Flood

Leslie: Jane, did you have a flood in your basement?
Jane: No, it just got lots of water in it and my daddy had to take out the carpet because it was all wet.

Ya, Jane, that's what we'd call a flood. And, yes, we did have one in the basement. I'm about a bummed as I've been in a while. Brent thinks that it's got something to do with the hose in the front yard... it leaked down into our basement bedroom. Our wall is all wet and the (nasty teal) carpet was drenched so Brent pulled it out to dry on the back patio today. I hate to put it back down there, but we also have no money to replace it. Anyway, we'll probably have some significant sheet rock repair that's needed and I'm not sure that I want to think about it just yet. In the meantime, the girls have been enjoying the back patio all nice and soft today. Enjoy ladies.

The Classics

So, I'm a classic girl. I can't help myself and it might get kinda boring sometimes, but I'm always drawn to classic, often traditional things. I figure this way, they don't age. Since we moved into our white and brick house, I've been itching to paint the shutters and door. Yesterday Brent took care of it for me. Now I have my classic house. You really can't go wrong with black, white and red...



This is the before, it had green shutters which is NOT the same as black.



And the after.

Try to look past the dead flowers, mirror from our bathroom and other trash on the porch as well as the overgrown landscaping, toilets and tires to the side of the house. Oh ya, not to mention the bathtub that's been sitting there since we remodeled the bathroom. We are totally the white trash neighbors. Next year we'll try to work more on the exterior. It's needing some serious love, but this will have to do for a while.

And a photo of Charlie...



My sister in law, Danielle, made the hat and blanket for him. He sticks his little tongue out when he sleeps, it's so funny. We love him!

Lizzy Lou Who

I am still trying to do something with Lizzy's hair so that she doesn't look quite so orphan-like, all the time. I try and I try and I try and for some reason, she always ends up looking like she lives on the streets or is being raised by dingos or something. Leslie and my mom keep harassing me to cut her hair, but I don't want to because I'd like it to grow. Today, we tried pig tails. Brent and I think she resembles a Who from Whoville.




In other Lizzy news, she is absolutely DETERMINED to wear Charlie's pants. I'm not sure why, but she's desperate to get them on. We find her like this about 5 times a day.



There is no hope. Poor thing.

Family Photo

Wow. Our little family doesn't seem so little anymore.

Man of the hour

Our sweet little Charlie has arrived!
Born 9/22/08 at 3:05PM. He weighed 7 lbs. 4oz. and was 19.5" long.
Everything went great and he's about as beautiful as I could have imagined. For some reason, Brent took all the photos with his phone instead of the camera, which was sitting right next to us. That's why all the photos look like they were taken with his phone.



I LOVE this one of Charlie and my mom. Isn't he darling?



We can't figure out who he looks like, he doesn't look like the girls did.



Jane wants to hold him every second. She's such a good big sister.



"Baby! Baby!" is about all Lizzy will say. She's fascinated with him.





And a couple of me with my new little man. I'm sure there will be tons more photos to come. Now... I've got to paint Jane's nails.

P.S.

For those who are curious, I still have no baby. I've reached the point of "annoyed pregnant woman that doesn't want to talk about when her due date is" and for this reason, I've been avoiding social interactions in general. If this baby isn't here before church on Sunday, I might have to sneak out the back before anyone has time to talk to me. He'll come no later than Monday though, thank goodness for that.

Things you didn't want to know about me...

Enjoy reading about weird I am...

Rules Once Tagged:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) Post the rules on your blog (copy and paste 1-6).
3) Write 6 random things about yourself (see below).
4) Tag 6 people at the end of your post.
5) Let them know they are tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6) Let the tagger (who tagged you) know when your post is up

Six random things about me

1- I'm not very good at finishing things. I graduated from high school through independent study because I left after my junior year. Same for college. My house and life are full of half finished projects.

2- Smarties are one of my very favorite candies. I can, and do, eat them until they give me serious heartburn. I know that there are 15 Smarties in each roll. I know this because I am compelled to eat them in 3s, making 5 delightful servings per roll. For this reason, I don't like sharing rolls of Smarties, so don't ask. It's really quite debilitating. Oh the things I suffer from!

3- I am a paint Nazi. I have VERY strong feelings about colors (I own about 4 paint decks), technique (Brent has none), as well as different brands of paint. Behr is horrible paint, I hate it. I won't use it at all, their commercials are full of lies. Ask any professional painter and they will agree. The best paint comes from Pittsburgh paints. I drive about 15 minutes to get to a store, but they are SO helpful there and are also a lot cheaper than most other places. Love them.

