an intro to furniture, of sorts...

Paul and I are ... interesting ... when it comes to furniture. We know what we don't like (style wise) but have pretty eclectic tastes and like all sorts of things. So our furniture tends to fall in a "hodge podge but it totally works" kind of situation. We both like all types of wood finishes depending on what piece it's on so when we started deciding what to do for the nursery it was sort of a free for all.

After much debate (not between Paul and I but the debate in my head) we settled on white. Which was a shock to most people, but it's what worked best for our current house and will work fine in any house we put it in later for future kids. So then it was on to style. We both like modern, transitional and traditional. But we got our crib (as a wonderful present) before we knew what we were having, so that set the tone for the rest of the pieces in the room.

Our crib is from PB Kids and for the price, the quality was well worth it. Every other place I looked, you spent an outrageous amount on a "modern" crib and the quality wasn't always that good. And I've bought furniture from Pottery Barn before so I knew what I was getting into. Plus, this kept us from going too modern or too traditional, which was perfect for the rest of our house.

We then settled on a dresser and bookshelf from IKEA. I've seen a lot of people use this dresser in their nurseries and I've been told, drawers, drawers, drawers. We'll use it as our changing table too. I plan to switch out the knobs for a more decorative style so it's a little different than everyone else's.

The bookshelf will hold a few metal locker storage baskets that will hold books, toys and blankets and the rest of the shelves I am sure will get filled up quickly as we're already accumulating wonderful gifts!



Finding a rocking chair though proved to be, for a lack of a better and more eloquent phrase, total crap. Everything I was finding was either quadruple my budget, ugly or didn't rock. I guess the "ugly" statement isn't completely fair. Some of them weren't ugly, they just were not right for our house, our style or our nursery. I really wanted a vintage mid century danish style rocker but all the ones I could find were in worse shape than I cared to care for. Things were looking down. So far down in fact, I almost gave up and was going to either A) shell out $1000 for a fully upholstered piece or B) move the recliner back into the room (and I was dreading both options). I'd almost made my decision when I stumbled upon this baby:

I about lost it and bought it on the spot. Urban Outfitters? Really? I was going to buy furniture from UO? There was only 1 review and I decided I had plenty of time to purchase it if it was what I really wanted. And then it disappeared. Story of my life.

And I about lost it again, but for a totally different and unrealistic reason. It was just a chair. You would have thought someone would have needed to walk me back off the edge of a cliff. It wasn't really the story of my life, my life's been great, I'm never the "always screwed over type". So I was back to settling between option A and B when it reappeared with more fabrics then ever and tons of reviews!

It was settled, it was the chair.

This weekend, Paul and I are heading to Dallas to pick all this lovely stuff up. With another set of family coming to visit in possibly two weeks, work commitments on weekends, 4 baby showers on the other weekends and the holidays just around the corner we figured now was as good as time as any!

"So long sweet summer, I stumbled upon you and gratefully basked in your rays."

Today is officially the first day of fall which means I need a pair of these:

Hello gorgeous. It also means that I am dying my hair back to my natural color, so it will be fake "real" for a while but will be my natural dark, fall and winter hair color. Oh and I'm getting a new pair of glasses and I am debating between a brown frame and a tortoise shell frame and I'm extremely giddy about it. Oh fall, how I love you.

Although it is still in the 80's here in Oklahoma City and will feel like summer for probably another few weeks, the calendars/meteorologists say it's now fall and therefore I am celebrating.

But for as much as I love fall every time it comes around, I am terribly sorry to see this summer go. This is the summer that we made major progress on our house, that we celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary, found out we were having a baby and a baby girl at that.

Some old school Dashboard Confessional came up on my Pandora station this morning and Age Six Racer made my morning (and this blog post):

"So long sweet summer, I stumbled upon you and gratefully basked in your rays.
So long sweet slumber. I fell into you, now you're gracefully falling away.

Hey thanks, thanks for that summer. It is cold where your going, I hope that your hearts always warm. I gave you the best, gave you the best that I had. You passed on my letters & passed on the best that I had."

Weekending in Tahlequah and a minor fit

This past weekend Paul and I and 7 other couples from our church class packed up and headed to the Illinois river for the weekend.

It started off as a disaster for yours truly.

A few days before we were going to leave, there seemed to be some confusion in the plan on how we were all getting there. Paul and I had thought we we're settled with a few other couples on carpooling but it seemed it had changed or morphed or grown and everyone was confused. I asked the boy to look into it which resulted in a lack of handling (the way I would have handled it). I threw a hissy fit because I didn't want to drive after an 8 hour day of work when I needed to get up and move around every 30 minutes to keep comfortable. Driving more than 45 minutes has started to get miserable because I can't shift a lot. Yet it was 6:30 Friday evening and I found myself in the driver seat of the Highlander packed with girls from our class.

