New Projects & New News

So I've got several projects in the works apart from the big "Build baby a bureau" and "clean the nursery" projects. One of them involves putting something on the walls of the nursery, which apart from that awesome green paint are blank canvasses at the moment.

I've wanted to put an alphabet poster up on the wall since my ideas about the nursery started coming to me. I did mega-research. Since the room was not going to be a pastel haven with lots of cute little fluffy animals, I needed to find an alphabet poster that would be a little more modern. It took a long time. A very long time. And when I finally found what I liked, it led to the question of, "WHAT!?" Seriously. Here is the poster I like. See any problems with it? Like the $85 price tag and it doesn't even come framed!?

Yeah. Not good. But if there's one thing I pride myself on, it's that I'm a pretty savvy shopper, especially on line. If there's a bargain to be had, I will usually find it. But I searched high and low and I couldn't find this poster for cheaper. Not even on Ebay.

I turned to my friends at Amazon.com Nothing. But they did offer a glimmer of hope. They didn't offer the poster, but they offered a set of notecards with the Binth alphabet on them, one card per letter, at a total cost of $16.95. (They'd be cool just as postcards, forget anything else! Want a set? Click here).

So baby project #1 is to make these into a poster or set of posters somehow and mount them on the wall. They're beautiful and I love the colors and the fun drawings, especially I is for Inchworm :-) And L for lobster is a nice nod to his New England heritage. I think this is going to be a lot of fun to put together.

I was also on a hunt for a baby book for him. It is kind of a pain in the butt to keep up with those little projects, but my mom made them for both my sister and I and they are something I cherish. I did some book store hunting, but most everything included "Here's how mommy found out she was pregnant." I did find one book that said, "Here's how we found out we were expecting you" which was good, but then it said, "Here's what Mommy was craving"... Not so good.

I was pretty sure that there must be adoption memory books out there, and so again turned to Amazon.com and started looking. Voila! There were several options, but ultimately I decided on Our Chosen Child by Judy Pelikan and Judith Levy. I like the design of it a lot, and last night Michael and I looked through it and read it together and much of it we can fill out already. It was kind of silly though, it goes all the way through the teen years (I think just in case you adopt an older child) and then adds a page for "your special day" and I said, "My God, I don't even want to think about him getting married" and burst into tears! Yeah, I'm a mess.

I also got a hanging photoclip mobile and I thought it would be fun to get B. a disposable digital camera and ask her to take a series of pictures that we could turn into a mobile and hang in his room. We'll see how she feels about that project.

Yesterday while I was blogging about the hell our nursery had become, the phone rang and it was B.! She was calling with an update about her Monday doctor's appointment. She went and told them that she was having a lot of trouble breathing and they said it was probably because the baby is a pretty good size and was pushing on all those muscles. Still, they decided to send her for a sonogram, so she went over to the hospital (Darn it! I MISSED IT!) and they did a sonogram (he still didn't want to show off his junk, so they still can't confirm 100% that it's a boy, but he better be, we have a LOT of boy clothes now). They estimated his current weight to be 9 pounds 6 ounces. Now everyone is telling me that it could be off either way by a pound, but 8 pounds 6 ounces is still a big baby, as is 10 pounds 6 ounces! B. said when she heard that news, she started crying, she is afraid of having to push out a baby that big and of having to have a c-section. I tried to offer her words of reassurance, but really, what can I say!? "Good drugs and a bottle of champagne afterwards?" She made me swear I wouldn't videotape the birth--which I hadn't planned on--and said I could shoot all the video and take all the pictures I wanted to after the fact, but not during 'the action' as she calls it. She also said that the hospital told her she could have 3 people in the labor and delivery room with her and she told the hospital that her first 2 picks were us, so they are aware of her plans.

So that's where we are right now. I am going to have to experiment with Blogger's privacy settings--we feel it is most important to keep B's privacy in highest regard. She is not computer savvy, and so we don't want to do anything that she wouldn't want us to in terms of posting pictures, etc. to a public space, but at the same time, we want to be able to share our joy at his birth and share photos with our nearest and dearest. I know Blogger will allow us to make this entire blog "by invitation only" which would mean you'd have to let me know you want access to the password. What I'm wondering is if we can just protect certain posts, so that if we got pictures of us with B as a family after the birth, we could just protect those posts with her image in them.

Other items we are discussing--our first date night! We have a tentative date planned for May 13th to go to a concert in DC, just waiting to speak with the ticket office about happy handicapped seating and then it's official. Anyone wanna babysit? :-)

We've also been getting strange calls from strange numbers in the middle of the night, so we're thinking we need to start packing for when the time comes that we do get The Call. Even if we just pack up cameras and baby gear and then only have to worry about our own clothing, etc., at least we're that step ahead of the game. So this is the game plan. We've been talking about it for a while, but we just haven't done it yet! So time to do it.

Our new freezer arrived yesterday, so we are probably going to renew our BJ's membership and start buying items in bulk--hopefully they have formula there, which should cut down on the cost considerably, although B. has offered us her formula vouchers, so that should help a lot too. When my mom comes to stay, I want to do a lot of cooking with her so we can load up the freezer and then I'll be able to just pull meals out and heat them up without worrying about it too much.

All baby's laundry is done except his cloth diapers, but I plan to use disposables for a few weeks while we get adjusted and then transition to cloth, so I'm not worried about that for now. Our washing machine died a painful death last night (it's less than a year old!), so it's being repaired tomorrow and then we can wash our clothes and be ready to roll in the event something happens soon! I'll keep everyone posted about going private and how to contact me to get put on the privilege list :-)