Full Nursery Reveal and Virtual Tour!

Seeing that we are spending a lot of time right now just waiting for little dude to make his arrival, I thought it was time for a full nursery reveal!  I know you all have seen lots of bits a pieces by this point but we haven’t shown any pictures of the whole alphabet wall or some of Jude’s new art.  We also got a video camera around Christmas time so I thought I’d also try my hand at it and make a virtual tour!  It’s probably a lot more exciting to me than it will be to you all, but I thought I’d share anyway.

And of course, the virtual tour, as promised.

Hope you enjoyed the tour/photos and that everyone is having a good Saturday!
-Liz

31 Week Bump Picture!

OK so it has been a while since we posted a bump picture and honestly, it's because we haven't been very on the ball with taking belly shots recently.  So here it is, in all of it's roundness, S at 31 weeks.

Behind S you can see some of the letters for our alphabet wall.  All of the letters are in and hanging up.  They are so far just put up with push pins because we are still waiting to get them just right before we hang them up with nails.  But they look great.  Hopefully I will get them up and take some pictures to post next week.

And as of last night, I think it is official, S is finally nesting.  So far with a few exceptions I have been the one doing all of the nesting around the house but this week S put together the stroller and last night spent an hour or two putting things away and cleaning out cupboards in the kitchen and bathroom and filling them with baby stuff.  It's cute to see her nesting and wanting to get stuff done.  And now that the stroller is put together, we let our first "baby" take it out for a test drive.

This is our pug, Pedro.  Pedro thought that the whole thing was pretty weird.  He didn't really get what we were up to and was nervous the whole time he was in the stroller.  Oh, and what is the deal with strollers being so very hard to open and close and car seats being so confusing?  I swear our car seat has at least 10 different buttons on it and I have no idea what most of them do.  Better start practicing soon!

Also, a big congrats to our friends Kayan and Marc!  Their baby girl was born yesterday and boy oh boy is she a cutie!
-Liz

Getting Excited

As soon as this boring work day wraps up, the little lady and I are hopping in the car for the drive to Tulsa, and we couldn't be more excited.  It's going to be a long drive, a little over 8 hours of road trip fun, but the last few hours of the drive we pick up my brother who will graciously drive the rest of the way for us.  Hurray for baby showers and hurray for seeing everyone!  It's going to be so fun and we have a lot of good times to pack into this short weekend.  Saturday night I'm really excited to go see my little brother play in the Tulsa Symphony.  I haven't ever gotten to see him play before and he is really a talented musician.  We are also meeting up with my childhood BFF for pizza at the restaurant where S and I met (not the exact one, but one of them), the Hideaway.  If you are ever in Oklahoma, the Hideaway is some seriously great pizza.  And then on Sunday the main event, our first baby shower.  We've got friends, a sister in law, family, childhood BFFs, and even a friend flying in from Colorado who are all going to be at the event.  It's going to be epic.

We have also gotten a lot of great stuff for Jude this week. I wish I had pictures to show you all, maybe next week, but we got all of our letters for our alphabet wall.  They are all so amazing, it's going to be the coolest thing ever.  And also a guy that S works with got us these two little paintings made by a local artist that are really cool and match Jude's room.  Then yesterday we got home and there was the sweetest package from one of our friends who doesn't live in town.  She sent us the cutest hand made dinosaur onesie, along with lots of other cute clothes, these awesome baby books that have art by famous artist, along with some other fun baby toys.  It was like mini Christmas opening up all of the fun stuff she sent.  It is just amazing to see all of the love that our friends and family already have for little Jude, who they haven't even met yet.  It really touches my heart to see it.  He is going to be so happy and loved!

I'll post updates about the baby shower next week, so stay tuned and have a happy weekend yourself!
-Liz

Photo-palooza

   It seems like I have so much to update you all on, our second birthing class, our visit with a lawyer about estate planning and second parent adoption, S’s pregnancy….but instead, because it’s Saturday and because I’m in the middle of making a birthday cake and cleaning my house for a small dinner party tonight, I think I’ll just share some pictures of what we have been up to this week.  Oh, and S officially has less than 100 days till Jude’s due date!  Can you believe it?  I was telling S last night that it seems like just yesterday that it was May and she was telling me she was pregnant.  Time is going by so fast, I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that she is almost 7 months pregnant and I’m going to get to see my little baby boy’s face in less than 100 days.  Yay!
    Back to pictures.  I’ve been wanting to hang a mirror in the nursery to open it up a bit and reflect some of the light from the window, but I’ve been having a hard time finding anything that wasn’t like $150.  Then I realized I had the perfect mirror already hanging in our guest room.  The mirror actually used to be my friend Brandon’s in high school and then when we lived together I ended up with it.  It used to be black and I spray painted the frame red to match the room better.