Instead of just going with it, the husband decided to be smooth (it was a little late for that) and after more shuffling and a few quiet curse words to myself and an almost full on scene of water works we were on our way, me not driving but very, very furious.

After we got there everything was great and everyone had a really great time. It was just getting there that was the problem.

I struggled over the weekend a lot with what my friend Lauren would call "super insecure junior high Christa" syndrome and I felt like I was back at summer camp when I was twelve and my best friend Vanessa had ditched me for much cooler friends with cooler clothes and jewelry. I also for the first time did not like being pregnant.

My doctor is easy going. No rules really. There was no packet, there was no list of do's and don'ts but the only thing she has flat out told me not to do was float in the Illinios river because of the bacteria. So 15 out of 16 people would be floating and Christa would not be one of them.

So while they went to float, I picked up breakfast for us for the next morning, got my eyebrows waxed and also grabbed our lunch for Saturday from Subway.

We spent the rest of the weekend hanging out, eating and playing games. The guys? A nice game of Mexican Train. The girls? Well, the girls played a ridiculously scandalous game of "Say Anything". I don’t think I’ve ever blushed so much in my life and if you know me, you know it takes quite a bit to shame me.

stupid people make me feel crazy

I'll leave it at that or i'll get myself in trouble.


Enjoy that post did ya?

the felt bird

Yesterday, Paul and I took off work and did a little tour of parts of Oklahoma we had never seen before with Paul's mom and dad.

We went up to a small town called Kingfisher, stopped in at a local (small-town) museum and then skipped (well not literally) across the street to a former governor's mansion. It was built in 1892, I didn't take photos, but you know me. I love those old houses so much I thought about hiding in one of the corners and just living there quietly during the day so no one would notice and then living it up at night. Huge front doors, trim and crown molding in perfect condition everywhere, parlor rooms and wood parquet flooring. I should move on or we could be on this house all day long.

After our museum and mansion tour we went up to Enid, Oklahoma to have some lunch and look around.

Lunch was at a place called PaneVino and was really delicious and fun. We we're shocked for a town like Enid to have such a cute, legitamite wine bar/restuarant. I had the Italiano panini off their lunch menu and would order it again, and again and again. If you're ever in Enid, whatever you might be hanging out around there for, it's a good place to eat!

We also hit up a store called B Hip Kids (super cute and we spent lots of time in there) and The Felt Bird.

The Felt Bird is a lot like Collected Thread here in OKC but had a little larger shop with a little more variety. It's run by Riley, Estela and their dog Dexter who was super sweet and just followed my mother in law around watching her look at stuff. They have clothing, jewelry, homewares, gifts, TOMS and a lot of other really cool things.

We bought our first gift for our little girl, it's their Owl Snuggly pillow seen above but ours has small red and pink apples on the front. They also had a big collection of sock monkeys and I'm wishing i'd grabbed her the classic gray and red one too but she's not even here yet, seriously, how many stuffed things does a kid need?

"it's a baby...GIRL!", "I'm sorry, did you just say "girl?"

Five weeks ago my doctor scheduled my mid-pregnancy ultrasound and I felt like I was going to have to wait an eternity to see our child again. The five weeks flew by though because we kept ourselves busy at work and with the house and before I knew it, it was the Sunday night before my appointment.

All of a sudden I was terrified of going to the doctor. I was nervous something was wrong or maybe nothing was wrong but I'd really have to see it again and it'd all be so very real all over again.

That night I had a dream that Paul and I decided that our 1:00 appointment was not convenient and so we skipped it. We skipped our ultrasound. THE ultrasound. We instead decided to show up at 4:45, unannounced, to which my doctor showed her great disgust and told me I couldn't be pregnant anymore. That was that.

I woke up Monday morning and planned my entire day around that 1:00 appointment. I couldn't miss it, we couldn't be late. We couldn't not be pregnant anymore, that wasn't an option. Yes, we'd still go to the 1:00.

I felt ridiculous all morning. It was all I could think about. I wasn't even remotely concerned about the sex of the baby, but I couldn't figure out what it was I was nervous about. I was sweating like a pig and drinking water like I was dying of thirst. I kept telling myself over and over again that my bladder had to be full and so I'd down 20 ounces of water only to have to pee oh, 5 minutes later. I did this all morning. Water, bathroom, water, bathroom, snack, water, bathroom. And the sweat. I was still sweating. So bad that I pulled my extra deodorant out of my desk drawer, hid in the corner of the finish library and reapplied it TWICE.

