Twig by Twig

So much for my goal of weekly posts. It's been five weeks since my last post. Here are all of the posts I've been meaning to get to for the last month, all rolled up into this one post.

Since I last blogged....

• I had my first baby shower, given by my mother-in-law (Mamasan) and sisters-in-law (Shelly and Katie), one of whom is pregnant with a girl and due 3 weeks after us. Baby Bonsa will have a built-in best friend from birth! 

Mamasan made this oh-so-cute-baby-in-a-carriage fruit arrangement

Shelly, Mamasan, me, and Katie at the baby shower

• we went shopping for wedding dresses for my sister Jessica, who is getting married in January of 2013. That makes TWO upcoming Petrone sister weddings: Melissa and Korey in September and Jessica and Chris in January. I'm especially excited for Jessica's wedding because she has asked me to be her Matron of Honor.

Me and Jess before wedding dress shopping

• the school year ended! Hooray for summer. I have been off for about a week and a half. And enjoying every minute of it. With my maternity leave, I won't go back to work for four and a half months.

• I took a trip to New York/New Jersey. Hooray for Melissa's wedding. It was beautiful. And so much fun to see all of my college roommates. And to stay with Jo. And to feel like I was back in college again for a few days.

The Ragamuffins--Barb, Jo, Melissa (the beautiful bride), me, and Natalie

• I took two trips to Springfield. Trip 1=Happy Retirement Dad!; Trip 2=Ready to Pop!  Baby Shower. Both trips were short, but it was great to see my family and family friends.

Mom, Dad, me, and Melissa following dad's retirement ceremony

Bekah, me, Jess, and Melissa at Ready to POP! shower

• I started my summer routine. I thrive off of order and schedules, as my husband will attest. Without a schedule, I often go nuts over the summer. In the last couple of years, I have realized how much better my summer days are when I get up and moving with Casey. In the past, I used to get up and go for a morning jog while it was still cool out. Since my jogging ended right around the 6 months prego mark, I have taken to walking instead--my friend Ami and I walk 3 days a week. The other days, I walk with Fitzy. I've also been making a point to do my Yoga Mama DVD a few times a week, which has really helped with my flexibility and muscle soreness--good prep for labor, I hope. An essential part of my daily routine has also become naptime, which I find works best between 10-11am. It seems so silly to me that I get tired so quickly after waking up, but for some reason, morning naps work better than the afternoon ones (probably because I just flat out can't make it that long). And as Casey often  reminds me, I AM pregnant, and this is my vacation--and likely the last time I will be able to take regular naps for years to come. My afternoons thus far have been filled with graduate class work and maternity sub plans. Though I typically work better in the mornings, I can't fit EVERYTHING in in the morning, so afternoons have become my "work" time.

• Casey and I (mostly Casey!) have been working to get our home ready for a third member. Twig by twig, we are building a nest :). Everything is a process, of course, and I have to remind myself not to be overwhelmed with the amount of work NOT finished, including the nursery, which still has piles and boxes of baby stuff yet to be sorted and put away. The thing is, there is an order to everything. It's hard to put stuff away before we have the furniture where it will be put away, and the furniture needs to be put together, and many of the baby things need to be moved to the basement (for later use), and the basement needs to be organized, and to organize the basement, we had to have a yard sale.... you get the picture.

From top left, moving counter-clockwise: 1. new bookshelves for our bedroom (so we could get rid of the bookcase in the nursery); 2. A new dresser, so now we have matching furniture for our bedroom (mostly); 3. the bathtub, which Casey is working on re-glazing. You should have seen it before (wish I had pics, but they don't do it justice--it had layers and layers of grime and scum that wouldn't come off until Casey got some heavy duty professional acid cleaner); 4. the closet for the nursery, still in progress; 5. The nursery, still in progress, but now missing a desk, a chair, and a bookcase, but with added piles of baby stuff; 6. We got a new couch! One on which Casey can fully extend in order to comfortably nap; 7. Casey tore out the dilapidated plywood from the garage windows and put up new windows--it's still an old garage, but amazingly enough, looks better now. See "before" picture below; and finally 8. We got a china cabinet from Adelaide's estate sale, and finally moved it into its new location and put all of the china from Adelaide (her wedding gift to us) on display--I LOVE it!

• But really, in the grand scheme of things, I have come to realize that with as much as we WANT to get done before Baby Bonzai's arrival, the things we NEED to get done are really very limited. We have a car seat (so we can bring her home from the hospital), we have some diapers (thanks to folks from various showers), we have a few onesies, and we even have a few different options where Bonza can sleep for the first few weeks. Aside from not having yet decided on a pediatrician, I can't think of anything that really NEEDS to be done before she arrives. Of course, not having my sub plans/grad work finished could make things difficult for awhile---but I have great plans to get those cranked out by the end of June. Which is why you may not see many more posts in the next few weeks. Unless, of course, I wake up at 5 am and can't fall back asleep, like I did this morning :).