4th of July

Matt and I had a really fun 4th. He had Friday off and we went to the huge outlet store that is pretty far away, but fun for a day trip. We went to the Motherhood, Old Navy, and Carter's outlets and found some really good deals! I bought 2 pairs of denim capris, another maternity cami, and a maternity dress. The other day I went back to the consignment shop I love and bought a couple of shirts so now I am totally set for the next couple of months. I've been really lucky to get things VERY cheap, I have an entire maternity wardrobe for less than half of what I'd normally pay for that many new clothes. Also, all of my maternity clothes are so cute! I love them. :-) I know have a hard time finding something to wear just because I have so many options. A new conundrum for me. It will actually be kind of sad when I'm not pregnant anymore and can't wear all of my clothes. Maybe I'll get to wear them next time around.

Matt also picked out a few onesies at the Carter's outlet. So cute! 2 have dinosaurs on them and one says "Wiggle" with a picture of an inch worm underneath. Our little wiggle worm. :-) I told Matt I need a shirt that says that with an arrow pointing at my belly. Evan has been moving around so much lately.

Saturday we spent the day relaxing around the house until we went to my parents' house for a cookout. After that we went to see the fireworks in the town they live near. They put on a great show and we had a great spot to sit and watch. It was a lot of fun! The weather was great this past weekend, much cooler than it has been. So it was the perfect temperature for spending time outside.

It's good that it's been cool the past few days because our AC is broken...again! We're hoping it will be fixed tonight. Yesterday the high was 86 degrees, but it was so humid and muggy. We also have a new stove. Matt's office manager was selling his flat glass top stove for very cheap. It wasn't even that old, but his family is completely renovating their house and getting all new appliances. We installed it on Thursday night and it looks and works great! I'm so happy to have it because it will be SO much easier to clean. Plus, it's great to have burners that are even. The ones on our old stove were tilted and it was hard to cook on.

Tomorrow we tour the maternity center at the hospital we'll be delivering at! I'm so excited!

u/s questions

I'm getting really nervous about my u/s tomorrow. And excited! I'm worried that there will be something wrong, but excited to see how much our baby has grown and find out the gender. I've been praying that everything's alright and will go smoothly.

Anyway, I have some questions about it. Does the technician record the u/s? Like, do they put it on tape for you to keep? I've heard of some doing this, even my mom has a tape of my sister's u/s. Also, do you think I should bring our camera so that we can record the screen and take pictures, or will the techs be annoyed at this? And does the doctor/midwife come in while it's happening to make sure everything is okay? All I know is that our u/s is at 2:00 and then we're meeting with a midwife at 2:30 to "go over" it. I don't really know what that means, but I'm guessing she'll talk about what we saw, etc. However, if she wasn't there, how would she know that it was all good?

My dad's birthday celebration was a lot of fun. We made him enchiladas and then my mom made strawberry shortcake and a chocolate ice cream pie for dessert. Matt and I bought him waterlilies for his pond and my mom gave him THIS, which is really cool! It will be perfect for him to use when he travels. I can't believe that I forgot to take pictures of him opening his presents! I just got one of the desserts and one of him being a goofball eating them. I'm really bad about remembering to take pictures at special events!

We put our new bedding on the bed the other night. Yep, we bought it last summer and just now put it on. We also just now cleaned out our bedroom, which has been a partial storage room since we moved in. We cleared off the dressers and our bedside tables of all the boxes, bags, and other random stuff. I'm so happy! It feels great that we are finally clearing the house up. It's never been completely clean since we moved. Everything was so hectic after moving in that I didn't immediately unpack and organize. We lived out of boxes until September and even then I pretty much just pulled things out and put them in corners or on table/dresser/counter tops.


I'm getting back on my feet now, finally. I've been much more social, I'm keeping things clean and organized, and I'm generally a happier person. I feel like my life is finally coming together for the first time in years after not being able to find a career and the miscarriage. Oh how I pray things continue to go smoothly, at least in the pregnancy/baby department. I know I can't expect my life to be perfect from here on out! Depression can consume a person's life and I'm glad I'm staying on top of it right now.