  Another awesome update to the nursery is my friend Jason made an amazing lamp for Jude’s room.  Jason has a knack for lamps and I couldn’t love the one he made for us more, it fits the room perfectly.

In case it’s hard to see, it’s covered in plastic dinosaurs!  Jude’s going to love it!  I also made some more art for the nursery last night that I think turned out pretty good.

Lastly, I will leave you with a picture of S this week, looking very cute and pregnant!

-Liz

Nursery Progress

    As S said earlier this week, I’ve been making some progress on the nursery.  I’ve been working on a painting for the nursery for a while and I finally finished it.  I showed an “in progress” shot of it earlier this month, and here is the finished product!

    Sorry about the glare, I must have taken a million pictures of the painting but I just couldn’t get one without the glare.  If you couldn’t tell, the painting is of the lyrics of one of my favorite Beatles songs, Hey Jude, which is what Jude is being named for.  

    The second thing I finished for the nursery this week was a mobile to go over Jude’s crib.  I’ve been looking at mobiles online for what seems like forever and nothing I could find was just right.  I found a few on Etsy that I liked that were made of paper but I couldn’t justify spending $80 on something I could make myself.  Here is what I came up with!

   While it did take forever to make, it was pretty easy.  I used the outside of a wooden embroidery hoop for the top circle and two wooden dowel rods for support.  I epoxied the dowel rods together and then to the inside of the hoop.  For the circles, I used two different sized circle punches to cut out tons of circles and then used some of my other craft punches to make the umbrellas, whales, rabbits, etc.  Then I used a sewing needle to poke a tiny hole in the center of each circle and then used fishing line to string them together with knots between each circle to space them out.  Here is the view that Jude will see from his crib!

  I’m really happy with how it turned out and the bright colors look great against the gray nursery walls.  I also took a few longer shots of the nursery so you all could see how this is all coming together.

  And then one last picture because it makes me laugh, here is the little monster suit we got for Jude from Target the other day.  S put it in his crib and we have been joking that it looks like the rapture got him.

-Liz

Nursery Dresser DIY Project- Reveal!

I am so excited to finally have Jude’s dresser make-over completed!  Last night our friends Lauren and her husband Jason came by to help me move it out of my studio and into the nursery (I couldn’t move it alone and S couldn’t help me in her delicate state).  It looks so perfect in there with the gray nursery walls, it gives the room such a bold pop of color; I just love it so much.  It makes me really glad that we painted the nursery gray.  I emailed a picture of the finished product to S’s mom last night and found out from her that this dresser was not only S’s as a little girl, but it was her mom’s dresser as well, so this dresser will be used by three generations of kids!  I think that is pretty cool, I like that this dresser has some extra history to it. 

Here is a before shot of the dresser.  I forgot to get one right at the very start, so this picture actually shows it after I had started sanding it and prying off the little green flower embellishments. 

So the first thing that I did was remove all of the green flower embellishments.  I was worried when I first stated that they were attached to the dresser in some sort of weird way, like hidden screws or that they were actually a part of the wood on the dresser and that they wouldn’t come off.  So I was really nervous to mess with them and ding them up when I could just paint over them and hope that they sort of blended in better once the dresser was one solid color.  But I got lucky, and when I took a screw driver and butter knife to the edges of them, they all popped right off.  It looks like they were stapled in some way to the dresser.  Here is a detail shot of one of the dresser drawers with the flowers I’m talking about. 

     Once all of the flowers were off, I removed the original hardware on the drawers.  Quite a few of the pulls were missing, so I didn’t really have any option on keeping the old ones, which weren’t very cute anyway, so out they went.  The next step was sanding.  I wasn’t sure what sort of paint had been used originally on the dresser, so I wanted to make sure I at least got the clear coat off of it and I wanted to rough up the paint a bit so primer would stick better.  I borrowed a hand sander from a friend and went to town.  I did a rough sand first and then went back over it with a finer sand paper.  I wasn’t trying to get down to the raw wood so in all removing the flowers and hardware and then sanding probably took me about an hour. 

