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This week was the week of furniture turmoil. Once we sat down to think about it, and especially after we started moving furniture, we quickly compiled a surprisingly long list of preferences and requirements. The red couch looks best in a room with green walls, the glass coffee table does not work with the other fish room or family room furniture, blue fabric and oak furniture looks best in the fish room, the dining room table and cabinet should stay as-is, we like the butterfly chairs in the corner arrangement in the family room, etc, etc. We had opinions about the traffic patterns of rooms. Kevin considered forgoing a desktop (and a desk) altogether. We considered five places in three rooms for my desk. We considered buying a new couch, or new chairs, for a living room grouping.

We were pretty pleased with ourselves for considering options, moving things around to see if they worked, and stopping for breaks before we got too frustrated or discouraged. The house plan and to-scale furniture helped a lot.

And now we have a tentative plan for a shared office that we’re sitting on for a few days to be sure that we’re both happy with it. 🙂 It feels like a very successful week.

The farmers market opened two weekends ago. I’ve been going to prenatal yoga on Saturday mornings (a wonderful thing) and now I can pop over to the market afterwards. They don’t have very much produce yet, but the flowers, as usual, are spectacular.

In the foreground: Mothers-to-be Day tulips from Kevin! 🙂

In the background: Total disarray. The furniture/rooms question was starting to weigh on us, so I measured all of our furniture and printed out a floor plan of our house and to-scale furniture so that we could start considering our options. We have a three bedroom house, and currently we each use one bedroom as an office. My office also has a twin/trundle bed in it for when guests visit. Once the baby comes, we’ll turn Kevin’s office into the baby room. But the third bedroom isn’t big enough for both desks and the guest bed, so some creativity is required.

We were doing a good job with the paper cutouts for a little bit, but before too long we thought we had a good option and just rolled up the rug and started moving furniture. Several couch, coffee table, and bookcase configurations later, we abandoned the effort in favour of dinner. I took the photo while Kevin cooked.

With a bit of a break, we thought of new possibilities to try which actually turned out pretty well. We’re still not quite there, but definitely getting closer, and we got the room put back together once we’d eaten.

In a big step closer to baby-preparedness, we have a carseat! (A gift from Kevin’s parents!!)

For those who are interested in such things, it’s a Britax Diplomat. We decided to skip the infant seat in favour of a convertible, and then I found a great sale price with free shipping.

We had a good time trying it out in the car (with my 26-week shape quite evident). Rear-facing for the first year:

And then forward-facing up to forty pounds:

It’s now packed back into the box in the garage. We’re saving all of the LATCH and installation fun for July, which still feels very far away. People keep telling me that time is going to start to fly, but I’ve been feeling acutely aware of the fact that it isn’t and I’m struggling not to feel impatient.

The weather on Thursday and Friday was gorgeous, and the forecast for the rest of the weekend looked discouraging, so we had Larry, Kelly, Shawn, Sanna and their dog William over for grilling on Friday after work. William treed his first raccoon (I wish they’d stop hanging out in our neighbourhood, but maybe we’ll just need to invite William over more often?), to everyone else’s bemusement. After we were done eating and the sun had set, we retired to the kitchen for brownies and chatter.

Kevin’s parents found a toddler backpack and sent it out to us a few months ago. We knew that Larry, especially, would be delighted.

He’s an avid hiker, and has already been scheming about introducing the baby to the great outdoors. (Lending new meaning to the phrase “baby hike”?) On the counter, you can see the gorgeous tulips he brought – wine for everyone else, and flowers for me! 🙂

While Larry played with the backpack, everyone else took a turn with the stroller (a gift from Kevin’s friend Sunil!). It’s quite the mean machine, with shocks, bright colors, and a great stroller/lifestyle instruction booklet. Here it is with the top down, facing backwards, with the back fully reclined:

William wasn’t too sure about it (his nerves were probably still on edge after the raccoon encounter), but luckily the humans in the room were much more appreciative — we’re quite enamoured of it and it was fun to show it off. 🙂

One of the things that I particularly appreciate about my job is having the flexibility to work at home. This afternoon was unusually pleasant, what with tulips, bright sunshine, and warm enough weather to have the windows open!

Now that we’re getting back to the warm season, I’ve recommenced mulling what to do with that big kitchen window. As you can see, it gets great afternoon sun but the downside is that the room heats up substantially, which is unfortunate because that makes it tricky to control the fishtank temperature. Last summer we spent a lot of energy doing extra water changes, making huge ice cubes, and running fans to promote evaporation (all of which cool the water). But I’m thinking that lined (and possibly insulated) curtains would probably do the trick for all but the few hottest summer days.

We spent a little while looking at fabrics last Fall, but the ones we liked on their own merits all looked pretty iffy with the kitchen counters (a pretty blue-grey corian) and backsplash tile (two very similar shades of translucent aqua) once we brought them home. Not expecting to have much luck, I did a quick pass through Joann’s yesterday and found a new fabric that I think is very pretty. It’s grey-green, has a nice sheen to it without being too loud, and has thin vertical lines of neutral speckles. I picked up two 1½”x3” samples to bring home, and while it’s certainly not a match for the kitchen, it also doesn’t clash.

We may have our curtain fabric?

Next up will be settling on a style and deciding if I can wing it or if I’ll need a pattern. I’m thinking a Roman shade will work well, but I’m also trying to figure out if there’s some clever way of pulling up the corners on the two lower edges so that if we leave the side windows open we can get a breeze. I can think of all sorts of button, loop, and drawstring methods for engineering that, but so far none of them look very attractive in my mind’s eye. I’m also trying to decide whether some sort of cornice at the top would be a good addition or not worth the extra work/fabric…

We had a great treat this weekend – a package arrived from California with a hand knit baby sweater from my friend Amanda! It’s so well done, and I love the offset cable and the seed stitch detailing at the edges.

