Four Months!

Happy July, everyone!  Our little four-month-old had a busy month--she's learning to grasp, practicing sitting and standing with some assistance, talking (a. lot.), and perhaps cutest of all:

She's found her feet!!  Seriously, I had no idea that this discovery would be as darling as it is!  Kate's personality reveals itself to us every day.  She is very independent, and I suspect we have years of "I can do it myself" ahead of us!  She prefers to hold a bottle herself, though she did give in and let Daddy help this weekend when she wanted to eat and play with those toes at the same time!

Kate's four-month doctor appointment is scheduled for later today, so I'll be back with official measurements then! In the mean time, enjoy this collage of her monthly pics--

Top left = 1 month; Top right = 2 months; Bottom left = 3 months; Bottom right = 4 months

A much longed for addition...

Yes, it's been nearly a month again, and once again I've had several posts in mind but have failed to actually type them up.  I'll continue to think about them and might even get some written and posted!

Anyhow, on to the much longed for addition I mentioned in the title.  No, I don't mean Kate this time.  I mean this addition:

Remember when J and I painted our deck and had a miserable time with it?  Well, the following year, when we should have repainted it (apparently once you've made the horrible choice to paint your deck (thanks, PO), you have to do so every year to keep it looking nice), we decided not to.  Quite frankly, I don't remember why.  Maybe because I was in the middle of a career crisis?  Or because the bathroom remodel was too time-consuming?  Whatever the reason, by 2011 we realized that a new deck (one that we wouldn't paint) was needed.  That April, we started sketching ideas and talking about what we had in mind.  Those discussions and sketches continued for months. I had folks out periodically to give us a quote, but I was never happy with the number (or the service, for that matter).

Last fall, when we had the gutters done, I asked the contractor for yet another quote.  We discussed what I had in mind and he said he'd give me a call.  Well, he didn't.  I didn't mind, as we had other things on our minds, but as spring (and the baby) rolled around, we realized that we couldn't put a little one out on the old, splintered deck to learn to crawl and walk.  I started asking around for recommendations and came across Deckadent Designs, a local company who built a deck for some friends of ours.  After nearly two years of waiting, these guys gave me a decent quote and could start quickly.  (By "decent" I mean I completely choked, but acknowledged that in the years of dreaming my plans had grown grander and the quote still came in less than some of our earlier quotes.)

So now, two years after we first discussed rebuilding the deck, we're enjoying this new addition to our home.  The addition prompted J to power wash and seal the fence and me to repaint the entry to the basement.  There are still things to do to the exterior of the house (move/paint/destroy? the storage building and finish the other planting bed out front to name two), but we are feeling pretty good about our progress on the house.

P.S.  I really need to write a complete deck building post, complete with pictures and the obligatory "PO's crazy contributions to the old deck" story.

Introducing...

Yes, it has been entirely too long since we updated here.  I thought we were only a month off, but it turns out that it's been nearly two months.  I blame the first three weeks off on the rush of work and volunteer obligations I wanted to finish before taking off on maternity leave.  I blame the last month on this little one.  I'm sure you'll agree she is worth the absence.

J and I are thrilled to introduce Kate to you all!  She was born Saturday, March 9 after a blessedly short and easy labor and delivery experience.  We suspect that 'short and easy' part was due in large part to our childbirth course, Hypnobabies.  The course focused on relaxation and visualization, and we highly recommend it to prospective parents, particularly those hoping to go med-free.  While our short labor after arriving at the hospital didn't leave us with much opportunity to put our lessons into practice there, I am confident that our preparation was key in getting us to the hospital after a pretty easy (and also short) laboring time at home.

The last month has been quite an adjustment for us, but honestly, we are very aware how easy a baby Miss Kate is.  She sleeps well (and often!), has a sweet temperament when awake,  and seems to be hitting all of her developmental milestones right on schedule.  We are certainly blessed!

If you're interested in the chair above, you can read more about it in this Furnishing Friday post. The chair now lives in her nursery.  I'm planning to take a picture of Kate each month (ideally on the 9th, but we'll see how that goes)  in this chair to document her growth.

We've managed to knock out a few projects around the MP, too, and I promise to take pictures and get those posted sometime (hopefully soon!).

Full Term!