     Next it was time to paint.  Originally I had planned to use a separate primer and then paint, but somehow the guy a Home Depot talked me into using the Behr paint with added primer, and I went with it, despite my poor results from using it previously to paint the nursery gray.  The color I used is called Mermaid Treasure, which is actually just a little bit more of a turquoise color than the after photos below really show.  I got it in a flat, so that it would again stick a bit better and also to help the polyurethane to stick.  I used a 2 inch paint brush that I had bought when we painted the nursery gray, along with a mini foam roller.  I put the first coat on just as is, being sure to get as even and thin of a coat as possible. 

     For the second and third coats, I added a product called Floetrol to the paint.  Floetrol is really cool stuff, its only about $6 for a big container of it and what it does is keeps the paint from drying as quickly and helps keep the paint level, which means that you don’t have the same brush marks and roller edge marks that you normally will have with latex paint.  The stuff is genius and it totally worked.  The dresser had a bit of texture to it from how the wood is, so I don’t know that you would have seen a lot of brush marks on this wood anyway, but adding Floetrol guaranteed that there weren’t any.  If you are painting a particularly smooth piece of furniture, it is worth the money.  Now I didn’t use it with the first coat of paint because I was worried that it might affect the sticky “primer” part of the paint and keep me from getting the paint to really stick, but I’m not sure that it really would have made a difference.  Also, Floetrol doesn’t effect the color of the paint at all, in case you were wondering.  It does however, make the paint feel a bit more watery, which again helped to get thin even coats, which I think is key when painting.

     After about 24 hours of letting the paint get really dry, I added several coats of polyurethane to make it nice and shiny, and also to protect the paint from dings and scratches.  I used a product called Minwax for this, the water-based version.  I used the water-based version just for the sake of clean up, I didn’t want to have to pull out the paint thinner, soap and water is just a heck of a lot easier.  Now according to the directions, you need three coats to get the most even coverage and you are supposed to lightly sand it after the first coat.  I skipped the sanding part, mostly out of being lazy, and I put three coats on everything except for the top of the dresser.  I put four coats on that, because I figured that it would be the part getting the more wear and tear. 

     All that was left was putting on the new drawer pulls.  I got these from Target.  But annoyingly enough, the screws that they came with where too short and the old screws were too long (plus because I was missing some of the original pulls, I didn’t have enough even if they had fit).  So I was off again to Home Depot to get the screws that would fit just right.  I was like Goldilocks trying to find one that was just right. 

    So that is the whole story of how I DIY-ed our dresser.  And now the picture you’ve been waiting for, the finished product!

-Liz

In Progress (and Belly Shots!)

            Right now, everything seems to be in progress.  S is now more than half way through this pregnancy, so our baby is defiantly “in progress”.  Everyday our little boy gets bigger and stronger, I’ve felt him kick and move around probably 3-4 times now, but only one really big kick so far.  And everyday my beautiful wife’s belly gets rounder and rounder.  Here is her 22 weeks belly shot.  And guess what?  S is going to be showing her cute little face around here now!  Yay!

            The nursery is constantly in progress, though a lot of good progress has been made.  I’m working on a really cute “Hey Jude” painting to hang over his crib.  It’s getting close to done and hopefully I will finish it up this week.  Here it is so far, with the lovely S posing with it. 

            I’m also mostly done redoing the dresser that will go in the room.  I cannot wait to finish it, move it into the nursery, and mostly, show it off to you guys!  The dresser was an old one that I’ve always disliked that S had as a little girl.  It was cream/off white colored with green and blue accents and little blue and green 3D flowers on it.  All I have left to do on it is attach the new knobs and put at one last coat of polyurethane and it will be all done!  Again, I hope to have it done today or tomorrow, so you can expect a post later this week about the whole process, including before and after pictures!

-Liz

Jude is a Republican! The Horror!

