Picture post

I've been super busy/sick/tired lately so I haven't had the energy to do much beside work/eat/sleep. But a lot has been going on! My brain has sort of stopped functioning properly enough to tell you about it, though. So I'm going to rely heavily on visual aids to get me through this post.

First, and most importantly:

This is the Jawbone 3 weeks ago at 7w1d. It was the first time he looked like anything more than a speck and it was so, so exciting to us. We saw his heart beating again, not just a flicker like the first time but more like an actual heart, with a pumping motion. (His heart rate was 140, which puts him right on the cusp of that old wives' tale: below 140 bpm is a girl and above 140 bpm is a boy. I still think boy, though, and James still thinks girl.)

We were just amazed by this picture, and we didn't mind at all that our baby looked like a delicious shrimp and not actually like a baby at all. So imagine how we felt when we saw him again:


That looks definitively babyish at 9w1d. Here's Jawby hanging out upside down like a bat. Bat-baby! His head is on the left and you can see his little feet sticking out on the right. And when we were there, we not only saw his heart beating some more, but we saw him moving his arms, legs, back, and head!!

He is 2.36 centimeters (or was, there--I understand this is a big growing week for him, so he's almost double that, now, or should be). That's about an inch, and about the size of a medium green olive (which actually...sounds pretty yummy. I need olives. And I don't even LIKE olives!)

James totaled the old green Camry last week (he's OK, the car is, sadly, not) in the lamest accident resulting in a totaled car ever (but the safest, so we're not complaining). He was pulling out of a parallel parking spot on the street and a guy came roaring by and smashed into him, crumpling the hood and breaking an axle. So....we got a new car!


It is a silver 2007 Toyota Rav4 with 35,000 miles on it. It was listed for a good price, but even so, James haggled them down another 1,000 and got the dealership to pay the taxes on it for us. This is the first time we have ever really bought a car instead of just driving what our parents didn't want or buying a car from a friend for $300 or so, so he had never bargained like that before and I wasn't sure he could. Disloyal wife! I was so nervous, and then when the salesman agreed, I wanted to jump up and down going, "IN YOUR FACE! HA HA! WE GOT YOU!" I think James did, too, but instead we settled for giving each other a surreptitious high five under the desk where they couldn't see.

We love the new car. It has already been to Roanoke and Norfolk. It has so much space and is so clean and I love driving it.

Because we saved so much money on the car, we can afford to replace the gross old couch and chair we've had since 2001. We're thinking of something like this:

The fabric is microfiber, and the color would be the lighter khaki instead of the darker sand on top. I'm not 100% sure about this couch because I find the arms a little funky, but I like the shape of it overall and I like the three-cushion back a lot. And the space underneath would keep things from becoming irretrievably lost under there (Like the TiVo remote that was missing for three months...)

I won't let anybody buy anything for the baby until 12 weeks (only 14 days to go!!!) and that includes James (although he might have accidentally gotten some little pumpkin socks) and me (who might have sort of kind of gotten the baby a book called The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat--but only because the cat looks like our Hank). But it hasn't stopped us from planning out what to do with the study when the baby is born. Right now, James works from home at the dining room table and I work in the second bedroom. But I've heard from all kinds of people about how HA HA you can't work in the same room where the baby is sleeping YOU CRAZY PERSON AHAHAHAHAHA. So we were chagrined to find out we probably wouldn't be able to have a nursery/home office like we had planned.

Our condo is really, really small, guys.

We have about 850 square feet. That's not a lot, since it feels like 30 or 40 percent of that is taken up by closets. We have 9 closets in this place, including pantries and the double closets in the bedrooms. I am not complaning, since I love closets for storage, but it does make it rather difficult to position furniture in the rooms. There are only so many combinations that don't leave you blocking a door.

This weekend, I made James push all the furniture around in the living room, wondering where we could fit an extra desk. (We call this game House Tetris, but it is NOT AS FUN and FAR MORE SWEATY than regular Tetris.) It was very frustrating because there was no good solution and I made James push the furniture around for two hours and finally we got snappish with each other and went to bed.

In the middle of the night, one on of my frequent (bi-hourly) bathroom breaks, I got an idea. A brilliant idea. This morning, I sat down and drew up a plan that I am pretty sure will allow us to have a workspace in the living room without sacrificing space or aesthetics.

Here is our living room as it stands now:

This is not really done to scale, but I think it gives you an idea of what we have to work with now. But this is what I think can happen:


The wine bar didn't make it--I think with it it will look too crowded--but I don't know where we'll put everything in it. I guess I could buy one of those vintage-y globe liquor cabinets or put a wine rack in the kitchen?

A better illustration of the desk/TV setup:

I get a workspace and I get to have my house still look nice and Pottery-Barn-esque. James gets a flatscreen TV! And Jawbone gets his very own room. Everybody wins!

James thinks that if it works, I should take pictures and send them to Apartment Therapy. I probably won't, but this post has given me the idea of doing a virtual tour around my house--I wish I had more pictures of different places I have lived throughout my life. I don't remember places very well--I have vague ideas, but it would be nice to have a concrete reminder of things. And it's neat to be able to look back and see how my design style--how my idea of home--has changed over the years.

I wish the gorgeous crisp weather we were having would come back and replace this muggy awfulness. Autumn, where are you?