Finished Pillow

Sorry for the bad lighting and the pillow bragging, but there has to be someone out there that appreciates baby crafting more than my husband who thinks this came out "good" and is just glad I finally took his advice and made something square as opposed to intricately scalloped.

I made the back out of a thrifted pillow case which I am now kicking myself for not buying the rest of the set of because I totally would have made nursery curtains out of it.  Oh well.

Now if I can just whip up the crib skirt this weekend I'll be officially ready for the little miss to arrive.  Not that she has an actual nursery as of yet but I'm thinking I probably won't have much time for sewing between the newborn and the moving.......

One of Those Mornings

This was thrust at me this morning along with a calendar detailing which day next week David will be officially quitting the family.....all because I had the audacity to make him finish his math work. 

Moms, we're just so lame.  

Translation:  "David sticking his tongue out at mom."

On the bright side, he did know better than to actually stick his tongue out at me.  I'm still trying to decide if I should go totally mean mom and make him correct his spelling and punctuation errors :)

The Finished Quilt and Thoughts on Having a Daughter

So I finally finished the most time consuming baby quilt in the history of baby quilts, but the final product was so worth it!  Don't mind my quilt model.....he's just really annoyed I was holding up our park trip for ridiculous things like blog photography.

The whole thing took a good ten weeks from start to finish but apparently I haven't had my fill because I just started a matching pillow for the rocker which I can hopefully finish up before the baby arrives....and also the crib skirt that I have all the materials for (including pom pom fringe!) but haven't actually begun.

I still have two whole weeks so I should totally be good.......

I decided to go ahead and bind each individual hexagon which was just as difficult as the quilt shop lady said it would be and did involve a lot of hand sewn repair work from where I didn't get my scallops quite right on the back side with the sewing machine but it turned out even better than I expected and, let's face it, it was going to have that certain special homemade look about it no matter what I did.......

It's even cuter now that I've washed it up and it's gone all crinkly.  And yes, yes that is my gigantic baby belly there.

And here's David, excited because he thinks the photo shoot is over.......

........and then more than a little put out when he realizes that it is not.

It's so much more fun crafting for a girl than for boys.  I feel like a whole new world of options has just opened up for me--not that the boys didn't appreciate all the things I made them but it was definitely harder to find projects to do in general and once we moved to Florida and they really didn't need anything knit for them I was pretty much reduced solely to cardboard creations.  With a daughter I can make all sorts of things--with lace!--or any fancy trim I want :)

The idea of having a daughter is also a little terrifying though.  With the boys there was a sense that I could just do my best at mothering until they get big enough to be handed off to dad for all the how-to-be-a-man lessons.  With a girl (and she definitely is a girl--I had the midwife double check last week when she busted out the ultrasound machine for a head-down check!) all the responsibility for teaching her how to be a woman falls to me.  I'm the one who will be responsible for all "the talks" and I'm who she'll be looking to as an example for, oh, everything....so no pressure there.  It's probably a good thing I started with boys because I am a much better woman now than I was at twenty-five.  And hopefully by the time she's a teenager I'll have grown into someone really worth emulating.

House Hunting and Showers

Well, we've made our dreaded trip up north to hunt down a new domicile and I am happy to report success! We will not be homeless come November after all and forced to move in with aunt Kate.......which I am sure she is also grateful for :)

I don't have any actual pictures from our Virginia adventure so I'm ever so cleverly sticking in pictures from my baby shower from the week before instead.  You are welcome.

The shower started out as a "sprinkle" but due to everyone's excitement over this being a girl it quickly morphed into something much, much fancier.

Can I just say house hunting in DC is the worst.

Just really the worst.

There are so many options and you are constantly having to check how close you are to the metro stops or the Pentagon bus and looking at google maps to see if you can figure out how long the commute would be and you could be ten miles away from your destination with an hour long commute or fifteen miles away with a a thirty minute commute and nothing makes any sense at all.  And then everyone tells you that google maps is always wrong anyway and there's no way you can use it to calculate your real commute time so I guess your only solution would be to hop on your public transport of choice at rush hour and just see how long it takes you to get to your destination so you could really be sure---well, we didn't do that.

I think we ended up looking at almost twenty houses and we didn't find our house until the very last day of the trip when I was in full on panic mode and Chris had dropped his requirements to "does it have a roof?"