I can’t believe that in 1-2 more days (depending on what tracker I’m looking at), S will be 20 weeks pregnant, which means, she is half way to the finish line.  I can’t believe my sweet wife is 5 months pregnant.  It still seems like such a dream and such a shock.  S told me the other day that she still wakes up half of the time wondering if this whole pregnancy has just been a dream and that in reality she is just getting fat.  But she isn’t getting fat, she is getting more and more wonderfully pregnant with our baby boy.  And I couldn’t be happier.  It feels like every day I fall more and more in love with my beautiful, strong, amazing wife and more and more in love with the little boy growing inside of her.  Truly, what a miracle all of this is. 

Yesterday, I think I might have felt Jude kick.  S has been feeling him moving and shaking (and lots of kicking) for the past three weeks or so, but every time I put a hand on her tummy, nothing.  But last night we were laying in bed reading and I think I might have felt it.  It was just the tiniest little flutter, and if I just had my hand on her and wasn’t actively hoping to feel him, I don’t know that I would have noticed it at all, but because I was looking for it, I felt it.  I hope that in the next two weeks our little Jude packs on some weight so there is a bit more heft to his tiny kicks so that I can feel them.  I can’t wait.

So now that we know that we are having a boy, we have been speculating on what he will be like.  My BFF Brandon said that he pictures Jude as being a really smart, liberal, jock type, where I have been picturing him as a witty, sarcastic surfer type of guy.  S and I have also been joking over the last few weeks about what he will be like.  You see, for the last month I’ve been working this weird schedule where I don’t go in until 11:15, so I have been able to watch morning daytime TV, including The View (not a big fan though I must say).  And S has a few mornings off too, so we have been watching it, joking that Jude is really conservative and how much he really loves Elizabeth (the conservative, right winger cast member) on The View and how he thinks she has some really great ideas/points.  It has been just cracking us up, but we are pretty weird.  We also decided (again, jokingly) that he is going to be a really annoying baby and not like the stuff that we like.  For example, one of the things that I am looking forward to (among lots of other things like mostly being around my baby all day) about being a stay at home mom is getting to hopefully watch The Ellen show (which I almost never see now because I’m at work).  And so we joke that he will really hate the Ellen show and make lots of grumbly sighs while I try to watch because he hates it so much.  Again, this cracks me up. 

In nursery news, I put up the mini blinds this week.  Man, what a pain in the neck (literally!  My neck is so sore!) putting those stupid things up were.  But they do block some light.  Though, even with the blinds and the curtains, it still isn’t terribly dark in there during the day.   I’m wondering if that will be a big deal as far as daytime naps will go and if so, should I add a layer of room darkening material to my curtains.  Any thoughts? 

Happy Friday!

-Liz

Updates and Pictures!

            I feel like I am behind on blogging right now, with so much fun baby stuff going on right now!  Of course you all saw that we had our ultrasound last week where we found out we are having a boy!  We couldn’t be more excited.  I really thought up until the moment we found out that I wanted a girl but honestly the minute the tech told us boy, I had tears in my eyes and was so happy I thought I’d just explode from the joy.  It just feels so right.  And all along we’ve felt really strongly about the name Jude and kept changing our minds about our girl names.  Here are some of the ultrasound pictures for you. 

First one, the junk shot proving his boy-ness:

I think that in this one he looks like he is flashing gang signs and is getting ready to party:

 

Face shot.  We couldn’t get any profile shots because of how he was laying.  The tech poked S quite a bit trying to get him to move into another position, but he didn’t want to.

And look at that perfect spine and head!

All in all, the tech didn’t find any problems what so ever and he is progressing along nicely.  Of course, the bigger Jude gets, the bigger S’s belly gets!  Here is her 20th week bump shot. 

Now that we know it’s a boy, it feels like we really have the go ahead to start putting this nursery together.  S and I put together the crib the other day.  It was much harder than I thought it would be, and easier than S thought it would be.  Either way it was time consuming, it took us about 1 ½ hours to put together.  I think it was the attached changing table that really made it take forever.  We got a sheet for it and I’m going to be making a crib skirt soon.  We’ve decided against crib bumpers for the safety reasons, plus no point in registering for a big expensive crib bedding set when all we really need is the sheets.  I think it looks pretty cute so far.  Here is it:

I also made curtains for the room.  The pattern is different colored dinosaurs if you couldn’t tell from the picture.  I think I’m going to use the same material to make the crib skirt so it all matches some.  Here is a shot of the curtains:

It’s all coming together and it’s looking so cute that I can’t help but go in there at least once a day to look around and smile.  It’s a really happy, peaceful room so far I think. 

