under pressure November 1, 2008

Yet another stressful week at work as drawn to a close, leaving me wondering if I am creating all this stress for myself in some way or if the universe has some kind of purpose to keeping me stressed out this late in my pregnancy.

Everything’s exacerbated by the sinus infection I seem to have developed early in the week and can not shake.  I’m just drinking hot tea and irrigating a lot, which I admit is not bringing out the Big Guns, per se.  I can function but the sinus pressure constricts my skull and makes it difficult to sleep or even relax.  Poor me!

General exhaustion established, I plan to visit the Austin Celtic Festival after our birthing class today – I have been wishing quite ardently for a good image of the goddess Brigid to help as a meditation focus for the birth (and beyond) and have found NOTHING on the internets.  Thusly, shopping at the Celtic festival we go!  Though Tom is very worried about how much work he can get done on the teardrop trailer before Amelia shows up, he’s wonderfully indulgent of my impulses.  What a great husband I chose for myself!

acquisitions October 8, 2008

le glider avec chat

As I mentioned, my father-in-law bought us a glider. It’s been a very welcome addition to our household, as you can see from Spike’s pose. It was nice of him to put down the magazine and let me take the picture, don’t you think?

For what it is, the glider is very symbolic for both of us.  Tom’s father used to sit in his La-Z-Boy in evenings and read the whole paper after watching the nightly news, and Tom kind of feels like he’s sitting down into the same tradition when he puts his feet up on the ottoman.  I fondly remember my mother’s antique “platform rocker,” the item of furniture from my childhood home that I loved the most.

I’ve been thinking in the past few months about the process of getting ready for a baby – there’s a lot of winnowing out of old gear and clutter, the detritus of abandoned plans and ambitions.  At the same time, there’s a real acquisitive aspect to the adjustment – and early on, we seem to be conscious of walking our parents’ old footpaths.   Obviously when you become a parent, you start thinking a lot about the parents you had and what lessons to take from them.  I hope, especially in my case, that we choose to learn the right lessons.

Safety first October 8, 2008

Last weekend we did another good job of Getting Things Done.  Tom put together the crib and dresser, as well as our new glider, generously bought for us by my father-in-law.  It’s looking like a nursery!   We do have the glider in the living room at the moment, because it’s just that comfortable.

One nice thing about our cats is how safety-conscious they are.  Here, Max makes sure that the crib slats are no more than 2-3/8″ apart at any point, and that the top of the adjustable rail at its lowest position is at least 9″ above the top of the mattress support at its highest position.

The mural September 24, 2008

Our nursery mural is complete!  And I couldn’t be happier – check it out:

before

full mural

remote closeup

closeup of PawPaw Fairy

Charlotte Jo is the artist, and all we gave her was the concept – all designs are hers.  For the record, she also sings, writes songs, drums, plays guitar, and cuts great hair.

We wanted airplanes for Amelia (the Earhart connection, of course), and I also wanted some fantasy mixed in with the technology – both sides of where the imagination can take you, available to our little one.

The sky’s the limit!

oy September 22, 2008

I need to whine a little:

My pelvis, which is expanding so as to Make Room For Baby, is just killing me. I don’t mind it getting bigger (though honestly I can’t imagine needing wider hips than Nature already gave me), but does it freaking have to hurt all the stupid time? Grsch.

Also, I can’t seem to eat enough. I’ll have lunch and then an hour later I’m starving, so I have a snack of cottage cheese or yogurt (and I’m talking a substantial-sized bowl of either) and 90 minutes later I’m starving again. It’s ridiculous.

OK, now I need to brag:

Charlotte is finishing our Kick-Ass Mural today, and I can’t wait to get home to see the results! We also hired her to paint the whole nursery, which she did on Saturday, and help Tom with some heavy lifting. I’m thinking I need to cut back on the heavy stuff, as my sciatic nerve has been chirping at me. And now all of the furniture we didn’t want is out of the house!

