Oatmeal, Snow, My Birthday, and Other Things, Part One

Well, it’s been a while since we’ve had a newsy update, so I am going to attempt to cover the entire month of March, plus the first three days in April, all in one post — not that anything amazing happened, but you love us so you care… right?! Besides, stick with me here, and you’ll be rewarded with lots of Pookie pics.

FIRST, there was my birthday on the 6th. We went out to Carrabba’s (naturally) for a birthday dinner, and at home Marcus gave me my presents:

Framed pictures of us and the little one.

and lovely, stainless steel cookware!

*                         *                         *

NEXT was Emrick’s 6-month check-up on the 22nd. They weighed him at 16 lbs, 12.5 oz, and measured his length at 25″. When I asked the doc where that length put Emrick in the percentile rankings for height, he said, “Negative 19%.”

Just kidding.

Anyway, he also received his last round of vaccinations until he is a year old. At his 9-month check-up they will prick his heel to test for anemia, but there will be no more shots until his 12-month check-up. His 2, 4, and 6 month shots were all doses of the same five (I think) vaccines. At 12 months he’s supposed to get the MMR vaccine, and that’s the big, scary one.

Emrick acted a little different at this appointment. Normally, whether he is in my arms or lying on the exam table, he is fine until he gets his shots, and then, of course, he screams until they’re over and I pick him up. But this time, he was crying as soon as I set him on the examination table to undress him. He cried during the undressing, cried during the weighing, and basically any time I put him down. Last time, he smiled at the nurse when she bent down and spoke sweetly to him. This time, his face broke into a look of mild horror, and then he screamed. Ah, Pookie! But when he was in my arms, everything was rainbows and marshmallows.

I don’t have any pics from the day of the pediatrician appointment, so I will just re-post a pic from earlier this March, ’cause it’s cute:

*                         *                         *

ALSO, we have a couple of household projects going on. One is simply getting Emrick’s nursery together. I was dying to do this last summer, but since we knew we wanted him sleeping in our room for the first six months, all we did was choose a paint color and paint the room. Well, *I* chose the paint color and *Marcus* painted the room.

But as of Friday night, Emrick is now sleeping in the nursery. All the furniture is in there, but the decorating has not yet begun. Here is what the nursery looks like right now. You might consider it a “before” picture:

Yeah, it definitely needs some pizazz. We need a cute nursery for a cute boy. I actually already have nearly everything I want to use to decorate it, but it takes time to get everything put together, so stay tuned!

The other household project going on is that we’re moving the laundry room upstairs, and turning the downstairs half bath into a 3/4 bath, by adding a shower to it, using space from the old laundry room. Here are before shots of the half bath and the current laundry room:

The laundry room has been doubling as downstairs diaper changing station and a baby bath station (there's an unseen sink to the right).

There are a few reasons we’re moving the laundry upstairs. One is that just above the laundry room is unused “loft” space. It looks cute and seems like a great space, but it currently just serves as an echo chamber that provides all of the upstairs bedrooms with noise from the family room below.  The only time the loft actually gets used is when my dad visits and he sets up shop there with his laptop, his blackberry, his iPod, iPad, iPhone, megaphone, TV, Wii, bluetooth, PSP, iPad2, and the kitchen sink.  (For those of you who don’t know my dad, everything after “blackberry” is a joke). It’s a great location that allows him to take care of personal business, while keeping one ear open to the conversations happening below (and interjecting the occasional commentary). Sorry dad, you’ll have to find a new spot!

So the loft is getting transformed into a laundry room, which will make the space functional and help block out the downstairs noise. And with the original laundry room directly below, the plumbing is easy to sort out. Also, as mentioned before, moving the laundry upstairs will give us room to add a shower to the current half bath. Our motive for doing that is to make the downstairs “bonus room” more usable/marketable as a bedroom. Without a place to bathe on the main floor, that’s hard to do. There is a lot of room for bedrooms and bathrooms in the unfinished basement, but we don’t know when we’ll get around to that, and that’s a much bigger, more expensive undertaking than moving the laundry upstairs. Marcus would have to hire out most of the work for finishing the basement, whereas with moving the laundry room, he is doing everything himself. I know! What a handy guy! After telling a couple of people what we were doing, and having them respond with faint surprise that Marcus wasn’t hiring someone else to do it, I said to Marcus, “People seem to think this is hard to do. IS it hard?” and Marcus responded, “For a normal person.” 😛

As for what we will do with the remaining space in the old laundry room, we will basically use it as a janitor’s closet (I’m the janitor). There’s no good place currently to keep the mops, brooms, and vacuum cleaner, so right now they usually get “stored” basically in the last place they were used. There’s a broom leaning up against the pantry door as we speak! Oh, the travesty! But the janitor’s closet is just gravy; it’s not our motive for moving the laundry.

This is what Marcus has done so far:

That's a pocket door to the left. A pocket door is the only thing that made sense for the space.

*                         *                         *

SORRY! I was going to talk about oatmeal and snow in this post, too, but it’s already too long, and I need a break, so I will post part two of this March Newsletter later today.

I hope every one is having a happy Sunday!