Next up on the agenda is getting registered.  We are going to be doing that next week once we get back from a little mini vacation to the coast.  I asked on Facebook and got a lot of great information, so I’ll ask you folks as well, any advise on what to register for?  Specifically, if you already have kiddos, anything you ended up really loving or anything you got and hated and never used?  

-Liz

One BIG Crib

Our crib is here!  Now that we have the crib, things are starting to feel real.  It struck me last night when I was picking it up, hey, we are actually going to have a baby to stick in that thing, and pretty soon at that.  Wow, still blows my mind.   

Picking up the crib yesterday was quite the ordeal.  We ordered it from Walmart and did the ship to store thing so that we wouldn’t have to pay for shipping.  Yesterday I got the email that everything was in and so I went after work to get it.  S was working till 11 last night so I couldn’t really wait for her.  I got there and the crib was in two really big boxes.  They had to call someone to help me out with them because they were on this big dolly and I obviously wasn’t going to be able to put them in my car by myself.   

Fast forward to twenty minutes later (Walmart is always so slow) and we were loading them into my car.  I drive a small, compact car with a hatchback, and figured with the seats down, surely the boxes would fit.  Wrong.  One of the two boxes was about 2 inches too long to fit into my car and close the hatch no matter how I moved the seats around.  At this time, it’s 9:00 on a Monday night and S was still at work and I couldn’t get a hold of my BFF, and I just couldn’t come up with any solutions other than to just wedge the boxes in as best I could and drive really slowly home (I tried to tie them up with a zebra scarf I had in the car, but that didn’t work).

Luckily we live about 1-2 miles away from Walmart, so it wasn’t a long drive.  But I was freaking out that the boxes would slide out of my car, not only messing up the crib but also causing a car accident.  I put my hazard lights on and drove slowly home.  Somehow, I made it home with both boxes intact and inside of my car.   

Once I got home, I realized that I had to figure out a way to get these out of my car.  Because I couldn’t close the hatch, I couldn’t just leave them where anyone could steal them, plus it would have killed my battery to leave the hatch open for three hours while I waited for S to get home.  So I got crazy and slid the boxes out of my car on my own, which was no easy feat, as they are like I said, big boxes that weighed at least 40-50 lbs each.  And then I somehow carried them to the front porch where I left them so that S could help me move them the rest of the way when she got home.   

An hour later, I started thinking, these are too heavy for her to move and I don’t want her to strain herself moving them, so I gathered up my strength again and somehow by the grace of God, moved them into the nursery.  Now they await being put together, which I will hopefully do tonight.     

Yesterday we also got a package from our dear old roomie who is now living in the UK.  She sent us the cutest onesie, which we realized is the first piece of baby clothing we have gotten.  One of S’s coworkers also got us this really cute monkey toy to clip onto the side of the crib, which I will do once it is put together.   It’s what is on top of the boxes to give you some perspective of the size of the boxes.
-Liz 

Pretty Young Thing

It seems like things are finally starting to get moving and a shaking with this whole having a baby deal.  The crib/changing table combo and crib mattress are picked out, ordered, and on their way to the house.  The nursery walls are painted (though I need to get some touch up paint to fix where I scratched them last night moving furniture out of the room, erg!), and thanks to one of my wonderful BFFs, last night we got the base boards painted and are finishing doing the rest of the trim tonight.  On Wednesday we are having the carpets cleaned (yay for not having to do it myself!), and we are hoping over Labor Day weekend to get our registry together because by then we will know if the baby is a little bean or a little beanette.  Of course there is still plenty left to do, but now it feels like we are almost half way done now that most of the big projects will be done soon. I can’t wait for the whole thing to come together.  And thank goodness for my friend Rex for helping with painting the trim.  I quickly realized that I am terrible at painting trim.  I’m hoping that it will be a bit better tonight doing around the window and doors.  Also, the people who lived in this house before us painted the trim green.  I cannot even begin to say how stupid looking green trim is.  It’s so nice to have it be a pretty glossy white. 

Poor S is still not having a fun time being pregnant.  She hasn’t been feeling very good the last few days and last night she got really sick, which was the first time since we were in Mexico, so she has been doing better, but not great.  This morning her eye lids look a bit funny and I think it’s from how hard she was throwing up yesterday.  Boo.  But, her belly is getting really nice and round and I just couldn’t love it more.  She just looks so dang cute!

