No Pictures....but hey at least I'm updating

Just realized if I didn't update this blog soon, I will have gone a month without an update. So what has been going on around the Phillips home well after our Ikea trip we have done the following:

1. I can't remember exactly when but we finished all but a couple of like 4 x 12 inch spaces of the wood floor in the dining and kitchen, I think Adam has mentally blocked that there is any more of that to do :)

2. We set-up our dining room table and chairs that had only been the boxes probably close to a year, and installed the light fixture above the dining room table.

3. We built the Ikea bookshelf for the office and started putting some stuff on it, but then I figured out I have way more decorative stuff (or crap as Adam would probably refer to it) than I thought so I kind of stopped that process until we are ready to actually hang pictures and do the fine detail decorating.

4. We finished the horizontal stripes in the nursery, we have a few places to touch up but no one else would probably even notice them, so I don't see that at the top of the priority list.

5. We got all of the plastic up off the floor and nursery clear of non-nursery items so that we could start filling it with the stuff Baby P actually could use.

6. One night Adam and our friend Cory cleaned everything up and built our closet organizer system (again from Ikea) and moved our recliner/glider into the nursery.

7. I had my first shower last weekend so once I got home I went through everything and started filling her closet and organizing everything else into piles based on where it should go (i.e. chest of drawers, kitchen, bathroom, car, etc)

8. This week we unpacked the chest of drawers from the boxes and assembled it, other than putting on the knobs it is done and ready to be loaded.

It's so fun, her nursery is really starting to look like a nursery, I know pictures would be nice and I will have to take some and post them soon. We still need to paint and hang the closet doors, finish sanding and then paint the bookcases, pick-up the crib and put it together (hopefully our task for next week), and then eventually I need to get window treatments and hang things on the wall. So really not that much, I feel like we might actually be ready to bring this baby home sometime soon.

As for the rest of the house, it is honestly a bunch of little stuff that once the nursery is done we can hopefully check off the list pretty fast.

This weekend is what Adam is calling our last free weekend EVER! I think that might be a little dramatic, but I'm going with 6 of my good friends to stay in a cabin in Brown County from Friday until Sunday and Adam is doing.....well I'm not sure....but I will assume it will have a lot to do with watching football and weather dependent maybe visiting a state park and doing some outside activities.

Other than that we are just staying busy with Birthing classes and showers, and I'm very thankful that the sciatic nerve issues I was having a week or so ago have disappeared. I think I have a very obedient child or God had mercy on me, b/c after pleading that she please reposition herself somewhere besides the left side of my sciatic nerve she miraculously moved last Friday night and I was overjoyed to be able to walk and move like a normal person by Saturday morning, just in time for my shower. I'll be 32 weeks next week, so not much longer before she is no longer able to cause Mommy any pain, at least not from the inside :)

A once in a long while shopping trip....

That is hopefully what a trip to Ikea will be for us, because if we went and spent what we spent today, very often, we would be living in the cardboard they use to pack your stuff.

So our adventure started with a trip to Cincy to visit the closest Ikea we have and we had planned out what we were getting. I had a list, and with their handy-dandy website, I was even able to note the aisle and bin where the merchandise could be found.

Items on our List:

Hermnes 8 drawer white dresser for the Nursery
Expedit bookshelf and some of the storage containers for the office
Antonius closet storage system for the Nursery closet

Items we ended up taking home that were not on our list:

A glass front kitchen cabinet (Lindingo style with glass)to put above our kitchen cart, we planned to put a cabinet up there but we were going to either DIY or pay someone to replace the solid doors with glass fronts, now we don't have that project anymore!

A really cute and very soft golden retriever stuffed animal for Baby Girl

A little farm set for our niece for Christmas, she is obsessed with Horses and Cows right now and the set had both of those.

Very cool chair pads for all the dining room chairs and the 2 bar stools

2 drawer sets for the Expedit shelf system

A little kids table and chair set, we figured the other little ones in our life can use it now and our little girl will also be able to use in a good year or so.

There was also just a plain mirror to put on the back of my closet door, but in the process of removing stuff from the cart, the clumsy pregnant girl, knocked it out of the cart and it went crashing down to the floor. We were too worn out to go get another one, so I guess I just left with 7 years of bad luck and no mirror.

A nice surprise of the day was that our good friends Kim and Eugene had already planned to travel to the same Ikea today, so we ended up finding each other in the store. We had lunch with them in the quite yummy yet very inexpensive cafeteria area. Eugene also offered to help Adam load the truck with all the stuff, what a blessing that was, I am no help these days, and some of those boxes were pretty heavy. It was funny b/c before running into Parks we actually ran into another couple from our church, I guess it was Indy Common Grounders travel to Ikea day!

As if that wasn't enough damage done to our bank account, Adam thought it would be a fine idea to stop at L. Fish on the way home just to see if they had any glider or rocker recliners we might like. We actually did find one that we agreed was aesthetically pleasing, wasn't huge and would be to scale in the nursery, and most of all it was super comfortable. So that was our final purchase of the day.

At least I can now say that we have virtually everything we need for house and nursery (with the exception of the crib which I'm ordering this weekend). Anyone really good at assembly??? We have more items to assemble then I think we are going to care to assemble :)

I guess next up will be pictures of all these things in their proper place in the house.

Hello 3rd Tri and Nursery Sneak Peek

I have officially entered my 3rd trimester, this little girl is making her arrival in hopefully no more than 3 months :) I have heard the comments "Ok, now I can really tell you are pregnant" or "I can finally tell you are pregnant" a lot the last couple of weeks. I didn't think this bump was hiding anywhere for awhile, but I guess I finally hit the large enough to not confuse weight gain with pregnancy spot?

