We're back!

We had a nice weekend in Mayfield. It was good for Eliza to get to see her grandparents and we needed to go and be a family together in our house. I sometimes forget how much I miss being able to spread out and just be us.

We arrived to a bit of broken tree limb damage to our fence. Our yard was an absolute mess. Mayfield looks like a special tree-seeking bomb went off. Luckily, Brian's Dad and Grandfather came over the help us pick up most of the limbs. We're going to go back in March after things have calmed down and do more yard clean-up and put up a nicer FOR SALE sign.

The power seems to be back for most people in town and we saw AT&T working to restore phone service this weekend. It's surreal to see all of the markers of a disaster area. We saw national guard in full army dude uniforms pulling into a gas station in a humvee. They'd been doing door to door checks and had left a yellow sticker on our mailbox. Not sure what that means.


Here are a few pictures of the damage.

Less than two days...

...until we're in Lexington to stay.

It's kind of sad, in a way. The house was and is a great little place to live, and I hate that we can't just take it with us.

However, it came down to choosing between our house and making sure that Janie and Eliza can go to the doctor when they need to, and I think we made the right decision. I would feel awful if Janie needed to go to the hospital for something and couldn't because we couldn't afford it, so getting her coverage is a big load off my mind.

Sure, we'd be better off if we didn't have the house on the market right now, but I'm optimistic that we can do something with it fairly quickly so we can get settled more permanently up there. Eliza needs a good place of her own to grow up in, and I want us to give that to her as quickly as we can.

Tonight, we dine with family. Tomorrow, we do the hardcore packing, then dine with more family. Saturday, we pile what we can in the car and set out on a new adventure with the wind at our backs and our future ahead of us.

Goodbye, house. Maybe we'll meet again some day.

Christmas trees, film noir babies and some big news...

Want to see a Christmas tree?


Eliza has taken to napping in the floor, for some reason, and I was just playing around with my camera last night. Here's Eliza looking like she's in a 1930s studio picture:


Here's a cool one of Janie with some blurry stuff in the background:

And now, the big news I promised you: we're
moving. Next weekend.

I got a job at The Richmond Register as their new cops and courts reporter, and I start Dec. 15 (also our anniversary. Happy Anniversary, babe!)

We're going to sell the house as quickly as we can, sadly. We both love our little house, and we wish we could take it with us, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be ours for long.

Eliza's (almost entirely) finished room.

Now that we have our new changing table (thanks, Cheryl), the baby's room is almost finished. We're just waiting on the bed skirt for the crib and some art for the walls.

Another week, another doctor visit.

This afternoon we head off for our weekly biophysical profile (aka how big can this baby possibly get? appointment) and visit with the doctor. My blood pressure has been staying mostly reasonable, but I've had a couple of pretty intense spikes. The stress of worrying about the blood pressure is probably worse than the actual blood pressure. According to me, the baby is officially being evicted. Do you think it would be creepy to have a sheriff come and escort her out? Anyone have any good labor induction tips or tricks? Someone mentioned a full moon on Saturday and that could help get things rolling.

I'm hoping the doctor will have a plan for baby delivery. If she even hints that she might let the baby go to term, I'll probably cry big, weepy sitcom tears right in her office. I don't think I can handle four more weeks of bedrest and bp meds.

At the moment, I'm planning to spend my day watching many episodes of Entourage (have to get my Ari fix) and once again trying to force myself not to want to clean the house. My nesting instinct has kicked into full gear and it's taking every ounce of will I have to keep me in the bed. If I'm still stuck in the bed next week, it'll probably take actual straps to keep me down.

A quiet weekend...

Pretty calm around Casa Smith this weekend, which is a welcome change from last week.

Saturday, Dad and I got a cable line run off the DirecTV box to the bedroom so we at least have some sort of television in there, which helps Janie sleep.

We've had a lot of trouble with the landscaping around the house, especially between our house and the neighbor's, so Dad helped me with that as well. He ended up cutting down the two holly trees in front of the house because they were tearing the gutters up, so the house looks a lot different from the front now.

