Cleft Chin?

Here is a picture from Monday that our doctor took. He said that the things you see on the top, by her forehead, are just interference, not a deformed hand.

So, what do you think? Cleft chin?

Our Crib

When my mom was here the last weekend of February, she gifted us with not only her mad room re-doing skills, but also with our nursery furniture. She purchased a crib, a dresser, and a glider. The glider and the dresser (which we will use as a changing table) we already have in the room. But the crib had to be ordered.

Well, about 1.5 weeks ago, I received a call from the store we bought the crib from, Crib City. Apparently, when he ordered more than one crib, the warehouse in NY only sent one crib. And there were two people who ordered this one crib (us and another couple). We told him that we could wait for another shipment. His estimate was that it would be in late April. So, our baby is due May 9th, which does make it close. But we have the family cradle to use for the first few weeks (months?) anyway.

But, I found a picture of our crib. We are getting this crib, in this color even. It's all rounded on the top edges. So not as much chance for our baby to hurt herself. While this is usually something parents care about, and we aren't being much different in that sense, for those of you who know me it makes more sense. I am very prone to hurting myself on things. Especially my head. I've had a lot of damage to that part of the body. Round hard things will lead to less cuts than squared hard things.


It actually works out okay (or should). We can't take the crib home in our little car anyway. And later in April/early May we should have some family member with a larger car around to get it.

Marshmallows

Marshmallows have been somewhat of a mystery to me. They have a crazy texture and are just sugary. How do they do it? How are they not super sticky on the outside to? Well, cooking has a lot of tricks, and I know about none of them.

So I decided to take the mystery out of marshmallows and make some at home.
Sunday afternoon, I assembled my ingredients (following the great Alton Brown's recipe). Then I started in on the cooking. I used our digital thermometer to get the sugary mixture up to 240 degrees F. Then poured it into the gelatin mixture. Set my stand mixer to high, and let her go for 12 minutes.

The stand mixer probably fought harder then it ever has before. But she made it through.

After it was all mixed, I used a greased spatula to get the marshmallow creme into a prepared 13x9 pan, dusted with more sugar/cornstarch and let it sit to dry for 4 hours.


Then Shannon helped me cut the marshmallows apart. We dusted with more sugar/corn starch and tasted!

They taste like marshmallows! Not too much different. But, they roast nicely. The insides get really gooey and it'd delicious. They also melt really nicely in hot cocoa (we tested both yesterday).


Since this was far from a failure, I will likely make more in the future. But, we'll try out some groovy flavors, not just vanilla.


Fun!

Roses and Snow

Good news. Last night it was really nice out, like 66 degrees when we got home around 6pm.

So, I decided I should trim the roses. The bushes are getting very unruly and have started buds! I trimmed the one by the garage and started the one by the mail box. But then it got dark and I stopped.

Guess what we may have on Saturday? Snow.

I hope our roses don't die.

That Burning Sensation

This is the first discomfort I've had to deal with in quite some time (due to pregnancy, not malt-o-meal). I have this really uncomfortable burning sensation on the top of my abdomen. I'm sure it's just due to my skin stretching, but it's no fun. It started about 1 week ago and I've grown quite a bit this past week.

She moves so much more defined now. Last night, I think I felt a hand/foot. Instead of just a general quick movement, or a all around push, there felt like a little nub in the middle of my tummy. I'm sure it was an appendage. :) How cute.

I've only got 52 sleeps left until my due date. Crazy. I can't believe how fast time is going.

Crazy Apple

We did not purchase this apple. Although I'm down with the red stripe, I'm not down with the little tail.

The Biggest Gainer

The title will be funny to about 6 people. Only 1 of which reads my blog. I would explain, but that just makes the joke less special. Trust me, it was funny.

This weekend (counting Friday) was a pretty good one. Friday at work, my manager and manager+ threw me a baby shower! It seemed to be quite a success. We had funfetti cake (sweet!) and punch.


My manager picked up 3 packs of onesies and some fabric markers. Then people decorated them! That was fun to watch/listen to and now to have!


There are some pretty good ones in there. 2 to mention... the 2nd down on the left-most column. It says "My parents are as normal as anyone" but instead of the word "normal" it has the equation for the normal distribution. Another good one is the top-most on the 2nd column from the left. It's a free-hand drawing of our company logo. Done quite well.


We got a lot more gifts than I expected! I work with some very generous people! Jennifer (a friend of Shannon's from grad school, she's basically the reason we applied here) got us a sweet K-State diaper bag, we got oodles of wipes and baby wash and baby lotion. And management got together to get us our travel crib! That was awesome!

