - that didn't help my nerves.

I go for the bangs first. I have experience cutting bangs at least - I've trimmed my own many a time.

I get through the bangs okay. Next, the back.

What I am hoping to do is even it off on the bottom and give her more of a level bob. I go for the first cut (which has to be saved for the baby book of course). Oops. According to the videotape playback the quote goes, "(nervous giggle), I think I took off too much".

So Grace's bob is a little shorter than I planned, but I have to admit, it looks much better than the scraggly mullet.

After pictures.

Not too bad, but I don't think I'll be opening up Salon Sara anytime soon however.

A Big Thank You

Its been thank-you card central around here. I promise, this will be the last post about Grace's party. Pinkie-swear.

But since I went through all the hoops in doing the invitations and the party-planning, I couldn't send out some sad thank-you's. I had to finish off the safari adventure. You know, bring it full circle - the "circle of life" like Lion King.

Okay, so I'm being a little dramatic. But I am happy with my thank-you cards. I took the same concept from the invitations and reversed it. I put the animal paper in the outside. On the inside I used a plain sheet of cardstock so I could handwrite the actual thank you. Then I tied the invitation closed with a piece of raffia with a little card attached that said "Thank You".




Now here's where I have a hubby that gets too involved. (Just kidding of course, I love his involvement). His great contribution to the thank-you card concept was to think of the thoughtful gesture of including in each card a picture of Grace playing with the new gift she received from said person. Great idea - in concept. 2.5 million pictures later I'm over it. Plus, I needed to get them out. So, there were a handful of thank-you's that simply included a picture of Grace from the party. (The one I posted last week of her wearing her safari hat). I tried hard to get good pictures for everyone, but my model wasn't always cooperative.

Here's a few of the more cooperative pictures.

Cooking with her new pots & pans (and hat)

The cool bubble machine

Putting money in her new piggy bank (and cleaning out dad's change fund)

New clothes!

And one more... just to show her "naughty" side

The Need to Clean

The aftermath.

This past week I had to recover from our previous party-filled weekend. Seriously. It took me all week. Well, I had to recover plus I came down with a cold, and I had an additional day of babysitting duty as well.

All week I've been staring at boxes piled up full of deflated jungle animals, leftover craft supplies and extra balloons in one corner, while in the other corner sat a stack of birthday gifts that needed to find homes and corresponding thank-you cards written.

While driving me crazy all week, this mess has also instilled in me "a need for clean" in the house. I have this incredible urge to go through every room and rid it of extras, clean out the things we don't use, and organize the things we do use. So today, call it early "nesting" or a God-given energy burst (kick in the pants), I spent the day organizing. On this rare Sunday, Mr. D had to go into work. We went to church together this morning, came home, I fed Mr. D some lunch (the last of the leftover hamburgers!), kissed him good-bye, and got to organizing.

I have convinced Mr. D to give me a cupboard in the garage where I can store my ever-growing collection of party supplies and crafy-type stuff. Once I secured the valuable cupboard space, we measured it and went off on a storage bin shopping spree last Thursday. In the Target aisle, we pulled out different sizes of bins, stacked them, turned them, restacked them, so I could make sure I maximized my space. I ended up purchasing about 8 bins of varying sizes.

And the bins have been sitting next to all of the aforementioned piles from Thursday to today. They've been taunting me of my disorganization. So today, I had to do something about it.

Of course, before you organize, you have to un-organize. I emptied out our hall closet - also known as my catch-all location. This is the place where I quickly hide things when company comes over (or I'm in the middle of planning any sort of event, holiday, etc.). Its a good thing I live in California where people don't wear coats, but most of the time when I have company over, I wouldn't be able to hang their coats in there because they wouldn't fit along with the baby potty chair stacked on top of the ironing basket, next to the table arrangement that didn't look quite right with my tablecloth, and the sad everyday couch pillows that were thrown in there to be swapped with the "company" pillows.

So the closet spilled out.

And I got to organizing.

I feel much better now. The closet is neat and tidy. I was able to empty it out some so I can actually access most of the items. Some items found their way to the goodwill box, and others to my new storage bins that are now filled, labeled, and waiting for their new garage home.

So I have accomplished step one in my need to clean. My next target is the entertainment unit. It has two cabinets underneath the television. I want to designate one for Grace, so I can store her books and puzzles neatly in there for her to access. Right now, one cabinet has movies and other randomness, and the other has my CD collection (which is organized alphabetically in CD holders) but also my empty cases with liners. What do I do with these? Anyone?

So now that I'm organized and can see my floor again, I am struck by how dirty it is! Yikes. Time to do some dusting, mopping, and shining this week.