Pippa's Room

I finished Pippa's nursery a few days before she was born, but I never got a chance to post pictures. So I thought I'd do it now since my life is too hectic at the moment to do much of a real post.

This is how the nursery looked before:

World map on the wall, tan paint color, no valance, no style. It was our general purpose room--Big Daddy's closet, book case full of my travel mementos, extra boxes, ugly 2nd hand recliner, etc. So I had my work cut out for me, turning this into a girly nursery. I also didn't want to make it like Daphne's room, which is pink and green and yellow with flowers and butterflies. I wanted girly, but in a whole new way.

First came the beautiful bedding. It started with a swatch of fabric I saw online at a fancy (i.e. expensive) nursery design website. : It became the inspiration for Pippa's nursery. So I bought a few yards of that pricey fabric and then bought coordinating fabric from the local fabric store (i.e. WAY cheaper), handed it over to the capable hands of my seamstress mother, and this is how it turned out:

The birds and the polka dots became the theme of sorts for the rest of the decor.


Next I had Big Daddy print me a giant wall sticker. I got the idea for the tree from this picture I found online:
I made some changes and Big Daddy found some birds to put in the trees instead of the flowers.


Cute, huh? Pippa loves to stare up at the tree while she lies in bed.

By far the biggest project (for me, at least--the other big projects were done by everyone else!) was the alphabet wall. I saw the alphabet frames idea on a blog called Design Sponge. Hers looked like this:

So I spent a week or so collecting various sizes and shapes of frames from the local thrift stores.
I think I only spent bout $45 for all the frames! Then I took them all apart, ripped off the stands if they had them, cleaned the glass, and spray painted them. While they were drying, I measured the holes, found fonts online, and had Big Daddy print the inserts for me. Then I cut them down, put them in the frames, and laid them out on the floor so I could rearrange them 600 times. Finally, I put them on the wall. What do you think?


(Pippa absolutely LOVES to stare at the letters on the wall while I'm changing her diaper. The contrast of black and pale pink is so fascinating to her.)

Then I just had to add a few more touches. Once again, Mom came to the rescue and made a slip cover for the 2nd hand reclining rocker to match the trim on the bedding.


A lamp and some wall art finished it off. I still have one or two more things I want to add, but I felt good enough about the way things looked to put the baby in the nursery and not stress. I guess there were a few advantages to Pippa coming late.

This is the final product as it stands...

If I have a few spare hours over the summer, I may get the gumption up to paint the tan walls. The tan doesn't do anything for me. Maybe a pale blue? Or a soft yellow? Or maybe they'll end up staying tan because I'd rather be at the pool with my kids, working on MY tan. At any rate, there is a beautiful, one of a kind nursery where a modge-podge room used to be. Hooray!

At Some Point I'll Stop Blogging about Pregnancy/Baby Stuff, I Swear

What can I say? It's what's on my mind, it's what my life is about, it's what's taking up 90% of the time in my day. My baby. Sweet, wonderful, good little baby. But she doesn't leave me much time for much else. So what am I blogging about? You guessed it...

Top 10 Things I Am Loving About No Longer Being Pregnant:

10. Breathing. Oh that little thing! But when your entire diaphragm is squished to the top of your neck and your lungs have the capacity of a piece of paper, breathing is something you can no longer take for granted. But I'm happy to say that putting on socks no longer makes me winded.

9. Breathing through my nose. I get stuffed up about 2 months into pregnancy and I don't get to breathe through my nose again until a few weeks after delivery. So just about now, I'm able to stop wearing breathe-right strips every night and shooting as much Rhinocort Aqua as I'm allowed up my nose only to suffer from poor sleep and nose bleeds anyway. Hooray for breathing!

8. Bending over. Seriously, not being able to bend over sucks! First there is the fact that everything your children touch stays or lands in a space from your knees to your feet. You see their stuff there and you think, "If it was metal, and my hand was magnetic, I would clean it up. Really I would." And then you walk away and leave it there because, well, your hand isn't magnetic and bending over causes your pancreas to end up in your esophagus. Also, your children suddenly develop complete amnesia about how to put on socks and shoes. They want YOU to bend over and do it. I don't even tie my OWN shoes when pregnant. Ask me why I wore the same two pair of shoes my whole last 5 months of pregnancy: NO laces.

7. Medicine. You can actually take medicine again. Try having a cold and not being allowed to take any decongestants. TORTURE. Torture + a lot of snot.

