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.

Do Fun Stuff Vol. 1 & my trigger happy purchase finger

Well, for a week now our baby has been able to hear things and I'm doing that weird, play music for the baby thing. Turns out, quite a bit of my music isn't really kid friendly, and some of it even drives me nuts so I don't blame the kid for not loving it and punching me in the stomach when I turn it on because I've started feeling that now too. So I started looking for kid music that didn't make me feel crazy but that the kid could listen to for years to come. Mainly, because jamming out to Sesame Street and Alvin and the Chipmunks in our new super sweet Mazda 6 makes me want to barf.

I've been reading Pacing The Panic Room for awhile (courtesy of Kathleen) and love what this guy writes about and he's also an incredibly talented photographer and artist. He compiled this charity album to help benefit an organizations that researches SMS, a disease which his wife's son has. I searched for it last week and iTunes released it early, without all the needed band info, but I bought it before I knew that. And after congratulating him on the release via Twitter (because apparently I "tweet" now) I had to keep it quiet for awhile. But it has now been officially released and is for sale on iTunes.

So, basically I was the first person to purchase this album. He thinks so himself. I'm amazing. I guess? And since I've been listening to it for almost a week, I'll let you know, the music is good. My favorites? Morton the Caterpillar, Ladybug, Nothing, Biscuits and Sleep. Oh and the Potty song about made me pee in my pants I was laughing so hard. But according to the song, you don't pee in your pants, you do it in the potty. Glad I got that one figured out. So go buy it. No need to thank me, he did all the work. 

16 down, 24 to go

Well, a few people have asked me what I've been looking like these days and there is most definitely a bump going on but I haven't had the right picture taken yet to advertise to the world. We'll work on that.

My parents came last week and helped us around the house, I will have an entire post about that later.
I picked the nursery paint color, whether boy or girl, and the room has been painted so we don't have to worry about it later. More on this to come too.

Work in the office/new guest room is underway.

Seriously though, have I mentioned I'm showing, and feeling the baby move and it's all a little weird and surreal?

The only thing that really has sounded good to me, because I've been incredibly indifferent about food this pregnancy, has been some Cherry Lambic Sorbet from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Well, Jeni's is in Columbus, OH and that's a little far to go. I mentioned them here. And the closest place to purchase their pints is 7.5 hours away. AND, we looked into shipping six pints to our house but that would cost $100 and as much as it sounds delicious, we cannot afford pints of sorbet that cost $16.67 each.

So we've been mentioning to Jeni on Twitter to get her stuff to some local specialty grocers. I'm hoping she does, that they love it and want to carry it and will purchase cases of the Cherry Lambic just for me. But this is all wishful thinking.

Today, Paul and I went to the Y to get in some exercise and after we were finished he mentioned that we had to meet his co-worker in the alley behind his office to pick something up from her. A gift of sorts. A gift?! We don't know what we're having yet, why is she buying us gifts? So we go to the alley and meet up with her and all the while I have no idea what's going on. To anyone watching, it more than likely looked shady. Because she did not pull out a pink or blue bag with tissue paper in it.

Instead, Heather pulled out an ice chest holding...wait for it...some Jeni's ice cream! Her husband is working in Texas right now and she went down there for the weekend to visit him. Paul sent her a message on Facebox (oh Conan, I miss you) and asked her to stop at a store in Houston and pick some up for me. They didn't have the sorbet but had plenty of other flavors. Tonight we snacked sparingly on the goat cheese and cherries and gravel road. When I say sparingly, I mean sparingly.

Seriously, what a husband.


I've even got him on board for making another batch of the Cherry Lambic since Jeni shared her recipe with Food and Wine. Sorry, sorry. I know my obsession is a little out of control.

the office, and by office, i totally mean junk room

We have decided that it is time to re-do our office, also known now as, the junk room.

We thought we were done with the house changing/work for awhile, I mean, everything was fine, but I changed our minds now that a third human being will be living in this little house with us.

When I was in school and had homework and projects and needed tons of space to work, this room was perfect. I had a drafting table, a table to lay things out on, the printer close by, another table to put together boards and even a dresser full of supplies including everything from my Prisma markers to rolls of trash paper and 3M's mighty glue (Super 77). However, since I graduated, rather since my friend Betsy graduated, this room has lost its need for homework requirements and has become the room that our cats' litter box and food is in. It is also the room that gets the brunt force of "I don't know where to put it, put it in the office." It's a disaster.

View of the office in 2007 before I got a rug, but at its height of usefulness and lack of crap.

Taken around the same time but it shows the wall color more acurately.

The beautiful part about this re-do is there is going to be very little construction involved. Well, the construction that does need to be done is bigger than I'd like to tackle, so we're going to pay someone to do it for us. Therefore, I consider it very little.

