Two more weeks...please?

Roughly two more weeks until the due date. Maegwin seems to have no interest in preparing for her life at large. She is head down but happily floating there. No dilating..no effacing. At least on the bright side I know doctors won't let you go more than two weeks past the due date anymore but that would put a damper on the holiday plans. We have Mom coming out on Christmas with the family here, Dad coming out the day after Christmas and then Mom #2 and Laura coming out for New Year's. I'd like some time to at least get into a little bit of a routine before then (or at least be home from the hospital :p) Ok, the fact that she is gigantic and crushing my lungs isn't helping either. The doctor estimates she will be between 7.5 and 8 pounds. I was secretly hoping for a smaller baby so that she would be a)easier to push out and b)stay tiny and cute for a little longer. Oh well, as long as she is healthy we will both be very happy.

In other news we found out at Planck's vet appointment last week that he has developed a bit of a heart murmur. Nothing too serious yet the vet says but they want to do some baseline testing so they can compare against it. Apparently it is common in the smaller dogs and many live for years without any effect. He has actually been more playful and active the last year or so than he was when we got him so I'm not too worried. I was very sad that day though and kept feeling the need to cuddle him constantly. I hope he is still with us for a very long time. I've never met such a mild mannered, sweet dog and I've had a ton in my lifetime. Never have I seen a dog so happy to occupy the bottom rung in the pack.

Things are pretty much ready for the baby to get here. We have the basinette set up. I even laid out the really pretty bunting my mom made in it. She is going to be so warm and comfy in that thing.

The last thing left to get is diapers which Mom is going to order tomorrow! My co-workers were kind enough to do a collection for me and got enough money to buy two things off my registry! We were so pleased. They got us the Ergo carrier (which Josh has already practiced strapping on with Planck playing the part of the baby) and the stroller base for our car seat. Yay! We also purchased a second car finally. We bought a 2010 Toyota Prius and boy do we love it. It took a while for them to locate a blue one but it was totally worth the wait. As Josh says, it's never been so much fun to drive the speed limit. We're averaging about 50 mpg highway and about 55 mpg city. Sometimes we can get it to go up to 100 mpg when we're running mostly on electric. It is amazingly roomy as well. It will be interesting to see how much overall our gasoline consumption goes down. Even though we now commute separately, we're using it for all our errands and weekend driving which is honestly where we tend to use the gas most.

I've been knitting mostly on Christmas things. I have finished up another pair of socks for Maegwin though. They are made of the same yarn as a pair I have. I'm hoping to get a photo of us both wearing them together. To give an idea of scale, Josh modeled them on his toes for me.

I'm hoping to whip up a few hats before she gets here. We had our first snow today-a gentle reminder of things to come.

I attended my last Stamp Camp sans baby and I was really pleased with how my cards came out this time. I'm excited to send everyone their Christmas cards this year. Here are a few of my favs:



Tomorrow we're doing the annual post-Thanksgiving yarn crawl. My mom, aunt, and I all go to as many local yarn shops as we can hit in one day. It should be fun though I probably will buy very little if anything. Yeah, I did buy a Prius...that's like my yarn budget for the next several years out there. Not to mention along with the baby coming is the reduced pay coming. It's totally worth it though to be home with her for at least a little while.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

T-minus three weeks and counting

Woohoo 37 weeks! We're getting pretty anxious for baby Maegwin to get here. She's getting really strong in there and kicking me. Sometimes I can feel her bony little heel or foot pretty clearly. We're almost prepared, basically we just need diapers. We're going to use disposable diapers for at least the first week or two since I don't want to ruin nice ones with the icky stuff. That gives us a bit more leeway on building up the Bum Genius stash. So far we have seven. All my co-workers had a shower for me and got us the Ergo baby carrier and the stroller frame to go with our car seat. I was really surprised. It was so generous of all of them. I'll miss them all while I'm out. One of my co-workers, Chris, also was purging baby stuff from his baby who is now two. We scored a swing, playmat, and cart liner for $50. I was very happy since we needed a swing and the playmat is really neat with lots of interactive things for when she is a bit older. The basinette came from Josh's family along with a tiny De La Salle sweatshirt that Josh was very happy about.

