Rockin the Suburbs

OK, here is the 36 week photo – went to the Doctor this morning, all is well, she is in “launch position” but no dilation. So we’ll see next week! (Oh and I LOST 3 pounds, ha ha! confirming my theory that some of this weight is in the waste management area)

36 weeks

And here are pictures of the house – clean. and the baby’s room – done (Of course extra special thanks to my Mother-in-law and husband who did the lion’s share of the cleaning… I did most of the fit-throwing)

Living room – wow, furniture

dining room with chandeliers

bathroom – 98% complete, 100% functional

Veronica's room

The crib wall – those are wooden letters

Her IKEA dresser with 3D wall accents

So here is the 34 weeks photo… ugh!

34 weeks

Had a wonderful baby shower on Sunday. So special thanks to Sue, Jen, Kathleen and Mom for such a great event! The theme was “Baby Bling” and Jen did a spectacular Tiffany-themed cake. the jewels inside were edible! We also had brownie lolly-pops and a watermelon baby stroller. So fun!! I wish I would have thought to take a picture of the crowd – but we all had a lot of fun!

baby shower cake with bling!

awww – down to the last detail

It would be safe to say that the tiling process for “Project ClusterF%!K” has been an educational experience. As my better half put it “Simple, but not easy”.

It’s up, every last damn piece of tile….(the tape is holding some of the top-heavy pieces in place until the thinset fully cures)….but behold the wonders of a LOT of tough nights and 125 pounds of thinset.

I would like to have a gallery on this site – sure easy, no problem. BUT I would like to be able to order prints from one of the online retailers right off this site… like snapfish or kodak. Anybody seen anything good that will work? It seems like a simple thing, but it doesn’t look like it happens that way!!

Although this time I made the theme myself (based on the previous one of course) But it’s a start.

So this weekend we have some headway on the bathroom. All the doors have casing on them and we are officially done with the professional building type of help (actually he is coming back one more time to drop a piece of molding off, but E is installing). We do have one minor issue with the electrical that we have to have a box moved a bit (got a little too close to the tile line). And Erich did his first foray into trim. He did an excellent job putting the outer trim on the octagon window, and the recessed cabinet he built for storage. We got the tile started on Sunday – Saturday got sucked into the remodel black hole… I don’t even remember why or what happened! But we got the fancy part mostly figured out and hopefully every night this week we are going to do a little bit of field tile to get that out of the way. Then I am hoping to finish the tile work Friday afternoon and grout on Saturday (then maybe I can get my toilet installed on Sunday!!) We’ll see.

the bathroom – a start

fancy tile work – electrical outlet was getting into the thick top border

And Bon Jovi on Friday – we had a good time. Kid Rock opened and was really good (I was surprised it was such a good show) then Bon Jovi started at 9:30… ugh, that was a little rough. And we had to walk out in the mob, that took about 40 minutes. But E was waiting with the car so it worked out. The weather was perfect, cool, nice breeze, low humidity (lucky for me!)

our seats – pretty close, but nobody ever came over on our catwalk

Unnamed person: “Hey Steph, when are you due?”

Me: “September 25 [insert big sigh]”

Unnamed person: “Are you sure?”

Me: “Yeah, pretty sure – it ain’t 1860 anymore”

Unnamed person: “How tall is your husband again?”

…

In other words – yes, I am a giant cow – and WTF? Sue assures me that Erich was a perfectly normal size at birth.

30 weeks – 10 more to go!

Yep, can’t see my feet. Which would probably explain all the tripping! Oh well… Saturday will start week 29, almost three-quarters done!

So I did the baby registry yesterday – and that was probably the worst experience of the pregnancy (yes, worse than throwing up every 4 hours). I went to Babies R Us since that has the most stores around and just about had a panic attack or seizure trying to weed through all the crap. I was trying to keep it simple… but they design those stores the way they design casinos. They want you to ping-pong around inside for awhile and hopefully get you to buy stuff off the endcaps. Then I went to Target for those of you in babies r us free zones and basically had the same problem. I was looking for more neutral things – teals and grays and dots or whatever so that if we have another baby and it’s a boy I could use this stuff over again. Well these retailers have figured that little trick out – most everything is PINK or BLUE. the only middle ground is a green that I think is just terrible – really bright and neon-ish. So to my future son I say, man up – strong boys can wear pink too! Ugh – what a horrible experience.

Oh, and I would like add that E and I are not opposed to hand-me-downs – if you have something that is in good condition and you think we need or could use, by all means we’re perfectly content with that. We are TRYING to keep it simple and not get bogged down in the over-conveniences of the modern baby.

I thought I’d post a general update.

Construction continues on the bathroom. There were some tricky framing obstacles, so we ended up hiring a carpenter to re mediate them for us. So now the walls in the bathroom are probably the strongest in the house! They also fixed some previous bad decisions by other renovators (don’t cut giant notches in the boards that hold the house up – just an FYI). So here is the progress.

the green line of tape on the floor represents where the bathtub will be when it arrives. the line on the wall is for the tile. We have some more stuff to finish up, then the window will get replaced, probably next weekend. Then it’s just drywall and tile! (ha ha) I’ll probably head to the tile store on Friday afternoon to see what is what. I have an idea of what I’m going to do. Samples here and here.

As far as the biological construction project everything is going very well. I am well and the peanut kicks and kicks and really likes to sit diagonally with her butt in my ribs on the left and her bony little feet crammed in my ribs on the right side. I just had a short massage here at work (Massage Day!) and the masseuse was able to move her down a bit. I swear I just took my first deep breath in a week! (awesome)

I’ll try and get a new picture up – since we’re at week 25 and bump-tacular!