Tom tiled the laundry closet, which required moving the small fridge and stacked washer/dryer out of it. Before and after pics below.

Before

After

He also plumbed in the portable dishwasher – yes they still make those – to the laundry closet, so now we have a working dishwasher again (when we put a new faucet in the kitchen, the little water hookup thing wouldn’t attach). Hopefully, now that our water system is using LCRA water instead of well water, the dishwasher will work better than it did.

Now our entire kitchen floor is tiled, and we’re all set up to wash diapers and bottles with impunity! All extraneous furniture has been banished from the premises! By the end of the day, the nursery will be completely painted and sporting a Work Of Art especially created for Miss Amelia! Progress, my dear reader, is not to be scoffed at.

cross your fingers September 19, 2008

We’re set up to do a shitload of work at the house this weekend.

We’ve arranged for a friend to come over and help Tom move a whole bunch of heavy furniture around, and then paint the nursery and paint a mural in the nursery.  I don’t want to spoil the theme of the mural, because I want to unveil it to the internet in a grand gesture, but here’s a teaser:  our mural will feature a juxtaposition of fantasy and technology.  Hmmm?  Intruigued?

I’m showing off my belly today, wearing a tight top.  I really never do this at work, but today I just figured what the hell.  So many maternity tops make me feel like I’m wearing drapes… but anyway.

The kid’s growth spurt persists, and I am invariably hungry every 2 hours on the hour.  Luckily I have a friend who’s a Luna Chick, and I have a whole office drawer of Luna Bar samples to get me through those 20 vital minutes between “I’m starving!” and “I’m eating!”  I swear I think I’ve gone through two 24 oz. containers of cottage cheese and three 24 oz tubs of nonfat plain yogurt in the last 5 days.  I may be the one person keeping the entire nonfat dairy industry afloat in these difficult financial times – everyone be ready to pick up the slack in January!

yes we can August 29, 2008

We completed the majority of the kitchen grout while watching and listening to the last night of the Democratic convention on KLRU. It was an odd juxtaposition, listening to a political equivalent of a revival meeting while feverishly working on the house at the same time – the psychic effect of the political exhortations made us work even harder, it seemed, despite the fact that we weren’t engaging in anything even vaguely relating to policy or The Future Of America.

I wore a couple of small holes in my right index finger from smoothing the sanded grout before I wised up and put some gloves on – typical me. We got mostly all of it done and Tom finished the rest this afternoon after he got out of work.

Here is the finished product:

Grouted sink and windowsill

grouted kitchen

Tom, feeling cherubic

And thus. You will not have to look at pictures of my kitchen for a while, I hope. We’re done except for some tile in the laundry closet and the wall base. Hallelujah! No wonder Tom feels like an angel.

Our house guests canceled because of the threat of a hurricane in Houston, where they live, but my father-in-law will most likely come up to visit this weekend. Then we may head down to La Grange on Sunday to visit Tom’s mother’s side of the family.  And Monday is my birthday!  Hurray!

One thing I realized in the zen state of frantic grouting was that Barack Obama was 40 when his first child was born.  That is a significant fact in our family because Tom turns 40 this year – in two weeks, basically – and it consternates him that he might be too old to be starting a family.  Not that he’s regretting our procreative exercise, but he worries about how old he’ll be when Amelia is learning to drive and going to college and things.  But he’s the hugest Obama fan ever, and I think it made him feel better that he and Barack came to this whole parenting thing at the same time in their lives.

So a message of hope rang in our household on the personal as well as the political fronts this Labor Day weekend.  Good times!

Long days August 27, 2008

Yawn. I’ve been playing and working awfully hard these days.

Monday night my friend Becky and I had a sort of a last gasp – before my third trimester starts – at the Saxon Pub. We infrequently spend Monday evenings at the Saxon to see Matt the Electrician and Bob Schneider play… you stay up way too late on a school night and have to get there ridiculously early to get a table, but it’s always a good show. I have a great fondness for Matt and admiration for Bob, and I think Becky thinks Matt is funny and cute and Bob is sexy as all hell. I agree with her opinion but with less fervor.

