Shorn

When I was growing up my great grandma always wanted me to be a beautician...I think so I could do her hair for free... Since I'm not doing anything with my Anthropology degree I thought maybe I'd try out my "beauty" skills on my husband. What do you think?

Before:

First we cut off his ponytail. Isabelle thought that was great...

Intermediate:

I actually kind of like this length, but it would drive Patrick crazy 'cuz it would get into his eyes. After we put the kids to bed I cut off alot more....

After:

I took these pics the next day so his face is all dirty from work, but otherwise, what do you think? Oh and here is my belly at 32 weeks with one of my new maternity outfits. :)

Names

So apparently no one cares for my angry post about not going to my reunion...or no one is checking my blog anymore, one or the other. My sister called me today to tell me her water broke so she's off to the hospital to have her baby. My parents are leaving to watch her kids and would have arrived at her house right about the time we would have gotten to theirs. So I guess it's a good thing we're not going to my reunion since no one would be there but my brother. (Although that doesn't make me any less mad about the whole situation). Moving on.
So we're trying to decide between two baby names:
Henry Russell or William Russell (although I also like William Henry, but Patrick is insistent on the Russell part). Here are the definitions:

Henry: The boy's name Henry \he(n)-ry\ is pronounced HEN-ree. It is of Old German origin, and its meaning is "home ruler". Norman name that is a favored royal name (for eight kings) of England and France. The second son of the current Prince of Wales is named Henry.

William: The boy's name William \wi(l)-liam\ is pronounced WIL-yum. It is of Old German origin, and its meaning is "will helmet, protection". For a long time after the Norman conquest in AD 1066, three out of four English boys were given some form of the conqueror's name, William. Short forms and variants came into being with a common basic meaning of "will", "determined", or "resolute". William has remained a royal name in the UK for nearly one thousand years. The firstborn son of the current Prince of Wales is named William.

Before you say it, no I did not intend to name my son after Princess Di's kids, it was only later that I realized both of the names I liked were theirs... Anyway. William is cool because I still like it from the last time and because one of the meanings is "helmet" which is funny considering what Patrick does for a living. I have liked Henry since we saw the last Indiana Jones movie. I also like that it is a traditional name (ie not wierd) but still not as popular as say "michael". We also have ancestors on both sides (I think) with both of these names so we can claim we took them from our family history. Which do you like better?

Updates

We just got back from our 30 wk ultrasound and are happy to report that the placenta has completely moved out of the way and we are previa free. Yay! Now I just have to worry about going into labor and not making it to the hospital on time (not a big worry since both my kids took 13 hours of hospital labor, were at least a week late and James had to be induced).

I'm glad everything is fine and we don't have to worry about randomly bleeding to death anymore, but I'm kind of disgruntled too. I was kind of hoping that it would still be there and they'd put me on more restrictions which would then make it medically necessary that we miss our supposed trip to Utah next week for my highschool reunion. Instead they took me off all my restricitions and told me it was totally safe to travel. Now I'm bummed out because the reason we probably won't go is money related. I hate not having money to do stuff. I also hate sitting at home all day taking care of screaming kids and constantly picking up the messes they make. I was looking forward to a trip. Eating at restaurants, stopping at gas stations, staying at a motel. Then once we got to my parents house we were going to take advantage of their free babysitting and go to the greenshow and a play, and see Harry Potter and the parade on the 24th and festivities at the park and then the reunion Saturday. We never get to do any of those type of things here. Just the screaming kids and messes. Bah! I think it would totally be worth putting it on our credit card to go anyway, but Patrick disagrees and since he makes the money I guess he should have some say in how we spend it. But it still sucks.

Picture Post

So I've been meaning to update but have been too lazy to think of stuff to say. Instead here is a picture post of what we've been up to:
28 wk profile pic...with new haircut. My mom trimmed up the back and sides for me while she was here and I decided it was good enough so I won't be going to the salon to drastically cut it anytime soon.

Mom and Dad came to visit for a week from Utah. Mom played with the kids and exercised and Dad sat around with small spurts of metal detecting in the 100 degree heat.