I gave Paul a last minute call and asked him to bring me a sweater and a brush because I was a mess with pit stains and my doctor was going to think I had lost it.

The ultrasound tech got us in and we got started and then I cried. I cried and I cried. The baby was there and perfect and the nose was the right length, there were two arms and two legs, I saw it's bones and it's heart beating with all four chambers. I saw it's spine flexing and moving and I watched it kick me with it's ridiculously long legs and watched it pull and play with the cord. I cried some more. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. No, seriously, you don't understand, even if you've seen it, you don't understand. It was just unbelievably cool. 

No really, stop pretending like you understand. You've just never seen anything as cool as Paul and I did Monday afternoon.

[I've been looking for a YouTube video all morning of Jim and Ryan (from The Office) talking about New York City. Ryan keeps telling Jim how awesome it is to live in the City and to be there and to be surrounded by everything going on. Jim keeps saying how much he loves visiting and how he agrees that it is an awesome place but Ryan keeps telling him he just doesn't understand even though he totally did. Yea, if I had found that video, it's clip would have been right here.]

Well, everything was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

And then we found out we were having a baby...girl. Cue the "are you sure?" questions. We were thrilled about it being a girl, but we sort of had a feeling it was a boy. Everyone did. Everyone I talked to (besides my mom) thought it was a boy and I'd sort of nestled into that mind set too. Again, we knew we'd be thrilled either way but we we're sort of in shock. She checked and checked again but there was nothing there. Well there was stuff there, just not the boy parts.

The rest of the day was strange and was a very out of body experience for me. I could now call it a she. I could refer to her by her name if I wanted to. I knew what direction to start taking the nursery. It just got weird.

We bought some stuff while we were out and about running around all of Oklahoma yesterday and it started to make everything more real. Pink tights with a dress with little owls all over it and little gray shoes will make it more real. Here's hoping my shopping bug stays on the down low for a while.

the in-laws have arrived

My in-laws are visiting this week!

They took a long road trip over the last week and a half and are finishing out with a visit to us. They arrived on Friday night and after a quick tour of the house changes we hopped in the car and headed for dinner. We ate prosciutto wrapped pears and artisan pizza out on a patio with Christmas lights overhead while we talked about their trip and the things they did and saw all over the west.

It was good to have them here again. They normally make the trip down to us once a year (typically in November around Bill and Paul's birthday) but this September weekend worked better. It's the first time they've probably seen our grass green.

Saturday we slept in, and then lazily laid around the house drinking coffee and having breakfast before heading to the mall for a few errands and some shopping. After spending some money and a few hours clothes shopping we headed to RePUBlic OKC for lunch and the Michigan vs Notre Dame game.

For those of you that don't live in OKC, you are missing out on some of the most fabulous food. We ate and ate and ate and ate. There's nothing on the menu there that isn't delicious and since we knew we'd be there so long we had the biggest meal we could fit. We shared a scotch egg, truffle potato skins, coconut shrimp and a pub pretzel for an appetizer and then of course I had the Classen burger which, let me just say, will knock your socks off if you don't have gall bladder problems from all the other things you ate first. The game was fun to watch and Michigan won, so Paul was happy, Bill not so much.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging, watching more football and taking naps before we ended the evening with some Orange Leaf for dinner.

They're here until Thursday and we plan to take a mini road trip throughout Oklahoma tomorrow. And then Paul and I will be back to the office while they finish resting up before heading home.

Oh Hermine, I thought we could have been friends...

Today, it is raining cats and dogs in Oklahoma City.

It started raining early this morning and hasn't stopped. Sometimes it's light rain, sometimes "not so light" isn't even appropriate enough.

For example, a few of us went to lunch with an old co-worker (which we were 40 minutes late to and that's an entirely different story) and when we got done with lunch it was POURING buckets of water from the sky. I'd left my rain coat on the back of my chair because it was only drizzling when we left and I had my umbrella with me so I was fine. Who was I kidding? The three of us had to R-U-N to the car after lunch. The rain was coming down sideways and we we're goners.

Here's how I described the scene to Paul in an email shortly after the incident:

"It’s time to leave and it’s raining harder than I have ever seen it rain. And that parking lot sucked. It took us 30 seconds to get to the car but we were RUNNING and let me just say, I’m wearing four inch heels, skinny jeans that are now suctioned to my body but at the time wouldn’t stay up while I was running, a baby bump that was jiggling all while I was holding onto my purse and running with the umbrella in front of my face because really, that's where the rain was coming from."

Guys, we're talking about so soaking wet, I might as well have jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed, hopped out, picked up my purse and hopped in her Land Rover ready to go back to work. I could squeeze water out of my pants.

