Final countdowns...

As we near the home stretch of starting life as a family of 3 humans, it has become apparent that we have a number of different countdowns going.  Life is never slow around here, and we constantly seem pulled in so many directions.  For instance...

 

My due date is 24 days from now.  24.  I don't even know what to say to that.  Ammon and I were talking about how in one way, that seems so far off still.  I mean, I'm pretty darn big at this point, and still getting bigger - though blessedly, that progress seems to be slowing down some.  My belly is also dropping, which I think makes it seem even bigger than it really is?  I don't know.  It's just big.

 

 This picture is actually 3.5 weeks old, so it's not really accurate.  Just imagine bigger than this, and that's where we're at right now.

 

But at the same time, 24 days is virtually nothing, especially when you consider just how many things have to be done in the days leading up to delivery.  We assembled a bunch of stuff today, which is good, except that we have about 10 shipments from Amazon still set to arrive over the next two weeks.  We still have to get carseat bases installed in both cars and checked.  We have a hospital tour this week.  We need to get hospital bags packed.  Ammon needs to change the oil in both of our cars.  Laundry needs to be done.  And SO MANY OTHER THINGS.

 

My last day of work is in 11 days, which means that in 8 working days, I will be done with work.  How the heck did that creep up so fast?  For those of you not in the know, the State of California disability program allows you to take up to 4 weeks of disability leave prior to your due date.  After much consulting arguing with my doctor over the pros and cons of taking 4 weeks off before delivery, we settled on a 2 week leave.  It's a compromise for both of us.  As the day gets closer though, I am becoming more and more okay with taking that time off.  I am tired, and grumpy, and uncomfortable, and hot all of the time.  Just today, it seems that the 3rd trimester swelling everyone talks about has started to set in, which I'm guessing has something to do with the fact that it's a good 15 degrees hotter today than it's been since last October.  So that's neat.

My last day of my classes this term is in 8 days.  After this class ends, I'm done until mid July, at which point I only have 4 more classes until I graduate!  This is such a big deal for me.  I've been working towards this degree since before I started this blog.  It's been a really long time coming, and with each passing term, I am finally starting to see that this dream is actually going to become a reality.  This particular class I'm finishing right now has been exceptionally challenging from a workload standpoint, and I've really struggled with it, largely because of everything else in my life.  It's going to feel nice to have 8-ish weeks off from academic pursuits.

So, if you couldn't tell by now, starting May 11th, I plan to be laid up on my couch watching Netflix, napping, and reading as much as I can.  I'm hoping that it doesn't get old too fast, and that this whole "I'm the size of a small whale" thing motivates me to be a little extra lazy.  I know other people talk about nesting like crazy in those last few weeks, but to be honest, I haven't felt up to any of that.  I'm totally cool with not having the nursery ready when the baby gets here - they're going to be sleeping in a cradle in our room for the first few months anyway.  I figure that so long as it's done before they move over into the nursery in 3 months or so, we'll be doing okay.

What are you counting down the days to?

Half-bath remodel!

So, I decided to procrastinate on take a break from my governmental accounting class for a bit to share with you our remodeled half bath!  One thing I really can't stand about the original design of our house is the bathrooms... They have ridiculous counters that stretch over toilets and non- cabinet sections.  They also have mirrors for miles... Like, they ALSO stretch over toilets, because apparently, men need to be able to look at themselves when they pee?  I just don't get it.

So this is what it looked like before.  Note the wall-to-wall mirror and the counter that extends only as an excuse for the mirror to be there.  SO DUMB!  And the lino... oh heavens, this lino is all over our house, and it makes me weep.  So way back in October, before we announced the impending arrival of the baby, Ammon decided we should just get after this project.  So we did.  And for about 6 weeks, we saw some serious progress.

After demo... Almost nothing left!  There was some serious drywall work in here too - don't be fooled that we had it easy by not taking out the drywall.  In some ways, we might have been better off ripping out the walls altogether.

