Blue Skies, Smiling at Me

Tags

airplane light fixture, cloud theme, decorating, home depot, nursery, painting

Clouds!

Isn't it heavenly?

Left wall

I love my friends. This is the room I always dreamed of. Better, because of the light fixture.

Don’t you love it? Perfect Husband picked it out a year ago, when we were shopping for lamps. He got all excited about it (he loves aerospace stuff – he can watch Mayday for hours and has a massive amount of NASA trivia memorized) but we decided not to buy it, because buying light fixtures for babies who don’t exist seems like a jinx. However, when I got pregnant, we went back and searched through a couple of Home Depots until we found it.

It’s a good thing I had always planned on a “sky” themed baby’s room, because that airplane was going in regardless. They had a ship one too, which appealed to the Maritimer in me, but a) Perfect Husband was like “nooo…. plaaaaaane!!” and b) since I was planning a SKY themed nursery, a ship wouldn’t have made a lot of sense (though I could have made a Wynken, Blynken and Nod argument).

Anyway, we opened up the box today and my friend was installing it when we realized… it didn’t have any bloody wings. I hear that’s kind of important. I was ticked. It was totally sealed when I opened that box, so why was there no wing? How was I going to convince Home Depot to give me the part? We bought this thing months and months ago – no way we still had the receipt. I was having nightmare visions of having to buy a whole new fixture, and what with cell phones and buckets of paint and everything else, money is not exactly abundant in the IfByYes household.

But I called the Home Depot where I bought it, and they didn’t give me any hassle at all. They didn’t accuse me of breaking it, or trying to rip them off. They just invited me to come down, which I did (friend’s son in tow for company) and they ripped open a new box, yanked out a wing, and said “there y’go.”

Home Depot, if you have customer service people trolling the interwebs for customer comments, like Shaw did for Mommy By Day, please here this loud and clear: I love you, and THANK YOU.

Now I have an amazing baby’s room. Now, if only I could afford furniture for it…

Don’t Fight the Zeitgeist

Tags

friends, nursery, painting, phones, zeitgeist

My phone still works, and I find this vaguely suspicious.

Everyone seems to be getting a new phone lately. Perfect Husband’s old MUCH Music phone died in the spring after many years of faithful service, so he replaced it with a shiny new model. My friend had to switch phone companies after a massive blow-out with her provider which I won’t go into here. She had to get a new phone. Then that same friend dropped her new phone in a parking lot just as the person in the parking space next to her was backing up out of their space – CRUNCH.

Then Perfect Husband calls me from rehearsal from a strange phone number. He tells me that his phone got wet, shorted out, and now doesn’t work reliably, so if I need him I should call this other number, which is a cast member’s cell. I don’t ask him what happened because his voice has that strained tension that comes with having to tell one’s director “I have a wife who is nine months pregnant and can’t get a hold of me. If you don’t give me five minutes and someone else’s cell phone, I’m going to start a massacre”.

When he came home he was too angry to talk about it. All he would say was that there was a “toilet incident”. I puzzled on this for a while, because his anger seemed to denote that someone else was at fault, but sometimes he gets angry at himself, so I didn’t push things further. Then I signed on to Facebook… and his director’s Facebook status was about HER phone getting wet and going on the fritz that same night. So apparently this “incident” affected multiple cell phones in the area that night. One’s imagination fills in rather too vividly at this point.

The next day someone else on Facebook posted that their phone was broken and they had to get a new one.

Then Spokeit made this post.

Meanwhile, my phone is three years old, has a damaged top with a Labrador’s tooth mark in it, and has been dropped more times than I could ever count, and then been retrieved by uncountable numbers of slobbering dogs. It works fine.

I’m watching it suspiciously.

In other news, I’m getting clouds put on my nursery today! YAY!

Except that since PH needs to buy a new phone we are even more broke than we expected to be, and I can’t even afford to buy awesome room-painting friends lunch. *Sigh*. I have freezies. They can eat all the freezies they want.

Check it out:

Tags

decorating, nursery, painting

The baby’s room is no longer gulag-grey!

I decided to go with Behr Premium Plus Ultra (…Uberbar, Super-Fantastic, Luxury etc) paint again. That’s what we used for the rest of the house. I chose a very bright colour of blue. Originally I was going to go with a more muted shade, but after looking at this one on Behr’s website the previous shade looked too dim and grey.

So I sent the links to my Mommy and asked for her opinion (without telling her my own thoughts) and she told me the same thing – that after checking out Horizon Haze, the Caspian Tide looked dingy. We decided that a baby’s room, of all places, can withstand a bright colour, especially since we’re going to cut the blue with clouds and possibly giraffes.

Before

After!

We were right about it being bright – it glows! But that’s fine. Children like bright colours and I want the room to be cheery. It’s North-facing, after all. The ceiling will eventually be painted too, but we (and by we, I mostly mean my friends who came over and basically did this all for me, insisting that I rest myself and stay away from the fumes) decided to leave that to my graphic design professional friend, when she comes to do the clouds, because when we touched it with a wet cloth bits of ceiling rained down on us and we were scared.

Still not ready

Tags

busy, friends, heat, nursery, pregnancy

I spent yesterday at a friend’s house “helping” her get ready for her garage sale today. I put “helping” in quotes because I don’t feel that I was very helpful. I sorted some books, moved some not-too-heavy objects from point A to point B, and directed her teenagers a little.  Even with that minimal involvement, I was wiped and back-achey by the end of the day. The sweltering heat is really getting to me.It’s only really at times like that, when just a bit of minor light lifting in the heat sends me into spasms of Braxton Hicks that I really realize how pregnant I am.

