Weekend "fun"

Friday our doula came over for about an hour and a half. We talked about our birth plan, and she had nothing but good things to say about the home birth midwife we are thinking about switching to! She also is really interested in Hypnobabies and asked us to give her a copy of the tracks I am listening to and Jerad's birth partner guide so she can use their techniques with us during labor. She's taken Bradley classes and has another client doing hypnobirthing (different than hypnobabies but similar) so she will have tons of techniques.

We have an appointment this Wednesday with the midwife. If all goes well we'll be switching to her for the remainder of my prenatal care, delivery, and post natal visits.

We were both 200% sure that we wanted to do a home birth, but were unsure about the costs. It can range from $1800-$6500 and we live in an area where there is NO competition and has a very high cost of living so I just figured it was going to be on the upper end of the scale. Which still isn't a ton, but we've already paid for almost 30 weeks of care and bloodwork at the practice we're at now. Luckily, her normal fee is only $4200 for all of the prenatal, delivery, and post natal appointments. Which is totally doable for us. I'm going to see is she'll take a little money off since we won't be having as much prenatal care, and maybe we can get a discount for paying it all up front. Jerad's attitude is "its worth it no matter what" and "we saved so much by eloping we're still ahead" but... its still a big chunk so I think its worth asking!

Plus, the less money we spend now, the more time we can take off after the baby comes:)

This weekend we were able to check off a lot of things on our "to-do before baby gets here" list.

We hung the new wall hangings in the living room. LOVE THEM! I got everything at antique stores. My favorite is a 6ft by 4ft window from a Victorian house in SLO. Jerad painted the frame and we hung it on the wall. It really fills in the big wall in our living room without making it look too busy. I should probably take some pictures or something....

So now our room has been rearranged and the paint touched up, the paint touched up in the kitchen, hall bathroom, and the living room and hall both repainted. We bought new living room furniture and a TV as Christmas presents to eachother so the whole room has a new color scheme and feel. The guest room doesn't need to be painted, but we still need to touch up the back bathroom and laundry room. The shower in the back bathroom is finished too, so MOST of our indoor projects are done! Mostly all that is left is the nursery, and a little painting.

We picked out this fabric to make the cradle bumpers:

That will be on the outside, with brown piping on the top and brown on the inside. Its ADORABLE, and matches both our new living room theme (aqua and birds), and goes in our bedroom as well. Everything is almost finished with those.

The biggest project this weekend was clearing out the office/3rd bedroom space so we could start turning it into a nursery. Once we decided that it was going to be the nursery, we sold the bed that was in there. Well, that freed up all sorts of room for us to put our totes of Christmas lights, thrift store donations, baby stuff, laundry... basically anything we didn't feel like dealing with at the moment. It was a disaster. I'm so OCD I was literally losing sleep over it. So, we finally buckled down and put everything in its proper place so we'd have a clean slate. Here is the room as of now:

(the pics are from Jerad's phone so not the best quality)

On Sunday Jerad went to Lowe's and bought the materials to build the molding and baseboards he wants to put up. Think something like this:

The paneling will be painted a bright white, and then the walls a deeper blue. The crib set we picked out is "Pea Berry Ice," by Nursery Works:

It is EXACTLY what we were looking for! Not too "baby," simple, and easy to match.

On Sunday my brother in law came over to watch the superbowl and help Jerad load/unload the lumber. I made a few dips and had to buy mayo for the second time in 4 years. That stuff freaks me out! I always use sour cream or greek yogurt instead, but I was making a new dip and wanted to make sure the flavor was right. We had jalapeño popper dip, spinach dip, veggies and ranch dip, homemade buffalo chicken tenders, and nachos. Annnnd today we get to pay for our sins; for snacks we have cottage cheese and veggies, Jerad got up before work to workout this morning and is running tonight, and I walked 2 miles on my lunch and am working out tonight. It was totally worth it tho:)

Jerad has a lot of side jobs going on right now (he's even working in Bakersfield next weekend for 2 days!) so I don't know what we'll be able to accomplish during the week but the goals are:

• finish cradle bedding
• build molding in nursery
• make midwife decision
  
• actually put "craigslist stuff" on Craigslist