This week according to all of our this is what your baby is up to websites, the baby can now hear what is going on outside of the womb.  So it can hear us talking, loud noises, music, you name it.  Also, on the In The Womb documentary it said that babies in the womb can hear music and if they hear the same song often enough they will be able to recognize it even after they are born, which is too cool.  So that said, I’m starting to make Baby’s first Mix CD.  Any suggestions for songs?  I’ve gotten a few funny suggestions so far like Michael Jackson’s PYT. 

-Liz

Doctor's Appointment and Updates

S had a doctor’s appointment yesterday.  Everything looks good.  She is gaining the right amount of weight, isn’t having any problems, and is doing great!  She is still having a few bad days here and there being nauseous, but hasn’t thrown up since we were in Mexico.  We also got to hear the baby’s heart beat (strong and in the 150s).  When they were looking for the heartbeat they found S’s heart beat first and we were both worried, thinking oh no! Why is the heart beat so slow!  But, nothing to fear.  And everyday she is looking more and more pregnant.  We’ll post a belly shot tomorrow I think.

We have been so jealous of all of the other January 2012 baby mommas finding out the sex of their baby already that we seriously looked into going to a 3D ultra sound yesterday.  But the one we liked the best said that they could start doing the gender stuff at 17 weeks, and S is just a day or two shy of that.  But I’m glad we didn’t do it, because we asked at our appointment how many ultrasounds we had after the anatomy scan on the 25^th and they said, to our surprise, none!  So unless there is some sort of problem/complication with S before delivery, they won’t do another one the entire rest of her pregnancy!  I could have cried I was so sad to hear that we wouldn’t get to see the baby for almost 4 full months.  That means that I’m really glad we didn’t run out and pay for an ultrasound yesterday because we will for sure want to do that in a month or two to check on the little bambino/a!  But it is killing me, not knowing.  I’m starting to think that the baby is a boy right now.  I don’t really know why, but that is what I have been feeling, though S still thinks girl.  Hopefully we will find out either way on August 25^th!

In other news, we ordered our crib!  I’m so excited for it.  In the end, even though we liked the Ikea cribs and my brother even offered to build us a crib (he worked as a carpenter/furniture builder for a few years), we went with the Graco Lauren crib.  We ended up getting the one that had the changing table attached.  I was originally going to use a dresser that I am painting for the nursery as a changing table but a few people have commented that the dresser is pretty low, so in order to save our backs, we went with the changing table.  It should be here by the 24^th, so that week is going to be really baby filled!  Now all we need to do before the crib gets here is steam clean the carpet and hopefully paint the trim.  I can’t wait for it all to come together.  I started a new painting last night to hang in the nursery, I think it’s going to be really pretty once it’d done.

Happy Friday!

-Liz

The Crib Conundrum

We are ready to buy a crib for our sweet little gray nursery, but alas, are having a hard time with it.  The problem is that we are cheap.  If we were willing to spend $400-$500 on a crib, well we would be set.  But we don’t want to spend a ton of money on a crib, so that limits things. 

I’ve been looking online at pretty much every store available and reading reviews and what not and just can’t decide what is best.  My MIL had the suggestion of looking on Craig’s List, which I really hadn’t considered because of changing safety regulations, but she didn’t think that having the most up to date crib was that important and somehow convinced me.  So I found a few things that I liked and even emailed a guy about a pretty white crib.  But it turned out to have drop sides.  The guy was an idiot and told me that the sides aren’t drop sides, but one side can be dropped down lower to pick the baby up and such.  Well buddy, hate to break it to you, but that is a drop side.  

So after looking into it more and reading up on what exactly has changed with crib safety and why, I definitely disagree with her on getting a used crib and want to buy a new one.  I don’t mind getting a used changing table or a used glider or any of the rest of it, but the crib is the one place that I should be confidant that my baby will be totally safe, especially seeing as how I won’t be watching the baby sleep every second of the night.  

I think now we have the crib we want pretty much narrowed down to the Graco Lauren Crib, which is what the picture here is.  But we are going to make a trip down to Ikea next week once we get back from Mexico to look at their cribs before we fully decide.  It makes me crazy though that you can’t look at their cribs online at their website.  How silly, everything else at Ikea is on their website.  Erg. 