4- I am a Rage Against the Machine fan. If you aren't familiar with Rage Against the Machine, I suggest that you don't bother familiarizing yourself. I know that my love for them should have tapered off by now and that it's left over from high school, but I can't help myself. I still get all into it when I hear me some Bulls on Parade. I heard that they broke up because the lead singer was donating all his proceeds to some terrorist group in Bolivia or something weird like that. What a drag. I've been listening to them as I'm writing this and I'm nothing short of giddy right now... ahhh, it's been a while. Now Testify!

5- I love hose water. Dogs and I share a taste for it. I know, it's gross, but I LOVE cold water out of the hose, it's totally preferred over bottled water. I also drink straight out of the faucets inside. My kids drink out of them and my family blames Brent, but I do it too. Lizzy tries to drink out of the play kitchen sink :)

6- My favorite word in spanish is comemos. It's such a fun word to say out loud. Go ahead, say it. Now. You won't regret it, I promise. Co-me-mos. Ha! It makes me laugh just about every time. Ah, good times. I also enjoy the word macaco, which is monkey in Portugeuse.

Ok, done and done. Now I tag Danielle, Leslie (oh ya) and Sheri. You are all horrible bloggers and if you can't come up with something to post about, I'll do it for you :) Have fun girls.

Nursery

Since I'm still NOT currently having a baby, I'm doing other things to occupy my time. One of them is finish up Charlie's nursery (which will likely be inhabited by Lizzy for an indefinite period of time). I finally got my cute monkeys up on the wall, so I decided to straighten it up and take a few pictures.



If the room seems like a tunnel, that's because it is. I think it's only like 8 1/2' wide or something like that. I don't understand this house.
I'd like to draw your attention to the pillow with large multicolored dots on the right side of the photo. I made this pillow. Well, I made all 3 of them, but this one (which will hopefully sit atop a mattress at some point) was made out of felt circles that I cut out and adhered to the white material myself. I'm very pleased with my fancy pillow. The monkeys came from Vinylwallart.com and I LOVE them! Thanks Holly, you have the cutest stuff! I also ordered the letters because they followed the "dot" theme.

I'm very pleased with my little boy nursery, it was kinda fun to do something boyish. Thank you to my mom and Brent who helped me to get it all put together.

Overnight Bag

Last night, Leslie is helping Jane pack an overnight bag, one night, for my mom's house. Jane gets into her underwear drawer and starts pulling several pairs out...

Jane: Oh! I need to get underwear!
Leslie: That's an awful lot of underwear, Jane, don't you think you could put some back?
Jane: You don't understand, Leslie. I change my underwear EVERY DAY.



Ya, that should be enough.

Oh the shame!

First of all, this is a post about pregnancy. If you are sick of reading about my pregnancy or uncomfortable with terms like "cervix" and "dilate" then I would suggest that you stop here. I would also suggest that you are not a mother since us women sure like talking 'bout birthin' babies.

Yesterday was horrible. I woke up at about 3:30 Friday morning with contractions. They continued to get stronger until at about 12:30 when I decided that it was time to go to the hospital. I called in the troops and told them that I thought I was going to be having this baby today. You have to understand that I'm really quite rational and I thought about it and timed and thought about it, I mean, I've given birth before, so it's not like I have no idea what a contraction feels like. Everyone in my family dropped everything to travel up here and take care of me and my kids while Brent and I headed for the hospital. Well... after spending ALL afternoon at the there, I wasn't making any progress and so followed the walk of shame. I was sent packing. I was SO embarrassed! I swore I would never be one of those women.

As if that wasn't enough, the contractions never let up and later that night they were about 3 minutes apart and getting REALLY painful, so I went back. The girls went over to my parents house to stay the night. I was sure that this time it was for real. Not so much. Thank goodness that the nurse on last night was so helpful. She explained to me that my cervix is very posterior, so even though I was having contractions, it wasn't putting any pressure on the cervix and was therefore all an exercise in futility. She said that the only thing that was going to get the cervix to soften enough to start dilating more was hardcore labor, otherwise, my body would just give up after a while, like it did this time. If I wasn't so posterior, I probably would have progressed fine and had that baby this weekend... so my thought is... why didn't they just let me have this baby?! I mean, I was trying! If they had just broken my water, I'd have gotten along just fine, that's what's happened the last 2 times I've done this. Instead, I'm at home, having taken the walk of shame twice in the same day, I'm still contracting and uncomfortable and I'll likely stay this way until my induction date. Come on body, this pathetic showing is completely unacceptable. I expect more from you.