Next came re-doing the floors.  We picked these nice taupey-gray hexagonal tiles, and we're really happy with that choice.  Which is good, because we bought enough to also do the laundry room and the upstairs guest bathroom (we bought that much on purpose, not because we're bad at math).

I don't really have any other intermediate pictures, because the walls got mostly painted, and then Ammon had a minor hernia surgery, and spent 6 weeks recovering.  Ammon was NOT happy with the color of the walls until we got all of the furnishings and fixtures in, so I didn't take pictures, in case we had to change the wall color at the last minute.  So from mid-November until sometime in early-mid January, my half bath sat with mostly painted walls and newly tiled floors.  It was pretty depressing.

But then!  The reno bug hit again!  Or nesting.  Whatever.  Inspiration struck, and Ammon decided it was time to wrap this baby up.  And in very short order, our bathroom suddenly transformed into this:

I mean, can you beat a pink powder room with a dark vanity and oil-rubbed bronze fixtures???  It's nearly all care of Home Depot, in case you're wondering.  We used Behr's "Cupcake Pink" paint, but we had them lighten it by 50%.  We probably could have asked them to tone it down even more, but it's worked out okay as it is.  Vanity, vanity top, and mirror came as a special buy set from the Depot last summer for $399.  And the fixtures... they sure weren't cheap, but in such a small space, we wanted things that we loved, and we wanted everything to match.  Our biggest expense hands down was these fixtures, which are from the Porter collection by Delta.  We even replaced the drawer pulls on the vanity so that they matched (because I'm OCD like that).

Oh, and the inspiration for the whole room?  Those adorable hummingbird prints, which I found on Etsy.  We pulled the color for the walls out of one of the prints, and went from there.

Our next project is replacing our front fence.  Our old fence blew down in a really bad storm just over a month ago.

We hated this fence anyway, so it wasn't the end of the world... But man, it was a pretty darn inconvenient time to lose the fence.  Our area is in the rainy season from November through March, so only now is the ground starting to dry up enough that we can start looking at pouring concrete footings for new posts and rebuilding.  I'm **hoping** that maybe we'll have a new fence before we have a new baby, but I'm not holding my breath on that one...

Winging it

These days, it feels like there just isn't that much of plan.  There is, in that we go to work Monday through Friday, and I'm still plugging away at school, and we have an unbelievable number of commitments and appointments.  Those things, they just kind of happen - except for school, which I'm forcing to happen, but that's a different story.  Everything else though, we're just making up as we go along.

 

 

For instance, food:  We're loosely following the meal plans that SkinnyTaste puts out, but I'm not nearly as on the ball with sticking to our meal plans lately.  We've been eating out a bit more again, largely because I'm TIRED all the time.  Like, the kind of tired where you go to bed at 8:30pm, you're so tired.  

 

 

Also, because it's just fun to eat out, and that is going to be limited once this kid makes its grand appearance.  We went out to dinner a couple of weeks ago with my cousin, and I got 2 desserts.  It was a great decision.

 

 

How I spend my free time has also been largely up in the air.  Some days, I can literally conquer the world.  Unfortunately, this almost always is followed by a day where it is literally impossible to get off of the couch.  Like, we went to this gorgeous spot overlooking the beach in Pacifica to take my maternity shots, and I had plenty of energy.  The next day, I watched Netflix for 6 hours, and we skipped church because I was so exhausted.  Oh yeah, that's a thing these days too:  We started going to church.  This is a pretty big deal for us, if you know both of our histories with organized religion and our personal beliefs.

Last thing we're winging?  All things baby-related.  This is the entirety of the progress we've made in preparing for the little bundle we're expecting 7.5 weeks from now.  A crib with no mattress, and a handful of space-themed clothing items that I couldn't pass up.  I figure that as long as the nursery is done by the time this kid is 3-6 months old (when we expect to transition him/her out of our room), we're doing okay.

Oh, and did I mention we aren't finding out the gender of the baby until birth?  Because that's a thing we're doing.  Leave your guesses in the comments!