6. Sleep! Oh glorious sleep! Not even the wakings of a newborn can make you feel bad about your sleep when suddenly your rib pain doesn't force you out of bed at 6am, your sleep apnea doesn't wake you up a dozen times (see # 9 above), there isn't a baby doing cartwheels in your belly from 10pm-1am, and you can actually roll on your stomach! Sometimes I want to make out with my mattress, I'm so happy to be face to face with it again!

5. Not puking. Although I only puked a couple of times this pregnancy from morning sickness, I was almost always 1 heave away from tossing my cookies. Every time I brushed my teeth or smelled something gross, I had to fight with all my will not to puke. It's so nice now to hork up a loogie without gagging.

4. Lack of pain. Ok, so this one has been intermittent. Throwing out my back, which turned into a horrible pinched nerve, the week after the baby wasn't fun. Neither was mastitis. Neither is the thrush I'm fighting because of the antibiotics to kill the mastitis. BUT it isn't non-stop rib pain, non-stop ligament pain, lower back pain, etc., all the time 24/7.

3. Ankles. Not the former cankles, but real ankles.

2. Proximity. Mostly to Big Daddy. It's one of the things I miss most all pregnancy long is no longer being able to get close to him. You can't spoon. You can't hug. You can't...you know...in any positions that don't leave you feeling rather whorish. Just being able to walk up, press against him, and lay my head on his chest is magical.

1. Definite #1 best thing about not being pregnant:

It's Time for a Pipdate!

I have had thousands of adoring fans (hers, naturally, not mine) request more pictures of Pippa, more details about Pippa, Pippa's social security number and fingerprint sample, so I thought I'd do an update on her. I'm all about pleasing my her fans. (Psst, Grandma and Grandpa, this is really for you. I don't actually have thousands of fans. Only many many hundreds. Ok, a few dozen. Alright, four. )

Pippa had her two week check up a few days ago. She did great. In fact, the pediatrician pronounced her "PERFECT." So, yeah, good work Mommy and Daddy. You created perfection!

She weighed in at a hefty 8 lbs 3 oz, a full half pound over her birth weight. (Hello? Can you say PORKER?!?) They usually want them back to their birth weight by then, so the weight gain was a nice surprise. Pippa's weight, in fact, is in the 60%! By far the fattest of my babies. Her height was in the 40%, which is 15% higher than my tallest child. Her head is in the 80%, about standard for my kids. What can I say? They have huge, brain-packed noggins!

Other tidbits about Pippa:

- Her name is the nickname for Phillipa, which is a Greek name meaning "lover of horses." We didn't name her Phillipa, though. Just Pippa.
- We got her name from a Robert Browning poem called "Pippa Passes."
- We are SO into Victorian poetry.
- Yeah, not really. We got it from excessive watching of the BBC's coverage of the royal wedding. DUH! (It's the name of Princess Kate's sister. )
- Pippa is my biggest baby.
- Pippa is my tallest baby.
- Pippa has white eyebrows, white eyelashes, and reddish-golden hair.
- Pippa is an extremely patient, mellow baby. She only screams when you take off her clothes or diaper. (I'd scream if someone were always taking off my clothes too.)
- Pippa smiled at only a week old. And just in case you think it was a fluke...or gas...she has smiled numerous times since. Mostly at me, of course. Or else tons of gas.
- Pippa is sleeping through the night. Mostly. She goes to bed about 11pm and sleeps until 5 or 6 am. Sometimes I have to wake her up to feed her because my boobs are going to explode. It makes me wonder how late she would sleep if I didn't wake her up. (But not enough to let my boobs explode to find out.)
- Daphne and Beck really like Pippa.
- Daphne likes to kiss Pippa on the head.
- Beck likes to growl at Pippa and shine flashlights in her eyes.
- (Hey, we all show our affection differently.)
- I am madly, passionately, unreservedly in love with this baby.
- Sometimes I want to eat her up.
- But then I realized that I just spent 9 months trying to get her OUT of my body, so I'd better let her remain unconsumed.
- See, once again, we all show our affection differently. Daphne? Kissing. Me? Cannibalism.

And here, by popular demand, are more pictures of Pippa. I just got some professional ones done this week, but I don't have them back yet. So mostly you're going to get ones where her eyes are half closed or she's staring off into space. Sorry, it's the best I could do while holding a camera and trying not to let her fall head first on the floor at the same time.

She's Here!

So it turns out I got to "plan my own wedding" and "open my presents Christmas morning" after all. Because the night before I was supposed to be induced, I went into labor, all on my own!