Every week for the past 33 or so I've taken a picture to map the little one's progress.  While I've not been sharing them online, I thought today's might be a good one.  Why?  Because today is the important 37 week milestone!  Now, I could totally get into a lengthy conversation about how that isn't technically right, but it doesn't matter. As far as the doctor's office is concerned, the parasite is 37 weeks 'old' today and has reached Full Term!  That means that, while we'd prefer she 'bake' at least another two weeks if not three or four, she could arrive at any moment and not be considered a preemie. 

For those of you who celebrate these things, today is also Ash Wednesday.  You might remember that last year, I gave up sweets and added steps every day to my walking regemin.  This year, neither of those seem practical (well, giving up sweets might be practical, but no one is going to hold a pregnant lady to that).  Instead, I've decided to strongly limit my facebook time and to be more intentional with the time saved through that.  Will that mean more blogging here?  I expect so.  I expect (and hope) that it also means more time reading books, more time devoted to keeping up my commitments, and in a few weeks, more time devoted to staring at a sweet little face.  I'll try to share that with y'all, too!

P.S.  J is giving up meat and cokes.  Pray for us both! :)

Almost done collecting furniture...

So as of today, we're seven weeks or so from adding a little person to our home, and as you may have noticed in last Wednesday's post, little people come with lots of stuff.  We'd already bought a baby bed, and we've moved two chairs we already owned into the nursery.  A bookshelf/future dollhouse is in the design stages (thanks, Dad!), and a hope chest has been identified (J's grandfather's grandmother's cedar chest!).  Really, all we have left (we think) is a dresser to hold the ever-growing pile of itsy-bitsy diapers and socks and onesies, etc.

I had a picture in my head (y'all know this never ends well), and had visited several retail establishments in town and online searching for an option.  The options generally fell into one of two camps--too expensive and too modern--though many also fell into the 'cheap, fake wood' camp, an option shared by both the expensive and modern dressers, though those descriptions also apply to real, solid wood dressers, too.  My mom and I visited a used-furniture store where I mused that perhaps I could find something like the picture in my head and paint it.  She pointed out that the picture in my head might be too ornate to paint.  She was probably right.

Monday, I popped into another used-furniture store right as they were closing and asked about dressers.  The lady didn't have anything like what I described, but commented that if I was willing to paint, I should "check out Uncle RayJay's".  Who? Where?  Uncle RayJay's, it turns out, is a relatively new used furniture/appliance shop in town that seems to deal a lot in solid wood used furniture.  I had time, and it was kind of on my way, so I drove over.  And found this:

Now, it's not as ornate as the picture in my head, but it has some pretty, girly lines to it.  And, should I decide to paint it, it's not so ornate that I can't easily do that.  I probably will paint it, as it is fairly beat up and has an ugly burn on the top, but the burn mark will be living under a changing pad for the next couple years anyway.

Also, it came with a mirror attached that won't fit in this room, but will be nice in some other room in our house.  Oh, and we will be swapping out hardware, which works well because I think those four drawer pulls across the top two drawers will work really well in the library on our built-ins!

The best part?  The entire dresser, plus delivery, cost us $130 (Uncle RayJay starts negotiating when you pull out cash).  As I told J, the mirror alone would have cost that at our local big box hardware store, and the dresser would have been twice that at any other used furniture store in town.

So that's the story of how we've finished collecting furniture for the nursery!  I think we'll end up with a basket or two for blankets and toys, as well as a small table and an ottoman for the reading corner, but it's so nice to have the big things out of the way!  Next up for the nursery: painting!

Blank slate

Back in 2008, when J first bought the MP, we knew that the smaller of the two rooms upstairs would be my office/eventual craft room.  We didn't really have a purpose for the other room.  When J received a bunch of UK-related framed art, I hung those on the walls.  Over time, it became an 'overflow guest room', with an air mattress or two ready to blow up as needed.  Finally, at some point, I started to think of the room as the future nursery, and eventually I pulled together an idea (a picture in my head) of what it might look like.

As time continued to pass, I finally broke down and started to fill the mostly empty room.  Left my 'real job'?  Well, those boxes from the office need to go somewhere...  New part time job comes with boxes and catalogs?  Well, there's room upstairs for that...  Don't feel like sorting through Christmas decorations to make new for the new ones?  Just store the new ones upstairs and pretend the old ones don't exist anymore!