Mom helped me (and by "helped" I really mean she did all the work and I supervised) plant two pots of flowers to put on our porch the morning before they left...you can't really see the flowers in this picture, but I guess that's okay.

Dad hauled our rocking chair from the back porch to the front...James thought he was chasing him with it.

Isabelle holds James' hand sometimes and "helps" him. It's cute when he goes along with it. Not so much when he's pulling away from her screaming....oh and Patrick put in a chain link fence around the back to keep James from running out into the street everytime he's outside (his favorite pasttime).

Isabelle and James finally got a new pool to play in. It looked much bigger in the picture, but they don't seem to mind.

Isabelle in her 4th of July clothes (there's a flag on her shirt if you can't see it) and Patrick grilling hamburgers....We went to see the fireworks in Gunter and were pleasantly surprised by all of the stuff they had to do in the park. Next year we'll definitely go earlier to see more of the booths as it was almost dark by the time we got there this time. That didn't stop Isabelle from playing on the swings and slide and running around crazy.Isabelle actually took this picture of us...in the dark I might add. Turned out pretty good for a three year old huh? This is us waiting for the fireworks to start.

James was not impressed with the fireworks. He liked maybe the first two and then decided they were loud and scary, so Patrick covered his ears the rest of the time. We thought they were surprisingly good and much better than we were expecting for such a small town. Though they played more traditional patriotic music over the speakers rather then Tom Petty's "American Girl" and Toby Keiths "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" which are Denton standards...it was still good though.

When we got home we set off a few small fireworks and did sparklers but it was late and the kids needed to go to bed so we didn't get to set off even half of the huge bag of stuff Patrick bought. If we manage to make it to Utah for the 24th they said we can set these off at my highschool reunion, but it's looking less and less likely we'll get to go. :(

The next morning it rained and Patrick let Isabelle go out and play in her nightgown with my Mona Lisa Umbrella. He's a much nicer parent than I am.Sunday evening I was finally able to finish making my 4th of July cake (fireworks and such ran too late to do it the night before). This is one of my favorite desserts...it's yellow sheet cake with a layer of vanilla pudding, bannanas, whipped cream and strawberries for the stripes. Generally you also have blueberries for the stars, but we decided to forgo those this year. It was still very tasty.

Guest/Baby Room: Before and After

So we just finished up the baby's room and I thought I'd post some pictures. Before:
(door leading to our room)

Closet and hallway door. (I'm starting to wonder why I bother posting before pictures since every room in this house looks exactly the same...)

We ran into a few snags along the way...I had originally wanted to strip the paint from the trim and have a dark wood border. We started doing this and then, at Patricks insistance, double checked to see if it was okay for me to be doing that. The internet betrayed me and every site I found said pregnant women should not only not strip paint but should vacate the premises until the project is completed. So we stopped stripping the paint and Patrick sanded down the part we had already done so I could paint it. Here's what we did:

We've been referring to this room as the "box room" since it is where all of the unpacked boxes have been. Here are some pics of most of them shoved to the center of the room for painting. There were actually 4-5 more big boxes in here before we started fixing it, but we managed to find some place to cram what was in them...for such a big house it seems to be lacking in usuable closet space...

So here's the finished product; notice that we only painted up to the edge of the two far doors. This was because Patrick is planning on putting in a wall here so that we can access our bedroom without having to walk through one of the kids rooms. So it may look kind of funny with only three of the four walls painted, but we'll fix it before putting the baby in there (so before like November/December since he'll be in our room the first couple of months).

So there area few more things that need to be done...I want some sort of curtain or valance for the window, we still need to paint the louvered doors (waiting on a paint sprayer thing for that) and I think the walls need a few more things on them, but I'll have to go looking for something I like for that. Plus the cradle will have a bumper/sheets/mobile but I'm not putting them on this early for the kids to destroy. I was thinking it might need a colorful rug in the center of the room too...and something more substantial on the bookshelf, but I'm sure we'll fill the space soon enough.