Tonight I will A) not be able to get out of these jeans and Paul will have to cut them off of me and/or B) will have a cold.

Thanks Hermine.

The Fun Stuff : Nursery Planning

So, having a newbie joining our family means lots of shifting and sorting and purging. For example, the office I posted about earlier was technically up first. It's still up, in the process, but so are a thousand other projects around our little house.

In fact, our bedroom was on the list to freshen up and has somehow far surpassed the progress in the nursery or the office. It got a fresh coat a lighter paint, new drapery panels, a new bed, new bedding, updated photos and new art.

We've also re-carpeted the three closets in the house. The brown, old, dirty shag just gave me the creeps when I thought about my kid crawling into one of the closets or the amount of dirt that I wouldn't be able to get out no matter how hard I tried. So one of my carpet product representatives quickly ordered me up 9 square yards of some commercial grade, high quality carpet and Paul and I went to work. For future reference, if you need carpeting work done, call a professional installer. It sucked.

But the really fun room, the room I've been thinking about for weeks now is what this is all about.

Erika Powell said it best when she was pregnant with her first, "And you know, when you are a designer the baby's name is secondary to the nursery. If I had a dime for every time someone asked about the nursery I'd be on in island somewhere in a hammock, drinking a virgin pina colada."

Well, we don't find out for another week whether our little human is a girl or a boy but knowing how insane our schedule is going to be over the next 5 months, we chose to start planning early. Plus, we're planners. Super, ridiculous planners.

I fell in love with a paint color while at Home Depot that is in the new Martha Stewart Living Collection called Seaglass. I knew it was the color for the room no matter what the sex of the baby turned out to be. So it got purchased and with the help of my dad and Paul, it started going up along with a fresh white trim paint on all of the baseboards, door trim and window sills.

*Side note about Martha Stewart paints: If you have fallen head over heels for Behr's Premium Primer and Paint in One, expect to be poorly disappointed in this Martha Stewart product. It's sold in the same freaking store but goes to show that not all paint is created equal. The color was/is perfect and in the mornings and late in the evenings is blue but during the day with the windows open it brings out all the green. But talk about watery. And forget getting it on in one coat. From now on, I'll just have them color match the color chip of any product (including the ones they sell) to the Behr.

My parents came up to help us around the house a couple of weekends ago and my dad and Paul made some serious progress on the room. Paul and I need to cut in the blue one last time, do probably another coat on the trim and then we'll call it good.

This nursery has been a bit of funny subject for me. I know that there are a lot of children that are brought home to nurseries that are not so quite done being finished, or need a few tweaks, or haven't even been started for that matter. But for some reason, in my head, I feel like this is important. I know the kid will sleep in our room for the first little bit but I want to bring him or her home for the first time, take him or her in a fully finished room and say, "This, this is yours."

I also don't want to be tweaking anything once that baby is here. I want to sleep when it's sleeping and feed and play with it when it's not and enjoy every possible second I have at home before I have to go back to work.

So yea, I've started a little early but don't have major plans on taking the room anywhere for a little while. Once we know what we're having, I'll start planning more, but for now, the paint is up and I love it.

Urban Picnic-ing

This guy makes me smile. A lot. I mean gut wrenching smiling where it makes my rib cage sore.

 

This afternoon after watching Michigan pummel the University of Connecticut, we hopped in the car, picked up some chicken, potato salad, sodas and a couple of choice desserts and spent the evening Paul style. We took the two minute drive to downtown and had dinner in an "urban park". It was beautiful outside and we spent the next hours walking up and down the streets and driving around with our windows open. We spent as much time as possible outside before we headed back to the house.

And here I am, in all of my new skinny jean glory. Never in my life have I owned a pair of skinny jeans. Never. I have never liked the way I looked in them. Until today of all days. I hated the idea of buying maternity clothes today. It was like shopping for a wig. I don't do it, so I couldn't tell you even where to start. I was not a big fan of trying to figure out what size jeans I wore and asking for help was not an option. But I grabbed a couple pairs of jeans, went in the dressing room and came out in these puppies. Paul loved them and so they got purchased. Why I want to wear them now of all times, when I am rounder and plumper than ever is beyond me but I like them. And it'll make boot season a lot easier to handle. Jamming jeans down into boots was always a pain in the butt. So if that saves that trouble alone, maybe they were worth it. 

And we'll make this my first official maternity, pregnancy photo. We haven't been taken them weekly, because we're busy and to be quite frank, I don't love the way I look yet. The stomach has made its debut but I like it better from certain angles and am waiting for it to round itself out. But, this being the end of my 17th week and with the big ultrasound right around the corner, I thought it wouldn't hurt to show it off.