36 weeks

Well, here I am...exactly one month from today is my due date. So there probably won't be many more pregnant Lesley pictures, and I am okay with that, because it means the baby will be here soon! I know a lot of people who, toward the end of their pregnancy, stop taking pictures because they look puffy and chubby and feel heavy etc. etc. But I'm all about taking pictures of me when I'm puffy and chubby and heavy, because after I've lost the pregnancy weight I can look back and see how far I've come! I even went swimming today with my friends Tiffany and Amanda. It felt great to be in the water and not have to hold up the baby and my stomach.

People keep asking me if I am so ready for this baby to be born. I'm not really sure what they mean exactly when they ask that. I guess the question either means do I have some diapers and a carseat, or am I completely miserable. I am always pretty vague when I answer that question. I am excited, yes, and I think we pretty much have everything we need, but I am not necessarily impatient for him to get here just yet. For one, I am still enjoying sleep (and please, PLEASE refrain from any "enjoy it while you can!" comments.). Two, I am not to the point where I am physically miserable. I guess at some point it's inevitable that I will be, but right now I'm okay, thanks to air conditioning and not having to be on my feet all day.

Beginning Friday, I will start going to my dr. weekly. He said he would induce, if I wanted to, as early as 38 weeks, which is only two weeks away. I've elected to go into labor on my own, unless I hit 41 weeks, at which point my doctor will induce. So stay tuned, things are about to get a lot more exciting around here!

Happy Father's Day, Chad!

For my favorite father-to-be on his first Father's Day...




The day Chad found out he was going to be a dad...
It's a boy!One of the things that has made me the most excited about having a baby is thinking about Chad being a dad. There are so many things I love about my sweet husband, and it makes me almost cry to think about how awesome of a dad he's going to be. On a daily basis, he does things to help me without even being asked--whether it's chores around the house, running errands, whatever. In fact, a lot of times around the house, Chad will take care of a chore before I even notice that it needs to be done. So I know that when our son is born, Chad will want to be a part of taking care of our baby's needs and will want to be as involved as possible and spend as much time with us as possible. He is so compassionate and has such a servant heart--I can't wait to see him hold our tiny baby boy for the first time. His 7 nieces and nephew loooove Uncle Chad because he is so fun, so I know our little boy is going to have fun with his dad too. Something that is so important to me is Chad's love for God. I can't wait to see our son "catch" this thirst for God's word that his dad has. I know Chad will be an awesome spiritual leader and example for our family, which is more important to me than all of his other qualities combined. Although, I think Chad does have so many of those other qualities because he loves the Lord.

Also, it doesn't hurt that I've got a live-in ICU nurse raising this child with me. Whew!

These last few weeks of pregnancy are so strange...I can't wait to meet our son and see WHO in the WORLD has been in my belly for the past 9 months. It feels like I know so little about him, except for his jerky, uncoordinated movements. At the same time, I am trying to cherish these last few weeks where it's just Chad and me, before being a family of three is our way of life. Either way, I can't stop thanking God for what he has blessed me with.
I love this guy.

Happy Father's Day!

The past week

We've done a lot of traveling in the past week. First, Chad and I drove to the cabin on Friday to get everything a little more organized and for Chad to do some painting. Friday and Saturday we spent the days working, and Sunday we mostly just relaxed. It worked out perfectly--it rained almost the entire day Sunday, so it was the perfect weather for reading and napping. Chad used the leftover paint that we painted our house with back in December to paint the bedroom. I discovered that this specific type of paint gave me pretty bad nausea, because when Chad painted our house I was in my first trimester. I couldn't go into this room without holding my breath the entire weekend.
So we slept in the living room on the sleeper sofa. I know this picture was taken Sunday because Chad is resting. He was a workhorse all day Friday and Saturday. He painted while I went into town and made a BTU and Wal-Mart run.
This is supposed to be the "before" picture. I never did get around to taking an "after." We were in a hurry to leave Monday morning because I had to catch a plane from Lubbock to Dallas, where I would be spending a couple days with mom, Erin & the fam in Weatherford.
Chad primed the upstairs and hallway and painted the bedroom. Everything else still needs to be done.
So after our wonderful weekend in the mountains, it was back to hot Texas. I was only at mom's for a couple days, but the highlight of the trip was going out to the land where they were breaking ground on mom's new house that she's building.

This cow kept running back and forth and mooing. I think the kids will have a lot of fun out here at granny's place.
Here is a view from mom's side of the road to grandmother and granddad's house that they built in the early '60s. They lived here until 1999 when they moved in to town so they could be closer to doctors, not have to take care of all that space, etc. I have so many good memories out here of being with my grandparents, so I am extremely excited that my kids will get to have some of the same memories when they come to visit granny. The builder is estimating that mom's house will be done in 4 months, which makes it even more exciting!