Baby Watch!

So, I had another appointment today. It wasn't all that exciting since I've already got my induction date for the 22nd. The doctor tells me that this baby is ready to come, its just a matter of getting contractions started. He doesn't think I'll be too early, but doesn't count on me making all the way to the 22nd either. I've actually been contracting a ton every day, but they always stop. I figure that the work my body does now means less that it has to do when I go into the hospital. It's just distracting and uncomfortable, but so is pregnancy in general :)

To make matters a little more complicated for myself, I signed up for 2 craft shows in the spur of the moment. One for next weekend and one for the following. Ya, I just want to make sure that no one feels sorry for me in my present state. I'm going to have a ton of work to do to get ready and I figured it would be better to focus on that than sit around timing contractions every day. I've tried a couple times to get into this particular show and they had a last minute opening for me that I didn't feel like I could pass up. I mean, I'm going to have some serious hospital bills to pay off here pretty soon, right? I've also got another boutique tomorrow night. Ya, I'm a glutton for punishment. If the baby waits until the induction date, he'll come right in between things and I might be able to make all the shows, if not... um,I'll figure something out then. In the meantime, Brent it super busy at work and I've basically been forbidden from going into labor until he's got a grip on things. I'll do what I can.

So Sweet

Such cute baby friends



They were enjoying some popcorn. With those faces, they look cuter from the back :)

Uniform?

Jane had a very successful first day of school last week and I thought that my preschool problems were over. I should never think things like that. Each day since has been a struggle, largely revolving around her uniforms. What gives? Last year she loved them! This year everything is wrong. She doesn't like white shirts, she doesn't like collars, she doesn't like blue, she doesn't like pants, she doesn't like skirts, she doesn't like anything! Argh! Finally, we found that she doesn't really mind wearing the blue polo dresses, so Leslie was kind enough to stock up on them for us since they were on clearance. She also wants several pairs of bright colored shoes to wear and needed new socks since white ones were unacceptable. I haven't bought her shoes (since the ones she likes run about $40 a pair!) but we invested in as many pairs of "silly socks" as a small child could possibly need. So now, when Jane goes to school each day, she looks about like this:



So much for being uniform. She definitely marches to her own beat and I just let her. If silly socks will get her in the car, sobeit.

Baby Watch!

I finally had my 36 week appointment today. It was quite the ordeal. I was the last appointment of the day and this was my doctor's first day back in the office after his vacation. Couple that with the 3 deliveries he had this afternoon and you can imagine the nice, long wait. It's ok, I was prepared for it and I have to admit that it was almost better to sit there for 2 hours and read People Magazine with no children than be at home.

Anyway... I had an ultrasound, which indicated that the baby is a little over 6 lbs. already! That's more than Lizzy weighed when she was born. I've gained a whole pound too, hooray for me! Everything looks good, the baby is healthy and strong, which is all I can ask for. Apparently the millions of contractions I've been having have been accomplishing something since I'm dilated and effaced enough that he felt comfortable scheduling an induction at 39 weeks. We are thinking probably Sept. 22nd, which is a Monday less than 3 weeks away! Weird. I'm not totally certain I'll last on my own that long, but I'll probably get close. I'm doing a lot of sitting these days and I'm trying to set milestones for myself to reach before the baby comes to make the time pass. I have a boutique next week that I should probably be able to attend and I've got a Sunday School lesson coming up when I hit 38 weeks that I've got to teach. After that, I'll be SO ready to have this baby!

We're almost finished with the nursery and I'll get pictures of it as soon as I get everything put together (Mom). Problem is that after several weeks of semi-successful room sharing, we've got Lizzy back in the crib. The girls just don't let each other sleep when they are in the room together! Lizzy will have to be evicted before much longer to make way for baby brother. Poor little girl has no home. She's already the middle child.

Dear blogging friends...

To those of you whose blogs I read, but probably shouldn't, I've just added you to my links list (in no particular order) to make it easier on myself. Now I don't have to click through several different blogs to stalk yours! Ah, the convenience of links.