Baby Update, books read, book giveaway!

The baby is awesome, thanks for asking! He's just over two weeks now, and he's cuter than cute. The jaundice is no longer a problem and he seems to be eating like a champ. The pirate is still pretty ambivalent about him, but occasionally is super cute. I'm not really sure what I've been doing with my time off, it seems I must be spending all my time sitting around holding the baby cause I sure can't figure out what else I'm doing.

I have done a little reading. I finished off the third Jim Butcher, Grave Peril, and will hopefully post a review one day. Then I went out of my usual pattern to start The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke. This is my first Burke, but I heard it was really good and painted a very accurate picture of post-Katrina New Orleans. It does. I'm not sure I'd want to read a lot of Burke otherwise, but am enjoying this one.

Speaking of books, Natasha at Maw Books is giving away 20 books in celebration of her 100th post. Maw Books is a new blog to me, I found a link on another blog this evening. Go check it out and leave some comments. I have already added her to my Google Reader!

I finally managed to take some pictures of the baby's room- I didn't finish everything I wanted to do, I kinda ran out of time... Here's a little peek. I made the quilt the baby is laying on and the pillows. My husband made the built-ins in the closet. I still need to do something with that big long shelf.

Weekly Recap 4

He might be almost three, but he really is still my baby! Today was an extravaganza of chocolate, candy, more chocolate, and some chocolate. It's almost 6 and he's just not finishing up his nap.

For Easter we dyed eggs. This is early in the game, before he just dunked them all in every color and stained his fingers a muddy brown color. I only boiled 10 eggs, so the whole event took roughly 37 seconds. He loved doing it, but since I'm the only one in the house who eats hard boiled eggs, I wasn't willing to make more. This morning the Easter Bunny showed up and from across the room he could see that his basket contained WILL TURNER. This almost fills out his pirate collection- we are only missing the "girl pirate."

This week I finished off one book- Moneyball, reviewed here on Wednesday. Yesterday I read the first half of 1-2-3 Magic which I am planning to review in parts. I picked Heat Stroke back up and got another chapter into it. While I do enjoy it a lot while I am reading it this one is really easy for me to put down and not be interested in going back to. I felt the same way about the first in the series. My husband's birthday is today, and I finished filling out the Dresden file books for him, so I'm thinking I might go onto those instead of picking up the next Rachel Caine when I make it through this one.

In baby preparedness- we got almost everything that didn't belong in the nursery out of the nursery this weekend. The furniture is in place. The curtains are hung (AND IRONED!) Still need to buy a mattress so we can make the bed, wash the bedding on the day bed, and finish the sewing. I have the quilt top almost done, just need to decide on a border and I can start quilting. We also need to bring up the teeny baby clothes and wash them, but it can be done after the monkey's party. I just want the room itself done.

Speaking of the monkey's party- anyone know what pirates eat?

Weekly Recap 3

Geez! I can't even blog ONCE a week? I might as well throw in the towel and go home.

So what happened to keep me away? Work was insane- no free time there to sneak in blogging. My head cold didn't fully go away until Monday. Then on Thursday I went to get the monkey only to discover that he was sick. AND WAS HE EVER! On Saturday we took him to the doctor only to find he has Influenza A, an ear infection, AND strep throat. So that pretty much wiped out the weekend. He's on the mend now, thankfully.

What did I get done? A good bit on the baby's room, mostly in terms of large furniture moving. I cut up the pieces of the baby's quilt. I sewed one little bag. I finished no books.

Last Monday Catherine at everyday life as lyric poetry posted a great post about babies growing up and becoming independent. It really struck a chord with me and I kept it in my reader all week because I couldn't bring myself to think about it enough to go comment. Perhaps it's the pregnancy hormones, but the idea that my sweet monkey boy won't need me to carry him or snuggle him or help him soon makes me sad. They aren't supposed to grow up! Yesterday we got invitations to send for his 3rd birthday party. How is this possible? I know, I have another one on the way so baby time is not over at my house, but it will be soon for the Monkey. And it makes me a bit sad.

And one little note that I feel compelled to post about- a lot of blogs that I read are switching to partial feeds for various reasons, some of them legit. This is fine. But I just need to say that if you have a partial feed, and you don't say anything interesting or anything AT ALL about what the post it about in that partial feed- I don't go read it. I'm sorry. I understand why you'd chose to do it, but please, grab some attention with those first sentences. I'm sure I'm not the only reader who feels this way.

Weekly Recap 2

Anyone else notice that I didn't post anything in the meantime? So what was I doing to take my attention away from here? Good question! I was sick for much of it. I had some kinda of sinus thing that definately would have keep me out of work, except that my counterpart was on vacation. By Friday night I was in bed crying about how much it hurt. Thankfully, on Saturday it began to clear up and I thought I might live.

