This baby better come soon (but not TOO soon, of course)

You may have noticed a dry spell on TBHNP lately. That's because we've been nesting our butts off and I haven't had much time to keep current on email, much less contribute to the world outside my house.

Thanks mainly to the frantic hormonal nesting urges of pregnant ladies (I'm not naming names), we've been doing a lot around the house. Some of it was quite necessary, such as finding a place for this new baby to sleep, and cleaning and whatnot. That seems important. The rest was probably not bad stuff, but might not have been as critical. Not critical, but who am I kidding? If it didn't happen now, it certainly wasn't going to happen a couple months down the road. The other stuff has mainly consisted of rearranging things, getting rid of things, and then turning around and buying more things, all at a pace we've never managed before, even when moving.

The rearranging seems pretty straight forward, or should have anyway. We have a three bedroom house, with one room previously being an office/den/guestroom. We toyed around with giving each of the boys his own room and doing something else for an office. Then I took a look at our house and reality sunk in. The best I might be able to do is shoehorn something into the garage, but realistically, that ain't gonna happen. So we settled on putting the boys together in the mid-size room and taking the small one (which was the Mizz's) and making it into a rather cramped office and guest room. Needless to say, the night before some friends were coming to help move furniture, we decided to leave the Mizz alone for the time being since he has seemed somewhat stressed with all that is happening. The current office would become part office/part nursery. The baby will probably sleep in our room in a new bassinet for the time being. We'll revisit the move again in a few months when the baby is ready to move out of our room, or when we want him out, whichever comes first.

The office/nursery is no longer the comforting warm orange it used to be (officially, "terra cotta." I loved it.). It is now a stark white/vanilla/whatever and has baby animals and blocks stuck on the wall. Stark is a little rough, I guess, but it's definitely not orange. Incidentally, this is the first time I've paid someone else to paint my house. It's a weird feeling to me to give someone money to do what I feel I should be able to handle. However, I have to admit that they did in a day what would have probably taken a week. Plus, I hate painting edges.

We also attempted to rearrange the bookshelves around our house, which involved the moving a bookshelf downstairs to replace a baker's rack, which took up temporary residence on the front porch. We both agreed that the book shelf was a little large and oppressive and decided to put the baker's rack back and use the shelf in place of a darker, uglier one. Of course, as soon as the baker's rack was back in place, and the bookshelf was back upstairs and full of books, Miss Prego looks at the rack and says, "I don't know. Doesn't it look too...wiry?" I don't care. It stays.

We've gotten rid of massive amounts of stuff during all this. I've been pretty impressed with us actually.

The reason we even had a bookshelf to worry about is that we got rid of enough books to fill one. That came to six shopping bags and a box. I took these to Powell's Books to see what they might offer me. They gave me $40 for a couple dozen of them. The rest went into a donation/recycling bin, which I assume is the equivalent of sending mangy strays to the humane society. I want to imagine that they went immediately to poor orphans who yearned for Dave Barry's humor and old social work textbooks, but realistically, they'll probably just be next weeks newspaper or Kleenex or whatever. The really depressing thing is that conservatively guessing, they probably cost us a couple grand to purchase over the years.

We've had pretty good luck with Craigslist and Freecycle. We've sold the stuff that we could and been able to give away a bunch of other stuff. Freecycle, especially, has been interesting. In our effort to pare things down, we put our CD's in a couple books and had several shopping bags of empty cases, which someone found useful. We gave away a bunch of old cassettes. We were happy that they ended up going to a guy whose daughter has down's syndrome and has hands that are too small to handle CD's, but who loves music. The most interesting giveaway was the vertical blind hardware. We found that the easiest and cheapest way to replace the vertical vanes that Mizz had damaged on our blinds was to buy a whole new set. I just replaced the vanes, and as such, had a brand new rail and hardware and whatnot that I felt guilty throwing away. We posted it, and in no time, a guys who needed just that found us. Cool system.

We've also become very familiar with Goodwill and Value Village for the stuff that might have value, but which is better for us as a tax break than as a sale. We figured out a while back that, if you keep your donation receipts, the tax benefit at the end of the year is about a wash with what you could get at a yard sale for most things. Plus you don't have to sit around haggling with old ladies over 25 cent t-shirts.

In the midst of our getting-rid-of binge, we've also acquired a few things. There's a bassinet waiting for the new kid. We had to take away the Mizz's bed, since it is actually a convertible crib, and will be needed again before too long. We didn't want to snatch it away from him and give it the the baby right away. So, thanks to Craigslist, he now has a Thomas the train engine bed that he just loves. And thanks to the fact that we have another mattress, we sold the one that came with the bed for almost as much as we bought the whole thing for. Go us. We've also acquired a new (old) filing cabinet and a new dresser. Craigslist has been good.

Anyway, after all this, we're more or less ready for the new kid to arrive. The rooms are almost as set up as they're going to be. We have all the furniture we're going to get. We've moved most of the things that are going to be moved. We've gotten rid of most of the things that are going. Now, our main concern is making sure the Mizz is taken care of when the time comes and trying to enjoy some time together while we can still squeeze it in. And maybe work in some blogging.

Passed out!

The Mizz finally learned to get up and turn on the light to play instead of crying in the morning. He did so at 11:30 last night. I snapped this when I went in to empty the toys out of his new Thomas bed.