Our not so secret garden

This past week was a time of prep both in the house for the Little Lady (washing diapers, assembling the co-sleeper, full house deep cleaning) but also outside for our appearance on the Permaculture Yard Tour.  We were really honored to be asked to participate and knew it was a little nuts to undertake the prep for it so close to the Little Lady's due date, but frankly it was a good excuse to get the yard in shape before a long summer when we won't have time to devote to it.  I also really wanted Wade to have the opportunity to have all of his hard work in the yard officially recognized.  We get it every day - the UPS guy, our midwife, friends, anyone who comes to the house for the first time - everyone always has kind things to say about how our yard makes them feel: inspired, secluded, fascinated, entertained, you name it.  But it'll be nice to officially share it with others who also have a passion for the kind of things we like to do in our yard - grow food, raise chickens, feed wildlife, and bring in lots of beneficial insects.

It's been a while since I've share shots of the yard, so I tried to get plenty during the tour (I'm also writing an article for my column in edible Tampa Bay about permaculture and our yard so the pictures will be used for that too).

This is Bill Bilodeau who first helped us design our yard and is a local permaculture expert and enthusiast.

We're still rolling in tomatoes!

Yep, a week before our due date I was standing on top of the picnic table taking pictures of the garden which seemed to draw some stares (lord my belly looks huge here!)

Houston, we have a Nursery

After much waiting, carpentry, painting, and accumulating of stuff, we finally have a nursery!  We have turned our guest bedroom/den into the nursery!  The room is in a central location in the house downstairs and easy to get to, and frankly it was the only option we had for now.  (It'll work for a few years then the finished attic upstairs will get converted into a kids room and the nursery will turn back into the guest bedroom/den/my home office.)  For the next few months, the Little Lady will be in a co-sleeper in our room that we're borrowing from friends so we're keeping the futon in the nursery for a little while since we've heard from a number of people that we might find it helpful to have an extra bed/couch downstairs.  Once we get the hang of things this summer, the futon will go up in the attic in my office to serve as a guest bed again.

Since the room is visible from just about everywhere in the house we wanted it to be fun, but not be too "kiddie" or be stuck with one central theme.  We also didn't feel it was necessary to repaint the room and kept the periwinkle blue color we already had on the walls. The decor is an eclectic collection of things we already had on hand and like (with a few special things thrown in) and it seems to work.  It definitely has us feeling excited about her arrival and spending time in that room with her.  However, this set up is Phase 1 for now, and this summer once the futon leaves we'll be making some more changes (bringing in a large wardrobe to serve as a closet, moving the crib across the room, hanging more pictures, bringing in a chair and footstool, and hopefully a chest to serve as a window seat).

Thankfully, Mom and Larry were able to come up for the day to help us assemble the crib, move furniture, hang shelves, and finally bring down all the boxes of baby stuff from the attic. It was a huge help and such a relief to finally create space in the house for the newest member of the family.  It has taken us two more weeks to put up the finishing touches so things are officially ready.

Without further ado, let's get to the pictures of Phase 1 of the Little Lady's Nursery!  (It was a cloudy day, so unfortunately it's not the best lighting for the photos - sorry!)

With the windows at my back, looking towards the dining room.  On the right, you can see we picked an affordable antique-looking crib to go with our antique house (right now the mattress is covered in tinfoil to teach the cats it's not meant to be a large cat bed).

Standing in the corner behind the futon in bed mode, you can see the dresser/changing table on the left, the skinny bookshelves on the far wall, and the far right is the wardrobe that was first my mom's when she was little then mine as kid.

A closer look at the book shelves (they are actually picture ledges from Ikea we painted a sweet orange color).  We have a print up top that we'll eventually hang to make more room for books, and below is a hanger for diaper bags, plus a big owl tote for dirty laundry.