You can imagine what the 'nursery' looked like once it was actually time to use it for real.  Lucky for me, my mom was in town this weekend and offered to stay over an extra day to help me sort through things.  Actually, she ended up serving as a runner while I touched each and every object in the room.  Do you remember that old show on TLC where they set up a Toss, Keep, Sell/Donate pile?  It was kind of like that, except I had a donate box, a trash bag, a box to send to my new office, a box to send home to mom and dad, and boxes for each level of the house.  Other than a break to run to Goodwill and the county electronics recycling facility, we spent most of the day sorting and cleaning.  By the end of the day, this is what we had:

Actually, at the very end of the day, this is what we had:

I'm kind of excited to have baby things in the baby room, and nothing else!!

Thanks, mom!

The best kind of leftovers!

After Saturday's food fest, we had a fair amount of leftovers to get rid of.  While sandwiches may be the standard leftover fare, we had my favorite kind of leftovers on Sunday morning--Thanksgiving Ebelskivers! 

These little Danish filled pancakes can be made with a sweet batter or a savory batter.  On Sunday, I started with the savory batter recipe, then folded chopped leftover turkey and some leeks into the batter.  For the filling, I used leftover cranberry-orange relish.

These were delicious!  (and at 5 points for three, a touch heavy on the WW points, but not nearly as many as Saturday's feast racked up!)

Election Day!

I remember going to the polls with my folks long before I was old enough to vote myself, and I look forward to continuing the tradition with our little one!  Here we were yesterday just after voting:

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

from the Melton Point

Anniversary Flowers--Yellow Roses

Remember back in July when I shared one of my anniversary arrangements?  Well, I actually bought those pretty pink and white roses the day J and I got our BFP.  Even though no one else knew, it was nice to have those flowers as an outward sign of our little (huge) secret.  Yesterday, I dropped by the florist to pick out another arrangement.  I've been in a few times since, but it's the first time I'd seen the owner since July.  Needless to say, she was surprised (and excited) by our now rather obvious news.  I'm so glad to have this special relationship with her, and so grateful for her help in picking out flowers whenever I drop in!  

On this trip, she'd just received some yellow (buttercup) roses, that made a great foundation for a Murray State-esque arrangement for our kitchen table!

Half-Baked!

Finally back with a picture!  Here's our baby girl!

Tap...Tap...Tap...

Anyone still out there?  I'm both surprised and shocked to see that it's been two weeks (TWO??) since my last post.  Last week was a busy one, at work and with DAR, so it was easy to push the MP to the back burner, but I still didn't realize just how long it had been.  I do apologize for that!  I'll be better (maybe not back to daily blogging or anything, but certainly better than a couple posts a month!) and promise to give an update on our container gardens before the frost sufficiently kills everything!

So what makes today special enough to actually write a post?

The baby is half-baked!  I'm officially 20 weeks pregnant today, and we go this afternoon for the 'big' ultrasound--the one where we get an extensive look at the heart and hopefully confirmation of the sex.  At our appointment four weeks ago we got a good guess about that, but have been holding off on any announcements until after this appointment.  If you popped in today hoping against hope for a picture, come back later today--I have one in mind to share!

So.  We're halfway there.  I guess it's time to actually start believing this might happen?

Harvest time!

If you've been reading the MP for any amount of time, you probably know how much I love going to the pumpkin patch in the fall.  J and I have a busy October, so I'm not quite certain when that trip will happen this year.  Luckily, this year we had our very own pumpkin patch out front!  Now, I told you about the ups and downs of front yard farming about a month ago, but I never came back to share the result:

I do regret not putting something in the picture for scale, but the pumpkin ias about ten inches in diameter and a foot tall.  And, thanks to J's diligence in regular turning, it is fairly pretty from all angles--no unsightly flat sides!  We're incredibly proud of our pumpkin, and we're still enjoying flowers on the plant out front (though no other pumpkins have developed).

Also in our front yard 'plot' we have the mums that I bought last year for the pot on the front steps.  I was certain I'd killed them a couple of times, but they are incredibly hardy!  I noticed buds last week, and am thrilled that they are starting to bloom!