Garden

Well, we finally got around to planting our garden. Here are some pictures from yesterday...Here's Chad adjusting the timer on the underground irrigation system. It seems to be working really well so far.
I planted basil, serranos, jalapenos, chives, gold bell peppers, and three varieties of tomatoes: celebrity, roma, and cherry. Last year we started a lot from seed but this year since we're getting started so late, I went ahead and bought plants. Chad planted some bean, canteloupe and squash seeds, and ordered some more seeds online yesterday.
Here is Chad's birthday/father's day present...a backyard composter. It's pretty stinky already, so I guess that means it's working!
In the back alley Chad planted rosemary, honeysuckle, raspberries and strawberries. We already had two thyme plants back there that survived through the winter.
Look, here's proof that I'm not just sitting in the house laying on the couch trying to stay cool. It's getting harder and harder to get down on the ground and then get back up, but I wanted to be a part of the garden that we planted! Chad's pretty much done all the work so far, so now I can say I contributed. Check out that belly!

Thursday I'll be 34 weeks pregnant. Six more weeks to go! We'll go to camp this weekend for a quick trip to the cabin, then I'm going to visit mom and Erin, and then that'll be it for me and traveling until after the baby arrives. Just to be on the safe side I'm going to the dr. this Friday, and they're going to make sure I'm not showing any signs of having this baby any time soon.

The dream is reality!

In the summer of 2005, we went in with Shawn & Emma to purchase one of the last empty lots available at Camp Blue Haven...it was kind of a leap at the time, and the hopes of building a cabin was something that we thought might happen in 20 years or so. Fast forward to 2008...and last summer as we were teaching at camp, we began the process of actually getting all the permits to build a cabin and meeting with the builder. By the end of the year, the cabin had been all but completed, and this last weekend, the Montandon men made a trip up there to move a LOT of furniture to get the place ready to stay in. Shawn started in Georgetown, bringing a refrigerator with him. Paul started in Tyler, bringing a hutch and dining room set with him. They met in Weatherford where my mom had pretty much an entire garage full of furniture, and when they got to Lubbock, we added 3 beds, a sleeper sofa, and what can only be described as a bunch of other random stuff that we didn't want at our house anymore. Basically, the cabin is the new Goodwill...for the past year, instead of anyone getting rid of anything, we ask, "Could we use it at the cabin?" So now it's nice that we can actually take the stuff up to the cabin instead of just storing it indefinitely. Anyway, enough talking. Here are pictures, which I tried to put in sequential order.
We stored the sleeper sofa in the baby's room, which is one reason it looks so much more like a baby's room now instead of the room of random furniture. One thing about our house is it definitely wasn't built for big furniture...navigating around the corners and through the doorways can be a little iffy sometimes. Anyway, Shawn and Chad made it look pretty much effortless. Needless to say I stayed out of the way and kept my mouth shut and my "helpful" suggestions to myself. Check out all the junk we were able to get rid of! I knew those big ol' Ikea bags I bought for $.59 each would come in handy at some point. Here are the guys after stop two. They're still smiling! As you can see all the furniture pretty much took up the whole truck. The guys decided to go ahead and drive to the cabin last night. It must have been fate--Beth made stew and cinnamon rolls for the counselors (in counselor training week) and the guys showed up right before they were about to put up the food. Good timing!Here are some views from the top of the loft so you can kind of see how the furniture fits in there right now...also it gives you a little bit of an idea of how big the space is. The kitchen area has nicer furniture than my kitchen. If this is roughing it then I think I'm gonna like this place. When you walk to the top of the loft and turn right (you can see a little bit of the stairs in the bottom right corner of the picture), here is a little nook where one of the twin beds is. Perfect size for the bed and a little side table. And the all-important bathroom. I am happy to report that the water runs and has good pressure and the water heater works. I'm glad the boys made this re-con trip so I didn't have to find out the hard way that something didn't work. The bedroom. Anyone have a queen bedframe they don't want? Erin, the washer and dryer fit perfectly under the stairs! Thanks for letting us have them. This place is finally starting to look like a cabin. The only problem is I'm jealous of the cabinets and light fixtures in this place. They're much nicer than what we have at our house! The kitchen appliances are all there thanks to donations from Shawn & Emma and one of our neighbors in the canyon...I don't know their name, but they were getting rid of their oven/stove and microwave and another cabin owner knew that we needed these appliances and kept them for us at his place for a year. I think I'm going to like hanging out with these people. Oh good, they're still smiling. These guys were serious troopers. Our cabin is complete with a porch glider, which mom bought as a "cabin-warming" from a place around Ft. Worth that makes porch furniture. I haven't gotten to try it out yet but I hear it's pretty nice. I think I'll be spending some time on that thing this coming weekend, when Chad and I go up for our first weekend trip! We're going to make it in time for 1st session closing campfire, worship on Sunday morning (which is the first Sunday of 2nd session), and opening campfire on Sunday night. At least if we can't teach this summer, this is probably the next best thing. I can't wait!

