odds and ends

so two days after my last post (don't know why i didn't write about this then!), we went in for our 20 week ultrasound ... and found out we're having a boy!  you probably already know that as i think everyone who still reads this also follows my life in other contexts, but hey, has to be written.  and is exciting!  i kind of sort of was leaning toward wanting a girl, but if i had had to guess, i would have said that pinto is a boy ... it's fun to know for sure!  his name is matson, which is scott's middle name and his grandma's maiden name - so yes, it's technically not a first name, but whatever, this is 2010 and you can name your kid banjo if you want, i think matson is a perfectly cute and acceptable name.  we're still working on a middle name for him.  on to odds and ends:

1. no, we haven't started any work on the nursery yet, but it's all decor related, so it won't be too bad.  we painted that room yellow when we moved in so that it'd be ready to go whether we had a boy or a girl and can be used as a nursery again without repainting if we have other other gender next time, so that's staying.  i was planning to get a white crib and changing table so that i don't have to worry about matching wood stain colors and can buy a changing table via craigslist, and my mom and i covered the glider in dark brown fabric (no i haven't finished the ottoman yet, mom!) so we're good to go on that front.

the room already has nice white wood shelves on either side of the window, so we just need to touch those up and put the actual shelves back on (just the brackets are left on the wall, from when we painted over two years ago - whoops).  so other than that, it's just getting the furniture, finding a few cute boy accents (which i already have visualized), and we're good to go!  oh, and cleaning things like spare sheets, broken sewing machines, and christmas wrapping paper out of there.  i think i might start working on that over our long thanksgiving weekend.

2. as regards our mouse travails ... well, we're still in progress with that.  we've been setting up traps and poison like crazy and were getting ready to declare victory over the mice when scott saw one scamper under the dishwasher last week.  bummer.  i googled mice and dishwashers and found this blog detailing mice coming in from a sewer pipe behind the dishwasher, eating plastic piping, water leaking, and ultimately having to replace the dishwasher ... aaah!  i had this image in my mind every time we ran the dishwasher last week, but come saturday, we decided it was full on cleaning and war-against-the-mice day.  we can't pull out our dishwasher because we had our wood flooring installed in front of it, but thankfully scott put his engineering degree to work and figured out how to remove the bottom faceplate from the thing so we could see what was going on ... and breathed a sigh of relief.  no mouse droppings or nests, no chewed pipes, no mouse-holes gnawed into the cabinets back there.

we did find mouse holes on the cabinets behind the stove, so we threw some poison packs back there and jammed up the holes with steel wool (which they allegedly won't chew through).  scott put steel wool under all of the floating walls in our laundry room downstairs, we sterilized our whole kitchen, and now we're just waiting to see if any mice continue to creep through.  i think we've killed maybe 10 or so mice over the past two months, but i'm semi-optimistic that we're nearing the end.  fingers crossed.

3. scott was finally able to feel matson move the other night!  admittedly, i had had both soda and ice cream with dinner, so the kid was quite literally bouncing off the walls, but it was really fun getting to share that.  i've been able to feel matson move for the past probably 4-5 weeks, and it's neat to feel him getting stronger and more active (or maybe just bigger so there isn't as much space to absorb his movements!) - at first i would maybe feel him move once a day at the most, but now it's pretty frequently throughout each day.  also fun is when matson curls up on one side toward the front of my stomach - i'll poke my belly and one side is rock hard, the other is soft and normal.

4. i had a craving for corn dogs yesterday, but couldn't justify having corn dogs for dinner.  (maybe this weekend. :))  in trying to talk myself out of it, i decided that rice sounded really really good ... so i went back to my midwestern roots and made my dad's classic chicken breast in cream of mushroom sauce over rice.  and it was amazing.