I started having pains, not even contractions per se, Thursday morning, and by the afternoon, they were quite painful pains. But they weren't really like any of the contractions I'd felt up to that point, so I was still hesitant to believe it was labor. By 5pm I started timing them, though, because they were quite painful and beginning to come fairly regularly. They were 8-12 minutes apart and 1/2- 1 1/2 minutes long. I still figured they'd fizzle out, but by the time the kids went to bed, I was running out of cuss words to scream through each contraction, so I thought it might be real labor. Finally, by 10, I couldn't take the pain much longer, so even though the average time between contractions was still 6-7 minutes, I called the doc and he gave me the go ahead to go to the hospital! By the time I got there about 11:30pm, I was dilated to 5 cm and 90% effaced, so it WAS real labor! Halleluia!

I got my wonderful epidurdual, which left me still able to move and feel pressure, but no pain, and by 5am was nearly ready to push. The doctor got there and at 5:30 we went at it. At 6:02 my sweet baby girl was born. Please meet:

PIPPA JANE ELEANOR

7 LBS 10 OZ, 19" Long

And 100% sweetness

So happy you are here, sweet girl. Hopefully God won't hold all those swears against me and your daddy will forgive me for telling him he drives like a grandma on the way to the hospital. (But seriously, though, stopping at a yellow light??).

Welcome to the family!

Scheduling an Induction, Analogously

Imagine it's the day before your wedding. You've been planning this event, in one way or another, your whole life. Ever since you knew what a wedding was, you've dreamed about how yours would be. You've sketched out countless dresses, chosen bridesmaids (who have summarily been dismissed and reassigned through the years), mentally arranged bouquets, planned the food, and even practiced writing your name with the last name of various beaux. This is one of the biggest events of your life and you know just how you want it to go. Of course, as the REAL event approaches, you have to acknowledge that you haven't been able to afford everything the way you envisioned it. You've had to cut a few corners and give up a few fantasies for the sake of the budget. But still, everything left is going to happen to your taste and specifications.

But then, the day before everything is to take place, your wealthy aunt, the one who likes to have a say in everything, announces that she has a surprise for you. Without you knowing, she has rearranged everything. With her vast sums of money, she has gotten rid of your small center pieces and substituted them with large, garish ones. The cake is now covered in bright blue butter cream flowers, just like hers were. Your tight bouquet of daisies has now become a streaming bouquet of ivy and lilies. And the location you chose for its sentimentality has now been moved to a large ballroom across town. All of it is the best of the best, the most expensive available. But it's not what YOU chose. It's not what you envisioned. Sure, you'll still be marrying the man you love, but all the imagining and excitement and anticipation is muted by the fact that this is not what you had planned.

Oh, so you're not the plan-your-wedding-since-you-were-four type? Or you're a man? Here, try this analogy:

It's Christmas Eve. You've been watching presents appear under the tree for weeks now. You love to look at them, pick them up and shake them, imagine what's inside. You can't wait for Christmas morning. And then, as you stand there the night before Christmas, someone comes in and tells you what's inside every single present. You know that Christmas morning will not be the same. Yeah, you were going to get those same gifts, either way, but without the excitement and anticipation of not knowing, opening them just isn't going to be the same.

Well, that's how I feel about the possibility of having to be induced. I know there is a baby. I know she's coming either way. But from the time I was little and knew where babies came from, I've imagined what it would be like for me. I never anticipated all the trouble and heartache that infertility issues would cause. I pictured deciding to have a baby and then, bada bing, being pregnant. It did NOT work out that way for me. Not when I wanted to, not how I wanted to. So to also anticipate going into labor, my body deciding how it would go--my water breaking, or labor slowly starting during the night, or suddenly getting hard contractions one afternoon, or whatever--and then not getting to experience any of that either, but just setting an appointment, going in and getting an IV, and having them pretty much force the baby out, well, it's just not the way I wanted it to go. And considering this is most likely my last child, I just had really hoped my body would figure things out on its own. The anticipation and excitement of seeing how things would go is what has gotten me through the last 9 months. It's my very favorite thing about being pregnant, just those last few hours once you know THIS IS IT! The baby is coming!

So yeah, it's my due date today. And unless this baby shows up tomorrow or the next day, I'll be induced on Friday. So please, if you're the praying time, pray for a Christmas miracle.