So my questions for you all: anything you really love/hate about your current crib?  Anything suggestions on cribs in general for people looking to spend less than $200?

-Liz

15th Week Belly Shot!

I’m in love with S’s beautiful baby belly, which is totally not shrinking by the way, that is all in her head.  It’s getting bigger everyday and I can’t wait until she is just popping out of her clothes, though I’m sure she isn’t looking forward to that with the same zest that I am.  Here is her 15^th week belly.  I couldn’t decide which picture I liked best, so you get both today J.  

Later this week I think that we are going to buy a crib!  It looks like unless you buy an expensive crib that you can’t really just go out and buy one, all of the stores around here seem to just sell them online and ship to the store or your house.  And it also looks like at least on the lower end, which is what we are looking for, Target, Walmart, and Babies-R-Us all carry about the same stuff for about the same price.  So I guess we are going to go to Babies-R-Us to look them over and then compare prices at home and pick one out.  I’m really excited for this!  Having a crib in the room is going to make this all seem very real.  I’ve been looking at bedding and have a few things picked out that I like, but I don’t think that we are going to buy really much of anything else (other than the crib) until after the baby showers and after all of the hand me downs come in from friends and family.  It’s really hard to resist though, it’s all so dang cute!

Next week is Mexico time, and it just can’t come soon enough.  I want to be sitting on the beach or in the water, sipping a tropical drink while the sunsets over head.  It’s going to be wonderful.  And I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time with both S and my darling family.  We leave Saturday morning, at the crack of dawn, literally, and then are in Mexico till Wednesday night.  Yay!

-Liz

14 Week Bump Pic

Here it is, this week’s bump!  I think that S is really starting to show!  It looks rounder in person and feels different than a non pregnant stomach feels.  I love it!

Also, very exciting news.   S made the doctor’s appointment yesterday where if the baby cooperates, we will found out if it is a boy or a girl!  The appointment is for August 25th!  I can’t believe we will know so soon!  It STILL all feels like a dream.  I’m sure S is tired of me saying that, and I’ll probably still feel that way until the baby is 3 years old!  Or 22!  Hard to tell.  But it really does still feel just unbelievable that we are really doing this.  I just couldn’t be happier at this point.

One more pic to share with you all.  I’ve been working hard on my letters for the alphabet wall in the nursery.  I finished the W the other day, it is so cute and wrapped in yarn, pictures soon to come, I just haven’t taken any yet.  And one of our dear friends came over the other day and made her & sign (‘cause you know, x, y & z!) and it is yellow and covered in different colored buttons.  I will post some pictures of that one too.  And other people have finished theirs, I’m so excited to get them all done and hung up together!  Anyway, here is the picture of my H, isn’t it cute?  It’s made with mega blocks, which are the big size of Lego's for little kids.  I got them along with a bunch more (with a farm theme, random) at a second hand store here for $10.  I still need to glue them all together (the ones that arn’t snapped on), but I just love it.  It’s about 10-12 inches tall and 7-9 or so inches wide, so it is a pretty good size.  Next I need to start thinking about how to make the K, our last name starts with a K, so I want the K to be really big and really cool.
-Liz

3 Coats of Paint Later...

Last night, my BFF Brandon and I finally finished painting the nursery.  We ended up painting it a Valspar color called Elephant Gray.  What a royal pain painting this nursery has been.  When I went to go buy the paint at Lowes I knew that because the color was so dark that I would need a primer or possibly have to paint it many times to get the color even.  But it isn’t a really big room and I figured two gallons of paint would be enough to coat it twice.  So we got one gallon of the Valspar paint plus primer and one gallon regular paint, both matched to the Elephant Gray color.  In retrospect I should have gotten both gallons of the paint plus primer, but at an $8 price difference, the cheap part of me won out.  So about two weeks ago we put up the first coat of paint, using the primer.  I couldn’t believe how well it covered, one coat looked pretty much perfect, there were only two or three tiny spots that needed touch up.  But the next day once it was dry, I figured, well, I’ve already got the second gallon and there are a few spots that need another coat, might as well roll a second coat on the whole thing.  And so I did.  Much to my total horror, the next day I discovered that the primer coat was just a hair lighter than the non primer coat.  Meaning that you could see  that all of the edges all around the whole room needed to be redone to match.  Also, it was streaky in many many places.  Ugh!  I didn’t know what to do because we didn’t have much more than 1/4 of a gallon of paint left.  So yesterday I went and got a THIRD gallon, mixed it with the paint I had left (because I’d go crazy if this new gallon didn’t match), and put a third coat of paint on the whole room, edges and all, with the amazing help of my dearest friend Brandon.  Needless to say, it was annoying.  This morning looking at the room, it still isn’t perfect, but after three coats, it’s as close to perfect as its going to get.  Now all I have to do it paint all of the trim (erg that is going to suck), put up the new ceiling fan, paint the dresser and side table, get all of the stuff we still need, and yeah ok we still have a lot to do.   But, progress has been made!  Even though this isn’t the chair that will go in the room, and I’m going to paint the side table, I took a picture to share with you all of the progress so far.