A closer look at the corner with the antique dresser we're repurposing - we put up small orange shelves on the wall to store diaper changing necessities and her bath tote, a swallow mobile hangs above, and the bag on the wall holds her newborn diapers.  We're doing cloth diapers, so the totes below hold bigger sized diapers, and the orange bag on the right of the dresser will hold dirty diapers until wash day.  All of the Little Lady's clothes for 0-6 are in those two big drawers.

The dresser is now behind me looking towards the opposite side of the room.  We made the futon into a bed this week because I've started sleeping in there to be more comfortable.  My hips are bothering me at night and our high bed has gotten hard to get in and out of.

I'm standing in the door with the dining room behind me looking out the windows - her room gets wonderful morning light filtered through the bamboo.  She also has prime viewing of the chicken coop and the orchids.  The door on the right goes into our bedroom and the door just out of frame on the left goes into the living room.

The one special thing I did for the nursery was to make her some fun curtains to give the room a centerpiece - in the morning they almost look like stained glass with the sun shining through them.

Over the crib we have a fun wooden octopus cut out and a colorful butterfly mobile the floats on the breeze.  Come summer we'll end up moving the crib to the opposite wall and will move around what we have on the walls, so we haven't hung much for now. 

We got this "ABC's of Star Wars" quilt 2 summers ago at Star Wars Celebration in Orlando and think it's so funny and cute - perfect for the nursery.

37 is the magic number

So 37 weeks is the cutoff for having a home birth - if it's earlier than that we have to go to the hospital in case the Little Lady needed any help breathing.  I'm breathing a sigh of relief now that we've crossed that threshold.  I still think she'll be an April baby (the average date for 1st time moms is actually 41.3 weeks instead of 40), but frankly, anything is possible, so we're preparing ourselves in the event she decides to come earlier than March 31st.  She's head down and in the right position for her grand entrance into the world (and has been for a number of weeks), so who knows what she'll do.

I am officially down to about 1 or 2 pairs of pants I can wear and wearing anything tighter than a t-shirt on my belly doesn't feel so great.  I am also almost out of nightshirts (even the funny maternity ones that say "Geek Inside" and "This one is strong with the Force" on my belly), but don't want to spend money on maternity clothes so I'm hoping I can make it through with what I have.  It's funny how something can fit fine one week and the next week it just doesn't fit at all!

We have our home birth supplies, have finished our reading (we're working through some parenting books now), and have the nursery prepped.  All we can do at this point is pick away at our house projects to-do list and wait for her arrival.  And for once, I'm ok with that.  Normally I'm a pretty impatient person (see exhibit A: my long history of spoiling Christmas presents before Christmas morning), but in this case I'm feeling pretty peaceful about it all - she'll come when she's ready and fully baked and I don't want to rush her.   

Stay tuned for pictures from what we can now officially call The Nursery. :)

36?!

So, we officially have 4 weeks left until our due date and I'm ready to celebrate since we've ticked off some milestones this week:

1. Finished our last birthing class and are feeling really good about it.
2. Carpentry and painting work is done (huzzah!)
3. The cleaners came today to get the dusty mess taken care of.
4. 3 trees we've been needing to take down finally came down today - in time for the garden tour and to give us time to plant more fruit trees in their place.
5. Washed and installed the carseat so we're ready to go if she comes early.  (We have a "baby bucket" style seat with clip-in base we got from friends to use for the first few weeks until she grows into her long-term carseat)
6. Squared away a number of small house projects that we were behind on (replacing the termite eaten/missing floor panel upstairs, recaulked some bad spots in the bathroom and closet, cleaned out a lot of junk from the garage, cleaned out and reorganized our bathroom cabinets, you get the idea...)
7. Finally bought a new ceiling fan to replace our defunct light/fan in the dining room (which we'll install in the next two weeks).
8. Finished iron-setting all the decorated baby clothes (from our shower, but also the extras that I decorated later because I was having too much fun to stop).