What a year

I just realized today that almost exactly a year ago we started TTC. Matt and I were talking about it when I was driving him to work and I couldn't help but smile when I thought about how excited and happy I was about finally TTC back then. But it still makes me sad to think that the happiness only lasted a couple of months, after that it wasn't the same. I always tried to stay hopeful that I would conceive soon, but I also always had in my mind, "I should be this far along, I should be doing this, I should be feeling this..." It isn't nearly the same as TTC before a m/c. It's also crazy to think about everything that's happened in a year. A lot of bad things, but a lot of good things too. At this point I don't say that I wouldn't have changed a thing. A lot of this past year has been a living hell that I wouldn't wish on anyone, no matter how much of a character development it was. On a positive note, I think the best thing that happened was that I became even more aware of what so many other women go through. I feel that I can be even more sympathetic. And that's never a bad thing.

To completely change the subject, we did so much cleaning and organizing this weekend! Matt was amazing, he helped out a lot. I couldn't have done it without him. We completely cleaned up the office, got rid of a lot of stuff that was taking up floor space. For the past month and a half we've had 4 office chairs in there!! Matt received 2 from a giveaway his office held back in January when they got new chairs. I really wanted to get seat covers or cushions before we started using them (because they attract cat hairs more than our other chairs!). So we haven't been using the new ones, the kitties have. We finally went ahead and started using the new ones even though I haven't been able to find seat cushions (we went to 4 different stores looking for them...no luck). Needless to say, the kittens are NOT happy about this change. They liked having their own chairs when we were both at our computers! We also took out the 2 cat beds that were on the floor that the cats never use anymore. What a big difference!

We also bought a new vacuum cleaner. For the past couple of months our old one has gone downhill. It was a cheap one to begin with, more like a dorm room vacuum than a whole house vacuum. The new one was worth every penny. It cleans so much better...so this is what it's like to have really clean floors! We bought some shelves for one of the closets and have been able to straighten up the living room and utility room with the new storage space. Matt cleaned the entire utility room yesterday. Amazing difference! Once again, he got everything off the floors. Even the kitties' food and water is up on the counter in there to get it off the floor.

We still have a lot to do, especially straightening up our bedroom and the nursery, but we're going to get there! It's so encouraging to already have more room and more order. We went to Good.will yesterday and got rid of a lot of stuff that's been sitting around the past couple of months. We had to borrow my sister's SUV to haul it all off! I didn't take before pictures (mainly because I was so embarrassed at the state it was in), but I did take after pictures to show off!

The closet at the end of the hall with the new shelves:


The office:


The kitty space (know what that spray bottle is for? lol And don't ask me why the CDs are on the scratching post too... there's nowhere else to put them so for now that's where they go):



My space (I was in the middle of writing this post when I took the picture):

The utility room (with Firefly in front of the food dishes of course):

Lemon vs Peach

I'm going to prove that lemons around here are smaller than peaches! I'm trying to decide if I should wait until peach season and then buy one of each and take a picture comparing or if I should just buy a lemon now to take a picture of since I think the lemons here are smaller instead of the peaches being bigger. lol! I asked Matt which is bigger, a lemon or a peach, and he said peach. I'm not the only one! Oh yeah, and I'm thinking of peaches that grow on peach farms, not the kind that grow on trees in our backyard. Those are a lot smaller.

I majorly threw up for the first time last night. That makes 3 times total since getting pregnant, and it was definitely the worst! The first two times weren't all that bad since I had an empty stomach. Yesterday I ate Mexican for lunch and dinner, stuffed myself at dinner, and then ate a lot of chocolate frosty. Yep...

