CostcoWarrior

I can’t bend 31 August 2009

TW has to tie my shoes.
TW has to pick stuff up off the floor.
TW has to help me do almost everything.
He even helped me paint my toenails.
He probably deserves a medal for that one.  It was way out of his normal job description.

People ask if we’re excited.

Perhaps it’s wrong to admit, but I’m not sure I know how to be excited about a baby that’s fully my responsibility whom I’ve never met before.

But YES OH YES I’m so excited to NOT be pregnant any more!!! Please, Baby, please, please come out and let me have my body back with full bending capabilities!!!

And that about sums it up at 30 days to go…

Baby Guessing Pool–Jump In! 24 August 2009

As most of you (hopefully) know, we are expecting our first child in the next 6-8 weeks.  Since we didn’t learn the baby’s gender, we invite you all to join our fun guessing game…

To play, just post a comment here with your guess of our Baby’s
1.  Gender    (boy or girl guesses only, please–the other guesses aren’t that funny, really)
2.  Birth Date    (official estimated due date is Sept 30)
3.  Birth Weight

To win, you MUST guess the correct gender, then be closest on the Birth Date.  The Birth Weight will help determine any necessary tie breaker between possible winners.

Your first guess is FREE!  If you want to increase your chances of winning, each guess thereafter costs $5.  Winner will get a prize from The Warrior and me, as well as all $$ accumulated in the pool.

Any guess will be considered valid as long as it is entered BEFORE the onset of labor.  Yes, the onset of labor marks the END of the guessing opportunity, so don’t delay–post your guess(es) today!  

It’s vacation in 291 minutes… 12 August 2009

But who’s counting, right?

Me.

I am.

We’re flying to Seattle.  (Hooray! A trip home to the beautiful Northwest!) Then tomorrow we head here with my family to vacation on the Washington coast.  Tell me this is not the cutest beach house you’ve ever ever seen???

The weather might not cooperate with us, but if that’s the case, I’m honestly perfectly OKAY getting stuck inside this place with my family for a few days.  Just LOOK at it!  So cute!

SCORE! Free Stuff! 11 August 2009

They say procrastination is evil.  I tend to agree, but then often struggle to execute the anti-procrastination.  This struggle is apparently aggravated by my pregnant condition:  Before last Thursday we had not bought a single thing for the baby.  NOT A THING.  Sure, we’ve been working on preparations like remodeling and dejunking and making room for the kid.  But as far as BABY STUFF.  Nada.  Zilch.  We had a couple of things (literally like 2 or 3 actual items) that neighbors had randomly given us.  But really we were 8 weeks away from a birth with NOTHING on hand.

After the school term…

After the big meetings at work…

After vacation…

After we finish the closets…

After we sort through our stuff…

After we fix the water line break issue…

After we celebrate your birthday…

After our next vacation…

Pretty much…AFTER everything in life settles down and we have a NON-PREGNANT moment to think and NEVERMIND that the NON-PREGNANT moment isn’t going to come until AFTER we NEED all the STUFF that we’re procrastinating purchasing thank you very much.

A less effective approach, I admit.  But I wasn’t worried.  I probably should have been.  I probably still should be.

But then a coworker comes by and asks a “silly” question because she’s sure that we’re totally already prepared, but would we happen to need a baby monitor that’s pretty much brand new that she only used for 3 weeks when her husband was laid up in bed after back surgery???  SCORE one for procrastination.  $40 baby monitor is now ours for FREE.

And then you might think that we thought “well really, it’s time to buckle down and get to it and start shelling out the hundreds of dollars that this baby stuff is going to cost”…but really we just said *AFTER* the weekend…

When a second coworker calls us up and perhaps we don’t really need it and maybe it’s a dumb question but were we planning on possibly needing a baby bassinet because they are getting rid of it and they just randomly thought of us and we don’t have to take it if we don’t want to but we can have it if we want and should he bring it to work on Monday for us???  SCORE two for procrastination.  $110 baby bassinet is now ours for FREE.  

And now since we’re on a roll, we randomly stumble on a brand new top-of-the-line breastpump for less than half price and we actually *buy* it–the first real baby stuff purchase.  And we’re now just tickled pink because for half the cost of a breastpump we also own a bassinet and a baby monitor.  Oh we feel TOTALLY prepared now, since we’ve got the sleeping part and the eating part covered, and those are really the most important, right?

Don’t worry about the carseat that the hospital won’t let us take the baby home without–there’s a TRAX stop at the hospital we could use in a pinch…

They even cleaned up! 4 August 2009

I just want to rave a bit about the plumbing company we hired to replace the water line to our house.

The bid was free.  The quote was a firm fixed price.

They showed up on time.

They didn’t look like creepy blue-collar workers who swear and spit tobacco everywhere.  Instead they looked like educated and experienced plumbers who were good solid guys.

They got to work within 60 seconds of pulling up to the house.

They called to tell us when they had finished and that they would mail us the bill.

And then–to top everything and totally make my day–when we pulled up to the house after work we saw that they had CLEANED UP!  I was totally expecting to have to come home from work and clean up the yard.  NOPE!  No extra piles of dirt.  They had rolled up the tarps and gathered our tools.  They had even taken all the cardboard we’d used as “extra tarps” and put it in the garbage can.  They’d unhooked our hose line from the neighbors and COILED IT UP on the side of our house.  They’d even REATTACHED all of our connections to the washing machine (where we’d hooked up the rigging to use the neighbor’s water).  They had the main water line to the house turned on AND they had run the water long enough to get past those initial chug-hiss-spurts of repressurization!  They had even sprayed down the sidewalk to clean the mud off of it.

And while I can’t say it looked as if nothing happened (our front lawn DOES have a strip of new sod down the middle as evidence of SOMETHING) I can say it was SO NICE to come home to a repair job that had been FULLY completed!  So often, the clean up phase gets the half-baked effort, but NOT this time.  They pushed right through the end and finished it right.  Thank you, Hillcrest Plumbing!

It’s so nice to have a good experience with a contractor.  It’s so often NOT the case, and believe me, we’ve dealt with A LOT of them in the last two years!

To sum up the good news: WE HAVE WATER!  And it’s not make-do-garden-hose-water-from-the-neighbor!  And we didn’t have to do ANY of the clean up!