Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Walls come tumbling down

One of the biggest things that I struggled with when Brooks and I were planning our wedding was the fact that we had this huge life event happening but you can only work so far ahead without coming to a standstill of things to do to prepare. I am now learning that apparently pregnancy is the same way. There are so many things to do before having a baby but you can only do so many things early. You can’t buy clothes that are on great sale for the next year until you know the gender. Obviously we don’t know the gender of this baby yet so I can’t go hog wild on any great clearance because there are about three gender neutral things out there and none of them are on clearance. You can’t plan a nursery until you buy the furniture. There is no reason to buy the furniture until after you clean out the room and move the current things in the room to somewhere else.


Our house is another thing that we are attempting to prepare for the big change of having a baby. We started the process of total house demolition. Fine, one room right now but holy crap the mess and dust is awful. This is also known as tearing down a big dang wall, completely ripping another wall apart, replacing lots of drywall and then about 700 sq ft of new flooring. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense that we are working on our living and dining rooms when we have a basement to finish so that we can move the office downstairs to make a nursery. It is all one project at a time to get to the next one. But there was a bunch of wiring in the basement that feeds the living and dining room that we needed to remain exposed before we closed up the walls and ceiling in the basement.

Right now our house sits in a mini state of flux, the living room is tore apart until we get scaffolding to put up drywall. Apparently happening this week while I am out of town. Next is picking out flooring that we can actually settle on. Maybe we should have done that before we tore down the wall? The basement waits on the living room project to be finished. The office move to the basement waits on that space to be finished. Again, it is all that hurry up and wait. The exact thing that drove me crazy when we were getting married.

I should admit that I pretty much mean Brooks in every sentence in the last two paragraphs. He has deemed pregnant as incapable of doing anything but fetching Raspberry Simply Lemonade. He keeps recruiting family and friends for these projects, which is awesome but also leaves me standing there like a dingleberry. I actually went upstairs and watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy on the laptop while they tore the walls apart on Sunday.

So here I sit with my stomach that looks like I have a food baby, which honestly could just be a food baby, with not much to do besides entertain myself by looking at nurseries online. Not that I can pick out anything yet. But the “Baby Ideas” document is growing.

I booked our flights to Tennessee for the end of March to tell our family and friends there that we are having a baby. I will be about fourteen weeks then, which makes me think it may be extremely obvious that I am packing some extra pounds, but who knows. It was the only time that our schedule worked with the immediate family’s schedule. We have booked the trip under the impression that husband has some work that he needs to do with a few folks from his old job/research and we had airline miles that were going to expire so we are both coming along. Apparently this is believable so far. I have almost banned my husband from talking to his family about the trip because he is 1)AWFUL at secrets, especially when they are big exciting ones like a baby and 2) he cannot for the life of him make up a realistic good cover story. He came up with the idea of him needing to travel down there because of his former workplace, which we have done for real in the past, but thought nothing past that, like why would I come along or why would we fly when we have driven every single other time.

I am hoping that he can be elusive enough with his mother and sister to keep the secret, but I am realistic enough that it likely won’t happen. We have had two other times when the secrets almost came out and I really think that one person already knows. The first happened when a friend showed up unplanned at our house and I had bought him a book about being a dad and a onesie that said something to the jist of Dad loves me. He had put them on the entertainment center and as the friend was going to our garage to get something to drink I dashed upstairs with cookie dough covered hands to tell him to HIDE THAT STUFF FAST. Our friend, male friend I should add, now strongly believes that we are hiding something a bit more risque than a baby onsie from him. We’ve decided that when we tell this friend we are having a baby that we will bag up the things we hid from him and ask if he really wants to know what we hid from him. I am pretty sure he won’t be expecting what is in the bag.

The second incident came just this week when a neighbor came over to help with the shutting off of some plumbing and Brooks sent him upstairs to open all the faucets. In the master bath I had written a note in eyeliner on the mirror to Brooks saying “We are having a baby!” Unless the neighbor just opened the faucet quickly and walked right back out of the bathroom, I am almost certain that he saw the note. Ah well. What do you do?

Since we are hoping to tell most of our family in about a month, we are really trying to plan a fun way to tell them. Anyone have any suggestions? We are thinking about telling my family at a family dinner and ask everyone to get together for a nice picture and since our camera also has a kick ass video option actually set it to record. Then husband will be behind the camera and instead of telling them to say cheese, he will tell them to say “We’re having a baby!” or “Steph’s pregnant”. Something to that effect all caught on video. I like the thought of catching it all on video but think it may be hard with schedules to get everyone there for dinner.

With my in-laws, we have another plan. My MIL has been saying/joking for about two years that the first one of her sane children to give her a grandchild she will give $5000 to. We thought it would be entertaining to create an invoice payable to us for $5000 and give it to her. The entire family is going to be together at some point that weekend so we want to tell everyone at once. I am wondering if she will get it quick enough or if it will be too hard for her to follow.

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