Make way for baby!

Jared has been hard at work crossing things off his "honey, do" list as the countdown to baby #3 draws near! This week we (Jared!) got the baby's room painted and finished painting the crib we found on craigslist a few months ago. It's hard to see in the photo, but there are three drawers on the right side of the crib and then two drawers underneath, which I love. I am SO happy with the results and just love how it all looks with our new floors-- thanks to my super hubby!

After Jared puts the baseboards in we'll bring in the changing table he made before Ruby was born and I also hope to get a black Poang chair like this one to rock baby in. I, of course, had to get some Ikea bedding and even got this cute diaper bag. I've been told that this bag is totally impractical and all together too small, but after carrying around that big old backpack diaper bag with the first two, I was ready to downsize! I figure it will at least work for quick outings around town.

Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, no one has been begging for belly pics this time around. I guess they figure they've seen me massively pregnant before, so no big deal. But, I felt for posterity I should at least post one belly shot. Unfortunately I had to take this myself with the timer and it was blurry every time I tried. Oh well, you get the idea. I'm 31 weeks pregnant and no, I'm not having twins. :)

We are so anxious to meet this new addition to our family and thankful already for the person God has made him or her to be. Now, all we need is a name...

Bear with me...

Y'all... ( I can say that now since we in live the South) this has been QUITE a morning!

The good news is that we are getting a new refrigerator and range. The bad news is we are getting a new refrigerator and range. Murphy's Law has been hard at work around our house. Since we've moved in we have had to replace the garbage disposal (covered by our home warranty), the heating element in the oven (also covered by aforementioned warranty), our laptop has required a new motherboard, memory, and keyboard (still covered under its warranty!), our new TV needs to be repaired (supposedly covered by its warranty), and now sometime yesterday our fridge died (NOT covered under our home warranty). Now, I really should have caught on to the fact that the fridge was getting warmer yesterday, but with the noise level in our house and the general heat and humidity, I just thought, "Hmm, I guess that temperature knob got bumped again." I'm here to tell you--it didn't.

In the whole "isn't life funny" kind of way things work, Jared also replaced our kitchen sink last night. It's a beautiful sink that I'm sure we are going to enjoy, unfortunately he realized at about 10pm last night that he was going to need some adapters to get water actually flowing. Imagine my panic this morning when I realized I had a whole fridge full of rotting food and no sink to wash things up! I would like to say that I was cool as a cucumber, but everyone would know I was lying, so why bother.

So, at 8am this morning Jared, the kiddos, and I were rolling into Lowe's. We decided to go ahead a just replace the range at the same time as the fridge so they'll match and plunked down our $2K+ all before 9am. That's tough to do before breakfast. My super hubby also fixed the sink so I was able to wash and rinse and dispose of OODLES of stuff. Now my fridge is empty and my garage freezer, trash barrels, and compost pile are stuffed. But the job is done and tomorrow I'll have a beautiful new fridge and range--yea!!

All that said, forgive me if there's no Tasty Tuesday. The only thing I'm going to be "cooking" today are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches... and I'm pretty sure you already have that recipe.

Follow the (yellow) brick road!

I thought I'd come on back to the blogging world with an update from our sidewalk project. This was actually done last weekend. Thankfully the daily thunderstorms let up for us so that we were able to get the whole job done. Anyway, here it is!
Jared filled the excavated pathway with coarse gravel first, then the sand. Getting it perfectly flat was a challenge, especially without trampling the flowers. I think Jared might actually have a little bit of "Spiderman" in him that he was able to do this at all! Imagine our chagrin when we saw Sunday morning that a cat and a raccoon had scampered along the back of the house where we hadn't yet laid the brick pavers down!

Here's Jared laying some pavers. This was at the bend in the sidewalk which was our stopping point on Saturday evening. We were both pretty sore from all of the squatting, kneeling, carrying, and just handling the rough bricks with our bare hands--ouch!

This was Sunday night. All the pavers were down and Jared got all of the bricks cut for the turn beautifully. Talk about advanced math skills! Jared was sweeping in the polymeric sand, next he compacted the bricks down--I'm sure our neighbors loved us making a huge racket at nine at night, but we had to get the equipment returned!

Check it out! I need to get one again in the daylight, but this will do for now. One home improvement project down, a million to go!

A weekend in our neck of the woods

I know-- I'm unreliable blogger. Sometimes life just gets in the way, and really that's okay. Right? But if you've been wondering here's what we've been up to this weekend...

My sister, Heidi, and her boyfriend, Kelly, drove down from Indiana on Friday to help us tear out and replace the walk behind our house. It was slanted towards the house and had rotted out the bottom board of the sun porch. Tearing out the concrete and digging out so that we could lay our brick paver path was a BIG TOUGH job!

Here's about half the path ready for gravel. You can see the huge pile of gravel at the end of the walk with the concrete they had torn out sitting behind it.

On Sunday, we all went down to Sliding Rock for a little fun since muscles were too sore to do much. Here's Heidi and Kelly.

Max decided that he wanted to go down with Daddy! The water is about 50 degrees and the pool at the bottom is 8 feet deep! Our little man didn't even cry--unlike Ruby's attempt a few weeks ago! He did say he was ready to go home after that though!

Here's Kelly making the plunge! I think the guys did it three or four times. The line was quite long so after that we decided it was time to warm up and have some dinner.

We had a great time with Heidi and Kelly and look forward to seeing them again soon. Hopefully I'll be posting photos of the finished pathway soon!