Monday, November 17, 2008
So where are we going to put the rugrat?
This photo is a good comparison with the 'before' -- hard to belive it's the same room. The Best Chairs glider from Buy Buy Baby is about as super-comfy as it looks. Jen found the curtains at Urban Outfitters after an extensive search. They have neat stencil images on them, including pairs of bird sewing scissors.
Check out all those books! Being married to a children's book editor has its advantages, massive discounts on printed matter being one of them.
Step 1a: check out the splotches of brown paint under the wallpaper. Really gives you that crackhouse vibe. Seriously, where are the receipts?
Step 3: patching. Jen's mom and Aimee patched innumerable holes and dents in the century-old plaster walls.
Here are some original photos of the kid's room from our house inspection and walkthrough.
Looks pretty normal, doesn't it?
- Three kinds of wallpaper
- A border saying "Flowers Harmony and Love" over and over
- Green picture molding
We pretty much ignored this when it was just a guest room, but if you know Jen and I you can imagine our kid is unlikely to be the Flowers Harmony and Love type.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The old guest room had to be turned into the baby room, which meant we had to relocate a guest sleeping area, our treadmill, and two full Billy bookcases. To have enough room for all that in my home office and Jen's craft room, we we needed to close up a large wall opening that had connected my home office with Jen's craft room, which meant calling back Tico's Carpentry, the reliable folks who moved a doorway and built an extra wall when we were renovating our kitchen. We had to buy a bunch of bookshelves -- more Billys for Jen, and a bunch of Elfa shelves from the Container Store for me.
The upshot was a couple months with the second floor in chaos -- I only got the new storage shelves into my closet last week. But the results were good. I'll put up a separate post with before & after shots of the baby room itself.
Hey, why wait to embarrass your kid until he's, you know, born? Thanks to the magic of ultrasound you can watch the kid's ontogeny recaptitulate his phylogeny in stunning time lapse photography. Soon he'll be leaving the womb and making his own way in the world. I hope he can find work in these challenging economic times.
March 28 -- 5 weeks 5 days -- the little blob on the right. The round bubble is the yolk sac I think.
April 4 -- the round thing is still yolk sac, not a head.
April 11 -- 7 weeks 4 days -- head and limbs.
April 25 -- big ol' head. For me this one gives off a kind of starchild-at-end-of-2001 vibe. Enlighten us, space baby!
May 7 -- 11 weeks 6 days, heart rate 141 beats per minute. The kid is a techno song.
May 14 -- ontogeny recapitulates technology as TV goes color.
June 25 -- 3D ultrasounds are the coolest things ever. Jen pointed out that this looks like a baby wrapped in spray foam insulation. (That thing in the front is not an insanely beefy arm.) Also this starts a few weeks of debate about whether the baby has my nose.
