Megan will roll her eyes when she sees that we painted the walls gray...

We finished the baby's room and he hadn't come yet, so we decided to redo our room. Over Labor Day weekend, we repainted, I sewed curtains and pillows and we bought a new duvet cover and a yellow candle. There's a rug in the mail to match. I thought that all of my antsy-ness would be used up, but it hasn't been. So I'm making kitchen curtains now. If this baby doesn't come out soon, I'm going to run out of windows on which to take out my impatience.
Here are updated pictures of the gargantuan belly that is still growing. Help.

Desperate Times...

Those Pretzel M&M's Really Aren't That Bad

The Man-Child's room is finally done (almost). We're going to repaint that side table if we have time before the Child is born.
This is his changing table, refinished and full of clothes and blankets and bibs and diapers.
This is the corner where the glider will go when it arrives.
I love the vintage pictures - Jon built the frames and cut the glass (we will never cut glass again, by the way. Don't really recommend it).
This is my favorite room of the house. It's not at all cutesy and it's all boy. Now all we need is a baby to put in it. Henry has already graced the carpet with dog hair, so we're ready.

Setting an Example

What Fatty really wanted this morning was a perfectly ripe banana. But none were to be found. So she ate a banana that would have been vastly improved by another 24 hours.

Fatty knew that she had to feed herself something with carbs (she was, after all, growing a baby) but everything she looked at made her a bit queasy. No to cereal. No to toast. No to last night's leftovers. So Fatty ate a corndog... for breakfast.

Please don't tell Fatty's doctor. He would be very disappointed. He would threaten Fatty with a huge baby. He wouldn't be so kind as to move Fatty's due date up. Only threats.

This, by the way, is what I found almost an hour after I got out of bed this morning. The dog had crawled up to Jon's pillow (thank God it wasn't mine, because I do believe that's drool) and fallen asleep. Pardon me, Henry, for interrupting your beauty rest.

Multigrain Cheerios

Yesterday Jon told me he'd had his first baby dream. I've been having them for months. Mine seem to reveal my worries about being ready. For instance, I keep dreaming that the baby comes out a girl, which has caused me to ask at every ultrasound, "Is he still a boy?" In my last one, I had just had the baby and was trying to nurse him. I was going through a mental checklist of the proper procedure, when the baby unlatched and looked up at me and said, "You're doing it wrong." He then told me how I was supposed to feed him. Too bad they don't really do that.

Jon's dream seems to reveal how little he worries in general. He dreamt that he had the baby in his arms, but then got bored, so he put him down on the bed and started trying to find clothes to change into, but all his shirts became women's shirts when he pulled them out. That's it. That was the main frustration in the dream.

I dream that things go really wrong and I turn out to be an inadequate mother. Jon dreams that things go really wrong and his clothing turns to women's clothing whenever he tries it on.

There's something to be said for being a man after all.

If We Build it, He Will Come

...at least that's what we're hoping. Here are updated nursery pictures. We had the wrong lens on, so there are but a few. More to come.


Jon made the shelf, I made the curtains (Jon helped) and the crib linens. Perhaps if we make the nursery all ready, then the child will be tempted to come out. We're trying.

Pass-on Worthy

I found this interesting article on signs of autism in newborns and infants (suggesting that autism is a life-long disorder, not the result of a post-birth exposure). Researchers found subtle deviations that parents may not pick up on starting as young as the baby's stay in the NICU and growing more and more noticeable as the baby gets older. Finally, parents start to observe differences after children are over a year, "By about 13 months, the development of children with autism started to diverge markedly from those without, according to the study."

Very interesting. Unfortunately, the things researchers notice in autistic infants that deviate from the norm are kind of specific and you'd have to have seen a ton of babies to notice them... meaning it's not very helpful for parents spotting the disorder in their own children. Still, it's progress!