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Powered by LifeTypeNoah loves to help Daddy with the plumbing in the new house. In fact, he had a hard time making the decision about whether he should stay home and plumb with Daddy or come to the zoo with the rest of us. (After Jonathan exclaimed about the baby elephants, Noah eventually decided to come to the zoo.)
He likes to put on flux, and fetch tools for Daddy, and he is very good about avoiding the end of the hot torch and potentially hot pipes. He will sit for hours on the floor with scraps and tools, fitting pieces together and taking them apart. He usually knows exactly where the tape measure, flashlight, and screw driver are at any given time.
In other news, people have been wondering how Noah has been taking the move. At first, he didn't really know what was going on. But the first day that the furniture was out of the new house, he was quite startled to see our bedroom empty. I had asked him if he knew where the camera was (we had lost it a couple of days before moving day but as you can see we found it again.) He brought me all the way upstairs (I'm sure he remembers seeing the case which had been in our bedroom.) When he got three steps from the top of the stairs, he stopped and wouldn't budge further. He reached for me, saying, "Bed? Bed?" When I picked him up, he clung to me very tightly, continuing to wonder where the bed was.
However, it hasn't taken him long to get used to the new house. The other day when we drove in from some errand, he exclaimed, "Home!"
My sister says I need to update my style. Same shirt, same glasses, same hair... I guess I just take after Mom that way. Here now, for your amusement, is a collage of me near the end of each of my pregnancies. They are labelled with letters so you can guess which is which if you'd like. (Click for a larger image.)
I have to say that the real baby is much more squashed in me than that little graphic baby is on the sidebar. (S)he pokes up knees and heels all the time and increasingly presses on my bladder. I am ready to go, but still have plenty of things I can do while waiting. When Mom and Janet first arrived, I was feeling anxious to get the baby out the next day, but I am content to wait until the right time.
Here are some things I have written down on scraps of paper that haven't made it out to the blog until now:
We got ants in our car, presumably from having food everywhere on our vacation trip, and one time when we were buckling in, Jonathan exclaimed that he had an ant crawling in his ear. I couldn't see it, but he said it was far down and wiggling. I told him it was probably just a phantom feeling after one had crawled in and out. However, a day or two later, Jonathan came up to me and said, "Mommy, I removed a dead ant from my ear!"
When we were at the Maggie P, the boys were playing on the top bunk with Aunt Janet's supervision. She then needed to leave and formally announced her abdicating of responsibility. Not 5 seconds later, we hear a big clunk. Noah tried climbing down (but only actually fell the last foot or so because Jonathan was holding onto his arm.) Jonathan's explanation for how it happened was, "He wanted to do it by his own accord."
8/12 - Jonathan counted backwards from 19, his own idea, and with no help.
I am starting to get used to the idea that this new house is my own, and not just someone else's with my furniture in it. We are starting a compost pile, and there are a lot of local corn husks and cobs in it already. Jon keeps clunking his head on low ceiling pieces, especially in the basement and coming in on the porch. I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about it.
We have running hot and cold and drinkable water! Jon hooked up my brand new front-loading washer two days ago and installed the dryer yesterday. Hooray! The washer really does dry things better and the dryer has a shorter running time. Jon looked in two stores for an umbrella type clothes line without success, but we'll get some kind of line out sometime. For the moment, I'm using regular detergent in the washer, but being careful to use a small amount. I drew a line on the cup for what seems good. It has not sudsed up too much. Otherwise, he detergents cost twice as much (and effectively four times as much since you only use half the regular amount.)
Breakfast time! Even when you live 5 minutes from church you can still be late, and I want to avoid that.
Having prenatal appointments every week is not giving me much leeway for blogging. I just had another appointment today and realized that I have not blogged about last week's.
First, Noah had his 2 year appointment last Wednesday. 35.5 lb, 37" He didn't like the poking and prodding, nor especially the ear flashlight. But he got three pretzels at the end because the nurse didn't realize that the doctor had already given them out.
Then I had my 37 week appointment. This one was with one of our favorite midwives in the practice, and we went over the birth plan with her. One of the important points is that Jonathan gets to be the one to announce the sex of the baby. Talking about our family being there, the midwife got excited, and said, "I hope I get to be there for your birth, it sounds like it will be so much fun!" My friend said, "Then you should hope she's there, too." They all got to hear the heartbeat again, and the baby was very active under all the prodding by midwife and brothers.