Thanks everyone!

Then Saturday, we had our childbirth class. It was one class, from 10am to 3pm, and included breakfast and lunch. We watched some old VHS videos of various things. We learned about methods to help relax and things Shannon can do to help. Then a pediatrician came in and answered our questions for about 1 hour. At the end, we drove to the big hospital, St. Francis, and took a tour. Shannon and I plan on having the baby at St. Francis South. It's smaller and MUCH closer to our house. But still, the tour was nice. The room after delivery is freaking tiny! Both the ones in Wichita (where Jayme was) and Manhattan were really big compared to the ones here. But we'll see. Shannon and I will try to go to the hospital nearby and see their rooms. Maybe they are bigger.

There were 9 couples at the class. One of which has the same last name as us. Crazy.

Other than that, Gary was here and left Friday morning. It was good to see him some. I worked on the quilt and have the entire front done. But we don't have enough of the fabric left for the back, so I'll have to go back to JoAnn, darn it. :)


We also chatted about new Necromunda rules. :)

All the Blocks are Done

Last night I finished piecing the blocks. There are 24 in total and I plan to lay them out like above. This weekend I'll probably work on it some more. Maybe sew the blocks together and even put the borders on. :)

P.S.

I'm really excited about having a baby.

Our Quilt

Here is a picture of what half of our squares will look like. I'm almost done with the other half of the squares. I'll show you my progress at a later date. So far I'm pleased (and so is Shannon).

More of the Moving Baby

It's a been about three weeks. And she is moving a lot more now. Almost every time I just sit back for a minute, I can feel at least a little lump move or jab or something. It's pretty sweet.

This video happened to capture a lot of the moving.

In other news, I'm really tired.

The Weekly Weekend Report

It's Monday, back to work and the dull-drums of money-making life. *sigh*

This past weekend was for sewing. I stitched up a lot of things. Shannon has been working a lot on making embroidery patterns for me. :) He's so sweet. I don't even ask him to do it. I think he kind of enjoys it. It's like graphic design, but for me to make things with. A lot of what we did was try something out, decided how to change it and go from there. The good things eventually make it to my Etsy shop, the Nausicaa Distribution. Such as this pi cozy, this Euler cozy, and these sold out pencil pouches. I'll keep putting new things up too. It's fun.

I also started on our quilt, finally! We decided on the "Quilt for Reba" from mamanance.


I just really liked the way the quilt looked. She did an awesome job on colors and fabrics. Ours is more tan and less white, and there is less variety to the fabrics used, but so far I like the way it looks. This picture is hers, not ours. I finished sewing together half of the blocks and cut out the pieces for the other half last night. But I didn't take a picture, so I can't show you. Maybe tomorrow.

In other baby news, she is moving a lot still. Lots of pushing, not just random jabs. :) Last night was the first night in a long time (months) since I've been awoken not by a horrible leg cramp (which I've always gotten, now they are just much worse and more frequent), but by having to pee or because she was moving a lot. Usually I just sleep through them both (not wetting the bed, but just holding it till morning). But last night, I woke up and felt her moving and then was like, "huh, I have to pee." So, that.

But all seems well so far. The nursery paint and molding has been touched up. Our Necromunda campaign is finished, after 160 battles, a 3600+ rating gang, a 400+ experience leader, and over 1 year of work. (It was worth it!) And I made biscotti yesterday.

MDM4U1

I haven't posted anything mathy in a while. So here is something.

http://mdm4u1.wetpaint.com/

Yesterday, my sister Jayme, whose taking a statistics course at Wichita State, asked about some of her homework problems. She's doing (too much) combinatorics in her stats class and I didn't really know the answers. So I searched the web-web and happened accross MDM4U1, a crappy name. But it's a pretty nice little place.

It's a wiki for mathematics and statistics topics. The entry I referred her to (about permutations with identical elements) was easy to follow and helpful. It seems like a good idea.

Home Organizing

Last weekend my mom came down to Tulsa to work with Shannon and I on the nursery. It ended up being a project that affected 3 room, but not the 3 originally planned.
Originally we were going to move my sewing room and Shannon's office to our bedroom downstairs and then move our bedroom up to Shannon's office and make the sewing room a nursery. Well, we were thinking about it and realized that wasn't the best plan. Here's why.

