The Desk Has Been Cleaned

Today is my last day of work. The beginning of my maternity leave. For 6 months. Man, that's wild to say! The longest "break" I've had from the working world since I started at this job 10 years ago (well 9.5...it will have been 10 years at the beginning of December) is 2 weeks at a time for my 2 longest vacations in Australia and Africa. It's a little bizarre to have a 6 month "vacation." Now, granted, my life is about to change completely and those 6 months will be spent trying to figure out what to do with a baby, not being on a carefree vacation, but still, I won't be "clocking in" to work for 6 whole months. I have to admit, I'm pretty excited and ready for the break.

In this day and age, I KNOW I'm extremely lucky to have a wonderful job at a wonderful company that compensates me well and allows me to live very comfortably. I have never underestimated that. However, I must admit, after almost 10 years at this company, I have experienced a little bit of burn out. Now, I've definitely have had periods of burn out over the span of this job, but I normally bounce back into my super motivated self in no time. However, since becoming pregnant, I have been dreading coming in almost every day. Now, likely, a lot of that has to be attributed to the fatigue that pregnancy brings...it doesn't exactly help you want to do anything. But, some of it, I'm sure, is just plain old burn out.

Something I do know about myself, though, is that I need to be a busy person....with endeavors that involve intellectual pursuits and adult socialization. Those are not things that really fall at the top of the child care ladder. Not to say it's not possible, but it's definitely more work to seek those things out if you were to be a primary caregiver for a child. So, I do think a working mom is what I want to be. Not that I have a choice given mine and Mike's current employment situation (ie, I have a paying job and he has not been able to find one since his lay off) but, choice or not, it is what I think I will prefer to do.

So, not only am I looking forward to having 6 months out of the working world, but I'm also looking forward to those 6 months being a time to begin to truly appreciate, again, the enjoyment of my career and to look forward to getting back to it in January 2010.

OK, I'm ready!

Well, it's definitely nearing the end of pregnant time. I've been doing my darndest to get as ready as possible for a baby. Ok, well maybe I haven't been "studying" enough child rearing or parenting books, but I figure I'd be better at absorbing those things on an "as needed" basis. Plus, I don't want to drive myself crazy from the get go trying to do the whole parenting "right." I figure we'll figure out how to be parents as we need to and don't want to worry about it too much.

Other than that, though, we've got the nursery done, of course, and have as many belongings as we think we really need to get started on the whole baby business. Everything is organized, cleaned and ready for a baby.

In addition, as you've seen on other postings, the house projects have been attended to as much as possible so we don't have to waste precious time on those with a newborn in the house.

I've also been doing as much as I can think of to get ready to not have time for myself for a while once the baby comes and life as we know it is turned upside down until we start to get a feel for this whole parenting business. In the last few weeks, I've gotten a haircut, had my check up at the dentist, socialized as much as I had the energy for, been reading books like mad and I even got a pedicure yesterday (in a lovely shade of blue to celebrate the new boy soon to be in my life) so that I won't even have to worry about my toes for a bit. Not to mention, I'm really over this whole being pregnant thing. So, I guess I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be. Come on baby! We're waiting!

The good news is that it literally could happen any day now. At 38.5 weeks, he's considered fully cooked and, not to get too gross and specific, all the signs of soon to be labor are here. Things are moving along. But, of course, babies come when they're ready so no one can tell us when. However, I can assure you that labor WILL happen sometime between now and the next few weeks! Crazy. I'm officially anxious.

More House Progress!

We've been working hard to get through some items on our home improvement project list since it will likely remain untouched for a while after baby boy is born. Mike, my wonderful stay at home husband, has been taking the reigns on most of it, of course. Here is a quick list of some of the completed projects from the last month:

1) Recessed lights installed in the lounge

2) New post light installed in front yard (involved Mike digging a big trench to run the electrical line). This and the above were done by a professional.

3) Mike and I installed a new light fixture in the front screened in porch area. What should have been a quick, 15 minute job, turned into 2 hours and a trip to home depot. The fixture that was there previously had some very questionable electrical work so we worked together and made it "up to code."

4) The inside stairs risers have been refinished. Towards the end of our renovation, we found out that the stair refinishing quote didn't include this part of the stairs. They wanted $15 per riser! Since we were already over budget and not looking to spend more, we opted to take on this project ourselves. So, one year later, Mike got them all scraped down, sanded and poly urethaned.

5) New windows for our "lounge" (which still need to be stained) and our basement (great improvement for our taped up window panes down there).

Basement Window "Before"

Basement Window "After"

6) New stair rail on front stairway.

