Fiona in January

Fiona in January

Saturday, December 31, 2011

2012 > 2011?

Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when all the bloggers of the world start pontificating and reflecting on the past year. To be honest, a lot of this year has been a blur for me, but I'll try to hit the high points:

1) My husband got a new job after being laid off for almost a year

2) We were able to move out of the upstairs of his parent's house and into our own apartment

3) We celebrated our 1 year anniversary

4) We panicked for a good 3-4 weeks after finding out (surprise!) we're having a baby in June 2012

5) We got to welcome a few new little ones into the world and congratulate friends who became new parents

This year has been difficult in many ways, in addition to the above blessings, and many I'm sure I forgot to mention...

- My niece, Reagan, developed a seizure disorder (she's almost 2)
- Dear friends of ours experienced a horrible loss of their newborn baby girl

I really can't list anything else after that last one...last night we found out another one of my good friends lost their baby girl, only 2 weeks before she was supposed to be born. The struggle of trying to understand what the hell is going on and how there could be any "good" come out of such horrible tragedies is overwhelming. I can't imagine the pain of a loss like that and there are no words I can say to make it better...not the easiest thing for a writer to realize...

My prayer for 2012 is that it will bring healing and hope to so many of my friends who are hurting, grieving and struggling to make sense out of tragedy. No resolutions this year for me, only desperate prayers for guidance and peace.

Friday, December 16, 2011

For the Love of Books!

Since the surprise news of a new little one joining our household in about 6 months was sprung on us, one of the things at the forefront of my mind was, "the second bedroom is a hole! where are we going to put this kid?!" Thankfully when we moved into this apartment about 6 months ago, we opted for the 2 bedroom model.

However, being avid readers with no extra money for decent bookshelves, we've been using the second bedroom as a storage room largely for boxes upon boxes of books.

We did manage to eventually wedge a full-sized mattress set in there for when we have friends crash with us on their way to the beach, but it really wasn't much of a guest room space. Now that Baby Knives is on the way we'll be using that room as her (can you tell I'm hoping for a girl??) space.

We were in desperate need of bookshelves. After much consideration and shopping around, we got these fabulous IKEA shelves as an early Christmas gift from my in-laws and I couldn't be more thrilled! My husband is slightly less enthusiastic since I was almost worse than useless in helping assemble them and it took him about 2 hours to piece it together. Damn allen wrenches!

However, now that is completely assembled and full of books, he's much more excited...so am I! Since he worked so hard assembling the beast, I took over unpacking ALL the boxes of books, sorting through them to make sure I could shelve authors and series together.

Needless to say I got completely overwhelmed at least 5 times in the 2-day-long process and had to close the door in denial of the mess lurking behind it!

I finally was able to get about 3/4 of our book collection shelved and boxed up a ton of books to give away and the last 1/4 of our collection was re-boxed and will go back into storage until we eventually move into a bigger place and can get another behemoth IKEA bookshelf to store them.





























I cannot adequately express how much I love the bookcase...and also love that it is the first thing we changed/added to Baby Knives' room - what kid needs a crib or dresser when they have hundreds of books lining the walls?

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Oh Baby...

I haven't been neglecting this blog by accident...major life "stuff" has been happening lately and I just haven't been ready to share yet. My husband and I are still adjusting to this latest development, but we agreed now it's time to let the word out officially...we're expecting a baby in June!

So far my pregnancy has involved a lot of puking and sleeping. Apparently that's incredibly common in the first trimester. I like to claim that this first trimester has been sponsored by Linda Blair. Seriously, I never knew what would set me off and it would differ from one day to the next!

Explain to me the logic behind not being able to keep down rice cereal and dry toast, but craving Coke and Taco Bell's nachos and Crunchwrap Supremes? I've learned to just go with the cravings and make my insides (and what feels like the parasite growing inside me) happy.

I haven't been able to stand cooking anything meat-related in about 2 months and I'm hoping that changes soon, we're a little starved for protein around here. I had a doctor's appointment today and everything looks good. My due date is June 17 and I'm going to be 13 weeks along on Friday. It still feels like yesterday when we found out (more than 4 weeks ago) and completely panicked at this new little surprise God has decided to drop in our laps! Thankfully, we're starting to adjust our brains to the concept of having a baby, although this whole pregnancy/labor/birth thing seems like a disgusting cosmic joke to me.

I am definitely not of the "this is a beautiful process" school of thought...my school of thought revolves mostly around the "this is so gross and horrifying, why can't I be unconscious throughout this process" concept.

So that's what's new in our lives at the moment, hopefully I'll be updating this blog a little more regularly now that I can actual feel comfortable sharing what's going on in my head lately. We have picked out names for a girl and a boy - we LOVE them, but the girl's name is really really cool. No, we're not sharing it yet on here...but probably will once we know what we're having.

As for now, I'm off to find a Taco Bell fix.