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. 

happy first day of fall!

happy first day of fall, friends!  no, it's not technically the first day of fall, and yes it did hit a high of 87* today ... but it IS the first day of september, which begins fall in my book.

i think that overall fall is my favorite season.  you have the pretty colors on the trees, the mornings and evenings start to cool off, so you can wear sweaters with your jeans and flip flops, and i think the nerd in me is still linked to the school calendar and just feels so many possibilities at the beginning of a new school year.  and, even though i unfortunately don't really like football in practice, i love the idea of it and the social aspects of it, and football comes with fall.

this weekend, scott and i are off to a cabin in the mountains, and i'm so looking forward to it.  it's the same cabin at the base of mt. elbert that we stayed in for a long weekend last summer and i have high hopes for a refreshing and relaxing weekend.  in case you forget the details, this cabin is surrounded by aspens to the extent that their quaking is all you can see out the windows, a creek runs right behind the cabin with a private fire pit on the creek, and hummingbirds flock the feeders in droves.  sounds lovely, right?  our plans include hiking along the twin lakes and possibly renting a canoe or paddleboat, but that will depend on pricing - i found one place's prices listed online, and it was $60 for two hours!  we'll also do a daytrip up to aspen along the independence pass to see the maroon bells.  there's no tv in the cabin, which is unbelievably relaxing, but we are planning to bring a laptop and the last two "lord of the rings" dvds from the library - we watched the first movie again a few weeks ago and it was SO GOOD!

anyway, one more day of work for me, then we're off for a four day weekend of sleeping in and sunshine!

refi, baby!

yellowstone was last week, and it was so fun!  i went in with basically no idea what to expect, and was very pleasantly surprised.  we stayed at a camp site right next to the grand canyon of the yellowstone, so lots of tall pine trees and waterfalls and rivers in the area.  hands down our favorite area of the park.  we did a day over in geyser country - old faithful and all that - and it was neat, but not a very comfortable place to be, if that makes sense.  a) the geysers smell like sulfur, which is gross, b) watching the ground randomly jetting out steam and hot water and seeing mud "boiling" is cool until you think about why it's happening, at which point you remember that you're on top of a gigantic volcano.  there are some truly breathtaking places up there, though!  and, i saw a bear for the first time in my life!  actually, five of them.  one set of mama grizzly and her two babies just off the road, one grizzly from a really far distance, and one black bear (which allegedly had another one with it, but i only saw one at a time) on a nearish hillside.  also, lots of elk including a massive bull elk, some deer, tons of pronghorn antelope, and herds of bison.  i highly recommend a visit to yellowstone - they have great roads with amazing sights very accessible to the road, plenty of good day hiking trails with

the highlight of this week so far is that we just locked in to refinance our house!  when we closed on our house at 5.875% two years ago, we thought that was amazing and were so excited to get such a great rate.  a coworker refinanced earlier this summer and said she's saving a fair bit of money, so i started looking up rates through our current mortgage company and bankrate.com - i was slightly overwhelmed with the multitude of info, though, so we e-mailed the mortgage broker we'd used when we bought the house, and he just locked us in at 4.375%!  all in all, it should save us about $260/month since we will hopefully not have to pay mortgage insurance anymore - wow, right?!  even paying closing costs out of pocket, we should officially be saving money within the year.

mice

pardon the interruption to my normally scheduled blogging; my life has contained much drama over the past few weeks, including things like friends visiting from out of town and mice in my pantry.

first the friends - we've actually had three sets of nu friends come through town over the past month, which has been so much fun!  first was chris and lesley, who graduated from nu a year after us, moved to wisconsin for her to go to grad school and him to work ... then up and moved to kenya for a year!  they just got back earlier this summer, and passed through denver with their moving truck on the way from the midwest to northern california, where they have lots of friends and family and she has a job.  we had a great time hearing about their time in kenya, seeing pictures, hearing what they're looking forward to in california ... just generally catching up for the four years it's been since we last saw them!

next was andrew and anne, a friend from nu and his new wife as of last labor day weekend.  they had originally planned to be moving from wisconsin to portland, oregon, but there are still some question marks surrounding andrew's job status there - but they'd already booked his mom a one-way ticket from denver back to illinois so that she could join them on the roadtrip through kansas and see her family with them.  since they knew they had to be in denver and didn't have any commitments until late july, they figured they may as well seize the opportunity to take a three week camping roadtrip around the national parks of colorado, utah, and arizona.  why not, right?  so we got to see them for a night between roadtrip with mom and camping adventure and had a lot of fun.  we went out for their wedding last fall, but hadn't really had any opportunity to get to know anne at all, so their stop with us was doubly fun in that we got to catch up with our old friend and also get to know his new wife who we thought was fabulous and perfect for him.

third nu friend of the summer was clair, one of my best friends from college (and my maid of honor), who was in town for a few days for a training seminar for her work.  i don't think i've seen her for more than maybe a day at a time at the occasional wedding over the past few years, and that was always in the midst of tons of friends coming together, so it was extra nice having her stay with us and getting more time to catch up.  we went out for pizza, took a long bike ride, ate ice cream, stayed up late talking, she told us all about her new boyfriend, and i tried to sell her on moving to colorado.  and, the night that she got to our house, i discovered a mouse in the pantry, which leads me to my next point:

we have mice in our pantry.  ick.  i had scott stop on his way home to get traps the first night i saw the mouse (last tuesday), and it took until thursday morning before we found him in the trap.  hooray!  we were mildly optimistic that he was the only mouse, since our kitchen's right next to the garage and we didn't think it was unreasonable that he might have hopped in from there when we left the door open at some point.  sadly, that night, we were in the kitchen talking, and scott saw another mouse scuttling under the stove - boo.  we went to home depot and got another 8 traps, which we placed throughout our pantry, next to the stove and behind the fridge, and in the crawl space under the kitchen, and got this thing that you plug in and it sends vibrations out through your house's wiring that is supposed to annoy mice that may be nesting between walls so that they want to leave.  no sign of mousey in the trap yet, and i saw him running into the pantry when we got home from hiking on saturday ... but last night, i bought a bunch of plastic bins, cleaned all of our non-canned goods out of the pantry, and didn't see anything that had been nibbled on other than an open bag of pine nuts (that was cleaned out!  the first mouse had found an open bag of chopped pecans that he had been going to town on) ... so i'm unsure what food they think they'll be eating from our house.  i'm hopeful that the mouse realizes that he's cleaned out his food sources and moved on, but i don't know how realistic that hope is.  any idea how long we need to wait to sound the all clear?