Lately I've been on a bit of a baking kick. As the weather starts to turn cooler I get excited about firing up the oven more often without worrying about it making the house too hot. I'm really into the bread making and Josh has been enjoying the fruits of my labors. I've tried whole wheat and a wheat blend loaf. I like them both and am going to try adding in some milk and honey to the next one to get a more sandwich bread kind of consistency. I also made cinnamon rolls which oddly are really easy. No more Pillsbury dough in a can or Cinnabons! I know, I know, *yawn* where are the pictures!? Well I documented my cinnamon roll making journey in steps. I used the food processor with the dough attachment to mix everything together and then rolled it out on the island (I'm better at this now and have since figured out that my silicone baking mat is awesome for dough rolling).

Once they were rolled out came the fun part. I slathered some butter on there and then coated the dough with a mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom. I think the cardamom is the secret. It's such a neglected spice but it has an amazing flavor and just wants to be loved.

Note, the sun is now coming up in this picture. I'm glad my marble rolling pin made it in there. I love that thing. Anyone who wants to work with dough-spring for the marble, it is worth every penny! Nuts you say? Say no more!

Mmm, pecans...Then I rolled it all up and threw them into my beloved springform pan. Again, go for the glass bottom one. People always comment on it and it makes nice presentations.

And finally the icing. I made a double recipe and scraped out some vanilla from the beans we had to put in it.

Josh pronounced them the best cinnamon rolls he had ever eaten.

I'll have to post more later today, Planck has a vet appointment. We are also invited to an OSU vs. Michigan party. Now, I hate football or rather I am extremely indifferent to it. I'm treating this as more of a sociological experiment where I will observe the behavior of others. I'm just hoping a few people there will not be into the game and will talk to me. It is with all of Josh's co-workers so I don't know anyone. Otherwise, I'm packing some knitting so I can at least finish up some socks.

My first baby's birthday

Yesterday was the birthday of a very special little man in my life-Einstein! 11 years ago he was born in a wood box in Stone Bluff, Indiana. A tiny scrap of a thing, weighing in at 1.5 pounds, he and his brothers and sisters were an accident litter. His mom and dad were both champion rat terrier show dogs but his dad got loose just after his mom had a litter and got her pregnant again. Sadly she was so calcium deficient she couldn't produce milk for his litter so he was bottle fed. Around the same time, the older couple who raised the dogs had a family tragedy where the husband found out he had cancer. They knew they wouldn't be able to devote the time they needed to the new pups so they sent out a call for people who could raise them. That is when I went and got my little Einy.

Through the years he has seen me through all the good and bad times of my adult life. We've lived on crackers and mustard for a while, lived in three different states, moved to countless apartments, had four dogs join/leave his pack. He's a good boy and I love him like no other. He's not so spry as he once was but he still can have spurts of puppy-like energy after a bath, when excited, or when doing naughty things with his stuffed Shamu.

Happy birthday Boo Boo!

Baby shower & more

Two weeks ago I had a baby shower hosted by my mom and sister. I went down early to make sure that I could help out with the set up and had a very nice phone conversation with Dad on the way. He was busy shutting down an exit for a motorcycle parade or he said he would have pulled me over to talk to me. It probably would have scared me except I would have heard him talking at the same time I heard it outside, but alas he was too busy. My friend Michelle drove down with me and volunteered to help take photos. She was great.

We had quite a bit of food made by my mom and Pam and a pretty cake made by a friend of Pam's.

Everyone was very generous in the gifting for Maegwin.

We played a few shower games-one that had questions about nursery rhymes, one on naming baby animals. Missy had planned a guess who this baby picture belongs to game but people had to start leaving fairly quickly after the eating so I settled in to unwrap. My niece Chelsea was my fabulous helper in taking the gifts and moving them over to another table as I unwrapped them.

