T Minus 10

That's right, Miss J is a mere ten days away from her anticipated due date. Since we only moved into  the house recently, we've really had to work hard to get things into a reasonable shape for her arrival. Over  the past week, we've finally started getting things into a workable state. The nursery and the upstairs bed room have finally been cleaned  up and painted (there was a ton of woodwork to do), carpet has been installed in both, and furniture moved into place (what we have of it, anyway).

Off to the side you'll see a before and two after shots of the upstairs bedroom. Although the furniture is a bit random at this point (it's just stuff from our various apartments over the years), I think the room looks a lot more finished now. (As a side note, I used Behr paint, which I found has a nice finish and is easy to work with. However, my experience with their primer was just awful. It clumped up on me in minutes, even under ideal painting conditions, which made it impossible to work with. In the end, two coats of paint on things like the baseboard looked better than paint over primer.) Them ceiling light fixutres gotta go, though.

Much thanks to Ficus for risking life and limb to get our damn near infinitely dense dresser up some difficult stairs, and to Laurens for helping me struggle with not one but two queen mattresses up the same stairs and providing endless amounts of guidance. He's the guy who saved the day by telling us that we could get a split box spring for our queen mattress. I tried to pass that information on to another struggling homeowner, but alas, I was too late.

The baby's room got a similar treatment of paint and carpet, although the wall color is essentially terracotta. I didn't post any pictures of the nursery because, well, there's not much to show you -- we don't really have any furniture. Our main struggle has been with the crib. I'd like something modern and sleek, but almost all cribs look like they've dropped out of the 19th century -- not my taste. Ones that are modern and appeal to me, however, are quite expensive. Spending a good bit of money on a crib is even less appealing since we're going to use a co-sleeper at night for many months. The crib would only be used for daytime naps. (The nursery is on the ground floor.) Another wrinkle is that rather than using a crib as the baby gets older, I'm interested in learning more about the "Montessori child-bed" described in Montessori from the Start. (If anyone has any experience with that approach, please comment!)

We were ill-equipped for the baby in other regards, too, so today we did some serious baby shopping. Among other things, we picked up the stroller (a Peg Perego Pliko P3) and a Pack 'n Play to use in the nursery for naps for now. Glad that's done! Our struggle to prepare for the baby has been made much, much easier thanks to our kind and generous friends who have given us so many gifts, items their children no longer use, and knowledge about what matters and what doesn't. We appreciate it all so very much.

Tomorrow it's back to working on the house, and if the weather is nice, I'll take some length off of doors so they'll swing freely over the new carpet, and paint them. If the weather doesn't agree, there's plenty of other stuff to do around here.

Woah, I just noticed the time. Now we're only nine days away from the big event.

Comments

[Erich]

The room looks great...nice work. We'd also noticed the expense of more modern looking baby furniture - tough call.

I'd never heard the term "co-sleeper", but looked into it after you mentioned it to me, and actually, Venessa was pretty familiar with it. They seem to have some nice potential benefits. I'd only read one book on baby sleeping before ours arrived, and the line in that book was to not do the bed sharing thing, so I suppose that prejudiced me against the whole concept. Sophie and Ethan have spent every night since they've been home in their cribs, and they've adapted to it extremely well. It was easy for us to do since the nursery is only feet away from our bedroom...in fact, we barely even need a monitor. They sleep 11+ hours/night, and by putting to practice some of what I learned by reading, they quickly learned to get back to sleep on their own when they awoke during the night.

I'm not familiar with the Montessori child bed...interested to hear about that.

[Michael]

Thanks Erich! The tricky part was the ceiling -- I'd never painted a sloped ceiling before, and there's no clear delineation between the ceiling and the walls (the plaster is a smooth curve), so there was no clear point where the colors should transition. What we ended up doing was picking a point on the curve and snapping a chalk line which worked fairly well.

About the co-sleeper, apparently one of the big advantages is that, while the baby may wake up more frequently during the night, both the baby and you wake less fully, since the baby isn't crying in another room and you can just move a little bit to feed or comfort the baby. Other people see the more-frequent-but-less-awake scenario as a major drawback. Depends on your sleeping style, I suppose. We'll see how it works in practice!

As for the Montessori child-bed, the idea is that rather than using a crib, you put a low, firm mattress in the corner of a room (protecting the edges against the wall with bolsters) and mount a child-safe mirror on one of the walls. Naturally, the room is child-proofed and there is a gate at the door. The thinking is that this type of arrangement fosters independence by not requiring a parent to move the baby into and out of the crib, and lets her explore the environment on her own. (That's the reason for the mirror before the baby is mobile.) They also claim it makes for an easier transition into a regular bed since the child is accustomed to sleeping without bars. It all sounds plausible, but I think a lot of people would view it as a little harsh to let a baby sleep in a corner on the floor.

[mikepop]

I had the same problem with cribs - anything I really liked was fairly expensive. I finally went with one that was not something I loved, but was at least something I didn't hate, and fell in the middle of the expense range.

I found out later that Ikea sells cribs (they only have one on the website but a few models in-store). As long as you are not going to use it that much and you might not like the design, why not save a bit of money? :)

[Michael]

Hi Mike! Actually we checked out Ikea pretty early on, but the Ikea near us only had two types of cribs and we didn't really like either. Like you, I've considered going with a design that's not hateful and priced mid-range, but I've been totally turned off by the poor construction of the ones I've seen. I'll keep looking...

[Ficus]

I used Kilz 2 primer in my living room and it was great. Well, it was fine. I don't know how "great" primer can be. And Home Depot keeps a quantity of it on hand that can only be expressed in scientific notation.