What do you see?

Baby E turns two in a couple weeks (remember when I made his first birthday cake?  Seems like just last month!!), and that means another party is upon us!  His favorite book right now is "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" so his momma B is planning an amazing party to go along with this theme!  Last weekend she invited me over to help make some decorations.  She ordered colored Chinese lanterns and we added card-stock and other materials to create the animals mentioned in the book.  This is one of my favorites--the goldfish:

Check back in a few weeks to see what I have in mind for his cake!

In the MP news

So.  Many of you have seen this already, but I know some of you haven't, and I would like to 'come out' across all of the technology platforms J and I use...

Surprise!  I've been keeping a secret for the last couple of months.  And y'all, that has been hard!  The considerable drop off in posting is directly related to that--unless I had a very specific post in mind, I was at a loss of what to say knowing I couldn't say the one thing at the forefront of my mind and most conversations around the MP!

It's such a relief to be through the first trimester (a far scarier time than it needed to be, I'm sure), and an even bigger relief to be 'out'!  I'll catch you up in the next few posts with all the details (what few we know at this point).  The most important (it seems, based on what people have asked in real life and on facebook) is the due date:  March 6.  Obviously that's just an estimate, but we've had the benefit of several ultrasounds at this point, and the Parasite (our term of endearment for the little guy...or girl) is measuring right along with that timeline. 

Another apparently important detail: no, we didn't steal that road sign.  Obviously the best case scenario would have been to find one of these in its 'natural habitat'.  Since we couldn't, we borrowed this one from a local road contractor.  Don't steal signs and blame us for it!

The Pumpkin Patch

Well, I completely forgot that today was Wednesday until this evening, so this Wordless Wednesday is rather late (but at least I'm still posting on the actual day, unlike a few weeks ago...)

Anyhow, I realized last week that I've not updated you on our pumpkin patch!  In a nutshell, it's been a bit of a roller-coaster.  It looked great, and the lawn mowing company did a great job of avoiding it.  All was well.

Then a pumpkin (an actual fruit!!) started to grow.  We were very excited.  Imagine the thrill when the roller-coaster reaches that first summit--serious excitement!

And then I went to show the pumpkin plant to my mom when she was in town a couple weeks ago.  I discovered that the lawn company, in an attempt to clean up around the plant, week-whacked the main stem.  The gut wrenching feeling you get when the roller-coaster drops off that summit into nothingness is about what we felt.  J and I were crushed.  

Somehow, some way, the little pumpkin plant that could has continued to survive this tragedy (Yes, I'm exaggerating.  A little.).  We don't know how exactly, but it seems that the little plant is putting every resource it has into growing our little pumpkin, which is actually becoming quite a nice-sized pumpkin:

We're happy.  Tentative and unsure, but happy!  I'll keep you posted!

Gutters!!

So remember way, way back over a year ago (don't bother looking for the post; I found it for you...sixteen months back...) when I mentioned that the winter of 2010/2011 was rough on our gutters and that we'd have to replace them?  Well, we interviewed folks.  We asked our friends and neighbors.  We thought about, prayed about, forgot about it (except for every time it rained...then we remembered again).  Then, this spring (after spending all that money we'd saved on the refi and new cars), we decided to spring for covering the wood trim on the house in vinyl.  So we went back to saving money for a few months.  Earlier this summer, I got brave and started looking for a new gutter company.  Thanks to Angie's List, I found a guy from Frankfort who had great reviews.  I went out on a limb and called to see if he serviced Lexington.  The good news?  He was willing to!

So long story shorter, we got a quote right before the company owner went on vacation, then once he got back it took a couple weeks to work us into the schedule.  Much to my surprise, he showed up yesterday morning (bright and early!) with a crew of four guys to tackle our job.  It took them less than one day to remove the old gutters (actually, that part alone took less then five minutes...the front gutters basically fell off when they tugged...), replace a rotten bit of fascia, fabricate and install trim, soffit, fascia and gutters, and to install leaf guards on those gutters.  And the best part?  My Frankfort contractor cost us half what a Lexington contractor quoted us for the same work.

So without further ado:

The new color is called "sierra" and I asked for a sample so that we can get some exterior paint color-matched.  Those windows pop in a horrible way now!  Needless to say, I'm pleased!