We have finished doing the patch painting in the two bedrooms and hallway. I enjoyed having the low-VOC paint because I do like painting, though it is more work to have the boys help. It's medium for Jonathan, but he still had a hard time keeping track of drips. Noah had to be completely supervised, that is, holding onto the brush or roller with Mommy. Even then, he'd get distracted and not even watch what we were doing. The color matching in the green room (our bedroom) was perfect, the purple hallway was nearly perfect, but the blue was just light enough that you can tell. But I'm not going to do anything about it now.
Most stuff is set up, though I just brought a bunch of kitchen stuff from Carroll St which needs to be put away. We need to get another bookcase, and when the plumbing is done Jon will make a shelf for the home entertainment stuff. That will then be nearly all the boxes unpacked.
Today was the 38 week appointment, uneventful and quick. Baby is estimated to be 8 lbs already. I did lose one pound since last week, but the midwife said she wasn't surprised in the least given all I've been doing and said don't even think about worrying about that. So I won't. (: My blood pressure was still great, even though I drove today. Oh yeah, this was the first time driving directly from the new house to the birth center. It took 42 minutes. But I won't take the 31st street bridge again because the light there at 28 was 4 minutes long. It might be the same time taking 40th street bridge, but at least you're going somewhere and not sitting at a light. We'll try that next week, I guess.
Ok, time to gather dinner for my crew.
Our new house has fairly long hot water lines to the kitchen and bathroom, so I was looking for different solutions to getting there to be hot water quicker. I researched some tankless heaters, and for the kitchen and washing machine (on one trunk) a small heater (12 amps) would have worked well. But, for the bathroom, a good sized heater (with our 45 degree incoming cold water) would have needed a 200 amp service to the house, with 60 amps (220 volt) dedicated to it. So, an awful lot of upgrades, not counting the tons of ongoing electricity. (More)
We are back at our new house, and had the first taste of our water (unfiltered). We got the bacteria test results back today, which said the bleaching of the well was successful, and no coliform bacteria exist any more (or at least, less than 1 part per million). The "MetalMaster" will arrive tomorrow, but since our water is almost clear at the moment, the filter is primarily for taste. The existing copper pipes do have a significant amount of iron in them, so probably we will have more iron some days, or some seasons, and then the MetalMaster will be helpful in removing all of it (it is rated at twice the amount of iron I have seen in the water previously). (More)
Yes, we have a new house! The closing was a little hectic because the seller left a van in the driveway and we had to work out an escrow agreement for them to get rid of it (which still had not been done by last night.)
Right after closing, we headed up to do work. We have had several helpers, which is MUCH APPRECIATED!!! The very first job I had on my list to do turned out impossible when 8 months pregnant (pulling old carpet staples out of the bedroom floor.) So I cleaned out the very nasty freezer and not quite so bad fridge. (They had left it plugged in but warm, which let stuff grow in the freezer.) I only did the interior and exterior surfaces - I left the drawers and shelves for my wonderful next-day helpers.
So my job has turned out to be delegator/director, errand-runner, and children supervisor. That is about the limit this Mommy can handle and so I am very thankful for my cleaning helpers who have made much progress on the road to making my new kitchen and bathroom useable. (And one of the men who had finished what Jon asked him to do came and took out those staples!)
The new water pipes are in, the chlorine has been poured down and flushed out. Now we wait and pray for no bacteria to grow.
Our bedroom needs more work than we thought originally - sanding and finishing the hardwood floor (should look nice in the end) and stripping wallpaper and repainting. We thought we could just touch up the paint, but the wallpaper underneath is having trouble and would just peel off more after we did it.
There are also window frames/sills to repaint, and maybe some doors. All the paint in the cans in the basement is old and unuseable, but at least some of the color labels are still there, so we can match it and not have to pick out anything new.
Jon also has exterior work to do.
The boys are sometimes restless, being there for hours on end and not much for them to help (their cleaning is not very thorough yet and they got tired of plumbing after the first day and started playing with the tools instead so Jon sent them upstairs.) They did do some dust mopping of the walls last night, which was fun for them and a start for tomorrow's helpers.
And there's still plenty of packing to do in the old house! I'm so thankful that we can still be living in our old house and not, for example, have to camp in the yard for weeks...
In related news, Jonathan got stung by a wasp on Friday just before we were going to head home. Thankfully, he had no allergic reaction (this was his first time, so we didn't know for sure) but he sure did scream about it. When he's upset, he's very irrational ("this will sting forever, it will NEVER feel better!") but he did calm down and said a cloth with water on the spot helped, and in a couple of hours it did not hurt any more.
Well, that's longer than what I meant to type, time to get going with the day.