I really like how the color turned out.  It’s a nice gray and looks sort of blue depending on the lighting.  You might be wondering about the cute stuffed animals and the amazing baby blanket.  You are?  Good, here are the details:

The green doll is an ugly doll I got for my birthday a few years back.  Never really had a use for it till now.

The other doll is a stuff animal snow monster my little brother made for me.  It’s really really cute and pretty amazing considering he doesn’t make stuff like this and he did it all by hand.  The really cool part about it is that he told me he put a felt heart inside of it that has a secret message on it for me, but I can only find out what it is if I basically kill him.  Funny and cute, I think.  Here is a close up of him:

And the baby blanket is a gift from one of S’s coworkers.  She took us to the store to pick out all of the fabric for it and she just finished it earlier this week.  We are totally in love with it, it is so much cuter than the pictures really show.  Here is a close up shot of it:

 So those are our nursery updates so far.  Isn’t is well on it’s way to being the cutest nursery ever?  I certainly think so!  Well, time to go to the store and get stuff for dinner, we are having a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 dinner and movie night with some friends in preparation for going and seeing the new movie all together tomorrow night.  Should be really fun, I’m making Butter Beer!
-Liz

Nursery Letters

On Monday S and I went to Anthropologie, which is now my favorite store, and got our first few letters for the alphabet wall in the nursery.  Even though they were a bit expensive, they are so cute!  The other letters are still going to be crafted, but I thought that these were too good to pass up.  Here they are in all of their glory.

Our other exciting purchase were some Eric Carle Animal alphabet flash cards.  The little bean won't be able to use them for quite a while, but we love Eric Carle stuff and weren't able to pass them up either.  

So do you guys love Anthropologie as much as I do now?  They have so much cute stuff!  Of course, I really can't afford any of it and I for sure can't fit into any of their clothes, but dang, I'm in retail love!

-Liz

A B C Easy as 1 2 3!

I started my first nursery craft this week, my wall of letters.  I’ve seen a few nurserys that have alphabet letters up on a wall, all painted/crafted differently and it is so cute.  Here are three amazing examples for you to feast your eyes on:

And because I’m a crafty girl, I decided to make a wall of my own.  The best part about my wall though is that my crafty artist friends are all helping!  I sent out a message to about 10 of my artist friends asking them to pick a letter or two and everyone jumped on the chance.  S and I are of course making a few ourselves- S is making the S and U and I’m making E, F, H, W, N, and V.  And then our wonderful helpful friends are making the rest!  We went to Hobby Lobby and Target and got a few of our letters to get started on.  So far it has been lots of fun.  I’m hoping to also make a few of my letters out of alternative materials- for example I’m thinking of making the V out of two rulers or something like that.  And I know one of my great friends who is a sculptor is going to be making her letters from scratch using wire and fabric, which I’m very excited about!  I’ll be sure to post lots of pictures as letters get finished and once the wall is up.

In other news, we have a busy busy weekend ahead of us!  Tonight we are going to a going away party for some good friends and then tomorrow night we are going to a 30^th birthday party for another dear friend.  And one of S’s friends is coming into town for the weekend and staying with us to go to the birthday party.  It’s going to be fun but I’m worried about poor S being able to stay awake and make it through all of these activities when she is used to going to bed these days at 8 ish.  Also, hopefully her morning/all the time sickness won’t be too bad and keep her at home.  After all, she is currently the best designated drive ever J. 

-Liz