See.....fancy.

You see Chris wanted to live as close to the Pentagon as possible given our budget constraints and my desire to not live in a condo and I wanted to live in the country--I mean google maps said you could take a Pentagon bus from Leesburg and be at the Pentagon in an hour so it must be true!  

We compromised by living as close to the Pentagon as possible given our budget constraints and my desire not to live in a condo and found a place in North Alexandria that has a metro stop on the corner and is close enough for Chris to bike or run to work.  

It's a freestanding house with a fenced in yard in a super cute neighborhood but living that close to the Pentagon comes at a price.  An actual super expensive for the size of your house price that is.

The house we ended up with is probably about the same size as our current house but there is no garage and not a lot of storage so we are going to be doing some major downsizing of all of the things and extra furniture we have squirreled away.  Also, probably some of the boys larger toys.

And of course I didn't think to take any pictures while we were there so that was smart.

It was a difficult choice because you can get almost double the square footage and a garage for the same price if you live further west but you are definitely sacrificing your time the further out you go and Chris has a desperate aversion to long commutes.  But I guess I can't be too upset at him for wanting to maximize his time at home with us :)

There was a lot of time spent watching me awkwardly unwrap gifts while everyone stared at me.   

We feel really good about the house though--it was the only one we saw that we both really liked.  It's charming, has been very well taken care of, has all hardwood floors and the neighbors sound amazing--we've even heard rumors of Halloween parades, block parties and children congregating in the culdesac behind us to play.  We think the location will more than make up for any smaller house living difficulties--and I'm sure the three boys will love all sharing one tiny room :)  

A LOT of time.

I'm actually getting pretty excited about the prospect of a forced downsizing of our things.  I always feel guilty that we have too much as it is and I hate knowing there are things stuffed in all our nooks and crannies however well organized they may be.  But when you have the nooks and crannies to stuff things in, things will be stuffed.  Now we won't have the option and we will have to make the call on a lot of our possessions that are in the nice to have and occasionally use but don't really need category.  

Now I only wish we had taken measurements of the rooms while we were there so I could actually know which pieces of furniture will fit and which will have to go.  Have you ever been in full pregnant nesting mode with no actual nest before?   It's making me a little crazy.  I think I'd feel better if I could at least hypothetically nest while drawing floor plans.  

I'm sure everything will work out in the end--the move has been officially scheduled and as long as this little girl arrives in a timely manner it should be smooth sailing--well as smooth a sailing as can be expected when moving from Florida to Virginia with a newborn anyway!  

{p,h,f,r} The Big News and Big Messes Edition

{pretty}

Okay, when you're living with all boys sometimes you have to stretch the pretty.  He did look pretty with his new home haircut before he joined his brothers outside....after that he was mostly just pretty dirty...

{happy}

We've had a lot of happy news at the Reintjes' house lately--although not a lot of photographic documentation :)

We thought the '94 4-Runner that Chris has been driving since college was dead after we got a repair quote for $5,000 which is considerably more than ole' faithful is worth--we were even considering scrapping the poor thing.  Luckily, we were able to resuscitate the old gal by only fixing the front brakes for considerably less money and not replacing the apparently completely rusted out back brakes.  Chris assures me that you don't need the brakes in the back anyway.....and I've assured him the children will no longer be riding in his car.  Chris is happy.  I think he was panicking a little trying to figure out who he would be if not that lawyer who drives the crazy old beat up truck.

We also finally got our official orders to the Pentagon and we should be officially moving to Virginia some time in the first week of November--with our hopefully two week old baby girl.  Now that might not sound exactly like happy news to those of you who prefer more than seven weeks notice before moving and/or not moving immediately after giving birth but it's so much better to know where you're going than to not know and now we can at least get working on some sort of plan!  And in related news, I would appreciate prayers for a successful house-hunting-while-36-weeks-pregnant-trip-to-DC--prayers to find the perfect place and prayers to not deliver the baby in Virginia :)

{funny}

It's a good thing our backyard is fairly private because we do a lot of pants-less swinging round these parts.

{real}

The current state of our back porch.

I barely have the energy to keep the interior of the house clean right now--I just don't even know where to begin with this.  At least whatever it was they were constructing out there kept them busy for a good two hours so maybe it was completely worth the mess, maybe :)



And as always, check out Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more captured contentment!