My parents are coming to visit next week and mom said she'd help me take down wallpaper in the dining room so I may have pics of that soon...or not if I'm not feeling like it. I usually take a few weeks off between rooms so I don't know that I'll want to jump right into the next one so soon. ;)

Belly pics

So, by popular demand, here are some pictures of my growing stomach:

16 wks

20 wks

24 wks

I don't know why it loaded them all to the side like that...they're supposed to be in the center. Oh well. You can also see my bad haircut in these...if I'm ever somewhere with a salon that's open and I don't have the kids I'll try to get it fixed. In the mean time it just looks retarded. Oh well. I'm currently working on the guest bedroom/baby room and should have pics of that posted within the next week. :)

Master Bedroom: Before and After

Well this past week I decided that if there was any chance at all I was going to have to be on bedrest at some point then I needed to get the bedroom done so I wasn't stuck in an ugly room. ;) Looking for before shots I realized that we seemed to have largely overlooked taking pictures of this room (probably because it looked just like the other two) and could only find two pictures showing parts of the room. The first is a pic of the tv stand they had mounted to the wall (just like a motel). Some people that have seen this thought it was cool. I thought it was butt-ugly and had Patrick take it down. The second pic is of the door leading out to the screened in back porch from this room.

I debated over what color to paint this room...I was toying with the idea of doing a cool two-color faux finish in here but after bringing home a couple of colors to look at that ended up being no where close to what I wanted I decided to just paint it the same color as the bedroom in our last house. The idea being that I was never able to fully actualize what I was visualizing so maybe I could do so here. The color looks a little washed out in these pictures. it's actually much darker.

Bye bye tv stand.....hello bookcase.

I think I'll buy a plant of some kind to put in the corner by the treadmill...maybe a small tree? I think that wall needs more stuff on it too...

In the future I would like to get some new dressers, matching the dark wood of the mirror over the taller of the two as well as a cool-looking four poster/canopy bed...kind of like this. The ceilings in this house are high enough I think we could actually get away with that. In the mean time I've tried various methods to mimic a canopy...two houses ago we had a sloped ceiling that I looped the fabric on, last house the ceiling was low enough that I hung it from there and then caught it back at the wall with hooks and draped it down either side. Neither of those options would work here, so I finally decided on a curtain rod. I think it turned out nicely.

I also plan to get a new bedspread...I'm kind of leaning towards one similar to this (look at the bed, not the rest):

but haven't been able to find one. I'd like to get some more red in the room so I may buy a red sheer curtain or loop some red in with the bed drapery. But here it is for now. :)

Coming Soon(ish): Before and After Guest/Baby room

Coming much later: Before and After Dining Room

Stay tuned. ;)

Na na na na na...Batman!

James got some new jammies at the store last week. I debated over getting these, but finally did since they were so cute. My little brothers used to have some very similar to these.

Please ignore the messy house. ;)

It's a....

Baby! YAY!!! We were worried it was four hamsters there for awhile. ;) I was going to post a picture here, but I guess my scanner isn't working. Imagine generic baby profile ultrasound pic.

So we were convinced that this baby was a girl, not only because of symptoms I had similar to Isabelle's pregnancy but also because Isabelle was convinced that not only was it a girl but that her name was Angelina...she said it often enough that she had us convinced too. Alas it was not to be. (That means it's a boy) So now we have to think of some boy names...maybe I'll do a post about that at some point, but right now it's a little depressing since girl names are so much easier to come up with...and I was excited about getting all of Isabelle's cute girl clothes out again. She had so many that most of them are still in very good condition...James' clothes on the other hand were mostly 2nd or 3rd time hand me downs which he managed to almost completely destroy (i.e. stain horribly in several places)...so I guess that will be fun....boy clothes are so boring! Pants and shirts. That's ALL they wear. Bah!

