36 Weeks - More Gardening and Nursery Painting!

This past week we made some good progress on the backyard! Ernie came by and installed drip irrigation throughout the whole backyard and I planted some newbie plants! We're trying two varieties of grape on the new lattice - Summer Royal Seedless and a Red Flame Seedless. I just got tiny plants (you can just see them in the pic against the fence), they'll take a while to get big and probably at least a few years to bear, but they look cute already :) Also planted some salvia and small groundcover under the Indian Hawthorne.

In baby news, I feel ginormous! Baby seems to have settled into one side, and all day I feel kicks on the right hand side - sometimes it shakes my whole belly! I will definitely miss the sensation after the birth, it feels rad to have something alive inside of you that you created.

Neddie has been A#1-double-extra-super-awesome husband these past few weeks (I mean even more than usual of course). Right now he's painting the baby's room and gorgeous pale yellow. It looks so light and bright in there, I just love it. We'll take some pics once he's done and we do a little sprucing up.

Oh - we also attended our final baby class this past week - Infant CPR! It was super cool! What a useful skill to have, it made us both feel better knowing we could do something - anything - in case of an emergency. We also learned some basics on choking and child CPR. Really glad we had a chance to take that one, just in case.

I've been trying to take it easy, too, but it's hard - I still feel like we have so much to do. But I guess that feeling will never really go away. I did get our carseat which was a big priority on the to-do list, so that felt good. I went with the Graco SnugRide - as well as the stroller attachment thingie so you just pop the carseat into the stroller frame which seems super logical and easier. We got the Mickey design, trying not to "commercialize" baby too much... but I don't mind it with Mickey!
Over these last few weeks I think I'll be concentrating on prepping some food to freeze for after we bring baby home, plus some light house stuff. But really, I think we're in pretty good shape. Just hoping baby doesn't decide to arrive early - I'm enjoying these last few days with Neddie, soaking up the "just me and him" vibe. :)

35 Weeks - Gardening

Just five weeks to go! Baby is doing great, moving around constantly and we're making a lot of our final prepartions. This week I'll get our bags packed, finish up all the baby laundry and Ned has volunteered to paint the nursery. (Buttery yellow, super cute). Also, we're getting some last house things done, too. We've finally started attacking our sad sack backyard - for the past oh... two years or so, it's looked like renters live here. Maybe even crackhead renters. Not anymore!

We're starting slow, I wanted to keep it affordable and manageable - didn't want to spend beaucoup cash with all the upcoming baby stuff and I also plan on maintaining a lot of the yard ourselves, meaning I need to be able to learn thru trial and error and not just pay someone to install expensive stuff that I kill :)

So... we had our awesome gardener Ernie and his crew come and rip out the last of the saddest plants (some old yucky lantana, gazanias and a bunch of weeds), then add a bunch of fresh new soil, roto-tilled it in so the beds were prepped, install edging AND this week they'll be back to install drip irrigation to all the beds - woohoo!

I have some raised bed planters that will go in, and yesterday Ned and I started the first phase of replanting the beds. In the guest house bed we added a dwarf Valencia orange, some Spanish lavender and a border or drought-tolerant herbs like thyme and oregano. Butterflies and bees seem to love those when they start to flower.

More pics soon - it's a bit cloudy today - but here's what the cleaned-up yard now looks like (oh, on the lattice we'll be doing a grape and maybe some trumpet vines or star jasmine)


Fresh and clean! Now just some nursery trips to start filling it in and making it look presentable :) In the winter, we're getting new sod, too - we have a bad mix of crab grass and yucky stuff that gives me a rash. We need babbeh-friendly soft grass!

34 Weeks - Grandparents Visit and Shower!

Bam! This is my "hells yeah I'm pregnant!" dress :) Six weeks to go, and this past weekend we enjoyed a visit from Neddie's parents from Houston and I had my shower!

The visit with his fam was great, got to catch up, talk a lot about the baby, we got some interesting lineage and names from both sides of their genealogy, and we even took them for 99-cent fish tacos at the roach coach in the Pep Boys parking lot! His parents hadn't been out since we first moved into the house, so it was great to show off our house projects and take them to some of the sites around town.

On Saturday I had my baby shower at the Tea House. It was rad - good food, good tea, lots of amazing pressies for us and the baby and just treating my friends and fam to fun little afternoon. It was funny, at one point while I was opening up gifts, it suddenly struck me how close we are to having a new little human to take care of. I think we're ready, but still - it's just strange and wonderful that it's really happening.

My friend Trishy took some pics at the shower, so hopefully I'll be able to post some next week :)

33 Weeks - Talk to the Hand

The last sonogram netted us this gem of a pic - my little sassy baby looking all cute. I still think the baby has Ned's nose and lips (thank you!) but perhaps my cute cheeks (yay!). Now if we can just get away with blue eyes... :)

This coming weekend is my shower - wheee! Ned's parents are coming into town, which is super exciting as they haven't been out to Cali since we moved in about four years ago. We're hoping for some zoo time, some chill time and of course, getting dressed up and going to the tea house for the shower (with his mom, of course. Maybe Neddie can take his dad to shoot guns while we're eating scones and lemon curd, that sounds about right.)

We've been getting a few presents in, which has been great! Neddie's grandma bought our pop-up stroller, how cool is it:

Also received the activity mat/play gym from my friend Katrina which I think is double extra super cute and adorable:

So sweet! It makes it seem more real now that we're assembling baby's "gear." Ned and I keep talking about how strange/cool/insane it is that in just a few weeks we'll have a new member of the family. I can't wait.

32 Weeks! Just under two months to go...

Well, we are getting down to the wire for sure. In under two months, our new little Engelke will make his/her appearance. We're ready for them to be here!
This weekend we had a garage sale, had a lot of stuff clotting up the baby's room and now I have space to start organizing everything in the nursery, yay! This week I'll start washing the diapers (I guess you have to wash cloth diapers like five times before they're ready to go, who knew?), the baby clothes we have on hand and some other prep stuff like that. We also need to get with our doula to work on the birth plan AND we definitely need a car seat very soon! After all, it's possible the baby could come early. I hope s/he doesn't to be on the safe side, but you just never know.
We made a few bucks on the sale and Ned and I split it up as fun money. I'm sure he'll use his for records, and I plan on buying some of the new plants for the backyard with mine. After nearly a year of basically nothing happening back there, we're moving forward with a more simplified landscape plan. Just replanting the existing beds with some better-looking stuff, planting a few fruit trees and adding some raised beds. I think growing our own food is dope yo!
Speaking of growing our own stuff, here's a look at our tomato plants. I'm totally sold on the Tomato Success Kit from Gardeners Catalog:

The two plants in there have grown at a pretty intense rate, even for tomatoes. They're about four times as large as another tomato I planted in a regular container. Impressive. There's even some small green fruit already!
We have our final sonogram tomorrow, I am sooo excited. I can't wait to see the progress as this baby kicks me constantly! It's been several weeks since we last got a peek at them so we're really looking forward to it.
It's warm here and feels like summer. Had lunch and dinner on the deck today, pretty hard to beat. Looking forward to some summer nights outside with the baby, just the three - well, five - of us.