Sunday, even though we probably shouldn't have, we went over to his house for a cookout, where I got stung by a bunch of wasps on the leg and we had some really good hamburgers.

In other news, I've had someone predict that Eliza will be born by this weekend because of the full moon Saturday night. We shall see.

The rest of the nest, part 2

Here's our living room, dining room and bedroom (with freshly painted walls) now that they contain furniture!

Living room before:

And after:


Dining room before:

And after:

The rest of the nest, part 1

Back in April, we very oddly and unexpectedly found ourselves in the market for a new place to live. Our two bedroom duplex in Murray just wasn't going to accomodate our computers, toys, guitars, AND a baby. We started cleaning out the office in an attempt to make a bedroom for the baby. Alas, it was not to be. We ended up with an office full of crap we'd pulled out of the closet. Luckily, around the time we started half-heartedly looking for a place to live, Brian's stepmother mentioned that the mother of a friend was looking to sell her house in Mayfield. It was the perfect location (near Brian's job), the perfect price, and the baby could easily have her own room. Because of the time constraints, we ended up having to move fairly quickly. We had about a week to get this place entirely together and in move-in shape.


The biggest undertaking was the kitchen/breakfast nook area.



We knew the breakfast nook had tongue and groove walls underneath the hideous grandma wallpaper. The original plan was to paint over the existing wallpaper and put up a chair rail to cover any seams. Well, that plan began to fail almost immediately. As soon as work began in the breakfast nook, it became clear that wallpaper would need to come down. We knew there were layers of wallpaper, but we were unaware that there were 7 or 8 layers of wallpaper. You could see the decades tick by as we stripped each layer. Once we stripped the walls, they looked a little something like this:


Once we saw the walls, the age of our house became apparent. We found St. Louis newspapers from the 19020s stuffed in what appeared to be an old stove chimney in the ceiling. It also became clear that we'd need to drywall. Brian's grandparents took on that task, and within a couple of weeks, we had an adorable little breakfast nook. Today it looks like this:




We also did a bit of work to the kitchen. We did have to paint over the wallpaper there, but it went much more smoothly. We also painted the cabinet, replaced the cabinet hardware, and installed a new washer and dryer and dishwasher. Here's our kitchen today:





View from the breakfast nook into the kitchen and Brian looking both insanely happy and slightly demented:

Nursery Progress

We've made some progress on the nursery this week. I've had some sort of pre-baby anxiety about Eliza coming home to an unfinished bedroom, so any progress is good. The furniture is in position, with exception of the changing table we're still waiting for. I'm very unsure about having to mix cherry furniture with white furniture. Still, I think it's coming along nicely. My sister Susan bought us the cherry crib and we couldn't possibly love it more.

Here's the before picture of the baby's room:


Sponge painted walls and a leopard area rug! Yum!

And here's Miss Eliza's room in progress as of tonight:


The crib is my favorite part of the room. You can see my Raggedy Ann's head sticking out from under the Boppy:


I'm entirely in love with that chair. We're going to have to find an area rug for this room because the rockers tend to slide backward on the wood floors. Also, this dresser is a hand-me-down from Brian's Grandmother. As much as I didn't want to mix white furniture with the cherry, I think this dresser is really cute!:


We painted the back of her door with chalkboard paint. If she finds herself tempted to break out the Crayola and draw on the walls, we can point her in a more productive direction:

Notes from childbirth class...

We didn't exactly learn a whole lot we didn't already know last night. We got to watch the epidural video again (sadly, without the scared-to-death teen couple from the first viewing) and learned how to put a too-big diaper on a baby doll.

In other news, we are T-minus 5.5 weeks until the due date. I'm fully expecting that Janie's going to go into labor at a completely inconvenient time, like this Saturday while I'm at the 128th Fancy Farm Picnic or in a school board meeting and can't get out immediately.

In other, other news, I got the stereo and XM set up in the den last night, meaning the house is that much closer to completely finished. If I can get home at a decent hour and we can pick the place up a bit, I'll shoot photos tonight.