In other news, we also discovered that I apparently have Placenta Previa. This means that my placenta implanted over my cervix (i.e. baby's escape route). The doctor said that this can resolve itself as the uterus grows, it can "move" the placenta out of the way allowing for a regular delivery. I have another ultrasound scheduled at 30 wks (which I might add are an additional $300 per ultrasound...if it has partially moved at 30 wks, they'll check again at 36wks...so a possible extra $600 we'll need to pay them)to see if this has happened. If it doesn't move then that means that I have to have a c-section. That freaking sucks for several reasons:
1- We've already paid off the hospital for a regular birth, a c-section is at least another $1200 we have to come up with.
2- How am I supposed to take care of three kids by myself when I'm going to be broken for weeks afterwards?
3- Apparently our hospital does not allow VBAC's. EVER. It doesn't matter that the only reason I would have to have one this time is the placenta thing or that I've had two completely normal vaginal births previous to this, they will not allow me to ever deliver "naturally" again. I think this is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard in my entire life. My doctor said it's because they're required to have a surgical team on hand in case I do need another c-section. Since their anesthesiologist is not there 24 hours a day and my ob is 20 minutes or more from the hospital, they've decided to just make it a blanket policy to not allow these for any reason. Caren, my doctor, said that if someone did come in and they were already at like 8-9 centimeters and didn't have any problems then she would deliver them but that I shouldn't count on that happening. She said if I wanted a VBAC for the next one I'd have to deliver at one of the much larger hospitals closer to the metroplex where they do have a surgical team on hand at all times. This has made me very, very mad. So right now we're hoping that the stupid placenta will just move and we won't have to worry about this.
4-I also found out that there is a higher chance of bleeding ALOT during and after delivery if you have placenta previa for various reasons I don't want to go into. But if they can't get it to stop their solution is apparently a hysterectomy. Yeah. What the crap. So that freaking sucks too.
5- I have now been placed on "pelvic rest". This means no fooling around with my husband...FOR THE REST OF THE PREGNANCY! Plus, the six weeks after delivery...which is SIX and a HALF MONTHS (assuming it doesn't move at 30 wks when they check again...which is still 10wks away but a lot better than the 26 wks we'd be looking at otherwise). Yeah so that REALLY sucks....really. I think that is a very important part of a healthy marriage relationship and I worry that it is going to effect us in more ways then the one in the coming weeks. They do this because if it were to hit the cervix or 'disrupt' it or something it could cause the placenta to start bleeding profusely and kill the baby. She said I will probably have some spotting in the weeks/months to come since any contractions and such can also disrupt the blood cells in this area and cause bleeding. She said spotting is okay but if it's anything heavier than that I am to rush to labor/delivery at the hospital. You know the one that's a minimum 45 min drive from here. So...yeah. Lots of fun stuff to look forward to. Plus now we also have to come up with money for a circumsion. Bah.

Anyway, baby is apparently healthy and doing well, kicking away. He was curled up into a ball during the ultrasound which made me worry they wouldn't be able to tell the gender, but she found it just fine. Fun, fun.

"Master" bath & Kid's room: Before and After

Well my husband went away on business this past week and I suddenly decided that I needed to be productive with my time. So Tuesday I painted the bathroom, Wednesday I decorated the bathroom and painted the kids room, Thursday I drove into Gaivesville to buy some wall art and Friday I drove in to Sherman to buy even more art after I noticed big empty spaces on the walls. Now my baby didn't seem to like this much (you know the one in my belly?) so I've been taking it easy the past couple of days, but it was nice to get so much done. The bathroom is long, narrow and dark and subsequently hard to get a picture of, so hopefully you can kind of tell what it looks like. Also I can't find any good pics of the kids room before so you'll have to just imagine more of the same from the one shot I have.

Bathroom Before:

Bathroom After:

Bedroom Before:

Bedroom Intermediate (Isabelle wanted to help):

Bedroom After:

There are actually a few more pics hanging on the wall now, but I guess I took the after pictures before I hung those up...just use your imagination. ;) I wasn't planning on painting Isabelle's room, but she kept asking when we were going to do hers and insisting that she wanted it green. So I told her that if there was enough green left over from the bathroom we could paint one of her walls...I was thinking like an accent wall....anyway there was a LOT left over so we painted two walls. I think it turned out pretty cute. What do you think.

Coming soon: The Bedroom Before and After. ;) This room looks really, really bad now that the ones surrouding it are done.