I'm determined to do some organizing today. I want Matt and I to go buy some shelves and drawers and stuff and get to work! I'm ready for this house to be a HOME to me. I want it to be like our apartment that was so easy to keep clean. Our office at the apartment was always cluttered and the bedroom was sometimes cluttered (I had to go through and clean it every few weeks to get stuff off the dresser tops), but here the office, bedroom, and all the other rooms are super cluttered. I'm ready to just start throwing things away. If we haven't used it in the past couple of months it's going in the trash! That's a big step for this pack rat...

So anyway, I better stop procrastinating and get to work!

Big Plans

A week ago it was 30 degrees outside and snow was everywhere. Today it's 80 degrees! As a matter of fact, after I write this I'm going to go sit out in the backyard and read for awhile to enjoy the beautiful weather. If I get a tan in the process...well, I won't complain!

It's been 80 since Saturday. Needless to say, that means we've done a lot of yardwork this weekend! Our neighbors have been out too. It's so nice to have things back the way they should be. We've talked more to our neighbors this weekend than we have since back in October! I love our little community. We live in a huge neighborhood, but our little section is very friendly and social. We're always out working in our yards (our house and the houses around us have the best looking yards on the street!) and so we talk to each other a lot. I hate that the vehicle traffic is so busy in front of our house, but it's also nice that the pedestrian traffic is busy. We just live in a busy section, I guess that's good and bad. It is sometimes annoying when we're trying to get serious work done and keep getting interupted, but I'd rather that happen than live in a place where nobody talks to each other.

We chopped down the pump (also known as pompous or pampas) grass in our backyard (remember my post on pump grass on my old blog?). It already looks better even though we haven't pulled the roots up yet. It's going to be serious work...we're actually going to have to rent a bobcat to dig them up. We had 10 of them growing in one huge group. UGG! It's bad enough getting rid of one. We also trimmed all of the monkey grass so that it will grow back looking nice and fresh. We're actually planning on getting rid of a lot of it, but we're going to give some to our neighbors and my MIL, so we still trimmed it.

Before:

After: (it will look much better once we get rid of the roots and plant grass there!
We have started designing our new patio for the backyard! Right now the "patio" is awful looking. The people who lived here before (the original owners) must have owned a brick factory or something! There are bricks EVERYWHERE. It's very unorganized and haphazard. We're going to use the same bricks, but we're going to make it look much nicer, like a real patio. We're going to level out the patio area and place the bricks close together. Right now there's all of this white gravel all over the place, so we need to scrape that up and get rid of it. We went around counting bricks yesterday. It was hilarious!! We wandered all over the yard and kept finding more and more bricks, some out in the back of the yard under the trees, some buried in the flowerbeds, some randomly stacked in corners of the yard. We have 102 18"x18" bricks, countless regular sized bricks (at least 300, but we keep discovering more and more buried under plants and stuff, so I imagine we'll find more as we keep working on the flowerbeds), 39 12"x12" bricks, and 17 10"x10". We also have a lot in various other sizes, but we aren't going to use those for the patio. Matt found a software where you can make 3D designs for patios and landscape design so we've planned out most of the patio already. I'm going to try to get a screen shot of our plans when he gets home to show y'all! We still need to design a pattern with the various sized bricks. But before we begin that, we need to pull up the many, many bricks in the backyard and dig up the pump grass. After that we can get to work on our new outdoor space!


The patio as it is now. We haven't moved a single one of those bricks (except those 2 you see placed on top of the large bricks). That's how the previous owner placed them. Including those completely messed up looking ones in the lower left corner! What were these people thinking!?

The view of the patio area from the end of our driveway (obviously this picture was taken last fall, before the leaves fell and we cut down the grass). We just tore down that section of the fence (that separates the driveway from the backyard/patio). We're going to replace it with a much nicer looking privacy fence!

The view of the patio from one of our living room windows. We're going to replace this window with a French door that leads out onto the new patio! Obviously we'll get move the AC unit!



The patio that we're going to build is going to end where those large bricks end. Then all of the rest of those oddly placed bricks and gravel are going to be replaced with nice, neat looking grass!

