Updating...

So I am still here, still pregnant and impatient for GV to make his appearance.  People ask me if I'm ready to not be pregnant and really the answer is no.  Not that I loved being pregnant, but physically, it hasn't been a huge adjustment for me.  I didn't have any of the yucky symptoms that usually come, I've only gained 16 lbs and I'm still just as mobile & agile (with a few extra pains). Mentally it's been a tough nine months. The anxiety and worry have been hard to deal with. Especially since normally I'm a positive happy-go-lucky kind of person.  But I've only flipped out so much that I had to call the doctor once. Since then I've been able to talk myself down from the ledge.

So a few changes:

• I'm now on maternity leave.  Friday was my last day of work!  Because of Kevin's job situation I don't know if I'm going back.  I haven't decided if I want to be a SAHM, WAHM or what.  For now we need the insurance coverage so as far as work knows I'm coming back.
• We have decided to do hybrid diapers. This is where you use an outer cloth with a disposable insert.  The inserts are all natural so you can compost them (or flush them down the toilet). The brand we're using is gdiapers.  They are seriously the cutest thing ever.  I managed to score an awesome deal with ama.zon for earth day so I have about a 4 month supply sitting in GV's room.
• His furniture has still not shown up.  Officially they said 10-14 weeks, unofficially she said it'd be more like 6-8 weeks, but I was hoping it would be here by now. Yesterday was the 6 week mark.
• I finished organizing the kid's room yesterday! It no longer has stuff piled everywhere. I managed to find most everything a spot. Don't know how long this organization is going to last but I'm hoping a little while at least.
• The office is still is a disaster zone but at least everything that is suppose to be in there is actually in there. I have until Friday to actually get everything put away.
• Why Friday? Cause that's when Wiki is coming! She's heading up here for a week and a half.  Hopefully GV will show up earlier during her visit.

Okay, that's it for now. I'll post more later.

30 days!

That's right only 30 more days to go. Hopefully it flies by. Probably not. But I can hope.

Sorry I've been a little MIA lately. It's not just from posting but commenting as well. I have been reading this whole time though! I promise to do better. In fact I've decided that I'm going to post something at least once a day from here to birth.  It might not be interesting but it will be something.  Also I need to publish my weekly updates. I've been holding on to those for some reason.

Just in case you were wondering, the new office is still filled with boxes but most of the stuff is in there. The nursery has most of the nursery stuff but some is still on the dining room table. So we're farther along but not quite done yet. Maybe in 30 days?

The Carpet is In!

The carpet is done! It actually happened quickly once we got off our bums and did it. First we took out a 6"x6" piece from our closet. Then went to various stores on Saturday to find something close. We had two contenders so we scheduled premeasuring for Thursday to get final price estimates. The much nicer carpet ended up only being about $100 more so we went with that. Even though the salesman warned us it could take up to two weeks to get our carpet in, they were able to come on Wednesday. It looks beautiful!
And of course, pictures!

So the ugly grey walls are gone and the horrible mustard yellow walls were covered up.

The room door and bathroom door. We're replacing the outlet covers too.

The nook area.

A better shot of the carpet.

And the current star of the room - the new carpet!

So we're almost done! But the exciting part is that we get to start moving things out of GV's room and into this room. Which means we can move GV's things into his room and out of the dining room. So we can start eating in the dining room again! Score!

Guest Room Office:
1. Get rid of the bed.
2. Put away bed rails.
3. Get rid of the headboard.
4. Get rid of the dresser.
5. Get rid of the nightstand.
6. Get rid of the current tacky $20 Ta.rget book shelves.
7. Replace the TV. — We've decided to hang on to this TV until closer to our moving date. Or when Kevin finds a new job.
8. Clean out my great-grandmother's armoire.
9. Paint.
10. Replace the carpet.
11. Figure out what to do with the PS2 and all the rock band/guitar hero stuff.
12. Move the office furniture & supplies into the room.
13. Buy a sleeper sofa. — Because we don't know what the third bedroom in any new place will be like we're not going to invest in any new furniture. We've already gotten rid of the bed (which was a must!) so any guest that comes to visit us between now and moving date will either be on an airbed in the office or the sleeper sofa in the living room. But at least they get a choice, right?
14. Install nice bookcases. — We're not doing this either. I know it only adds to the value of the house but I don't want to go through the hassle and expense of installing bookshelves in a house we're leaving in a few months.

Generosity & Progress!

I forgot to mention that Sunday evening (while I was at the airport) our neighbor K came by with two brown paper bags full of baby clothes and a "My Br.est Friend" pillow. This is the neighbor that had a boy last April. The clothes were so cute. I talked to her a few days later and she also mentioned that they had a swing, excersaucer, baby hangers and a hanging baby jumper that they were done using. After two boys, they're not going to have any more kids so she's clearing things out. Oh, and she said that she'd give us their breast pump and leave it to us to decide if we wanted to keep it or not. I guess once you get to that stage you just want things out.

