As Promised

First of all, I'm going to start using "he" and "she" interchangeably because I feel kind of weird calling our baby "it." We are still not finding out the sex, at least, not on purpose. Our friends Lauren and Brandon, though, just had an ultrasound at about Week 20 and said it was kind of obvious. If we have a notion one way or the other, don't worry, we're not going to guard that information like a top secret cryptogram.

There are a multitude of these websites and books that tell you essentially how far your baby is in its development. "It's Week 6, your baby is beginning to develop the top half of a small intestine" or "it's Week 9, your baby now has a gall bladder!" Well, we are currently in the throes of Week 15. What does that mean? Apparently not a lot goes on in Week 15, actually. Let's see...our baby is developing taste buds and he or she can sense light. The latter development is kind of useless information, considering our baby's current environment. Pretty dark in there, I suspect. Not sure I want to even learn how we came to the conclusion that at Week 15 a baby can sense light. This week is apple week, by the way. They have these other websites that tell you how big your baby is and they usually use fruit as examples. This one website did use a shrimp as an example a week or two ago, which was kind of weird. Are we talking a curled up shrimp? One stretched out? We talking 31/50 count shrimp? Or maybe U8 shrimp - those are pretty big. Anyway, we seem to refer to each week as "apple week" or "lime week" rather than what number we're on. This seems to confuse the people at the OB/GYN.

This image is from a couple of weeks ago. We went in for that triple screen test, which we debated getting for awhile but now are glad we did. The tipping point in the decision to get it or not was, I think, the "free" sonogram. It was a pretty lengthy sonogram, too, because they had a new technician who hadn't used that particular type of equipment before. Unfortunately, they only gave us 2 images, and one was either a hand or a foot - we really couldn't tell which - so I'm not posting it. This time we saw legs and arms flailing about, the baby was rolling around...it was pretty amazing. Yeah, it looks like every other sonogram I've ever seen...but it's ours!

Another Project Completed

A half bathroom is usually the smallest room in one's house, and our former travesty of a half bathroom was no exception. This room was as depressing as it was tiny. It really needed to be put out of its misery. This was one of those rooms that, when we first saw it thought, "well, at least it's clean." To call it an embarrassment would be like saying GM is "financially challenged." To say that it was outdated would have been like Erika going to work in a hoop skirt and bodice. Let's take a look at what we had to work with:

Three things kind of stick out. First, I don't even know what kind of floor this is. Is it supposed to look like cracked marble? Like little dingy interlocking stones? I have literally no clue, but it appeared perpetually dirty, no matter how much it was scrubbed, mopped or wiped down. Next, the tile on the wall was that classic 1970s harvest gold. It might have been a touch lighter than that, but you get the general idea. Here's a confession, though: I actually thought we could leave this tile and paint the walls a bright orange. Erika pointed out that this might cause either seizures or flashbacks by anyone confined to our bathroom for more than 2 minutes. So we took the tile down. Finally, you can kind of see the wallpaper, but you'll have to take our word for it when we say that all 3 layers were completely unpalatable.

Ah, there's a better shot of some of that wallpaper. Whoever patented that design must have made a fortune because I've seen that crap everywhere. There was actually an additional, hidden layer under the mirror that was a kind of neon green paisley - which I am sure actually did cause someone at some time at least a mild seizure. The mirror/medicine cabinet/lighting combo is one that we see elsewhere in our house. My theory is that the contractor either had a relative working at the store where these were purchased, or he got some sort of 3-for-2 deal on them. If you like them, let me know quick, because the remaining 2 in our house are not long for this world.

The vanity is another piece that we have more of in our house. It's made, I think, of cardboard. And while your eyes might be telling you that the counter is carved from a single piece of creamy yellow marble, joke's on you! It's not! Actually, I don't know what it is made from, but I think some sort of polymer was involved in its creation. And while it's in the picture, has anyone else taken up a toilet? I thought there would be some intricate, secure connection between the toilet and the pipe that takes stuff to wherever. Yeah, the toilet just kind of sits on this hole. All that stands between a dry floor and utter, awful disaster is a relative thin ring of wax. Luckily my father was able to walk me through the proper removal and reinstallation of this thing.

So there you have it: the before shots. Now to the after!

Obviously we needed to repaint, adding to the current tally of repainted surface in our house. Instead of tile we put up beadboard or wainscoting (heard it called both and I use both terms interchangeably). The tile is, well, tile. I think it's marble but I honestly don't know.

Little bit of an aesthetic upgrade in the vanity/sink department. Although I feel a little hypocritical because we got a very similar vanity for our master bathroom, just as the original vanities in our house seemed to be from the same litter. No medicine cabinet because it's a half bathroom and it seemed superfluous. The granite is this really cool (in our opinion, anyway) piece that looks like a cross section of a fossilized river bed. We spotted it in our original stone safari when we were looking for a surface for our kitchen but didn't think it looked right in that kind of setting.

So that's it. We did everything ourselves except for the floor. I'm sure at some point I'll learn to cut tile, but until then we have no problem paying someone to do it. Sure, it took a little while, but it came out pretty darn good. Only two rooms to go now! Still...Dad, if you're reading this, I'll probably need just a little help on those toilets, too!