Cooper's Chair

Our very aweosme coworker gave us a rocking chair that was his when he was a little boy in the 60's. It was a little water stained but sturdy as ever. We decided to paint it to match Cooper's room. Now he will have a rocking chair to read his favorite books in.

I sure to love spray paint. It is a true transformation tool.

:)

Surprise!

When I got home from work today, there was a Christmas tree in our living room, filled with lights! Jory surprised me, he put it up while I was at work. He also put lights around our dining room window.

He can be pretty wonderful when he wants to. :)

I Almost Forgot...

I almost forgot to post a photo of this beautiful bassinet that was handed down to Cooper. My Grandma Anne is letting us use it in the beginning, while Cooper is small and sleeping in our room. It has been in the family for years and had over 70 babies in it.

It's an honor to use such a special piece of family history.

The Nursery... My DIY Project

At long last, I am posting nursery photos. It's come a long way and I've gotten quite a bit done. There's still a little more to do, but I'm very pleased with it thus far (click on photos to enlarge).


This is the nursery a couple weeks after we moved in:



This shelf was in my bedroom when I was a little girl. It was pink. I'm not sure what the hell my mom was thinking when she painted it recently... it's a mess.




I have no idea what's going on here:






Fixing!:


It looks like I have a basketball in my shirt:

My Grandma Sue sent Cooper this card with a letter on the back. It was so precious. I hope he always keeps this card from his Great-Grandma Sue:

I got this amazing idea from a website Tara introduced me to, http://www.younghouselove.com/photo-gallery-2/our-first-house/. In their first house they had cards hanging on a line from clothespins. I loved the idea and hunted down the perfect cards on Amazon.com. I found these for under $10 and fell in love with the art:

Jory hand cut me some wooden stars in our shop at work, to be used to hold the strings up:

I painted them:

When I was done I had some pretty cool line holders:

I attached the line and used clothes pins to hold my cards:

I had quite a few extra cards, so I put up some cute shelves to display a few more of my favorites and to take up some of the extra wall space:

And it started all to look more complete...

I played with these Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls when I was little. Grandma Sue kept them all these years:

And the crib:

That's all for now. We still need a rug for the nursery, which is not in the budget at the moment. I am pretty happy with what we have so far and I'm pretty sure Cooper will like it too.

Prego Portraits!

My dear and very talented friend Melissa took some portraits of me, so I would have some before I got too big.

Getting Even Closer

In less than a week, I will be 8 months pregnant. This is mind blowing to me. The time has truly been flying by and I'm already starting to wish I had a little more time. I want nothing more than to hold my son... but I have started to love being pregnant and feeling him move 10+ times an hour.

Yeah, it's getting rough. Really rough. And I still have two more months to go. As cheesy and cliche as it sounds, all of the pain and exhaustion stops mattering the second Cooper moves (or rams his little foot into my kidney). As I said before, it's beyond worth it.

We had our hospital tour yesterday and it was a huge relief to see the labor and delivery department at Kaiser. It was beautiful. I expected it to be more cold, more hospital-like. It was a pleasant surprise, to say the least. The walls were painted with murals, bright and colorful. The private delivery rooms all had private showers and the were very, very comfortable. I felt safe immediately and was very at ease when I saw where our son was going to be born. The staff was incredibly sweet and I could tell that the genuinely loved their jobs. I kept looking at Jory and all I could do was smile, because this is where our baby will be born.

As I mentioned before, I'm exhausted. I slept in and took two naps today... and I'm already ready for bed at 8:45 PM. Working an 8 hour day is beyond difficult. My doctor thought it might be easier on me if I cut my day down to 7 hours, we started that last week. The extra hour of sleep seemed to make me feel a little more refreshed in the morning, but didn't really change how tired I was by the end of the day. I have 23 more days of work left and it seems surreal. That's nothing! Then, I can rest. For now, I need to keep truckin' on and work my tooshie off.

I have been unhappy with my level of activity, it's been pretty much non-existent. The absolute last thing I want to do after a long day is walk anywhere. At one point during our hospital tour I thought I was going to fall over because exhaustion. It makes exercise feel like torture, even though exercise was one of my favorite things before I got pregnant. It's also hard to not feel guilty or not feel lazy, especially when I see women exercising past their due date and my doctor tells me she went into labor on the elliptical machine. I have to remember that not all women are super women and not all women go into labor while in the gym. All I can think about is how exciting my first spin class will be next year.

So that's my update. Goodnight!

Couch!

We have a new couch! We're slowly (but surely) on our way to having an adult-looking home. More to come.

Crafty Boy

Jory has become quite the carpenter around here. He has been improving our home one step at a time. He just finished making the numbers for the outside of our house, which he hand cut out of pine and then painted.

They looked so good he decided to make some for Tara and Nino next door!