First up-the gifts from the knitters and crocheters in the family. My aunt Lynn crocheted me three blankets, some booties, and some bibs.

My sister knit me a blanket consisting entirely of yarn she had dyed herself! She hasn't made that many things so I was super proud of her and I love it.

My mom made me a fleece blanket with a silky edging that matches the nursery colors. She has also knit me a flower petal hat which I need to get photos of and a baby bunting which I'm super excited to get.

Then there was a slew of clothes in every imaginable shade of pink. Some of my favs were the organic cotton sleeper from my mom, the cute onesie and jeans from my old hairdresser Lori, the frog & duckie sleepers, and the Boppy pillow. Too many photos to put up here or this post will take forever to load. I set up an album here so you can check out all the baby goodness.

I've been busy the last few weeks with baking and holiday type things. I got into making bread and it is ridiculously easy! The kind I make can be refrigerated, takes about 15 minutes of prep time on the weekend and the rest is just letting the dough rise or rest. The dough can be refrigerated up to two weeks and you just cut off what you need and form a loaf, let that rise for forty minutes, then pop it in the oven for 30 minutes. Bam! Fresh bread every day. Josh and I are enchanted. Here's my first loaf I made which I thought looked pretty impressive.

I also made marshmallows for a cookies & candies contest at my work and I won a $10 Panera gift card!

I made some pumpkin black bean soup that turned out well also. We have been experimenting with seasonal cooking, trying to make dishes that would utilize the type of produce we would be pulling from our garden at a given time. We figure that way we will be ready for next year when we can keep the critters out and expect a better harvest. We're trying to decide if growing pumpkins and other squash is worth it. I think it is and that we can definitely use them, especially since they keep for so long. The thing I love about squash is that they are so pretty you can use them to decorate your house and then pull one as you need it to eat and it is so easy to prepare. I think Maegwin will really like having some butternut squash and such next winter when she's starting to get into solid foods.

Josh has been busy putting out our winter cover-a mixture of winter rye, vetch, and austrian winter pea. We covered over all the plots with straw and I think it looks quite autumnal.

We got them done just before sundown which happens just after 6:30 now anyway. It was fun teaching Josh how to spread a flake of straw and what a flake was. He also poured the foundation for two of our brick compost bins that will be built in spring. All the quickcrete bags weigh 60 lbs each so I couldn't help him with all the hauling, but in big strong man style he got all 24 out there then dug tons of post holes and the foundation before mixing and pouring.

I've been working on some knitting. I'm currently making a sweater called Presto Chango that has a detachable front panel as seen here. Mine is in yummy Blue Sky Organic Cotton in a colorway called Circus Peanut. It totally reminds me of those circus peanut candies and is aptly named.

I also finished up a hat for Josh for his birthday out of Debbie Bliss Rialto 4-ply. It is super soft and I have enough to make a matching stocking cap for Maegwin. Josh really liked that idea so I'll probably whip one up soon.

I took off work early today to get my H1N1 shot at a public health clinic. We got there forty minutes after it opened and they were already over capacity for how many shots they had. I'm starting to lose hope that I'll be able to get one before Maegwin is born which freaks me out a bit. I'll just have to keep trying but I can't afford to take time off to go possibly stand in line to maybe get a shot. Hopefully there will be more soon. So much for being in a priority group.

Winterize!

Things have been super busy at Le Chateau. Many of those home maintenance projects on our list are slowly making their way back off of it again. It has put us a bit thin on funds but I am very happy with how things have turned out and everything definitely needed to be done. First, we had our back porch roof redone and new gutters put on. The shingles on there were literally rotting and peeling off and the gutters were hanging oddly as well as not actually collecting any water.

I think this picture sort of gives an idea of the oddness. Note the exposed tar paper going from the slate to the flat part also. Shingles are not the right solution at all for this kind of roof since the pitch is so slight. We opted to go with a material called EPDM. It has a much longer life than shingles, is less environmentally impactful, and is a fully adhered rubber product so perfect for this type of roof. Amazingly the guys that did it (TDS2 Roofing for the locals) got it all done in one day!

