Belly pic - 20 weeks 2 days

Been meaning to post this for over a week now. Lori took it on Feb. 6 when she was at my house. I'm going to be huge by June! Makes me glad I haven't bought a bunch of maternity clothes yet. They wouldn't fit by the end of this pregnancy.

Without further ado, my glorious, already big belly. And don't even try to say it's not. I have already misplaced my toes. So don't even try to lie and say I'm not that big yet. Trust me, this picture does not do my belly justice. It's obvious to strangers, even when I wear a t-shirt, that there's more in there than Quizno's and chocolate cake. Lori's mom predicts a good eight pounder or more if this keeps up. At least it appears he'll be a good healthy weight at birth.


Today, I am 21 weeks and 4 days along. This leaves 129 days until my due date. This morning, my weight was 155.8. This makes a total weight gain of 11.2 pounds. According to the American Pregnancy Association, total weight gain so far should be 9 to 19 pounds, so I guess I'm right on track. I'm not holding my breath, though. I bet I make up for being in the lower half of this "normal" range before delivery. :) As long as I'm somewhere in this band, and Roberta says all is well, I guess that's good enough. This also means I can continue with my daily chocolate cake time, too.

Out of the last 8 days, I've worked in the baby's room for at least a few hours a day (most days, several hours) every day except Valentine's day. I was tired, so we took the day off. So far, we have washed the walls (Michael has become OCD about this. He's washed them once with me, and probably three more times solo.), cleaned the carpet I hate so much (want to put down hard wood if we have the money in the budget right now), put together a shelf/drawer set we bought at Lowe's, put together the changing table, hung new curtains and blinds, organized all our baby stuff in the furniture we have so far, put up a new ceiling fan and light in the dormer, put up a new light in the hall at the top of the stairs, hung a shelf in the bathroom upstairs, and painted shapes (circles, stars and ovals) to go on the walls. Today we hung most of the shapes. I kept several to use to fill in the walls after we pick up our armoire (waiting at Wal-mart right now) and crib (somewhere in "shipped" land, between the warehouse and store) and hang the wooden letters we bought to spell out the baby's name on the wall above the crib. Tomorrow we will go grocery shopping and pick up our 140 pound armoire that has to go upstairs before we put it together. Hopefully I can convince my husband that we need to open it and take it up a couple of pieces at a time. Michael and Bobby had a rough time with getting the changing table upstairs in the box, and it was 30+ pounds lighter.

Well, time for bed. I don't have to go back to work until Friday morning. 14 days off is nice. :)

A preview of the baby stuff bought today

Ok, so I jumped on the 'net to "approptiate" some pics as a preview of today's aquisitions. Without further ado, the pictures.

Our lamp.

We bought only the blanket from this set. We didn't bother with the rest. I'm creating our own set, from pieces from here and there.

And we got this blanket.

More to come later!

Bought stuff for our nursery today.....

So, we got our income ta refund deposited today. We used it to buy baby stuff. When we got to Babies R Us and Michael saw all the beautiful blue and brown stuff, he asked if we could change the colors of the nursery. SO guess what? Since I LOVE the color combination already (I want to do our bedroom in blue and brown), we changes our minds. So now everything will be blue and brown. We got blankets, sheets, baskets, clothes, stroller, carseat, high chair, playpen, swing, and I don't know what all else. We spent over $900 there. Three buggies later, the back seat and cargo area of our car were full. I'll post pics later, after I unpack everything and put it all together.

Then we came home, balanced the checkbook so I wouldn't forget, and ordered our furniture. Over $800 of furniture. Pics to come of that, too. I'll have to go swipe the ones off the website, since I have to wait for all of that to be shipped.

Michael had a cool idea for the walls. We aren't painting them. He wants to take 8 or 10 inch strips of wood and paint it blue. Then stencil on a brown pattern TBD. Then put it up on the walls about halfway up, kinda like a really wide chair rail. He thinks this will give the walls some much-needed color. I agree. So we'll be doing that, after I find stencils I like.

Since we changed the colors of the nursery, I guess the red carpet has to go. Yay! I hate that carpet. Later we'll be putting down hardwood like we already have downstairs. I want to do both bedrooms upstairs like that anyway, so this will be a good excuse to get one of them done.

Pics of all the new stuff to come later. We need to wash the walls and steam clean the carpet before we unpack everything and put it all together. Maybe a few days or more before we get all that done. Michael doesn't want to be tripping over everything while we clean. Can't say I blame him. And yes, we're going to go ahead and steam clean the carpet, because it'll be a few months before we rip it up, and we con't want all our nice, new baby stuff to smell from the smells trapped in the carpet. Stupid dog and his habit of peeing and pooping in the house at night. That room will now be off-limits to the little ankle biter!