Counting Down

Here I am, 37 weeks (full term!) as of yesterday. I also got my hair cut, which I am pretty happy about...it feels good to have it off my neck, and it's a lot easier when it's that much shorter!



I have my list of projects that I am trying to get done before Baby J arrives, but starting about two weeks ago, Jared and I got caught up in one we were not planning on, but are excited about--our back yard! My friends Emily and Brittany showed up one Friday morning to see what they could do with my "garden," and Emily and Jason came back the next day (and the next, and a few more after that) to make things happen. Now we are hopefully not too far away from changing our low maintenance, rock-and-juniper back yard to one Baby J will want to run around in in a year or so! Here is the before picture (taken before we moved into the house, which was definitely the best its looked):




Here are Emily and Jason chainsawing some junipers--the very last of many!

And here are some after pics. We (really Jason, Emily, and Jared) ripped out a ton of bushes, scooped up about 1000 pounds of rocks, and moved dirt around trying to make the yard flatter. Emily and Brittany also transplanted plants, and planted vegetables and herbs. Check out the very cool rock wall Jason started building.

The belly-it's growing

Today I am 33 weeks, but here are some pictures from the last week (when I was 32). It seems like the baby is going through another growth spurt. (Last time I thought he was going through a growth spurt, I was right, and the doctor sent me in to get an ultrasound to make sure everything was alright. Everything looked great; he's just huge.)













Most of the time, Baby J is good to his mommy, and makes me like being pregnant. But sometimes he enjoys spending his days pressing his butt into mommy's rib cage and making it uncomfortable for her to sit down or leaning on mommy's sciatic nerve and laughing when she hobbles around like a 75 year-old.

Like my mom

Just in time for Mother's Day, I had a entire weekend where I felt just like my mom. It was great--my living room was covered in piles of fabric, the sewing machine, glue gun, iron, etc., and I had a great time making all kinds of things. It started because I wanted to make a valance for Baby J's room, then I had an unexpected day off work and made things till every scrap of fabric was gone. Here are my favorite, two turtle onesies (I only made the turtle, not the onesies.)














I also made a diaper holder, a hooter hider, and the valence. I also did most of the work for two mobiles that I am making for friends. I'll post pictures of them when they are done.

Kitchen Now

I was having problems posting pics before, so I got up the before pics of the kitchen and dining room, but not the after shots! We got all new knobs, new light fixtures, new curtains, etc. We also took down the 70's gold flecked mirrors, and painted a cute display shelf. (Thanks for making that happen, mom!) Here is what the kitchen looks like now, with no more wallpaper!: And for Chach, here is a picture I just took of myself (28 1/2 weeks). Notice the wallpaper in the background--someday that wall is going to be chocolate brown.

One Year Ago...

We moved into our house on May 1, 2008. Almost a year ago! Since then, we have completed quite a few changes, starting with stripping wallpaper from every room in the house. (To be totally honest, we still have wallpaper left in two bathrooms, and it may be another year before those get tackled.) I thought it would be fun to look at some of the before and after pictures, starting with our kitchen and dining room. Here it was before: For those of you looking closely, YES, there was wallpaper on the ceiling. It was very exciting. Here are some picture of us taking it down: If it seems like we were always working on the same wall, it was because that was when we first discovered that most of the house had TWO layers of wallpaper, not just one. And the bottom layer was like a piece of cardboard stuck on with cement. You can see me trying to sand it off in the picture above--we eventually gave up that tactic.

Order

I've been feeling pressure lately to get organized before the baby comes. I get panicky thinking about how my house barely maintains a sense of order now, so when you add a lot of time spent taking care of Baby J and a lot more stuff for taking care of Baby J, I feel like ultimate chaos is eminent. It is no secret that I am not a neat person. I pile things up, begin one thing without finishing another, I put off until tomorrow what can be done today. It made my mother crazy. The thing is, I don't live happily in an unorganized environment. The mess itself doesn't bother me, but the list of things I know I should do can make me lose sleep at night (though rarely enough to get out of bed and start cleaning.)

A few days ago I was reading an article about keeping your house clean in twenty minutes or less a day, and I found a website called flylady.net. I actually read a great article on this website a couple years ago about streamlining beginning-of-the-year preparations for teachers, but I haven't looked at the site since then. I decided that I was going to try to implement the site's strategies into my life, beginning with the 31 Babysteps for Beginners. Proudly, I can say that I spent today completing my own "Weekly Home Blessing." This is basically spending an hour doing 6 things for ten minutes each. I swept, mopped, vacuumed, collected and took out the trash, cleaned the toilets, and unloaded the dishwasher. My house is not perfectly clean now, but there are big improvements! Especially because it is hard to clean the floors of my bathroom and let the counters continue being cluttered. It feels good to make progress towards having more order in my house.

It also makes me feel like a nerd that keeping my house clean is something I think about so much. Aren't I still too young for this? My high schoolers told me yesterday that I already act like a mom because I had a Tide Stick in my purse. I hope that's a good thing!

Starting something new

Sooo, It's 2009, and I decided we should start blogging. It's going to be a big year for us, after all. I suppose this means that I need to go out and buy a new cord so that we can download pictures onto our computer again. (The last one disappeared when we moved back in May. Oddly, we haven't run out of room on our memory cards in the last 9 months.) Stay tuned...