Bookswise- I didn't read much. If it was quiet enough to read it was quiet enough to sleep and so I did. I did review Iron Kissed on the other blog, go check it out. I really loved it. I also finished up a romance novel re-read of In the Midnight Rain by Ruth Wind. This is one of my very favorite books and happily, it held up. It's got a little mystery (not too hard to figure out), the blues, a sexy broken hero, and a nice little falling in love. I am still reading the other books I was last week, and miracle of miracles, have not started anything else.

I am 31 weeks pregnant and my due date is less than two months away (May 10). My son's 3rd birthday is April 7th. My self-imposed goal for baby readiness was his birthday party. I want the nursery to be DONE at that point. So what did we do this weekend? The basement. On Friday night my husband and two year old ripped out all the old nasty carpet while I laid in bed whimpering. On Saturday we swept and mopped the bare concrete and then put all the furniture back where it was. We have one large rug in the couch/tv end of the room, and a smaller rug on the sewing end. The rest is bare, unpainted, concrete. Amazingly, it looks much much better.

This morning my husband went and built two big platforms for the box springs on our bed. Whoever designed it thinking that two little metal supports was enough on a king sized bed was crazy. It was the creakiest, shiftiest thing. So he built these big boxes and we replaced it. It's so much better. I don't feel like it's gonna collapse every time I roll over. We celebrated by taking a nice long family nap.

I did manage to iron all the pieces of the baby's quilt. I wish my library book would come in so that I could start sewing. I have a bunch of sewing projects planned for the near future. Now that the basement is ok to hang out in, perhaps I'll get some done?

Weekly Recap

Like that title? Sounds like this is something I do every week, doesn't it? Perhaps I should- every Monday I challenge myself to blog twice that week and every Sunday night I'm sitting here thinking of what to blog to meet my goal. Of TWICE. Sheesh. So here's a bit of random goodness.

The only book I finished this week was Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs. It was AWESOME. Full review forthcoming. I read bits of three others- In the Midnight Rain by Ruth Wind (on old favorite romance, very bluesy, I love it), Heat Stroke by Rachel Caine (Weather Warden book 2), and The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism by Karen Armstrong (I'm not very far into this one, but so far it's very readable.)

My in-laws were all in town this weekend and we took most of the kids to the park. It was 72' out, on March 1st, in SOUTH DAKOTA. I did not take my camera, but my brother-in-law did and I convinced him to take a picture of my roundness. I am not really smiling (in fact, I am kinda scowling) because I am looking into the sun, but otherwise I like this one. This is at 30-31 weeks, 2 months to go!

We cleaned some more crap out of the guest room/nursery and I'll be able to hang the curtains this week. I need to start on the baby quilt but have been waiting and waiting for my interlibrary loan book with the pattern to come in. Anyone reading have Modern Quilt Workshop and want to drop me a line so I can get started? (bookslistslife AT gmail DOT com)

Hope everyone else had a great weekend.

Randomness

Lots of things to post about here today. The monkey and I are both off today and had big plans for shopping and lunch, but woke up to being snowed in. So I guess we'll hang out at home instead!

I blogged about my two most recent reads over on We'd Rather Read, be sure to stop by and check it out. I'm currently reading Storm Front by Jim Butcher. It's a really fast book and with this snow I'll probably finish it today. I'm not sure what's up next. I have the next Dresden book, but I also have Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs. And several hundred other possibilities.

We've started the huge task of turning our guest room into the new baby's nursery. My husband built some shelving in the closet that is custom sized to accommodate those square cloth boxes. We'll be using those instead of a dresser. The closet is 54 inches wide and he built a waist high shelf all the way across that we'll be using as a changing table. I need to find a cream or tan shower curtain to use as a door. I started removing all our books from the two floor to ceiling shelves and dispersing them to other parts of the house. I decided to leave all the "classics" in there on the theory that kids eventually need to read the classics. Right? I also left all the kid books, even the ones that are way too old for either child (Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter, Inkheart, etc.) If we end up buying another set of shelves I'll probably move the classics out.

We bought one large set of shelves to put in the living room, but it only holds part of the books. I like to mix framed pictures and stuff in with my books so part of the shelves aren't books, but I like the way it looks. I've dealt with most of the non-fiction, but still need to address fiction. As it turns out, my husband is resistant to getting rid of any book he's ever read, so while most of the books are mine, most of the already-read books are his. The shelves in the living room have five shelves. Because this is a bookish blog, I will bore you with what made it out here-
Top Shelf: religion, books and authors, current event stuff like The Tipping Point
Second Shelf: Travel books- Bill Bryson, my growing collection of Italy books, a statue of Don Quixote, a picture from our Mexico trip
Middle Shelf: History, largely WWII and Stephen Ambrose
Fourth Shelf: Baseball
Bottom Shelf: Random mix of large hardcovers

There will eventually be more odds and ends mixed in, I'm getting the books here first. We have shelves in the basement for overflow.

I bought fabric for the new baby's quilt this weekend, so that will be underway soon. We have the curtains ready to be hung once the giant desk is moved out of the way. Then it's largely a matter of moving the daybed across the room and clearing out the rest of the odds and ends. It's so much more real this time than with the Monkey. This time we KNOW what's coming. Two kids. Yikes.