It’s a Girl!

Baby Girl will be arriving at the end of August! We are thrilled.

Liam says he knew it was a girl, but Paul was hoping for another brother.

It’s Been A While…

Sorry for the lapse in posting. It has been a busy time, and priorities shifted. I think we all felt a little like these pictures – upside down and worn out.

Our living room just needs a coat of paint now, and our basement just needs me to take some pictures to show you our new master suite, complete with a huge walk-in closet. It turned out very nice, and I’ll try to get some pictures soon – we keep rearranging things and nothing is in order when I grab the camera to show it off.

We are doing well, and I hope to post more soon!

Little Pretzel Reaves

I had an ultrasound today. My second one ever. The due dates with both boys were just around a certain month, and this time, I just wanted to know.

 

So, I found an OB who is sympathetic to well-informed, educated decisions about homebirth vs. hospital births, and he set up an ultrasound for me today at the hospital.

 

David met me and Paul there, and it was so fun to see our new little one!

 

Due date: August 22, 2009

While I know that it’s not set in stone, I’m happy to have  a little better ballpark figure of when our families might want to come for visits and such.

 

And it was so precious to actually see the baby. I can’t get our scanner to work with me at the moment, but he/she looked precious!

 

About the title of this post: before Paul was born, Liam called him “Blackberry Patch.” I’ve ended up giving both boys nicknames that start with P – Pickle and Peanut. So today, the boys have been debating what we should call this baby: Popcorn or Pretzel. I’m going with Pretzel for now.

Living Room

 

We’re almost done with the living room! Our friend, Eric, and his crew have been working hard to get us back to normal. Our ceiling is up and painted. We ended up with higher ceilings, after finding plaster underneath the ceiling tiles, and a terrible lack of insulation. So, David and my amazing dad will be adding a bit more crown molding to the original crown molding this weekend.

 

 

We also found a nice ceiling fan that we’re planning to hang in the living room. We love the style of the Arts & Crafts movement, and I was thrilled to find a fan on eBay in that style. Here’s one of the eBay shots:

 

There’s still little things that we need to do in the living room, like repaint it and the fireplace, but it works for now.

Place of Refuge In the Midst of Chaos

Sometimes you just want to go hide in a box.

Video on Paul’s Birthday

It’s been chaotic, but I did manage to catch Paul on video, opening presents from my parents. Please excuse my voice (I was in the midst of a terrible cold), and the terrible camera work.

 

 

A Little Update

In spite of a little chaos,

We have ceilings!

We also have an extra room in the basement, which will be a big closet/nursery.

We will soon have wood stairs here:

And David has his work cut out for him, stripping the glue off the floors in front of the pantry.

And we’ve been busy today, ripping out the entertainment center to make an alcove for our bed.

And deciding on colors – either yellow or khaki.

So that’s what is going on.

By next Friday, we will have a new ceiling in the living room and a master suite in the basement!

Where We Stand

The basement floor was finished on Friday. We decided to do an epoxy-coated floor. It’s kind of hard to photograph, but it looks something like this:

Here’s a close-up:

We also found a camelback sleeper sofa on Craigslist, so we’ll have even more room for any overnight guests (hint, hint!). It’s the same green as the couch that was ruined. That wasn’t on purpose, but it’s nice because it matches the recliner that survived the flooded basement. It’s covered in plastic because the guys are here today to tear down the rest of the ceiling.

Besides the progress in the basement, we’ve stayed very busy. We took the boys to the Cincinnati Museum Center for a special dinosaur exhibit on Friday, kind of as a Valentine’s Day celebration. They had animatronic dinosaurs that would look around and move their limbs and tails, and there were real fossils. It was very exciting. We forgot the camera, though – sorry! We also took them to see the IMAX movie about dinosaurs, and Liam thought it would be awesome to be a paleontologist.

David took me out on Saturday night for Valentine’s. We went to The Rookwood, which used to be a pottery factory. You can sit inside a kiln for dinner. We didn’t, since those are pretty big tables for two people, but it was fun to see them. After that, we went to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It was  lovely.

All of this has been in the midst of us all starting to get sick. We all now have fevers, runny noses, and pretty serious coughs, as of Sunday. So, it’s been a little crazy. We were going to celebrate Paul’s birthday on Sunday, but I think we’ll try again next weekend. Oh, and that was a picture of our new truck that we bought a while back – it seats 6, and it’s our new family vehicle. We love it.

Shots of the Boys

 

 

David took all of these shots

Stayin’ Alive

Just wanted to give you an update today. Our insurance has been extremely slow in sending money, so our house has been in a state of continuous chaos. There was a pretty big winter storm last week. We were snowed in for 2 days, and then spent the third day trying to dig our truck out of the snow bank the snow plow created. The one tree in our back yard was covered in ice, the branches were leaning against our house, and ended up breaking. So, David pulled out the ladder and chopped off the branches with a hand saw and a machete. It was pretty impressive. He also shoveled the snow off the back deck all so that we could get our electric dryer (that we brought from Huntsville) out of the basement. I found a guy on Craigslist that was willing to trade his gas dryer for our electric dryer, so that saved us a bit of money. We got the gas dryer home, and realized that our gas valve and the surrounding pipe need to be replaced. So, we are still without a dryer, but it won’t be much longer!

Our basement is pretty much gutted. The bathroom is still intact, and the ceiling of the “bedroom” area is okay. Most of the walls are still up, but there are patches cut out to get rid of mold. David has decided to tear down the wet bar, and we are going to refinish the concrete floors (hopefully by next week). The plan at this point is to maybe put a small kitchenette in the place of the bar, to make it more like an apartment down there.

Speaking of making the basement into an apartment, we now have a friend from church living with us. Her name is Lisa, and she will be living in the basement, once we  get it pulled together. She’s trying to save money for a mission trip she will be going on for 11 months in October – it’s theworldrace.org, if you want to check it out. Anyway, she’s saving money by living with us, and we’re excited to be able to experience “life together” with her for the next few months. At the moment, we are living kind of on top of each other. Liam finally got his wish, and we moved him into his “secret closet.” He is loving it. We moved a full size bed into Paul’s room (which is Lisa’s room until the flooring is done in the basement), so we will still have a spot for our out-of-town guests (hint, hint!). So, Paul is sleeping in our room for the next week or two. It’s a little crowded, but only temporarily.

So, we’re doing good. There’s always lots of work to be done in the house, but we’re all healthy and warm. I’ve got all-day nausea, so at least we know that the baby is doing well. David has been playing with my camera lately, and he took all of these pictures – pretty good, if you ask me.