Heathbar's Hearty Weblog

Unlike Friday night, I actually got some sleep last night and was in full nesting mode today. I think I swept the kitchen floor 3 times this morning.

No pictures yet, but I spent most of the day making a crib skirt, packing the hospital bag, and doing some more nursery cleanup. As of today there are no more crafting supplies/Rubbermaid storage towers/etc in the baby’s room. The closet still has some boxes of fabric and fiber, but we literally have nowhere else to put them at this point, and there’s room now to hang the Grifflet’s clothes, at least. I need to buy some peel and stick velcro to finish up the crib skirt, since that’s how I want to attach it to the crib frame, but it’s otherwise ready to go. I have plans for a little matching window valence too, but that should go pretty quick.

I did finish up a quick hat to match the sweater that I knitted for little Griffin (note that the pompom on top was Jag’s idea!).

And the second wool soaker wrap is done, too, except for the Applix closures.

I’m currently mulling over what to knit next. I have a ton of baby sweater patterns downloaded and printed, and I’d like to knit another type of soaker to see if we end up liking it better.

On a semi-related note, I keep running into references to “push presents” lately (see the Wikipedia article for details if you’re not familiar with the term, I wasn’t). Does this seem…just sorta creepy and tacky to anyone else? Seriously, women are really signing up for “push present” REGISTRIES???

Having a kid is really expensive, and it seems pretty stupid to blow a chunk of change on some kind of thanks-for-enduring-the-pregnancy bribe at a time when money is flying out the window. Do people really need some kind of material reward for every frigging thing they do these days? Biology isn’t “fair”; being female, there’s nothing I can do about being the one to endure the various inconveniences of being pregnant, and I fail to see how that translates into “I deserve a pair of overpriced diamond earrings”. If Jag wants to make me happy after the baby’s born, he can take me out for a sushi dinner or get me a 4-pack of Guinness draft cans. And change a couple extra diapers.

This turned out to be a much busier weekend than we expected. On Saturday we drove to my old townhouse to check on things and see if there was any remaining cleanup to do. It turned out we’d somehow left a bunch of empty boxes and old computer equipment in one of the spare bedrooms, so we ended up making 2 trips to the dump/recycling center. Then we discovered that 2 of the toilets had stopped working. I was able to fix one with a bit of joggling things around, but the other one broke completely as soon as Jag started poking at the innards, not very surprising since all 3 toilets are probably original to the 30-year-old house. It’s very clear from looking things over that the 2 full bathrooms are going to have to be completely redone before I can even think of selling: new tubs, toilets, and sink/vanity and floor replacements.

We stopped by Home Depot afterwards to get a feel for how much a redo would cost, and the parts themselves for nice basic replacements aren’t too bad, it’s just the labor that’s going to be a killer. If anyone knows of a good contractor who redoes bathrooms, let me know. I’m not looking to do anything fancy. With the Bean arriving in 4 months, there’s no way we’re going to try tackling this kind of renovation ourselves. If I can recoup the costs and break even when I sell, I’ll be happy.

When we got home, we found that Jag’s garage door refused to open. It turned out that the big spring on the door had broken (yet another nasty repair that we didn’t want to deal with ourselves). We found a likely-looking web site and Jag used their online form to request a repair quote. A mere twenty minutes later, someone had called and we’d set up an appointment for Sunday. The place we used was http://www.garagedoorspecialist.net/ and we would definitely recommend them! We still can’t believe they called us back on a Saturday afternoon and showed up on Sunday for a totally non-emergency call.

The garage repairman showed up today to replace the spring, which led to the exciting discovery that the doorbell was broken. After the repairman left, Jag ran out to Lowe’s to get a replacement and did the swap with our pal Frankenstein looking on in amazement.

The weekend wasn’t all doom and breakage.

I spun some more of the merino-bamboo on the new drop spindle. Jag suggested winding it onto one of my spinning wheel bobbins in case I wanted to ply it. I think I’ll end up leaving it as singles, but it’ll be much easier to skein it up this way.