5. a few months ago maura asked how much we paid for our trash service because she wanted to know that she got a good deal on her company (one of their neighbors had recommended it when they moved in).  her company charges $45/quarter for trash + $5/quarter for recycling, whereas we pay $45/quarter for trash and $12/quarter for recycling.  turns out, though, that her company doesn't charge any extra service fees, fuel surcharges, or taxes on top of that rate whereas mine does.  in the end, we were paying $77/month (they just increased the rate this summer) while they were paying $50/month for the same thing from a locally owned company.  switching's been on my to-do list for the past few weeks, and i finally got around to it this week.  $108/year savings, here we come!

food

i cooked dinner tonight!  a real dinner!  considering my history of loving to cook, you may be asking why this is so exciting?  because i've been an awful cook since i got pregnant.  (awful in the sense of having the energy and making the effort to cook, not as in making awful food.)  most of the stuff i've made has been things like pasta or chicken legs, and i've probably cooked fewer than 20 times in the last three and a half months.  yikes.  (we've filled in with a lot of cheesy crisp, eggs, and frozen chicken nuggets in there.)

once you get out of the habit of cooking, it's so easy to stay out of the habit.  i don't think about cooking, so i don't think about menu planning or grocery shopping, so i don't grocery shop, and then even if i want to cook something real, i have to go to the grocery before i can make anything, which means that it's easier just to heat up some chicken nuggets for dinner.  if i take the time to think about what i'll want to cook and what nights we'll need to cook, though, and make sure that i have cookable real food in the house, i get to cook and remember that i enjoy cooking!

not to mention, tonight's meal does double duty, which is awesome.  i made spicy honey brushed chicken thighs (which is one of my fallback easy, quick, tasty healthy-ish foods), steamed broccoli, blueberry muffins, and fresh pineapple and strawberries.  all quite yummy.  and then for tomorrow night, we'd signed up to bring dinner to some friends with a new baby, so i'll chop up the leftover chicken thighs, layer with rice, black beans, avocado, and chopped tomato and lettuce, and voila - burrito bowls!  speaking of, i need to go get my rice going.

big week

as long as everything goes right, we'll know pinto's gender in a mere 3.5 days!  (or, as scott says, we'll find out what flavor pinto is.)  our appointment is first thing in the morning on friday, and then saturday we get to go start looking at baby things!

it's exciting in that i feel like it'll make everything more concrete - we get to see an ultrasound of a real baby rather than just a little gummy bear, we can decide on a real name for pinto, register, look at cutey boy or girl outfits, start working on the nursery, etc.

and at the same time, the "big appointment" is frightening in that it means that we're halfway to the end of this pregnancy!  (halfway!  crazy!)  which means we have a lot of work ahead of us - starting (and finishing) work on the nursery, taking baby classes, prepping for labor and parenting, and coming to grips with the facts that we're going to be actual parents to a real child and our lives will be changing A LOT.  which isn't a bad thing ... it's just big.

motivation

i am utterly unmotivated to do my budget.  a few months ago, i was excited for the end of the month to come so that i could balance out and do my projections for the upcoming month, make payments, etc.  i mustered enough motivation to sort of halfway do september's budget, but now come october, i find myself putting it off and wondering if it's really necessary.  why the change?  i think because we paid off my students loans.

when we were still working on my students loans, i was so excited to see how much we could put toward the loans after each month's budget was balanced up.  we still have financial goals, but nothing as concrete as that, and nothing with as much immediate impact as being able to pay off a loan.  my current goal is basically to save as much money as we can, but it's more or less going into bulk savings fund that will eventually be distributed to pay for baby stuff, go into a roth ira, or toward the grad program scott wants to start next fall.  all good things ... just not as immediately exciting as paying off a loan.

plus, with the loan, i knew that i had $x left to pay down, and if i was averaging paying $y onto the loan each month, i could figure that it would take me z.z number of months to pay off the loan.  very tangible!  paying for baby stuff?  no idea how much we need set aside for that.  roth ira?  more like we need to be saving every month for the rest of our lives, not z.z number of months left to go.  grad program?  totally depends on whether his company is able to help out, if he gets financial aid, and how many classes he takes at a time.  all very ambiguous!

