Our Little Man's Room

Our little man's room has come a long way from the office that it use to be. It all started with a vision and a little persuasion to get David to completely remove all traces of an office space. For those of you who don't know, this is what the room use to look like:

The tall bookcase went downstairs to the living room to create a reading nook, and the two small bookcases remained in the room to be re-purposed.

Our diplomas went to our respective offices at work. The vases went into the guest room for decoration.

The chair was sold (no use for it since David no longer had an office), and the exercise ball deflated (I wouldn't be able to really use it soon).

This is sans desk, but everything else is pretty much the way it was before. The only thing that had to stay was our Internet hook-ups since they have to be in this room. We came up with a clever idea to hide those away, though.
So, once everything was cleared away, all that remained were the 2 small bookcases. The first things in were the crib and an area rug. The floor tiles remained, but they were a bit rough for baby. The crib was a steal from Target and went perfectly with the bookcases.

Next, we got some baskets to use as storage in the bookcases. One bookcase holds the lamp next to the rocking chair, and the other one became the changing table and holds all the necessities for changing our little man and getting him ready for his day/night.

The awesome tree you're catching a glimpse of was painted by my co-worker's (Jamie) husband, Brennan. He basically donated his entire Sunday this past weekend to painting it. The following are a couple of different tree views:

Here's a picture of this frog organizer we spotted at Ikea. I have to say "thanks" to my co-worker, Michele, for her suggestion to put it behind the door. We're hoping to fill this up with stuffed animals and other toys.

Last, but certainly not least, is the closet. It's not quite completed yet, but I wanted to show just how much we do NOT need any more clothes for our boy. This just includes up to 1-year. There are three storage bins not pictured full of clothes to dress him until he is at least 2- 2 1/2.

One of the only things we have left to do is find a place for some alphabet cards I picked up. I have an idea of how to display them, but we'll see. And we're thinking of this wall because it's a bit bare in comparison to the rest of the room.

I think the transformation has been wonderful, and we couldn't have hoped for anything better. I know our son won't really care a whole lot as long as he's comfortable in his bed, but this room is really what I envisioned. We pretty much just need one more little thing to make it complete...

Surprise!

Before anyone gets in a tizzy, there is not another surprise, I just titled this post that because I am sharing the story of how I told David we were having a baby. Someone recently asked how I told him, and I realized I never did share that story with anyone outside of our family. So, without further ado...
First, this was all planned. I don't know why, but several people asked this, and so I feel the need to let it be known. So, when I say David was surprised, he wasn't surprised that we were going to be having a baby, just that it happened so quickly. I also want to say that we were both ecstatic.
I had a feeling that I was pregnant pretty early on. I don't know if a test would've confirmed it as early as I "knew", so I waited until 5 weeks. My first sign was the smell of coffee. I have come to have an affinity toward hazelnut coffee. I brewed myself a cup each morning to take to work. One morning, I didn't smell hazelnut; rather, I smelled bitterness and nothing else. When I took a drink, it just tasted bitter. I also started to find myself hungrier than usual. Now, I could've chalked this up to the fact that I'd gotten very sick a week earlier and hadn't eaten much in several days, but I knew it was more. It was hard to keep this to myself, but I didn't want to get David's hopes up. Mine were already high enough for both of us, and probably both sets of parents.
I decided to take a pregnancy test on a Wednesday. They say to wait a minute or two, but I saw that plus sign in maybe 10 secs or less. David was actually just down the hall, in the office, but I managed to keep it to myself. I wanted to take the opportunity to surprise him and make a big deal out of the fact he was going to be a dad. I decided I would let him know when he got home Friday evening from work, giving me enough time to plan and prep.
I printed out baby footprints and had them leading to the kitchen from the front door. The footprints stopped at the kitchen table where I had wrapped the pregnancy test and put a stuffed animal next to it. We had picked up this rabbit almost a month ago when we were doing some shopping. I wanted it for our baby that we would have one day, and David couldn't turn me down. Anyway, so I had that set-up and then I had Stevie Wonder's "Isn't she lovely" ready to play when he came in the door. I was getting excited just setting the whole thing up.
Well, finally David got home and I hit play on the music and went upstairs. I wanted him to be alone and hear his reaction. It sort of worked :). He saw the footprints and went into the kitchen, but then just kept asking Truman, "Where's Amy? Is she hiding?". Finally, I said, "No, I'm not hiding. I wanted to surprise you and have you open the gift alone.". Needless to say, David was very happy and excited about me being pregnant. He insisted we go out to dinner to celebrate. It was awesome. Now, here we are 25 weeks later, with our baby boy on the way soon. So, that happened...