As much as I love the color and pattern, my favourite part is the way it feels. I wish that you could blog texture – the yarn is a gorgeous merino/microfiber/cashmere blend and it is so wonderfully soft. It’s such a treat to have a hand knit that I didn’t make myself, and such a beautiful one at that!

All seems to be going well with the baby. He’s been kicking away with increasing intensity. Kevin felt him kick for the first time almost two weeks ago (so exciting!!), and when he was describing it to a friend later he mentioned that he could see the kick as well. I thought he was exaggerating but he turned out to be sincere – it hadn’t occurred to me to try to watch. When the baby really gets going, as he seems to in the evenings, it’s kind of like watching a lightning storm pass overhead – you’re not entirely sure where to watch for the next one, and never sure whether the previous kick was the final one of the series. Most of them you just see out of the corner of your vision, but every now and then there’s a kick that’s so obvious and exactly where your gaze fell. It’s a bizarre sight, but captivating.

For the last week or two, we’ve been sorting our way through all of the tons of baby gear out there to figure out what we think we’ll need. We’ve arrived at decisions for many of the big things (a crib, cloth diapers, breastfeeding details for when I go back to work, daycare, assorted must-haves), and are making good progress on others (a pediatrician, car seats, sorting out the zillion options available for pack n plays…). We certainly are not wanting for options. We still probably won’t start buying things in earnest for a few months, but it’s nice to have brands and rough price points figured out, and an increasingly complete list. (We both seem to be magnets for advice right now, and I’m appreciating a larger context to fit all of it into, instead of trying to keep track of all of the individual comments and data points as they’re given.)

I’m having fun working the first front of the Sunrise Circle Jacket. You knit the sleeve up from the wrist, and then in addition to decreasing as usual for the shoulder, you start increasing to form a steadily growing semi-circle for the front.

It’s an interesting design, but it takes a fair amount of attention to knit. The designer made the increases appear at random (a very pretty effect, so you don’t see spokes radiating out across the chest), which means that the increases are in a different spot on each row of the chart. I’d been counting as I went, but that was going poorly since I tend to knit while reading and I kept flying past the increases. Finally, I got smart at row 47 and started marking the increases with white stitch markers in advance before I knit the row. Now it’s going much faster, since I only have to stop and count once at the beginning, instead of several iterations of counting and ripping back. Here’s a closeup of the semi-circle forming, with randomly-spaced increases, and my white stitch markers waiting for the next row.

I’d love if I could ever finish the sweater this week. I’m in great shape on maternity clothes except for long-sleeved shirts. All of the maternity sites I know only seem to sell short sleeves and ¾ sleeves, made of surprisingly thin fabric. Since it’s still in the forties most days, that just isn’t sufficient. I’ve been just wearing a few loose pre-maternity sweaters, but all but two are suddenly too short and I’m in dire need of new options.

By far the leading question so far about the pregnancy, even beating out gender, is about what our leading contenders are for names. It’s a hard question to answer, especially since everyone has strong opinions. Quite the loaded topic! This week at the Brown dinner, our friend Stacy showed us the best baby name website.

It has the cleverest way of graphing name popularity over time. You can search for specific names, and it updates the page as you type (for the screenshot above, I’d typed an S so that we could see that nice peak in Susans in the 1950s, but as you keep going it shows all names and variants that made the top 1000 since the late 1800s). You can narrow down to boy or girl names, and if you mouse over the graph it shows you the name’s rank by decade. You can click on names for more information. It’s an incredibly fun thing to play with.

For a flat list of popular names, the best (no-nonsense, ad-free) option is the SSA site. This one lists popular names and the various spellings (though I can’t decide if that’s helpful or annoying).

And, no, we don’t have a name yet, or even a list of favourites. We gave ourselves a reprieve on even considering names until we had the 20 week ultrasound. Now that we know it’s a boy, we don’t have any strong opinions yet but it’s definitely a topic of conversation. 🙂

This morning was wonderful. The light woke me up early (not something I usually can say!), and I had breakfast and noodled around on the internet before heading to prenatal yoga for the first time. The class was great, especially after a somewhat uncomfortable week, and I stopped at the bread store and the library on the way home. The afternoon was sunny and low key until Kevin called me into the kitchen around five because he’d spotted this enormous guy in our neighbour’s backyard.

Cleaning himself like a cat, and quite the grooming and scratching session, but he was enormous. Despite the tail, I was still somewhat disbelieving that such a big creature could be a raccoon until he left his spot in the sun for a stroll across the yard.

Definitely a raccoon. :-/ He wasn’t acting disoriented or odd, but I really didn’t think that they were sunshine sort of creatures? Maybe the Seattle variety gets confused when the days start really lengthening? Or he was as delighted to see the sun as the rest of us? In any case, I was decidedly less than pleased when he hopped over our fence (only five feet, no big deal) and started hunting in our rock wall. I don’t know quite what he was eating (those beetle larvae? Worms?), but his technique was very efficient: dig away, and then wipe the creatures off on the lawn before consuming.

I was mostly just fascinated as he dug up whatever they were in front of the wall, since we try to keep that area weed/plant-free. When he started moving around in the beds, though, we decided that was plenty of a good thing and when to go throw things at him. He was very skittish, and scared easily, but unfortunately chose to scale one of our pine trees instead of just hopping the fence. The sound of his claws on the bark was the creepiest thing. You can see him way, way up (there’s an orange arrow, and you can see his tail hanging down off of the branch).

He finally came down and then Kevin succeeded in frightening him over the fence. I’m hoping his usual haunts are many miles away and he was in an exploring (but not settling) kind of mood.