Putting Down Roots

When we left our beautiful old Victorian house, we arrived here at our new house with so much promise and anticipation. It has some serious improvements over our old house--like no drug dealers for neighbors, or hoarders for neighbors, the ward doesn't seem quite so needy, and we have those wonderful 20th century inventions called air conditioning, a garage, and storage rooms. Really, we have a lot to be thankful for.

BUT...this house isn't IT. This house and neighborhood brings with it its own issues. There are actually fewer kids in the neighborhood than our old neighborhood. So the drama that occurs every day after school when my kids want to find friends to play with and there are none continues (especially for poor Beck who has four boys his age nearby and they are ALL anti-social with anti-social mothers who have no desire to make play dates). Also, a good portion of the neighborhood is still very rural, so there are smells you never bargained for in a suburb, flies galore, and even the crowing of roosters and braying of goats every morning.

The problems we had at our old house with heating and cooling are just as bad here! Hard to believe it for a house built in the 1990's compared to one built in the 1890's, but it's true. Our old house pre-dated vents, so radiators were our only source of heat. And they did OK in the rooms that had them. But several rooms didn't, leaving them freezing cold and requiring space heaters all winter. Then in summer, we had a swamp cooler, but it was noisy, required the windows to be open (i.e. more noise) and didn't make it to the main floor very well. Eventually we put externally vented a/c in half the house, but the other half remained 20 degrees hotter then the rest. Well, here we have a super crappy vent system so that the 3-4 rooms closest to the furnace get all the heat and cold air. And the ones furthest away are 20 degrees colder in winter and hotter in summer. JUST LIKE OUR OLD HOUSE. It's ridiculous.

Other little things include doors that don't seal, walls and floors that have no insulation or sound proofing, and the fact that our yard isn't fenced off, so I still have to worry about my kids when they're outside. Anti-social neighbors abound. And a newly-wed/mostly dead ward mimics our old one almost exactly. So, ya. A lot of the things I thought I was leaving behind seem to have followed me here.

But this time of year, the time when everything starts shooting up out of the ground, bursting forth out of buds, turning green, and flourishing, I want to plant. I want to plant strawberries and vegetables and flowers. I want to dig in the dirt and see my handiwork blossom and produce. But (beyond the fact that I'm not physically able to do it at the moment), I feel the futility of it here. Our lease ends in a year and 3 months, we're not likely to renew it or to buy this house, and so it just seems dumb to put all that effort into a yard where I won't be here to see the results.

But tell that to my gardeners instinct. It doesn't want to listen.

It's sad knowing that we'll most likely be moving again in less than a year and a half. But it's also exciting to think of what lies ahead--maybe we'll build our dream house. Maybe we'll move out of state. Maybe we'll find a place that's just right for us where there are lots of kids, and nice neighbors, and big shade trees, and a perfect space for a garden.

I hope so. I can't wait to put down deep deep roots.

I Scream, You Scream

As I've said before, and though you might not believe me after all that talk about frozen custard and stuff, I'm not much of an ice cream fan. It's not that I don't like it per se. But there are just so many other sweet treats that come first on my list of sugary delights. Mostly baked goods--cake, brownies, cookies, pie, truffles, etc.

But in the summer time, and even in the spring when the days are getting warmer and my blood starts to stir, I do appreciate a good scoop of ice cream. SCOOP is a big part of it, because soft serve is, to me, a big swirly waste of calories. So unsatisfying. But a nice, rich scoop of Baskin Robbins, for example, is just the ticket every once in a while.

When I was a kid, I went through phases of liking a certain flavor and only getting that for a very long time. My first love was Daiquiri Ice, light and refreshing. Then came Chocolate Fudge. (Ironically, this is now Daphne's favorite flavor--totally unsuggested by me--and when I tasted hers, I about died from chocolate overload. I guess some things do change.) Then came a phase where I only liked Jamocha Almond Fudge. Even as a kid, I loved the taste of chocolate and coffee together.

During my teens and early 20's, Baskin Robbins had a seasonal flavor called Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. It was TO DIE FOR. And it only came out a couple of times a year. You were very lucky if you went while it was in season. That was, and still is, my all-time favorite ice cream flavor. But, alas, I haven't seen it in years.

Now my fave is Chocolate Peanut Butter. I love how the huge wedges of peanut butter get semi-frozen and then melt in your mouth. Wonderful. I will occasionally try something new. And when I'm in the mood for something not quite as rich, I will sometimes have a scoop of Pralines 'N' Cream or my old standby, Daiquiri Ice, but I'm pretty much a Chocolate peanut butter girl for now.

What about you? Are you an ice cream fan? And what's your favorite flavor?