First they stripped off all the shingles and cut out some of the bad wood. They couldn't find tongue & groove wood like ours so they just put in boards (I wouldn't have expected them to be able to considering they are the original woodwork).

This revealed some of the shall we say "interesting" patchwork that had happened over the years. I thought it was cool to watch them sawing. hehe

Then they hung the gutters and put down a nice decking layer over everything and put the EPDM on. I have to say, it looks a million times better and we had rain for a few days during which I didn't see a downpour of water coming out the side of the gutters. Yay! There are already a million leaves in the gutters though. We need to buy a ladder so we can get up there and clean them. The roofers also suggested a product called gutter brush that is like a huge brush that sits inside the gutters and lets water through but keeps anything solid from going down in them. We have to see where we can buy it but I definitely want it.

Our next project we tackled is getting the house scraped and painted. When we moved in supposedly the prior owners had just had the painting done. Well they didn't have it scraped or primed and only one coat was put on so it is already peeling and looking like total crap. The guys have been out a few times doing scraping and putting primer on the wood. It's all the old wood siding so they can't power wash it (did you know that wood in 1900 wasn't pressure treated?). They did a good job matching the yellow with the sample and it will be a relief to know the paint is in good shape going into winter.

We also had a wine, cheese, and chocolate party last weekend. Originally, we invited all of Josh's co-workers but only one of them showed up. I invited mine after he did but only two of them showed up. There was an OSU game that day of which we were happily oblivious so I think that is why we had such poor turnout. We spent all day cleaning up the house (I cleaned ALL the wood-a monumental task)

Josh arranged some flowers

and I even got all gussied up for the occasion as much as my limited maternity wardrobe would allow.

We had a good spread! Of course we had some antipasti-oil cured black olives, almond stuffed green olives, marinated garlic cloves, and marinated mushrooms. For cheeses we had an herb wrapped goat cheese, a medium cheese with black truffles, two kinds of brie, smoked mozarella with shaved chocolate, & Perano served with four kinds of water crackers, french bread, and Highland Oatcakes. For chocolate we had a honey & caramel milk chocolate, Toblerone, a dark chocolate with sea salt, a dark chocolate with earl grey tea, a dark chocolate with green tea, and marzipan as a palate cleanser. I think everything looked great on our new table and the table runner we found matches really well with our walls.

We had two types of organic wine, a white and a red. I can't recall the names of them since I didn't actually drink any. :( I wanted to but I was good. Even with the small guest list, the party was a great success. We played Apples to Apples and things wrapped up around 11pm. We want to start having a monthly board game night once the baby is born. Maybe when Mom wants to have Maegwin over...

Josh has been busy turning over all our garden plots this week and prepping them for the winter cover crop, a mixture of hairy vetch, winter rye, and austrian winter pea. We got two bales of straw to put out to insulate once the seeds are down. He's also going to try to pour the concrete foundation for our compost bins we will build in the spring. I have my baby shower on Sunday and Saturday we have our birthing classes. It should be a busy weekend!

We have already begun to receive baby gifts from the family in California. All the great aunts, uncles, and grandparents went together to buy us the crib we registered for. Josh put it together after some minor setbacks...

Einstein checked out the other baby goodies while he worked and I think he is convinced the baby tub must be for him. Oh the rude awakening that shall come!

My poor little boy, he's getting too old for this.
After getting it together we realized we have no sheets and I didn't register for any. Oops! We also got the car seat, extra base, food mill, bath thermometer, and baby food puree recipe book from Mom & Kevin in California. Hopefully after the shower this weekend we shouldn't have a ton more to buy. My mom asked what we wanted and I told her diapers. Not glamorous I know, but we will use them everyday and think of her. Plus though Bum Genius are cheaper over the life of the baby it is certainly a bigger up front outlay of cash. More after Sunday!