I was actually on the phone with Kevin when she came by. He had called me because he had just started re-painting the guest room and realized the color was really really close to white. We had been thinking that some of the butterscotch color would bleed through to make it look darker, but nope. The new paint went on really thick. So he stopped and called to confirm that I wanted him to keep painting. Since I was hundreds of miles away I told him to stop. When I did get home it was really light. My solution? Go back to Low.e's and get the darker color on the swatch card and mix them up. Then this past Sunday he painted. It's done! Finally! The color is beige. I'm so glad that's over.

Guest Room:
1. Get rid of the bed.
2. Put away bed rails.
3. Get rid of the headboard.
4. Get rid of the dresser.
5. Get rid of the nightstand.
6. Get rid of the current tacky $20 Ta.rget book shelves. — These are in the attic awaiting the neighborhood garage sale on May 15th. If I can get someone to sell it for me since I've got a game. Or Kevin agrees to do it.
7. Replace the TV. — Still have the old TV. I got a few interests in it but our schedule has been so crazy that I couldn't ever meet up with people. I'll relist it for this weekend.
8. Clean out my great-grandmother's armoire.
9. Paint.
10. Replace the carpet. — The owner before us replaced the carpet in the master, current office and landing. But not the GR for some unknown reason. Now that we're replacing it, we want it to match the other rooms. But according to all the carpet places we've called, in order to do that they would need at least a 6"x6" sample of our current carpet. They want me to rip up my nice carpet! I'm struggling making myself do it. But I know I've got to this weekend or this room is never going to get done.
11. Figure out what to do with the PS2 and all the rock band/guitar hero stuff.
12. Move the office furniture & supplies into the room.
13. Buy a sleeper sofa.
14. Install nice bookcases.

Sunday Confession

Sunday I admitted to Kevin that I hated the wall color I picked out. I'm not sure what happened but when I went paint shopping, I wanted to get a light beige. After 5 minutes or so, I picked it out, bought 2 gallons and then went home. Sunday as soon as Kevin started, I realized that it was not light beige at all. He finished the first coat (it really needs a second coat) around 3 or 4 and was planning on doing the second coat but I asked him if he liked it and he said no. So then I told him I didn't like it either. Tomorrow we're going to go to the store together and pick out another color. We're gonna go with a lighter color than originally because I don't want him to have to prime again. This way if the first coat bleeds it won't be so bad.

Side Note: The color is only a tad darker than the color of our bedroom, which I love, but apparently Kevin doesn't like that one either.

Next weekend is my trip to Florida. The main purpose of the trip is Chicken's bridal shower and bridesmaid dress choosing/fitting. But I also get to see my sister! Last month Wiki and her boyfriend (of 4 years) broke up and Wiki moved back home. The past year has been really rough on her (she got laid off of work in Feb 2009, lost her coaching gig in September and now this) and she's taking some time to regroup. I've dropped hints about her moving here so you never know!

Last night was my first spring soccer practice. I told the parents I was pregnant two weeks ago, but last night I told the girls. Some of them knew already. One girl asked me when in June because she thought maybe GV would be born near her birthday. But since her birthday is the 26th, I hope not! Practice went well and physically I was fine. That was my biggest concern. 

I do need to talk to my "co-coach" though. He helped me with the team last fall because of the cruise and towards the end of the season he started showing up to practice and trying to take over. He was there yesterday and while I understand that he's going to take a bigger role because we don't know when I'm going to stop coaching, I just felt like the whole time he'd rather I was doing something else. He's going to practice tonight and before he left he started talking about how he knew what he wanted to work on. I usually have a practice plan before I show up so it's a bit disconcerting and distracting when he just shows up and wants to start doing things. If I know he's coming or has something in mind then I can have a plan for that.

Guest Room Conversion

On Thursday I had someone email me about the TV we put on craig.slist. We made arrangements for them to come see it on Friday. But Friday evening came and went and they didn't show. However Friday another person emailed me about the TV so I emailed them back yesterday. Hopefully they still want it. Still no bites on the bookcase.

My plan was to finish packing up and clearing out the guest room by Thursday so that we could do the prep on Friday and Kevin could paint on Saturday. Yeah, didn't quite work out. I didn't finish packing and clearing till Saturday morning, then I went to get the supplies (sandpaper, roller refills, TSP and of course primer and paint).

So here's the room we started with:
Side Wall:

Back Wall:

Inside Wall:

Front/Inside Wall Section:

Little Alcove/Front Wall:

To the left of the alcove is the closet. No it's  not that deep! There's crawl space storage in the back and then a standard closet in front of it.