The ceiling in this room has detached itself in one area from the ceiling joists. We were just going to try and screw it back up, tape and mud it but I'd rather fix it the right way and if something is causing it to seperate, I want to find it. So Phil, our new handy dandy fix-it guy, is going to replace it for us.

We're also adding white quarter round to the perimeter of the room, because at some point, someone felt the need to remove it and never replace it.

This room is not only getting a ceiling lift and some trim, but is going to change in function too. Since I'm obviously not putting together color boards until 2 in the morning at home now (I have an office for that...) we need to re-evaluate and purge. This room will become our guest room/work space. Having laptops makes it easy for Paul and I to move wherever we want to but we still need a place for our files and printer.

We also don't entertain a lot of overnight guests, mainly our parents. Well, Paul's parents. My mom is so highly allergic to our cats that the moment she lays down to sleep, she can't breathe. She's fine walking around, having dinner, sitting on the furniture, but the moment she's laying flat, the wheezing and coughing and inhaler start. I hate that they can't sleep in our house but I'd rather her not die. So, that leaves mainly Paul's mom and dad. The number one issue with this space becoming a guest room is that this is the only place we've been able to make our cat litter situation work. 

Our cats are strictly indoor cats and with every room in our house having a very set purpose with no small nook or closet of unknown territory, there just isn't a convienient, out of sight spot for their boxes. We have a back porch that could work, but only if we had it enclosed better. Currently it's a screen door with screened windows and would need a more permanent window system to keep out fleas and other cats that have found their way to our back door. This would also require us to put in a cat door, which just the thought of that makes my eyes roll.

So, we're going to bite the bullet and let the cats keep this as their room too, when guests come, we'll figure out a temporary solution of relocating them but we'll just keep the litter cleaner than ever for now since this has become more of a "living space".

There will be new paint on the walls, trim and ceilings and the window treatments are due for a major overhaul. The current roman shades were already installed when we moved in and were from IKEA and are dingy and needing to be replaced. Oh and there will be a change in wall decor, which will also knock a few things off my life list (thankfully, because I haven't knocked anything off that sucker in awhile).

I'll keep ya posted.

the ugly cry

Last night, it struck again. The “Christa-wont-ever-sleep-a-full-8-hours-again” bug.

I was furious.

I had been reading in hopes that it would make me tired and it had a little bit. As soon as it happened, I felt my eyes drooping and words blurring together, I snapped my book shut and ran into the room to fall asleep. The moment I walked into the room with Paul though my head started swimming with to-do lists and wants and wishes and what-ifs. I laid there in the pitch black darkness for twenty minutes before I decided it wasn’t going to happen and I’d go into the living room and read another chapter of my book.

One chapter didn’t do it. So I went on to read a second, and then a third and then it would have been stupid to not have just finished the last chapter of the book. By this time I was drowsy, the book was finished so I headed back to bed. Where I laid awake for another hour secretly crying because I was terrified something was going to happen to Paul in the next six months and I’d be left alone to raise a child I am all of a sudden terrified of.

Paul could hear me sniffing after a while and I told him it was nothing, I was done crying so I started talking slowly to make sure the fear was gone and then these words came out of my mouth:

“It’s weird; I can’t really explain it to you. I feel different about everything. I think differently about everything. I worry about things I’ve never worried about before, and worries I have had before are a thousand times more scary now that a child is involved. Even stuff that is not worry worthy, like where to buy our freaking rocking chair from seems to be racking my brain for hours on end.”

And the second the last word came out of my mouth I started doing the ugly cry (that’s what Jodi and I call it). You know the one, where you’re heaving and choking and your face is hot and sopping wet, you can’t breathe and you knew if someone was filming you it would most definitely not be cinematic worthy and people would look away because it was so awkward to watch? Yea, that’s the cry I had at 1:00 this morning. I was hysterical. I couldn’t even figure out why I was crying.

I was sitting up in our bed and Paul gently asked what he could do to help and I knew there was nothing. I told him I just had to cry it out. Cry it out? Cry what out?! Why the hell was I crying?! (I get that my pregnant hormones are crazy now but something had to have set me off…).

I started going through the things that I thought might have triggered it but couldn’t find the one in order to rationalize the fit I was now indulging in and so I could try to calm myself down. Instead, every time I thought of something that would have been pregnancy cry worthy, I just sobbed harder knowing it wasn’t the start of my heaving cry but was now in my head and was worth crying about too. Stress at work. I sobbed harder. Fear of losing my job after I come back from maternity leave. Sobbing harder. Dominican Republic. We’re talking hysterical here. It was unbelievable the things my body wanted to get out. I sat there upright in bed for 5 minutes after I was done, thinking about how very tired I was and furious at how hard it was for me to fall asleep. I leaned back and thought for a bit and then stopped remembering anything at all. Finally I was asleep.