Wool Gathering

Yesterday I attended the Wool Gathering in Yellow Springs for the second year. My aunt, mom, sister, and niece went along. We met up at 9:30ish...(I was there, but they were late-my sister has a thing for perpetual tardiness) for breakfast at the restaurant conveniently located on the same site. I had sweet potato bread french toast and a scrambled egg. Sadly, no veggie sausage was to be had. It was really good but the bread was so sweet it felt more like a dessert than a meal. I brought some yarn to Mom that she had ordered for a baby bunting. Mmm super soft Sublime cashmerino silk aran. Two nice ladies saw me with the bag of yarn and were like "Oh my god! Is the Wool Gathering open already???" I laughed and said no I brought it. Ah, Knitters...we are an anxious lot when there is fiber to be had so near yet so far.

Having grabbed sustenance, we headed over to the festival. One of the coolest things about it is that there are lots of demonstrations. The first we watched was of herding dogs. The particular one there was herding ducks. I had no idea one even could herd ducks.

That dog pushed them through tunnels, over bridges, into pools. It was amazing. The ducks were really pretty too-a solid black iridescent color. I tried to capture it and I think you can see a bit of it in this photo.

Next we went to a demonstration of the Australian sheep shearing method. They try to take off the fleece all in one piece. The man said that this is now the preferred method of shearing. All work is done with the legs to hold the lamb. Hands are only needed to turn them to keep the fleece moving around in a spiral pattern.

Here he shows that as long as you don't let the lamb's feet touch the ground, they will lay there as long as you want. It almost looks like he has the lamb's head on a small fleece pillow.

I also learned why sheep are sheared in the winter. I often wondered about this as a child since their wool is so warm it seemed cruel to shear them. Apparently though, sheep tend to give birth in the winter. Having them sheared not only makes birth less messy (no sticky wool), but also exposes their body heat to their new lambs. If the mother still had her wool, the baby would not be able to share any of it since wool is inherently insulating. Cool, huh?

After learning all this, it was time to shop! Unfortunately the Wool Gathering is extremely fiber-centric versus yarn-centric...ok maybe not unfortunate since I didn't want to buy a lot and I don't know how to spin. My sister and niece learned how to use a drop spindle and I bought Sarah a tiny roving ball to practice with. She wanted a large sparkly red one but I told her she needed to get good at it first and then she could have more. We'll see if she sticks with it. I felt like I was nicely restrained in my buying and everything I bought has a plan for it. Behold, my purchases!

Going clockwise from the upper left: Debbie Bliss fall 2009 issue, Interweave Holiday Knits 2007 (huge score! I got this for $1 and have regretted not buying it since that time), Jared Flood's new pattern booklet Made in Brooklyn, Casbah sock yarn (socks for me), Jojoland Melody (socks for Mom), Creatively Dyed yarn in Midnight (for socks for my brother-in-law), a huge skein of organic cotton boucle (destined to be a ribbed couch pillow with some nice wooden buttons), a felted pumpkin because really, who could resist him?

I also went to Heavenly Creations on the way home. Sadly this is one of the local yarn stores that is closing. I always hate to see it happen but there were good deals to be had and I didn't even spend all the cash I had set aside for the Wool Gathering. Everything was 30% off so I stocked up on some issues of magazines I didn't have along with some yarn for a sweater. Here's what I bought there:

Issues of Knit Simple and Knit.1, 8 skeins of Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool in a nice tweedy green, 2 skeins of Panda Silk DK, and the book Custom Knits. I have no idea why I never looked at this book before. There is a ton of useful information about customizing sweaters to fit along with some really beautiful patterns. The yarn I got was for one of the sweaters in there. I can't wait until I get the baby weight off so I can enjoy making sweaters for myself again. It seems a waste to put a ton of time into it right now since I only have three months left, but I might change my mind once it starts getting colder and I can't button/zip my stupid coat up.