Just like how Perfect Husband’s first words to me when I get up in the morning tend to be “holy crap… you’re PREGNANT!” when he sees me afresh each day.

My friend really didn’t work me too hard. SHE’S more aware of the limitations of my pregnancy than I am, I think. Mostly, I was there for company and to poke her if my friend wandered off to a computer or something. That wasn’t necessary, though. She plowed through an entire garage worth of junk and by the end of the day everything was sorted.

This is the same friend who wants to paint my nursery for me as a gift. To my original vision of blue sky and clouds she has slowly added in her imagination a giraffe, a lion, a tree, and even my own pets all painted on the walls. All of which would be totally amazing. But she works full time, has two teenagers, and is trying to get her house ready to be sold. She’s a busy, busy lady, and she just hasn’t found the time to get paints and come to my house yet.

As much as I would love the giraffe and lion and tree with my cat in the branches, I think I’m going to have to remind my friend that it doesn’t all have to be done at once. In fact, the nursery doesn’t NEED to be done at all, since the baby will sleep in a moses basket with me for the first few months (breastfeeding = getting up every hour and a half = me not wanting to go to a different room to pick up the baby every time) but the pregnancy hormones are screaming “YOU NEED A NURSERY!!!”. The baby, due to show up in the next eight weeks, doesn’t really feel real yet, even when he’s propping up my ribs like a tent pole with one of his limbs. The spare bedroom is still a mess of gulag-grey walls, bare futon, piles of clothes and so on. It doesn’t LOOK like we’re expecting a baby, so it’s hard for me to believe that my life will change so utterly in just a couple of months.

So I think I’ll wait until her garage sale is done, then call her and propose that we do the basic blue paint with clouds, so I’ll feel like there is a nursery around, and my friend can add giraffes and trees and things in the nebulous future when she finds the time and energy.

What, already??

Tags

doctors, dreams, nursery, pregnancy, preparation

Monday was my 30 week OB appointment. There was a different doctor there that day. Instead of the usual Monday doctor, a friendly and somewhat hazy lady who tends to wander off on tangents a lot while we nod and smile, there was a brusque Chinese (one of those many Chinese names that means “penis” in English slang) doctor man. He came in and had me lie on the table while he whipped out a tape measure, stuck one end of it down my pants onto my vagina, and the other end up between my boobs while prodding vigorously at my belly. Then he bounced my uterus enthusiastically like a kid trying out a new basketball, to get an idea of how the baby was lying. He was running behind (we were the first appointment after lunch but he started us half an hour late because he’d been off delivering a baby) so you could tell he wanted to get through us quickly. Everything he did was swift and hurried.

You’d think I’d hate him, but I actually liked him.

While he was in a hurry, he didn’t hurry us. He asked if we’d had any concerns the last two weeks, and when I told him that my rash was getting worse, instead of better, on the new steroid cream they had given me, he asked to see and then showed great sympathy, noting in my chart that it was “clearly demarcated” and “very prominent” and advising me to discontinue the cream and try an anti-fungal cream instead.

When he measured my uterus, he did something Dr. Hazy never had – he told me the measurement (31 inches). When he bounced my babby like a ball, he told me where he felt hands and feet, and grabbed my hands and put them on my lower abdomen, telling me where exactly to feel the head. Then he flipped through my chart and noticed they hadn’t done a urine culture and sensitivity, or a TSH test yet. Then he asked if we had any questions, and when I asked how overdue I would be allowed to go before they induced me, he told me seven days and then worked out the date – the 6th of September. Then he explained WHY the limit was seven days, while writing out requisition forms for the tests they’d missed.

So really, rushed and rough as he was, he was actually better in some ways than kind Dr. Hazy.

So I’m 30 weeks along, with a uterus 31 cm long, a head-down baby , a possibly fungal rash, and my baby will be born by September 6th.

Where did the time go? I only have 10 more weeks until the baby is born. The nursery isn’t even close to prepared – it’s still a pile of miscellany on and around a bare futon and a rickety wooden shelf that could give you splinters just looking at it, and it smells like my cat’s litter box. We have a pile of donated baby clothes, but they are in cardboard boxes in our living room. We have no dresser for me to put them in. We have no change pad for said dresser. We have no car seat. If it weren’t for Perfect Girlfriend sending me receiving blankets, baby socks, and breast pads when I was 12 weeks along, we wouldn’t even have those vital things.

We’re waiting for the government to actually approve my EI claim and start sending us money. We’ve been on a single income all month, and while Perfect Husband says we’re okay, I just KNOW we’re eating into savings – savings that should be used on baby dressers and car seats and paying that house assessment in October. The nursery is waiting on one of my friends, an incredibly talented person who is planning increasingly elaborate things for our nursery, but who works full time. She’s going to take some time off, probably next month, and come over here and paint but in the meantime the nursery remains Gulag Grey and filled with junk.

I can feel myself growing increasingly more edgy. I’m starting to lose sleep. Suddenly that moment in Marley and Me, where Jen makes John go out in the middle of the night for baby socks because she can’t sleep thinking about the baby’s naked toes being cold, even though she’s only seven months along… doesn’t seem funny to me any more.

10 more weeks – and we still haven’t set up a regular read-to-the-fetus time every night, the way that I thought we would have done back at the five month mark. I’m not really eating right. In fact, I’m ashamed to tell you how often I forget to even take a prenatal vitamin. It’s like that dream I had last year. I think we’ve been floating through in a vague sense of denial, or possibly we’re just afraid to really acknowledge the baby’s reality with dressers or scheduled reading times or videos of my kicking belly, because we’re afraid something will go wrong and we’ll be left with a decorated nursery and no child to put in it. I don’t know.

All I know is my pregnancy is slipping away, and I’m starting to panic.