These fits can’t happen often. I’ll drive poor Paul loco. Oh, and I’ll make myself fat (you know, with the cheddar bites from Sonic I had today as a consolation prize for being exhausted).

insomnia: 1 christa: 0

Saturday night I was exhausted. I went to bed at 9:00 pm and didn't wake up until 8:00 the next morning.

Then I took a nap in the car on the way back to OKC, about an hour long.

Last night we had dinner with some friends from church at Earl's where I proceeded to scarf down my chopped brisket sandwich, french fries and okra with no problem. Oh and a coke to top it off.

I paid dearly for the fact that I had slept 12 hours and had enough acid producing food to give a rhinoceros heart burn.

At 10:00 last night when Paul was exhausted from his weekend of golf playing and running around in the heat, I wasn't even close to ready for bed. So I read a chapter of Harry Potter hoping it would make my eyes tired and I would tucker out.

Wrong.

Apparently when you're pregnant, you start not sleeping early.

I read and read and read. I stared at the wall in the living room. I stared at the cat laying on my lap. Nothing worked to make me tired. I finally just bit the bullet and crawled into bed at 1:00 and pushed Paul off my side of the bed for another hour before I think I feel asleep.

Today, I'm a little cranky.

I wish I was taking a nap, but since I'm not...

Considering that this is how I feel today, I am going to link/and post an article Paul sent me this morning. Side note: I snapped this photo a few nights ago while laying on the couch. Paul and I were talking and had the TV on and our cat had apparently had enough of our excitement. She plopped down, stuck her face in the couch and took a nap. A face planted nap sounds wonderful doesn't it?

If you are not an interior designer, you probably will have no desire to continue reading this post. I'll be on my soap box for a moment.

Since I started college I have found that "interior design" bashing is quite fun for some people. There's the standard jokes about fluffing pillows and picking paint colors and people rarely realize what an actual, educated, licensed designer does. In fact, I've never "fluffed" or specified a pillow in my entire career. Yes we pick finishes and furniture and accessories, but we do much more than that.

We're given a building shell, and we make the interior what it is. We help determine, or sometimes just determine without help where walls are to be placed, how large rooms need to be, we have to follow the same codes and regulations that architects have to follow. We design ceilings, lighting, millwork, etc. We are more than capable to work on buildings. Most states require you to be registered after you've been educated and passed an examination, just like an architect, or a doctor or any other profession where the health, safety and welfare of people are at stake.

So, when Paul sent me this post this morning written by IIDA HQ about OSU Professor Drab's research stating that some of the problem comes from ourselves and the words we use and that our publications use to describe projects and our process, it made sense.

That Elephant is...umm...Big

Judging by the overwhelming response to the blog post “10 Reasons Interior Designers Matter,” I think it’s safe to say that there are a lot of misconceptions about interior design and its practitioners. And you’re a little sick of it. Ok, very sick of it.

Well, turns out the design community and their publications may not be doing justice to the profession, at least in the printed word. Research at Oklahoma State University over the last decade analyzed the language used by writers of design periodicals and interior design practitioners when describing the activities of interior designers (Drab, p. 543), and what they found may surprise you.

Researchers found that verbs such as “love” and “like” and adjectives such as “beautiful” and “simple” rank among the most used in design publications and by design practitioners. To me, this is like calling an elephant big. It doesn’t do the creature justice. Big is a relative term; that is, it doesn’t take on meaning until the audience interprets the word — and because every audience member’s world of experience is different, it means something different to each individual. To one person, big might mean the size of a house. To another, it might mean a pair of pants she wishes she didn’t have to buy.

Using an objective term to describe the elephant helps standardize the vision; for instance, “that elephant weighs 2 tons.” The same issue applies to defining interior design. “Love,” “like,” “beautiful” and “simple” are emotional words. The emotional context of these words contributes to the misunderstanding of the business discipline and the art of interior design. These words don’t provide the audience with a very complex view of the talents of the designer or the merits of the project.

Since most of you aren’t editors of design publications, your audience will most likely be a client, a friend or an acquaintance. When describing your projects, why not use words that describe how you followed a systematic process when designing the space? Take the time to explain how you researched design solutions to increase efficiency or safety in the workplace. Your work isn’t lazy or one-dimensional, so your words shouldn’t be either.

Lucky for you, NCIDQ provides a multi-faceted definition of interior design on their website. These words and descriptions do more for the elevation of the profession than an emotional outpouring could ever do. And in combination, they’re targeted. If we want the world to take seriously the profession of design, shouldn’t we use serious words?

It’s never a bad idea to double check ourselves before we exclaim over how “beautiful that room is” or “how we love the simplicity of that design.” This isn’t to say that the emotional component of design isn’t important, because it is. That’s the art of design. Just remember to include the business discipline as well. Because while the art of it may be fairly evident to the observer, the discipline may not be. Your job is to explain what about the project’s beauty or simplicity makes it the work of a professional. And then the public will begin to develop the vocabulary for design from both perspectives.