We spent most of the early afternoon cleaning and patching the walls. The previous owner had painted 2 1/3 walls a dark grey color. Even though the room has three windows because we have so many trees, it doesn't really get that much light. The other 1 2/3 were left the builder's white. I'm not sure if they did this on purpose, only had one can of paint (the room needs about 1 1/2 gallons for all the walls) or didn't want to mess with the awkward angles of the alcove. They didn't really do a good job painting so after we moved in I had to go buy more paint (they left the can in the garage) and fix the edges and clean up the trim. They hit the ceiling quite a few times! There were also tons of little nail holes in the wall.

Anyways Kevin didn't start priming the walls till about 4 or so. It's a bit awkward priming because part of the room is unpainted (well hasn't been painted since the builder did it) and the other part has a glossy dark paint.

And it's been killing me to be downstairs while Kevin gets to paint. I actually enjoy painting and am quite good at it. Kevin really doesn't like to paint so I'm sure he wishes we could switch places too.

So progress as of this morning:
Side Wall:

Back Wall:

Inside Wall:

Front/Inside Wall Section:

Closet/Little Alcove:

The real paint goes on today and then it's carpet shopping!

98...

192 days ago I started provera to end another anovulatory cycle.
180 days ago I started clomid.
149 days ago I found out that clomid worked and we finally had our prayers answered.

The past 149 days have been the slowest of my life! People told me that the first two trimesters would be the quickest. But I'm hoping that it will be the opposite for us. Since we've been waiting on preparing for GV's arrival and now we're in full swing hopefully the next 98 days are going to fly by.

In g(uest) r(oom) progress we took the bed to the dump and Kevin has agreed that he'll paint the room next weekend if I have the room completely packed up and mostly moved into the office. I should be able to do that.

The Guest Room

In our house we've got two extra bedrooms. When we moved in, I turned one into my office (I was working from home at this point) and the other one into the guest bedroom. Once I quit my home business and got a full time job, I redid the office so that Kevin would have his own space. My plan when we got the house was that we would use the guest bedroom (which is almost as large as our bedroom) for any kids that we'd have.

However the guest bedroom is over the garage and as such is way unreliable in either keeping warm or keeping cool. We always have to have a surplus of blankets for any overnight visitors during the winter and during the summers the overhead fan is always on when someone is in that room. So I had to revise that plan and knew that when a kid was coming and we started to work on the nursery it would need to go into the current office and the office would need to start sharing a space with the guest bedroom. I guess the good part is that the guest bedroom can accommodate both uses without being too cramped.

Back in January when I would talk about preparing for the baby to Kevin, he would be anxious about doing anything too soon. But in the past few weeks he's actually been talking and interested in shopping for GV.  Every time we stop by Targ.et or Walm.art he always helps me check out the sales rack to find things for GV. So last weekend I made a list of everything I wanted to do with the office and guest bedroom to get them ready. The guest bedroom stuff will need to get done first.

Guest bedroom:

1. Get rid of the bed.
2. Put away bed rails (we're planning on getting a convertible crib so we'll need the bed rails again eventually).
3. Get rid of the headboard.

4. Get rid of the dresser.

5. Get rid of the nightstand.

6. Get rid of the current tacky $20 Ta.rget book shelves.

7. Replace the TV. The current TV is 27". We're thinking of mounting it to the ceiling or wall so it would needs to be an LCD.
8. Clean out my great-grandmother's armoire. We're moving it into GV's room. Right now it houses my candle making supplies, jewelry, dog supplies and some crafting items. I'm planning on moving all that stuff into the five-drawer cart that is currently in the closet. Yes, that cart will need to be cleaned out too.
9. Paint. I don't know what color yet, but the room doesn't get a lot of natural light.
10. Replace the carpet. When we first moved in, Dave went through a peeing-in-the-guest-bedroom phase and not all of the stains came out.
11. Figure out what to do with the PS2 and all the rock band/guitar hero stuff.

12. Move the office furniture into the room (a desk (or two) and 2 file cabinets). Also all the office supplies will need to get moved over.
13. Buy a sleeper sofa.

14. Install nice bookcases.

Progress:
1. Moved the bed and box spring out. Kevin is going to rent a Low.e's truck tomorrow and take it to the dump along with some bookshelves not worth giving away and the cuttings from the crepe myrtle out front.
2. Bed rails got moved into the attic today! Along with our Christmas decorations (don't judge!) and other odds and ends that needed to go up.
3. Listed the headboard on crai.gslist for $25 and sold it! Cool fact: That's how much I paid for it 10 years ago!

4. I bought the dresser 10 years ago at a scratch and dent outlet.

The side was broken and I never got it fixed.

Then over the years I managed to stain the top.

So I listed it for free on cra.igslist. Within 10 minutes of my posting this guy emailed me. He just got custody of his twins and need to get furniture for their room ASAP.
5. I listed the matching nightstand for free too.