but i still need to do my budget.

baby on board

so by now clearly everyone who reads this realizes that i am pregnant - yay!  i think i scaled back on the blogging after i found out we were expecting because we didn't want the whole world to know yet, but that's what was primarily on my mind ... in the process, i got out of the habit of writing.  anyway, fun facts for faithful blog readers:

1. i am due march 22 according to my doctor (march 28 according to me ... i know due dates don't really mean much, but i like to have appropriate expectations), which puts me at 16 weeks 2 days according to dr and 15 weeks 3 days according to me.
2. i am kind-of-sort-of starting to show.  when i wear jeans, it's currently at the point where i look like i need to work out and/or like i just had thanksgiving dinner, which i find annoying.  if i wear a tshirt and yoga pants (ie, more fitted clothes), you can see my bump more clearly.  it's still not huge, though, and i don't think anyone would guess i'm pregnant just by looking at me.
3. yes, i really am feeling good, i promise.  i was fairly nauseous from maybe weeks 5/6 to 10/11, but by the end of week 10, it started fading away (pretty abruptly, actually).  i am also perhaps more tired than usual, but that's harder to gauge since i've always enjoyed a good nap.  i'm trying very hard to not get too hooked on a daily dose of caffeine, less because i'm pregnant (you're still allowed up to two cups of coffee a day, i think, or a few sodas?), more because i have never really done daily caffeine and don't like the idea of being reliant on it to get through the day.
4. in the last few weeks, i've gotten super excited about the whole pregnancy experience.  we were trying to get pregnant, so this was very much a wanted thing, but feeling sicky and not many people knowing that we were pregnant kind of put a crimp in the fun of it.  now that i'm feeling good and everyone's in this with us, though, it's awesome!  i'm having a great time researching things like cribs and strollers and enjoying poking my belly to feel where pinto's hanging out.
5. baby's pre-name is pinto.  we felt like we wanted a name to call him/her before we know the gender so that we're not walking around calling our child "it" all the time - i suggested "bean", since babies kind of look like a bean at first, but scott thought that was too generic.  he said we should specify the type of bean, and we landed on "pinto".
6. yes, we will be finding out the gender.  i love planning way too much to not find out!  plus, as i said, i am all about expectations.  scott's discovered that even if he wants to surprise me with something, i'd much rather know to expect a surprise on say, friday afternoon, than to just have it come out of the blue.  with finding out at 20 weeks, i can have 20 more weeks of excitedness that i'll can look forward to having a son or a daughter ... and plan appropriately. :)
7. i really like my doctor.  i just had my 16 week checkup with her this morning and think she's fabulous.  we've been leaning toward doing a natural labor/delivery (by which i primarily mean no epidural) and i wanted to get her input on that.  apparently she did both of her own labors without pain meds and said that she and the rest of the practice fully supports women who choose that route, and also highly recommended getting a doula (which was another question i had) and said that she thinks very highly of the hospital's doula staff.  she also said that they are the most midwifey practice of doctors you could find, which i think is awesome.
8. friends have given us a few baby things here and there - scott's aunt sent us a baby sweatshirt from our alma mater, another friend gave us a cute onesie set, and some friends last weekend gave us a super cute elephant toy that clips onto the carseat.  my first official baby project is coming up this weekend, though, when my parents will be out here - my mom's going to help me recover the cushions on the glider rocker that i got on craigslist last year!  i'm excited.  i've been wanting to do it ever since i bought the thing, but just can't commit to a fabric on my own or conceptualize what the process will look like, so i'm glad that she'll be here to help.

i promise to post belly shots soon.  i had scott take a picture last weekend, but am approximately 4 months behind on sorting and uploading pictures, so that'll be my project next week when everyone's out of the office for board meetings.