Baby's Room is painted!

Well, after a little trial and error with the trim color (green is bad) we finally finished painting the baby's room! This is Jonathan, very hungry and totally over it. I was pretty much over it too. All that crawling around climbing ladders and trying to not ruin the floors was a lot for us to get through with my growing belly and his bad back. But we made it! And we're really happy with the results. Now there's just the rest of the house to paint.....

Here's the latest pic of "the belly." I'm now 28 weeks and heading into my last trimester. (about 7 months) Baby is kicking all the time and moving around lots! She seems most active when I'm trying to sleep or sitting on the couch. She is heavy! I'm now lugging around about 2 lbs. of actual baby and about 18 lbs. of extra tissue and fluid housing the baby. Last night I got woken up by my first leg cramp. That was interesting but not nearly as bad as the round ligament pain I was having from weeks 14-24. Now begins all the prep work. Classes at Kaiser, setting up the rest of baby's room, planning for my maternity leave from work. Lots to do! We're trying to pace ourselves.

Here's a little fun in the basement! Jonathan's parents got him this awesome work bench for the X-Mess and both our parents hooked us up with a whole bunch of great tools & gear for working around the house! I'm betting this will all come in pretty handy in the near future. It's just really nice having a central location for everything. Before, our meager set of tools were spread all over the place.

Growing Belly, Pretty Quiet December

Well, this is a little creepy to see. In the span of about 4-5 weeks my belly has gotten pretty noticeably bigger. And that second pic is about a week and a half old so I'm even bigger today! I am now officially in maternity clothes and just kind of getting used to taking up a bit more space than usual. Our little Demon Baby is kicking A LOT lately. Or at least she's big enough that I can feel it more often now. We're getting more excited and/ looking forward to the new year and all the work that will go into getting her room and the house ready for her arrival in May.














Here's a couple totally adorable kitty pics from this month. We call them the "Trifecta of Terror"
although Pandora is really the only terror of the bunch. She took an instant liking to the X-Mess tree and proceeded to try and help me un-decorate it immediately after I had finished decorating it.


















I need to post a couple more pics of the lovely X-Mess dinner we had in our house! It was super casual and laid back, which was about all I could handle, being pregnant and all. Just my parents and Jonathan's parents over for turkey dinner. It was a really great evening with our awesome families.

It's A Girl!

We're having a girl! Hurray! We're so excited. Just what we wanted. She was very uncooperative during the amnio. She was bouncing and dancing around, not showing her spine to the technician. But eventually we got to see all her insides, fingers and toes. They said she looks perfect so far. And the test results came back ok! She's got all her chromosomes and they are all pointing in the right direction. Whew! The test wasn't too tough. Not like I've never been stuck with a needle before. The cramping afterward was unexpected and a little scary but it went away after a couple hours. So now we're into the 17th week and things are going great! We think we're going to paint her room lavender (with purple and mulberry trim). Going with dark wood for all the furniture if possible.

Halloween! - 3 months late...

Ok this is a little late but I've been busy and tired. Pregnancy does that to you. Here's a few pics from our first halloween in our house!

We had about 95 kids come by. It was good fun! Although we realized pretty quickly that we need to sit about halfway down the steps to give out candy so the really little kids don't trip on their way up and crack their skulls open. That would be bad.

Jonathan and I both love carving pumpkins. We wanted to do one for each step but that was a bit ambitious so we stuck to 4. I made a big batch of beef stew and we kept the horror movies going all night.

Our neighbors were very impressed with our decorating. Gwydion was kind enough to come over and supply us with some mini spots for the evening. We'd like to add fog next year. Of course it was nowhere near as cool as Chez Neumansky. We have some catching up to do.

Doorway for Baby!

So now that we have a baby on the way we need a little more access around the house. When we moved in the only way to get from one side of the house to the other was to walk to the entryway and cross over. We really need better access from the nursery to the kitchen. So Mom and Doug came down and stayed with us this last week and while they were here Doug helped us install a new doorway! 

Here's an adorable pic of Lucky explaining to my parents what she'd like us to do with the back yard. We tried to tell her that project was being put on hold for a while but she was being very insistent about the koi pond. 

BEFORE SHOT - So here is the back wall of our kitchen. The door you see goes to the small hallway that holds the office and 2nd bathroom. We decided to put the new doorway right in this corner so that we'd have easy access to the baby's room from the kitchen and by looking at the layout of the place it doesn't seem like this position would interfere with any electrical or heating stuff. and putting it in the corner wouldn't break up the wall in the kitchen or the baby's room. 

Here's Pandora helping mom and I lay out plastic. This was going to be one of those messy jobs so we cleaned out the kitchen as much as possible. 

The initial deconstruction went a little slow. Doug wanted to be careful we didn't cut through anything important or disturb any load bearing walls. We got lucky on this one. We didn't run into anything at all really. It just took a long time to get through the lathe and plaster which was underneath two layers of sheetrock. The first layer must have been the original from when the house was built. I'm guessing the second layer was from more recently. It was thicker. 

Eventually, the men started working from the other side of the wall. You can see Jonathan's "zombie shot" through the boards. 

Of course when the men got hungry Mom and I made sure they ate well. 

Here's the doorway with most of the framing in. Doug spent a lot of time online figuring all this out. There's a lot more to making a doorway that I thought! Having a house that is 115 years old means the walls are weird dimensions which doesn't make things standard or easy. You can see Jonathan is working on the threshold where there's linoleum and wood to dig out. Our neighbor said he might have a spare piece of oak that he could fit in there for us. 

AFTER SHOT - And here is the almost finished doorway, before and after sheetrock! Jonathan has been plastering the seams for a couple days now. Eventually we'll paint. (that's another blog entry)

And now we have a doorway! It took a week but it got done! Thanks again to the parents! It was great that you could help us out! 

New Addition to the House!

So in about 7.5 months we'll be getting a small new addition to the house! That right there in the picture is our future demon spawn! We're super excited! The Dr. says it's the right size and I even got to see the blood flow already! This week it's about the size of a raspberry. More updates to come!

Black Sabbath Pancakes 2009!

Instead of going to Burning Man this year, a lot of us old folks decided to stay home where it's clean. Actually, Jonathan and I are just broke from buying a house and don't have any vacation time left... and we wanted to be clean. But of course, old traditions die hard. We decided to bring the desert to  Alameda for one day! We set up the stereo, busted out the pancake mix, and had ourselves some Black Sabbath Pancakes, just like it used to be at Burning Man! Well almost...

Our food choices were a little healthier than the usual sprinkles and gummy worms. Of course there were mimosas and coffee vodka! 

Poop! GUNS! And FIRE!

Christine even made it all the way back from the desert in time to play with us for a while!

Once it got dark we headed over to Chez Neumansky and enjoyed the super pretty fire lounge!

All the pictures from that day can be viewed here:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=jdl5k87.1xpf23iv&x=0&y=-u6m8p6&localeid=en_US