We still have a few dozen more things on the House Projects To-Do list in Wunderlist, but it finally feels like we're gaining momentum rather than slogging through the mud and making no progress.  This weekend we'll finally get the nursery assembled and head to Ikea to get a few last things we need  (shelves for the laundry nook, some storage bins, and maybe a new small cabinet for the breakfast nook) since it'll be the last weekend we have left to get any real work done (the following weekend is the garden tour).  We also are in need of ordering the essentials off our registry that we haven't gotten yet (particularly diapers which will need to be washed a few times before we can use them) so things will be ready for the Little Lady's arrival.  This weekend I'll also start washing all of her 0-3 clothes, bedding, diapers, and curtains so they can be put away.  Currently everything has been living in the attic with my office since we needed to keep it away from the carpentry dust so it'll be nice to have everything put in it's place.

Otherwise, I'm feeling good, but have been getting lightheaded (not uncommon at this point), so I've been upping my iron and water intake to ward off any potential causes.  I'm also finding it harder to get out of chairs, rolling over in bed generally sucks, and I'm getting kicked in the ribs - a lot.  But I'm still feeling upbeat about things and happy with how we're doing.

Because I apparently like tearing up our house...

Now that the carpentry is squared away we're breathing a giant sigh of relief.  It took 6 days, but we finally got 5 of our door frames redone.  We hit a few minor snags along the way, but our carpenter and I were able to come up with some solutions to work around things and I'm really pleased with how it's turned out.  We recently had all 7 of our original doors stripped and repainted to get rid of the lead paint and the thick accumulated layers of crappy peeling paint (that was also sticking and peeling off on the door jams) which was step 1.  Then the carpenter came in to rip out the door jams, frames, and trim in 5 of our doorways to realign them so the doors would actually close and hang straight (a modern miracle in this old house!) so the doors wouldn't be rubbing and sticking to the frames anymore.  It actually was a bit heart breaking to not be able to keep the original trim since it's the original heart pine, but the effort involved to strip the doors made us realized it would have turned our house into a toxic waste site to try stripping and sanding everything, so replacing the trim to look just like the original was the best solution.  We tried stripping the original hinges but couldn't get them completely clean of the lead paint (and some were clearly bent in weird ways from years of misuse, so we decided to just replace all of the door hinges in the house.  Now they all match and swing straight and quiet.  We did, however, manage to salvage the original locksets, crystal handles, and faceplates, so that was nice.   Despite the week of chaos in the house, we are beyond thrilled with the results - we have doors that actually latch and close properly and are lead-free!

Here's a few in progress shots:

The main door into the nursery from the dining room after the old trim had been stripped off.  When the threshold was removed from this door we found perfectly good floor boards underneath so we decided to leave it off and plane it down for use in another doorway (it was practically a speed bump everyone tripped over anyway).

A closer look at that door shows a cross section of the plaster wall and where old floor boards were used to attached the door casing to the wall.  This door was cut into the wall in the 1950s when the house was converted into a single family home (it was originally a shotgun duplex bungalow when it was built in 1926).

The doorway that heads into the living room from the dining room (left) has already been redone in pine and the nursery door awaits reworking.

As our due date looms closer on the horizon and I have less energy or ability to do projects around the house we've been trying to pace ourselves on what we can get done.  We decided to go ahead and have the painter who did the doors come back to prime, caulk, and paint the new trim and jams for us because 1) it was affordable, and 2) it will be the best $150 we've spent in the last 7.5 months!  He can do in one day what would take us a week, so we're saving our energy for getting the last little house/garden projects squared away and prepping the nursery.  Thankfully, we are still using the Benjamin Moore zero-VOC paint that we used everywhere else in the house during the remodel so we don't have to worry about off-gassing issues for me or the Little Lady when she gets here.

Although the carpenter and the painter were really great to work with and were really nice guys, I'm hugely relieved to have the house back to myself during the days while I'm working.  I know the cats are thrilled to not have to be locked up anymore and we're all relieved that the house is put back together and no longer covered in plastic.  Now that the drudgery is over we can start focusing on the fun stuff - like finally assembling the nursery!