Matt’s band played a great set and he played a song that he had written that morning about the name Milo. If I understood it right, a pal of his had had his second child that morning and named him Oscar, a name Matt really likes. He wrote the song because he was so happy that his friend didn’t name the baby Milo, because he thought it was a terrible name… but then he felt bad and wrote a song about all those cool, likeable Milos that don’t exist as an apology to the name. He didn’t want to apologize to the actual people named Milo, because “Well, fuck them.” Though I’ve never met anyone named Milo, I can relate to the impetus to the song, it was a good song, and also Matt’s hilarious.

Bob’s set was unusually chill, for him, with a lot of slower songs and a accordionist/trumpeteer and cellist sitting in. Rehearsing for Labor of Love? Who knows, but the music was awesome even if the volume was so high that I heard distortion on the vocals and ended up plugging my ears with tissue halfway through the night. Yes, I realize that I’m signing my death warrant re: old age by admitting that, but damn! I was glad I’m only 6ish months along so the uterus is nice and thick and Amelia wasn’t running the risk of gestational deafness… though I admit worrying about being wrong about that.

Then last night, we got Busy.  Built up the window sill and the bar shelf so we’d be ready to tile, and then we tiled the bar wall.  We started at about 6:30 and didn’t finish until about 11:30, and I had about 3 hormone rushes before we were done, between worrying about the mural looking OK and listening to Hillary’s speech.

BUT, it’s done.  Check it:

BEFORE

AFTER

Tonight, light tiling of the windowsill and shelf.  Tomorrow, we grout as if our lives depended on it.  Friday, we clean.  Saturday – House Guests!

When the kid shows up can I start getting some sleep?

a good tired August 24, 2008

We’ve been Getting A Lot Done at the house, and not before time too!

Though we had planned to visit Tom’s father in Cuero this weekend, the rainstorms in his area made us reschedule the visit for early September. We saw a silly movie at the Alamo on Friday night to out-wait the rain that arrived just in time for the Friday after-work commute, and then got up early on Saturday to tile the kitchen backsplash.

We’ve been sitting on this project since March, as you might remember from my post when we installed the backerboard a couple of weeks ago. But yesterday and today we unearthed the boxes of tile and stuck them all to the walls like studly mason-type people.

I was quite worried about doing this backsplash, as what I remember from tiling the kitchen floor in March was that it was the hardest thing I’d done in years. For those of you considering tiling, let me hint you something: 16 inch tiles are much harder to install than 4 inch tiles! Who knew?

Though I had some trouble reaching the corners (I’m sure Amelia was trying to figure out who decided to introduce corners to the womb), I like to think that I was my old handy self this weekend. I’ll admit I was utterly exhausted afterwards, but then so was Tom. And it was over 24 linear feet of backsplash. And they’re hand-made tiles from Mexico, so they’re not what you might call square. Yeah, we kick the proverbial ass.

Care to bask in the glory of my tiley, tiley kitchen?

Over the rest of the week, we’ll tile that shelf up there and the window sill over the sink. Then we’ll tile the 50″ x 51″ wall on the other side of the bar (with the shelf on top) with a Senor Sun-Face mural. Then we’ll grout all of it.

All of this will happen before next weekend’s houseguests arrive on Saturday. No big whoop, right?

(If you’re wondering about that Tile Guy I was rejoicing about, that’s someone who will install tile in our living room and hallway for us. After we finish the kitchen, the next do-or-die is finishing the nursery, and then the replacing the living room carpet with ceramic tile. My midwife commented today that we were early – usually preggo couples start kicking into nesting overdrive at 32 weeks. But we have so much to do, I think we’re right on time.)

Finally! August 20, 2008

I found a tile guy.

Who will save us lots of money on tile and installation.

Fucking-A.