Here is the honorary belly picture:



We've also made some headway on our little girl's bedroom. Adam got done with the insulation, drywalling, and drywall finishing on Friday and then my parents came up and helped get the nursery to a point to paint. On Sunday we did some paint sampling with the little samples you can get at Lowes (what a lovely little invention) and determined our initial wall paint was too dark so we decided on something a bit lighter and then tried out our idea for the horizontal stripes. Adam then went to town and painted the whole rest of the nursery walls last night. We have some touch ups to do and then need to put the stripes on the wall. After that we will put up all the mouldings (window, door, and baseboard). Then it will be time to actually get the real stuff into the nursery.

A blank slate:



Our little horizontal stripe project:



Nursery nearly completely painted:

And the Mommy madness begins

Last night I found my inspiration for the nursery and thus I came home and searched for all of my other items so that I have everything ready to go when Daddy gets done with that mudding and sanding he has been working on this weekend.

Here is what I think we will be using for furniture pieces:

Crib

Dresser (we'll put a changing pad on top of this for the changing station)

Glider/Recliner

And this was our $24.99 inspiration that we found at, of all places, Lowes. We are planning to paint the walls the green color and then do some horizontal lines in the chocolate and plum color:

This is what I'm planning to use for the bumper and crib skirt:

And these for the sheets, I think it is fun that since I don't have a crib set, I can kind of make things fairly interchangeable:

And finally possibly this wall decal somewhere on a wall, maybe above the crib, but I would do the plum colored owl and chocolate colored branch:

I had initially considered doing more of a shabby chic thing, and this is a complete divergence from that, but I really like the different pieces. I think it looks childish enough without being too babyish, and yet still being girly enough.

Now if I could just get in there and put my thoughts into action!!! Patience, Mommy, Patience.

Finally a house update...Bath #2 and Laundry Room

We haven't just been sitting around watching my belly grow, we actually have been trying to get this house done so that when the Little Miss comes along there aren't anymore projects (or at least big ones) to complete.

After finishing the pantry (our last house post), we took some old kitchen cabinets and sanded them down then painted them white and put new hardware on them. We then put them up over the washer and dryer for storage and added a clothes bar for easier hanging up of clothes as we take them out of the dryer.

For old times sake here is the original laundry area when we moved in, we had the gorgeous wallpaper, lovely carpet, and even the occupants paint and kitty litter.

And here is our handy work.....

The bathroom was a much bigger project. We had to virtually rip everything out, reframe the room and rerun plumbing and electrical since we were going from a tiny half bath to a slightly larger 3 piece bathroom.

Again here was the loveliness we got to start off with:

After Adam had ripped everything out and before the rebuild started:

And our final product.....it really did end up being a nice bathroom, but it is really hard to take pictures of a long skinny room so just use your imagination on where everything is :)

The only thing we are waiting to complete is getting a shower door ordered and put in, but other that we are done with this little area!!!!

We have since started getting the nursery to a place where I can do my Mommy duties and make it look like a nursery. Dad (Adam) is doing the manly stuff right now like blowing insulation into the walls and finishing some drywalling. The insulation is done and the drywalling just needs to be taped, mudded, and sanded and then we will be ready for me to do the decorating, wooohoo!!

24 weeks .....The second trimester is almost over

I can't believe it has already been 24 weeks and that we only have 16 weeks until this little one is going to be making her arrival.

I read somewhere that my uterus is the size of soccer ball this week and Baby Girl is getting close to being a foot long and is weighing in at a whopping 1.5 lbs. If at this stage, she were to be born, there is a chance of survival with modern medicine, we of course are praying that she stays put for a few more months.

I had my monthly doctors appointment and everything looked good:

Blood pressure - good
Weight - good
Measuring right on schedule with my estimated due date
No signs of pre-eclampsia or any of those nasty pregnancy things

At my next appointment I get to drink the lovely sugary nastiness and then get my blood drawn to make sure I don't have gestational diabetes, this is just one of the normal tests as all you Mom's out there know. After my appointment in early September I start going every 2 weeks and then we are taking our prenatal (birthing and breastfeeding classes) in early October. I have a feeling that this fall is going to fly by!!

Happy Wife....Happy Life

Isn't that how the saying goes? That is what I said to Adam at about 11:00 pm on the night he finished the pantry and I was finished unloading our lovely plastic tote of food into the blessed little pantry.

I then realized I had lived for over a year and half with all of our food either in this large plastic tote seen below or on our counters. If you know me I might be disorganized in other ways but a messy kitchen drives me nutso, so how I lived this long without organization in my kitchen I don't know.

I think Adam was a little surprised at my cat like reflexes (from a 5 month pregnant woman at 10:00 pm) to unload that tote and some of our cabinets into the newly finished pantry closet.

It has been so nice to see what food we actually have and to not be afraid of spilling an entire box of spaghetti into the monster tote while looking for a can of salsa! I think all in all I'm an easy wife to please if all you have to do is put a few shelves in a closet and call it a pantry!!!

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of the bathroom and laundry room to put in the blog soon, they are nearly done. We have actually been refinishing and painting some cabinets that were in the old kitchen for the laundry area, that process has been much easier than I thought it would be. Adam's answer to that was that sanding and painting cabinets are things normal people do in their normal home updates, not our normal crazy shanangins, he's right!