I Don't Believe In The Term "Nesting"

I pretty much hate it when people say "You must be nesting!" or "Wow, you are definitely starting your nesting period!" and etc. Obviously, it takes some work to get ready for a baby. Why is it so necessary to label that work and say someone is "nesting"? What else are we supposed to do, wait for the baby to come and THEN figure out what we need to support the child??

You will understand why I opened with that paragraph after you see how friggin' busy I've been this past week! Oh yeah, don't hesitate to call me "cranky" or "ornery" because I won't be offended at that, I actually agree with it!

Okay, first of all, a huge ol' Happy Birthday to my mom this past Wednesday. She is 65 years young and I love her more and more each day. It was my own fault, but I kind of overloaded my schedule last week. I got this brilliant idea to create a memory book for my mom that would have 65 memories of her for the big 65th birthday. I included all my siblings and their families and everybody totally pulled through with some AWESOME memories! In fact, we love my mom so much that we ended up with 71 memories instead of just 65.

As I was going through some old pictures, I came across this gem. Remember how I despise butterflies? Well, here is my mom, pregnant with me, and she is standing in my nursery. Check out my CRIB and WALL!!! There are butterflies on them! Well, maybe this is where the butterfly aversion came from.... Now if I could just figure out why I banged my head over and over into my pillow until I went to college....


Here is the opening page of my mom's memory book. I huge shout out to my friend, Cathy Gilmore, for helping me do all the formatting of the memories. Cathy, you are AMAZING!
The title page says "65 memories of Mom, plus a few to grow on)


Then each page included a different memory, and some pages included pictures. It was a huge stretch for me since I shy away from anything that is scrapbook-related. Here is a picture of me when I had a she-mullet. Yikes.


The best part of the book was that it wouldn't close. After I finished putting my sweat and tears into this project, the dang thing wouldn't close! Well, all I could do was laugh and come up with a reason for it not closing. So we told my mom "your life has been so full, there was NO WAY your memories could be contained in a closed book!" Phew, dodged that bullet!


My dad wanted a nice wedding-style cake for my mom so I enlisted the help of my mother-in-law, Fontella. She has patience for cakes and the end result was super nice. I will admit, I had the honor of actually baking the cakes and you should have seen my laugh as I was about to turn the big square cake onto the cooling rack. I laughed OUT LOUD and said to myself "I can't believe anyone is trusting me to do this!" Luckily for me, the cakes came out perfectly, thanks to my friend, mister parchment paper!


I'm so lame because I didn't get a good picture of my mom with the book, but here she is looking at it. :)


Next topic:
Our Bonneville, affectionately called "Bonnie", was rear ended this week. The lady who hit Sam had totaled her car 2 weeks earlier so when she hit Sam she asked to settle outside of insurance companies. We got an estimate for the damage: $2500. Ouch. It doesn't look totally bad, but the trunk won't close and it's a real mess. The lady finally agreed to go through her insurance company, but the insurance companies are all backed up due to all the bad weather/fender benders so we probably won't get the car fixed for several weeks. If anybody is going downtown, call Sam, he wants a ride to work! :)


Final topic, and don't call it "nesting":
I was very organized after Carson was born. Every time he grew out of his current sizes of clothes I would get a rubbermaid container, labeled with that size, and store it away. Then along came Parker. When he'd grow out of a size, I'd just put those clothes in a garbage bag and throw it into the back of the laundry/storage room NEXT to the nice rubbermaid bins. Or, I'd try to use the bins, but wouldn't even look at the labled size on the bin so each bin has a hodge podge mixture of sizes... Are you understanding what I'm trying to say? My storage room was a mess! Plus, our food storage shelves needed some attention and organization... So, this weekend we tackled the storage room. Here is what my family room looked like after we hauled almost everything out of the storage room:


Here is the nearly emptied room. It's really long and narrow, and DANG, we can fit lots of stuff in there!


And here is the room put back together again. It's hard to tell, but in the back, behind Sam's dart board, are about a dozen rubbermaid containers with very organized clothes in them! I guess I'm thankful I don't have any girls because that would DOUBLE my bins, right? Phew!!!


As we were going through our clothes we also created quite the D.I. pile because I refuse to let my 3rd child LOOK like he's a hand-me-down-third-boy! I got all my newborn to 6 month-old clothes washed and put in the baby's dresser. We got our crib set up, and we are 95% ready for this baby. I just have a few odds and ends I need to finish up.

I had a doctor appointment this past Friday and apparently my uterus is measuring large and my doctor thinks it's because I have excess fluid in there. So tomorrow I am going to have another ultrasound (this makes 4 this pregnancy) to determine exactly what is going on. I guess the risks of excess fluid are pre-term labor and my water could break...Ewwwwww! Who knows what else might happen, I have nightmares of my water breaking in public places. Anywho, regardless of what my ultrasound shows, my doctor has set my induction date at March 9th, if I don't go on my own before that. So, 4 weeks from yesterday is the big day and I'm very excited because I'm quite the uncomfortable grump.

Here is just a random picture of crazy Parker. Sam put one of the D.I. shirts on Parker which is clearly too small. I am pretty sure Carson or Parker never wore this shirt, so why did I keep it stored all these years? The answer escapes me...