This is the flowerbed between the patio and the house. We're going to cut down the bushes, move the AC unit, and get rid of the flowerbed altogether. In its place we're going to build a raised flowerbed/benches that run the length of the patio.

din din

I said "din din" instead of "dinner" the other night and Matt thought it was so funny. Now I call it that every once in awhile to hear him laugh.

Anyway, dinner with SIL and her family was good! She made chicken and pasta and salad and we brought some Italian bread over. I think it was all a great combination! I normally do not like Italian food much (it tastes bland to me, and I've had a lot of different types and from different places), but I enjoyed her recipe. I've actually kind of been wanting pasta lately (I don't know if it's too soon for cravings, but it just sounded good), so maybe my tastes are starting to change a little bit and Italian will be something I eat more during the pregnancy.

After dinner we played Scra.bble and I lost horribly. It was kind of embarrassing. I am not a big game player. I'm not competitive in the least and I usually have to make an effort to care enough to try. It's great because I'm not a sore loser, I never get upset if I'm not doing well. It's just that a lot of games aren't all that fun to me unless I'm playing with really fun people who spice it up. Like over Christmas my sister received Appl.es to Ap.ples and I played with Matt, Chris, Melissa, and my mom. We had so much fun goofing off. However, it's always more awkward to play games with people I don't know as well, especially one that is more "intellectual" like Scra.bble. I had bad luck though, after the first two times I drew letters every single letter I drew was worth 1 point. And I drew 7 "I"s (out of 9). lol

SIL actually doesn't have an apartment, it's more like a condo or townhouse. It's 2 stories and so cute! It made me miss our old apartment. I came home and felt like BLAH. There's still something about this house that isn't right for me. I can't place my finger on it exactly. Even after I clean, it still feels dirty to me. And I need to decorate the walls, but I feel like it isn't going to look good once I do that. It's so hard to explain. I am starting to think that maybe the walls are too dark. I like the green color a lot, but maybe that has something to do with it?? I've always had light colored walls in my apartment on campus and the one I lived in after getting married. My family also had mostly light or bright colored walls in their house. I hate to paint the walls...but it's starting to cross my mind.

And there's too much clutter here. I need to get to work on clearing things out a little more. I also have an idea for our utility/laundry/mud room. right now the water heater is in the room and is blocked from view by a screen. A screen that is very hard to sweep and vacuum around. And there's always this space back there that is dirty that I can't get to. So I want to build a small closet around the heater. Then we can close the door and there will be nice clean corners to sweep and clean around. Plus, we can use the closet for storage as well. Matt agrees with that idea so I'm hoping we can afford to put it into affect soon. Maybe if we can get that room cleaned up it will improve the feeling of the entire house.

On Thursday I'm getting together with an old friend that I haven't seen in years. I can't remember the last time I saw her! It was before Matt and I got married. I think it was when the second LOTR movie came out. Or maybe even the first??? She's back in town and doesn't have a job yet so we're finally getting together. I'm actually excited about it! I'm not a big social butterfly, especially if I haven't seen someone in a long time. But I'm really looking forward to this. I'm feeling all around more social, slowly but surely. Matt and I are planning on joining a small group at our church soon and I want to start getting together with some of my high school friends more often too. My friend is coming to the house on Thursday, which will be the first time someone outside of our normal group of friends (family members and guys) has come over. I'm a little nervous about that, but determined not to stress about cleaning or trying to impress her.

Okay, so can ya'll say CRAZY!!? I know I'm a weird person, but oh well! What did you do for the game last night? We went over to my parents' house to help my dad out with hooking up a new water heater and ended up staying for dinner and the game. My mom and I weren't going to watch it, but we went up to the TV room to see what was going on at the beginning of the second quarter and got sucked in. I thought it was a great game!! I was going for the Cardi.nals (yes, even though they beat the Pant.hers) so was a little disappointed at the end, but still impressed at how both teams played.