A walk in the park

So usually on Mondays I walk with B and Baby E (BTW, B--at what point should I just say E?  'Cause I'm thinking he may develop a complex in his teens if he's still Baby E...).  This summer we've been joined by the Superkid, too.  This Monday, Baby E had his first(!) gymnastics class, so B asked if I'd hang with Superkid.  Not one to miss my walk entirely (or, quite frankly, one to know what to do with a six-year-old for an hour), I suggested we take Zep for a walk.  We had a great time (well, I did...I hope he did, too!) wandering around the walking trail in the park.  About a mile in, Superkid asked if he could hold Zep's leash.  I've seen him walk his own family dog before, and Zep was pretty tired at that point, so I figured it would be okay.  As he started to jog ahead, Zep trotted along, then suddenly glanced back.  I waved, they ran on, Zep turned around again.  I laughed, grabbed my camera and caught this picture on the fourth glance back.

It's as if he was completely sure about what was going on and why I was clearly allowing some small human take him away!  Luckily, they stopped just after this and let me catch up.  I took the leash back for a while, and the next time I handed it over, Zep seemed much more comfortable trotting along with his new friend!

It's the great pumpkin plant!

So...I was a day or two late in taking this picture and then I forgot to blog when I got to work.  So welcome to...Wordless Thursday.  Um...just go with it!

Remember last year when we had a pumpkin plant out front?  It ended poorly for the plant, probably because it kept being moved and its delicate little flowers fell off early.  I was so bummed that I decided to better our odds for this year, an after Halloween I dropped all our pumpkins off the side of the porch in hopes that we'd have another try.

Success!  In fact, thanks in large part to the mowers leaving it alone and just mowing around it, it's doing really well!  We've got more than half a dozen flowers and I'm hopeful something good comes of it!  If anyone has tips on how to ensure those lovely flowers turn into pumpkins, please let me know!  I'd love to be able to grow our own this year, and maybe even supply our friends!

Coolest Field Trip Ever

Remember last week when I mentioned that VBS was sucking my soul out of my body in the slowest and most painful way possible?  Oh wait, I was too busy to write that and too tired to think of the words anyway.  So yeah.  VBS.  Killer.  We have a three day VBS for all of our elementary aged kids, and quite frankly, it went really well.  There were hiccups, of course--any event has those--but really, I enjoyed the week and I think our children did, too!
The biggest hiccup had to do with Friday's schedule.  Initially, we planned a field trip to EKY.  On Wednesday afternoon, Fr. Johnnie said "oh the place we're going Friday has been condemned.  I got a voice mail."  Quite frankly, I thought he was joking.
He wasn't.
I learned on Thursday that it wasn't quite that dire, but that it was pretty serious.  The facility had a bat issue.  A family of a protected species of bat had taken up residence.  The Executive Director was, understandably, flipping out.  (My interpretation of her situation.  She might have been calm as a cucumber...but she didn't sound that calm.)  She was grateful when I suggested we would find another field trip.
As it was, no one was really looking forward to a two-three hour drive with little people, so we set about brainstorming local field trip ideas.  The conversation in my office went something like this:  Music (the VBS theme)... field trips... hmm... Recording studio?  Does Lexington have a recording studio?  I dunno, let me Google it...  Oh look, we do!  Oh!  This place actually looks cool!  Fr. Johnnie--call this guy!  One quick phone call later, we had a field trip scheduled.  And let me tell you, it was COOL!  I wish I'd taken a picture in the room with the sound mixing equipment, but I did grab this shot of the owner talking to our group in the drum room. (The room is big enough they can put a whole band in to record a 'live' take, but usually they don't.)

So, if you happen to find yourself needing to reord some music, I highly recommend Saint Claire Recording Company in Lexington.  They are set up to house overnight guests (some artists stay for as long as a month), so you can stay there and invite me over to visit.  The hot tub looked nice...

Anniversary flowers--July

It's been awhile since I shared a picture of my anniversary flowers, so I thought I'd pop in with my most recent bouquet--

The best part of this particular visit to the florist?  Being told that I'm not buying as much as J'd apparently intended.  The florist is fairly certain that I've got at least another year of fresh blooms coming my way!