I also worked on my Dad Secret Project. Dad should not click on this link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hsarik/4087869650/in/photostream/

Let’s see…we found what is possibly the world’s awesomest candleholder last week. It’s gnometastic! Jag told me he’d still have married me even if he had known we’d be buying this less than 2 weeks after the wedding. That’s love for you.

Jag tried to get some reading done, but the couch was taken.

He ended up settling for the love seat, even though it was a little on the small side.

Of course, within about 10 minutes he had to share that, too.

Last but not least, I made a big tray of chicken pot pie with herbed biscuits on top. It was deeelish, especially since we got pretty hungry while waiting 45 minutes to eat it due to some excitement going on at Jag’s work. Yay for working in IT.

Tomorrow starts Turnip Week (week 17) for the Bean, according to the babycenter.com How Big is Your Baby? slideshow. I think this is my favorite food item comparison, at least until Rutabega Week (week 25).

The Bean is the size of a turnip this week

Tomorrow is also when we’ll be having the level II ultrasound, which barring any excessive modesty on the Bean’s part should probably give us a definitive gender reading as well as detailed views of the brain and other organs and some hopefully less scary face shots. I’m looking forward to this one.

The wedding planning stuff is in full insanity, I mean, swing. I ordered some shoes (finally) and froofy girly wedding stockings this weekend, and we met with the florist yesterday and got the flower stuff settled. The silver tussy-mussy bouquet holder Jag’s mom bought me came in on Friday by some miracle, so we were able to take that with us and just leave it with the florist to make sure the bouquet will fit. Tomorrow after work, we meet with the wedding minister to discuss the ceremony. And Tuesday morning at 8am, we have a 30-minute appointment to do some tastings and make the cake arrangements at Mad Hatter. I think there are still some details to hash out with the restaurant, and I still need to buy some combs for my hair. And I’m still knitting on my “something blue” shawl, which I want to have available in case it’s chilly on the wedding day. I’m way more than halfway there now, but I really need to get this done so I’m not blocking and drying it at the last minute.

In the meantime, I bought a bunch of autumn leaf garlands and other decorations at Michael’s (50% off!) to spruce up the wedding site, and we’ve spent many hours cleaning up the study and its closets and moving stuff out of the craft room/future nursery into the study and other parts of the house. It’s slow going due to the sheer amount of old paperwork that has to be sorted and shredded, but we’ve moved all my fabric (which filled up fifteen 15″x15″ wire cube units and now lives in an almost equal number of big plastic bins) and one of the bookshelves out of the nursery. I’ll be working on the yarn next. At least yarn is relatively light.

Does anyone need a nice set of computer speakers (with subwoofer) or a black wooden double-drop-leaf table from IKEA (a little banged up, but could easily be repainted)? If you say yes, they’re yours.

I seem to have gotten at least some of my spinning and knitting mojo back. I finished plying up around 300 yards of the blue/gray handspun today, which added to the first bobbin of approximately 250 yards, should be enough to make a Carol’s Clever Little Shawl. Here it is in the very early stages.

I’m really happy that you can see the blue color shifts after the yarn is knitted up. It should be a subtle but interesting effect in the shawl.

I’m also at the point where I need to divide the front of the Lutea Lace-Shoulder Shell to start the eponymous lace shoulder bits. I tried it on for the first time today and the fit is fine; I could have gone down a needle size, in fact, but maybe a little extra ease won’t be a bad thing in the next few months.

On another topic that’s occupying my mind this weekend, if someone had told me 3 months ago that I would be rigorously researching the pros and cons of all-in-one, prefold, pocket, and fitted cloth diapers, bookmarking patterns for nursing pads, reading up on swaddling techniques, and comparing different types of baby slings, I’d have told you that you were out of your flipping MIND.

Jag is to blame for this, since he left his copy of The Sagas of Icelanders laying around where I could find it and start reading in total fascination, but the working name for the little bean is Thorbeana for a girl, and Thorbean Monsterbeard for a boy. (There totally was a historical Thorolf Monster-beard. Icelandic nicknames were the coolest.)