The baby will be sleeping in our room for at least a few months, in the cradle from when Shannon was a baby (awesome huh? (Uncle) Randy made it back in 1980, all 11 of the Dick grandchildren used it). And we would like to stay in our room for some time and not have to start sleeping upstairs now (with still 2 months before she's born).So we decided to move most of Shannon's office down to our bedroom (it's a stupid big room anyways). Some of the book cases (and random stuff from the bedroom) was moved to the spare room. And we kept the sewing room as is. Now Shannon's old office is the nursery.

We did a lot this weekend. Here are some pictures to show it!

This is Shannon's office before we moved everything out. We moved Shannon's big desk to our bedroom, two of the book cases and their books to the spare room, the other two to our bedroom. We had to remove the door to fit the desk through it... jeepers.



In the spare room we added the two book cases and moved the small black computer desk from out bedroom up (with "computer" and all!). We also moved all the Fall and Christmas decoration boxes to the storage in the garage. That cleaned this room up.


Our bedroom lost one small black desk and gained one large desk and two bookcases. We also moved our bed a little.


After moving things, of which I did little to help. We got to the redecorating. This was only in the nursery. The other rooms still look the same, just with more stuff and eventually more organized. We puttied, sanded, and started to tape, but ran out.


So we took a break which involved SmashBurger for lunch, Target, Lowes, Babies-R-Us, Crib City, Baby Depot, and TGI Friday's for dinner. Then, back to the house for more work! We finished taping, then primed the walls and the chair rail, and watched some Olympics.


Sunday morning, Mom got up earlier than us and painted the whole ceiling and half of the brown walls, and some of the molding. :) Eventually we all helped and got the chair rail marked and the room painted. It's an oatmeal color on top and ceiling, with a gray-sage-green color below. The chair rail is painted white.



While we let that dry, we went out and spent some big monies on furniture. Well, Mom spent all the monies. It's her gift to us and the baby! Thanks Mom! We got a really nice crib for 330$, a nice big dresser for 350$, and a glider with ottoman for 270$. It's all a dark espresso color. The cushions on the glider and ottoman are a dark taupe color. The crib is the only thing we are waiting on. That should be here in about a month.


Then, when things were dry, we put up the chair rail. Shannon got to use his new miter saw! It made the job much easier. That and going to Lowes to buy a 10$ stud finder. All of the walls in our house are not square or straight. It was impossible to put up the molding nice without the stud finder, we tried. There were gaps all over the place where it wasn't against the wall. However, now it looks pretty good. It's all held on, puttied, and painted. Made the room look more fancy.


After that, we vacuumed and spot cleaned the carpet. Then moved the furniture we had into the room and enjoyed.


I still want to make at least one bookcase, too. But that will come later, probably after we get the crib so we know how much room we have, and where. We also put all the stuff we have gotten so far in the room too. I hung up pj's. :)

So, thanks to Mom for coming down and all of her help! There is NO way we could have done this without you. Not only was your manpower useful, but your knowledge and baby names were too!

:)

I'm pretty excited. I like the way things are going so far. :)

SnowBuffs

I met a lot of important people in my life through the SnowBuffs. That is the roller hockey team that Shannon started before I even met him in Garden City. The summer before my senior year of high school, my best friend Julia and I started to play with them. That is when I met Shannon, and met his family and all of his friends (which are now may friends too).

So, now all the SnowBuff girls are having babies (girls in particular*) and I made a onesie for Autumn to celebrate!

Julia ordered some goods from my Etsy shop and Shannon and I decided we would send a bonus gift for Autumn. We wanted to try embroidering a onesie for a while and this was a good time to do it. So Shannon found an old Sabre's logo in vector form, pulled it into our digitizing program and after about 30 minutes, we had this, text and all. We put it all together on the machine, and let her go! Pretty pleased with the result. Hopefully it fits Autumn okay and the knit/embroidered combo doesn't stretch out too much.

*Somary had 2 girls already, Julia just had a girl, and Jenette and I are having girls.

10 weeks to go

I'm 30 weeks pregnant now. Today Shannon and I went to another appointment (and paid for/registered for the option to get an epidural).

She's looking pretty good. Heart rate was about 120 bpm. I've gained about 20 lb so far. But he said her waist area is measuring a little small (33rd percentile), so he's going to have me go to the hospital for another ultrasound. He said that he isn't worried, but they can do a more detailed job of measuring her growth.

But I did get a new picture!


If you can't tell, its a profile of her face. Just that one. But it's a fun/creepy one. I guess until she is no longer in my belly they are all going to be creepy.