On Friday we made some big household purchases which I think are the last ones we need. That's right boys and girls, we bought tables!! We've had our eye on a dining set from Cost Plus for a while and thought if we ever saw it on sale we were getting it. I believe we're hosting Thanksgiving this year so we knew we had to at least purchase by November. If you noticed the lovely wood grain texture in the yarn photos above, you were observing the surface of our brand new pub table:

I love having more places to sit. I only add this photo for posterity so here I am, 28 weeks pregnant, acne and all. sigh...that better go away after the baby :P Bless Josh's heart, he still came up and pretended to hit on me like we were at a bar. hehe Ok, ok, here's one without the prego lady:

Only one chair there so far because the other one had a broken cross piece in the box so we have to exchange it today. The table can be lowered to normal table height if we want and then our dining room chairs can be used with it instead. We both love how nice it looks with all the wood in the kitchen. We also bought the matching dining room table that comes with four chairs and a bench that we think will probably seat three comfortably. We don't have it set up yet since we have to do some desk rearranging for that to happen. We're not quite ready to move our computers upstairs yet since it is still a bit toasty up there and we can't afford to have vents put up there until next spring. I think once the weather starts to cool though it will be nice up there since the heat rises from the first floor. Here's the photo from the website though-I'll update once I have pictures of ours.

Only 12 more weeks until baby Maegwin could be here!

Fall gardening

So Friday night I came home and had terrible heartburn. I thought nothing of it, took a Zantac, and went to bed early. About 3 am I woke up with a sore throat and stuffy nose. NOOOOOO!!!! My first pregnancy sickness-I was kind of hoping to avoid it, compromised immune system be damned. It seems like it is just a run of the mill cold. I spent most of Saturday alternately sleeping and working on my mystery sock designed by Nancy Bush for the SKA group I'm part of. I really like it. Plus, I got to learn how to do a vikkel braid at 5 am Saturday morning rather than feeling sorry for myself at not being able to sleep. It is progressing quite nicely.

The yarn I'm using for it is called Crystal Palace Panda Soy and is a mix of bamboo, soy, and elastic. It is sooo soft and will make great summer socks I think.

The sad thing is Josh and I bought tons of mums and coneflowers to put in this weekend for fall color and to get them established before winter. It's pretty amazing all the colors that coneflowers come in now. Here are a few of my favs that we picked up:

This one reminds me of a sunset or a ripened peach skin. I believe it is called Big Sky Sundown. The one in the background is a sort of candy pink color that I also love.

This one is called Fatal Attraction. It's a very bright magenta color. In the background you can see some of our mums but we mostly got ones without blooms so we could enjoy them at their proper time. This one was the only exception since we both loved the color of the blooms and none were unblossomed right now.

I hope I'll feel well enough today to at least help with the planting. We also got tulip bulbs and giant onions to put in. They get large round puffball like blooms that are purple.

I also finished a few pair of baby socks last week. One pair was for my co-worker's new baby, Emma. He asked if he could trade them in for a size up as she grows out of them. I thought, you know, that's not a half bad idea as Maegwin could then wear them. Re-use, right? Hers were in a sprinkle yarn dyed by my friend Gwen.

Maegwin's are in Jojoland Melody. I bought two skeins to make socks for me and started knitting them only to find that the first 60 yards of one ball was a completely different colorway. I had to rip those but luckily it worked out great for a pair of baby socks.

In other news, Josh and I have been watching a series from the Sundance Channel called EcoTrip all about the impact everyday items have on the environment, people, etc. Each episode is only 25 minutes long and I love that it is very fact based without making people feel like they need to give things up. In every single one they offer a responsible alternative. Some of the things covered are cotton, light bulbs, paper napkins, cell phones, and chocolate. A lot of it I knew, but some I didn't. It did make me feel really good about all the choices we make though, like I'm not just a crazy tree hugger. I'd love if they did one on disposable diapers. Someone at work made a comment that the environment can take it and I said that's not true but left it at that. We plan to use the Bum Genius all-in-one cloth diapers for Maegwin and already have some. They are so cool! My mom even thought they were pretty neat and Josh spent some time playing around with them and took one in to work to show his co-workers who were asking about them. If I can do my part to not add to the 18 billion diapers thrown in landfills every year then I don't mind a little more work. Ok, ok off my soapbox and off to plant flowers.