Sustainable Romance

First of all, I feel like I haven't blogged in a while. I guess there are two reasons for this: 1.) As I enter into these last few months of my pregnancy, I don't always have the motivation to blog about things. Lately, something has to be really important to blog about it. 2.) I can't say that something "blog worthy" has occurred until recently. Although, this is our blog, and as long as we deem it worthy, we can blog about it. So I guess the big reason is me being lazy as the pregnancy progresses.
To the main event: we went on a babymoon this past weekend. This was something I'd read about in my Fit Pregnancy magazine. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, but I didn't really do much more than glance over it. It was David, while reading through the magazine, who became intrigued. He noticed that one of the locations was nearby.


The Proximity Hotel, in Greensboro, NC is the only LEED Platinum certified hotel and restaurant in the United States. Pretty cool, huh? (The answer would be "yes".) Given that David works in solar, this was definitely a location he was interested in for our babymoon. The fact that they had a package called "Sustainable Romance" wasn't too shabby, either. In fact, once I looked at the website and saw pictures of the rooms and read they offered prenatal massages, I was ready to go. We decided that we would go in my third trimester, but not too late because I wanted to be comfortable and enjoy the weekend. We left mid-afternoon and arrived early enough to settle in our room before enjoying a fabulous dinner at the hotel's Print Works Bistro. The best part was dessert - I ordered the profiteroles that came with vanilla ice cream and "lots of hot chocolate". It was funny because when it came out, I was surprised by how much it was. There were three separate puff pastries with vanilla ice cream in the middle. Then came the coup de grace, the pot of hot chocolate, which the server proceeded to pour on top of the pastries. David laughed at me when I said, "That's a lot of chocolate. Was I supposed to say 'when'?". When I asked why he was laughing, he told me, "The description said, 'lots of hot chocolate' ". I was only able to eat one and David managed to eat one after eating his chocolate almond cake. We couldn't eat the third.
The entire weekend was so relaxing. Both nights, I got to enjoy a wonderful bath. Saturday morning, we enjoyed some room service for breakfast and then headed to the gym. I felt so proud of myself - almost 30 weeks pregnant and working out on the elliptical machine! After we were done in the gym, we went swimming. I loved being in the pool because I felt like I didn't have 20 extra pounds on me. I swam and swam while David mostly sat in the shade reading the paper. That was fine by me, though. I even managed to get a bit of sun on my baby belly. I got to cap it all off with an hour long prenatal massage. I tried really hard to stay awake so that I could remember techniques that David could use ;). The other great thing was finding comfortable positions for me to lay in when sleeping. I have slept better this week since being back, and that is a huge blessing.
Saturday night we had dinner at Ganache. My co-worker, Heidi, recommended it to me. She mentioned that it had great desserts and good food, so we decided to go there. Dinner was good, but we really enjoyed our slice of white raspberry cake. There was one that involved decadent chocolate cake, fudge, ganache, chocolate mousse and chocolate frosting. I considered it, but after the "lots of hot chocolate" I had the night before, I decided to pass, much to David's dismay. We'll just have to go back again so I can try that cake.
We headed back Sunday morning feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the week ahead. I realized once again what a wonderful husband I have and just how much he loves me (not that I need a babymoon to know that). This babymoon was a needed recharger for us. We were able to spend some key "couple" time together without worrying about anything else we had to do or take care of. We also talked a lot about our son and how excited we are to be parents soon. Taking this babymoon was definitely one of our better ideas. I would highly recommend it to any pregnant woman/couple who needs a little rejuvenation in the home stretch.
Here are some more pictures from our stay. They're all of the room.