One of the drawer pulls is missing and the leg was broken when I bought it.

Never fixed that either. I told the guy that wanted the dresser that I wanted to get rid of both pieces together. He said okay. By the time I finished talking to him (maybe 30 minutes after listing it) I had 15 more emails from people wanting the dresser and nightstand. I ended up having to pull the listing.
6. I listed the bookcase too. It's currently priced at $15. But no takers yet. If no one goes for it we're gonna put it in the attic and wait till the next neighborhood yard sale.

7. I listed the TV too ($50). No takers either.

8. Cleaned out the armoire and drawer cart. Now I need to sort everything out and get rid of stuff that we don't need.

Not bad for one day's work, eh?

Cycle the Fifth

CD3. That's where I'm currently at. Sometimes I hate being right. Chicken called me on Sunday to check in and I think she was more disappointed than I was. Although I was prepared for it, the last she had heard about round 4 was that ovulation had been confirmed.
Kevin and I talked about what we should do for this next cycle. We've decided that I'm not going back to Dr. T. My journey with him is over. We are still going to chart and OPK, but we're both concerned that any drugs I take will affect the bloodwork that Dr. G is surely going to want to do. I'll be on CD25 when I go to see him, so if I haven't ovulated by then, I'll be able to start provera and if I have ovulated then I'll only be about 5 days away from a new cycle.
My second IF support group meeting went well. One of the girls that was there in December is now pregnant so Yay! for her. This meeting there were only three other women. They're the ones that started the group. It's a bit weird because they've been meeting for about a year so when they're giving updates they keep having to fill me in with back stories about their experiences/lives. But they've been super nice and welcoming so it's easy to feel very comfortable with each of them. Cool thing about our next meeting is that they've decided not to have it till the end of February so that I'll have any test results from my appointment with Dr. G.
Eek! I only have one week left to get anything done for my January project. I started out so hopeful and I got started right away. But it's fallen by the wayside since those first few days and now there's no way it's going to be all done by the end of January. Does having everything ordered count?

First part done

Remember back in October when the Deladubrees came to visit and I decided that I couldn't deal with one more person walking into my house and seeing my ugly bedroom walls. I had such high hopes for getting the room completely finished and since then, nothing. Well today I finished painting the walls in my bedroom. So now all four are a lovely shade of buttercream yellow. I have no idea if that's an actual shade of yellow available at Lowe's but that's what I'm calling it. The next job for the walls is doing the feature wall. That's going to be a battle. Kevin doesn't really like wallpaper, but I think 4 walls of the same thing is just boring. I've just got to convince him that I haven't gone wrong in the house yet (to his amazement) so to just trust me on this one.

I think I've chosen a hamper.
It's a bit pricey, but I've been looking for 3 years and I haven't been able to find anything else that fits what I want. My criteria is: I want it to not look like a hamper, I want it to tilt out, 3-4 comparments, be modern/traditional and white. The rest of my bedroom furniture is white. I think I might just have to bite the bullet on this one and go ahead and get it. Besides, I'm helping the economy!

I also found this bench. I like the ulpholstered seat as well as the combination of drawers and baskets. I do want it darker but I'm not crazy about the side panels. They're kind of mission style which I'm not a big fan of. We'll see.

Experiment Over

I've decided to end the experiment. It last about two weeks and could have lasted longer but Kev decided that I wasn't really cleaning the mess, I was just spreading it out. So here's the last shot from a couple of days ago. Maybe I'll try the actual kitchen sink next.

Crap I Missed a Day

So last night I was up late watching the vice presidential debate. We had to DVR it because of Les' Agility Class. So anyways, I finally got bored and decided to go to bed. A little later Kev came up. This morning when I went downstairs, I looked at the coffee table and it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't clear it off last night! Crap! It had already started collecting the days items on it so I was really annoyed that 1. I forgot and 2. I didn't have a picture of it. Kevin then told me that he had taken the liberty of taking a picture before he went to bed— after he cleaned off his stuff, of course.

So unfortunately, here it is:

Not as bad as that before picture I have to admit, but I'm kind of annoyed with myself.

That Kitchen Sink Thing

I've heard of that flylady thing. I've read the book, the blog, and the website. I can do the 27 things in a bag to get rid of without looking back. She talks about the kitchen sink and how one day she decides that she's going to make sure that every night the kitchen sink is cleared. And when she had a handle on that she moved onto the "kitchen sink" for each room. It seems simple enough so I'm going to try. Now seeing as how I HATE doing the dishes I decided to start with the "kitchen sink" in the living room. That's right, the coffee table. So last night, I'll took a before and after picture and then each day I'll take another picture to show you all my progress.

Before:

After:

*Yes, that discoloration was caused by me. I was painting my nails when I tipped over the bottle of nail polish remover and then tried to mop up the spill with a napkin. As you can see, not a good idea. Oops!