The Nowlands: January 2009

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Painting

So yesterday I had to be in Park City for about 5 hours for recitals for my students, so Jeremy finished up painting the baby's room! It looks so good. He did a fabulous job, I must say. We actually still need to touch up some things, so I guess it's not completely done, but it's close. There's just a few spots on the white trim that have taupe paint on them from when I painted that room last April (oops) so that doesn't look so nice in between the white trim and the green wall. We'll fix it. Anyway, so here's a couple pictures of my sweet husband and our cute room. I'll put more up later when we finish the touch-ups and put some of the baby stuff in there.

Here's what color it used to be:

Here's Jeremy getting ready to paint the second coat:

And a picture of my amazing taping job. (I felt good that I could contribute in some way).

Another of Jeremy getting ready to paint:

And the finished product! (That spot is from the camera, it's not on the wall).

Yea! By the way, I got inspired to do a color like this by seeing my sister Amy's new house. Her baby room is about this color and I really like it. Thanks Amy! :)

Friday, January 16, 2009

The final stretch!

It is hard to believe that I am 6 months along, in my third and final trimester with only 13 weeks to go! Yikes! It has gone by so fast, and I'm sure these last 3 months are going to fly by even quicker. I've been reading up on labor, delivery, etc. and I'm even going to sign up for a childbirth class. It's crazy that this is all here already. This point seemed so far away and now it's here. I'm even done with my once a month appointments! I had an appointment this morning, everything is good, and my next one is in 3 weeks, then they're every 2 weeks and then every week. It's definitely starting to feel closer and more real.

So we are very excited for the arrival of our little guy. He kicks and moves and spins and dances all the time! It is so fun to feel him (except when he nudges my bladder) :). He's especially active in the morning. I think he's just practicing for when he'll be waking me up with cries instead of kicks. :) But it really is so fun to be preparing. We finally decided on a paint color (we had 6 different colors around the wall) so I think Jeremy's going to paint the first coat next Saturday since I'll be at recitals all day long for the Conservatory. We've got a lot of gear too. We inherited a lot from family members (thank you!) and we already bought a car seat/stroller set too. (It was on sale and I had a soon to expire coupon too, so we decided to just do it now). So we are getting ready.

Here's the most recent photo I have of me. We took this Wednesday before we went to the temple. Let's just say it's a good thing my temple dress is empire waist with lots of room underneath.

Oh, and I'm getting very close to passing up Jeremy on the scale. Not every woman's dream. He's been playing basketball twice a week though and we've been eating healthy, so he's been going down and I have obviously not :) So the time is quite near when I will weigh more than my husband. Oh well. There are worse things.

So life is great with us. We've been having a lot of visitors. We're going to call our house "Hotel Nowland". Jeremy's cousin and his wife came 2 weekends ago, just to stop by and say hi, then his other cousin and his wife stayed with us a couple days later as they were passing through. Then last weekend our friends Rachel & BJ (and baby McKay) stayed with us for 2 nights and tonight Jeremy's aunt is staying with us for a night as she's passing through. So add your name to the waiting list and come visit us! Our next guests will hopefully be Jeremy's parents in February (I hope they can come!) and then my mom and ALL my sisters in March! Yea! We have a lot to look forward to. Hope all is well with all of you.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I don't know why it's taken me forever to blog, but I'm finally doing it. We had a wonderful Christmas. We drove to California on the 20th and spent until Christmas morning with my family and then hopped on over to the Nowland's until we left on the 28th. The Astle half of the trip was spent watching movies, reading, singing, doing puzzles, playing games and chatting. My mom and I sang "O Holy Night" in church for I think the 5th year in a row now and it went really well. We had friends from Concord over for our tradition of singing Christmas carols and Messiah highlights (we've been doing that with them for as long as I can remember). Christmas morning was great too. Some highlights: I got new dishes (set of 12, woohoo!) and Jeremy got a wheat grinder and water purifier.

So my parents and Heidi left Christmas day about 11:15 to fly to New Jersey to see my sister Wendy who just had her third baby! A beautiful girl named Vanessa Christine McNiven and she was a hefty 9 lbs. 4 oz. and 22 in. long. So when they left we went over to the Nowlands and had fun with the 5 grandkids that were all there and 2 of Jeremy's brothers and his sister. We also played some fun games (the Nowlands are great gamers) and played with the Wii that Santa brought! The whole vacation also included eating way too much food of course, but having a great time with family and enjoying some time of relaxation. Highlight gifts from the Nowlands included slippers for me (yea!!!!) and fence posts for Jeremy. His dad was able to get a bunch from his work. He works at a power plant and people bring their waste there and someone brought a ton of fence posts that had been slightly burned, so George took them and is going to trim the burnt edges and bring them out to us for a fence. A very nice, time-consuming gift!

Eli got a few presents too and lots of great hand-me-down clothes! (by the way, that's what we're planning on naming our boy, for those who didn't know). Both grandmas got some really cute clothes, blankets, bibs, etc. and Aunt Becky and Yaya (Grandma Nowland) spent hours making a really nice Quiet Time ABC book. It's filled with lots of pictures of family, (i.e. D for Daddy), the temple, and so forth. We feel so blessed to have such wonderful families and are grateful that our sweet baby boy has such wonderful support already! Thank you families!

Steve, me, Jeremy & Heidi on Christmas Eve