New Railings and Lamp Post

So, as you can tell, Mike's been a very busy guy! Somehow, he still makes time to have dinner ready for me when I get home. I like this spoiled life!

A Story of a Latch

This is the story of the antique latch on our built in dining room hutch. It's not likely an interesting story to anyone but myself and Mike. However, I'm so personally thrilled about this project that I'm going to bore you with the details anyway (unless of course you take my advice and stop reading now). If you've ever had any kind of household project that was tedious and difficult and you were able to overcome it with a fantastic result, then you'll have an idea of why I'm so excited about this.

It was approximately 4 and a half years ago that I bought our lovely home and knew that it needed a lot of updating. What I loved, though, is that it still had a lot of it's original charm, including lovely built in's like the china hutch. Unfortunately, the house had been rented for a while and things were beaten up a bit, including the latch on the china hutch which was missing a pin. So, for the last 4 plus years, the door has either been permanently shut (we couldn't easily open it), rubber banded shut or standing open.

The "Before" Latch Picture

Trying to figure out how to fix this has been occupying my thoughts on and off all of that 4 plus years of time. I've looked into finding replacement pieces, replacement whole parts (but nothing looked the same) or finding someone that did this kind of repair. None of the antique stores, online searches nor specialty hardware stores brought up anything that could help

Finally, last week, I spoke with the owner of a wonderful store in Boston called Restoration Resources that "saves" beautiful parts of old Boston homes and sells them salvage style. I'd visited the store before but their hardware section was hidden away so I didn't know they might have something that could help with the latch issue. However, I thought of them again since I've been on a renewed mission to get this latched fixed after my Dad and Mike installed the bead board in the interior...the latch was the only missing component to complete the hutch restoration

The owner of Restoration Resources I spoke to said "sure, we probably have something that can help you out...come on in." So, Monday a week ago I did only to find them closed (the hours listed on their web site are obviously incorrect). Mike and I went back last Saturday and another man that worked there said he had no idea what the owner might have been referring to but he didn't have anything like our latch. Great, two wasted trips. However, he did say he knew someone that might be able to repair it. While writing down the info of this person, he mentioned that he got some of the parts that they needed from the store. After I inquired further, I found out that they have a box of old latches in the back so I asked to look through them. Low and behold there was one latch in this box that had the same interior mechanisms ours was supposed to have and it was somewhat similar in size. So, we bought it for $5 and left

On Monday we attacked the project to see what we could do. After studying it for a while, we thought there might be a small chance we would be successfully able to use the parts from the latch we bought, so we started to take apart the latch we had purchased. Since trying to describe the interior fittings and the whole project end to end would be incredibly difficult, tedious and even more boring than this story has already been, here's the shortened version.

Several hours Monday, drilling metal, tin snips, metal filing, trips to Home Depot, Lowe's and a craft store for more supplies; Tuesday, a couple more hours, lots of hammering, more filing metal, weld adhesive, WD-40, lots of little tweaks and about an hour of Mike polishing, we had a working, beautiful, newly restored latch for our built in hutch! I can't even tell you how excited I was! It really made my week (sad, I know).

The Latch "After"....Beautifully Restored and Fully Functional

It's such an incredibly great feeling to have this long pending project completed. Yay!

Baby Luci

My parents recently shipped us the family bassinet (the ones my brothers and I all used as babies). Mike and I got it set up in the bedroom so it's ready for our baby. But, before baby boy Hines comes home, there's one other "baby" in the house that wanted to get some use out of it.

Yesterday, we found little Luci curled up in half of it. (The "junk" seen on the other side is where I've been creating my "to go to the hospital pile.") Isn't she a precious baby?!?!

The Happy, Expecting Couple

We didn't have one nice picture of Mike and I together with baby in the belly. On Sunday, we enjoyed a "cook-in" (it was pouring rain so Mike and his Dad were the only ones out braving the rain by the grill) at Mike's sister's to celebrate niece Emily's b'day, Mike's Dad's b'day and Fathers Day for all the fathers in the family (including Mike, of course). We took the opportunity of looking nice and having another person around to take a picture of us to get one. So, here we are!

Kara (at 37.5 weeks) and Mike

Viva La Revolution!

It's rare that I see commercials these days. With the miracle that is TIVO, I blissfully fast forward through their existence. However, this one caught my eye in super speed and I went back to watch it. I'm SO glad I did! Of course, I then shared it with Mike.

Being chinchilla owners, this commercial is flipping hilarious to us! However, we're going to refrain from letting our little feisty chinchilla, Smokey Josephina, see it lest she gets any crazy ideas. Enjoy!