Baby shower

Yesterday my church friends threw me a really nice baby shower. The decorations were cute and the food was yummy too! It was a fun day, and the best part was coming home and getting to go through all the goods. (See post below for the latest nursery pictures)Me & the lovely hostesses
Here I am opening up the hostess gift, which was a Pack-n-Play. It's set up in the living room right now, because I just wanted to see if I could do it. Thanks girls! And thanks Amanda for writing down all the gifts. Mom and Barbara were both able to come for the shower. They'll probably both kill me for posting this because they claim that every picture taken of them is bad, but I think it's good! Plus, y'all are the only ones that read this blog anyway! I am just really appreciative of everyone who came out and took time out of their day to come to my shower. So to those of you who read my blog who came, thank you, it really meant a lot that you were there.

The baby's room in progress

I've been working on getting the baby's room decorated and organized, and there are pictures at the bottom of this post, but first, let's travel back to 2007, shall we? The above picture is what the room looked like when we bought the house. Below is after we did our first remodel with the room, and later we ripped out the nasty carpet. Just wanted to show the phases that the room has gone through since we've moved in to the house. And below are the newest pictures of the room.

I am all about hand-me-downs. This little guy gets a new crib and a new glider (which is more for Chad and me), but all the other big furniture in the room is a hand-me-down, and mostly from Erin. She has supplied her little nephew with the swing, bookcase, changing table, exersaucer (not pictured), a bouncy seat, and a brand new high chair, not to mention a bunch of baby clothes that Kellen once wore. How awesome is that!? Thanks Erin. And the chest of drawers is my old one...maybe one of these days I'll get some new furniture for myself! The walls are very bare right now, but eventually I will hang the quilt above the changing table and chest of drawers, and the two paintings below will go above the crib, with another painting with Baby M's name in the middle that Emma is still working on because we are being stubborn and not coming up with a for-sure name. I looooove how the paintings turned out, and in the 2nd picture below you can see the frog and helicopter in the quilt and what a good job Emma did of replicating them. The colors in the painting look a little more subdued in real life (right now on my computer screen the helicopter background is looking very bright purple, but it's not actually that color). I am really loving how the room is coming together.
And since some people are interested in stuff like this, here is the stroller that I picked out (carseat is the same design) and this is what Barbara gave us for the shower. Thanks, Barbara!So there you have it, the latest nursery pictures. Eventually I'll get the stuff put up on the walls and the room will look a lot more put together, but just in the last few days it's really started to look like a baby's room. Makes everything even more exciting!

Helpless, helpless, helpless

I think I know what it's like to get old. One day, you're doing your thing, driving, going to the store, running errands with ease, and then one day, BOOM. You can't do those things anymore. I had this discovery today about myself. I ran a few errands this morning before going to the grocery store for what I thought was a typical grocery trip. About halfway through the store, the cart became unbearably difficult to push and every turn required a huge amount of effort. Of course I chose to go to Wal-Mart today where they are huge proponents of American Individualism (YOU unload your groceries onto the belt, YOU load the grocery sacks back into the cart, YOU load your car). I usually shop at the United a few blocks away where they do all that for you. Well, 5-or-6 month pregnant Lesley wouldn't have thought anything of loading a few groceries into my cart and bringing them into the house, but 7+ month pregnant Lesley realized today that she can't do that anymore.

By the time I had come home and unloaded the car I had only enough energy to put the cold stuff away. Everything else is still just sitting on the counters, waiting for me to get a second wind. So, lesson(s) learned: 1. Plan grocery trips around when Chad is not working or sleeping, and take him with me next time. 2. Don't go to Wal-Mart, where the lady still charged me $3.86/lb for tomatillos even though the sign above them clearly said $2/lb. (and do you think I had the energy at that point to argue or talk to customer service? Nope.) It's totally worth it to pay a few extra bucks to get someone to load your car for you and take the cart back in, because even 7+ month pregnant Lesley is not willing to leave her cart in between two cars instead of putting it in the cart return. That's just rude, people. 3. Don't buy groceries during the summer. Too hot.

So, there are my lessons learned for the day. I wonder what's in store for me tomorrow.

Ohhhhh homeownership

Here are some pictures of some things going on around our house lately. The two photos below are of our garden. Chad recently had a new irrigation system installed that is hooked up to our sprinkler system but has its own timer. Then he ran irrigation hoses throughout the bed and since it's a raised bed, now he's in the process of filling it with dirt. We borrowed a truck & trailer from our friends Talin & Amanda, and they brought us a trailer full of dirt from Talin's mom's farm. That got us a little way, and Chad brought two more yards of dirt to fill the rest of the garden. He'll finish filling it up using potting soil, fertilizer, and all that stuff to prep the soil for planting.
Our next little "project" has not been quite as fun. About a week ago I was turning on the hot water faucet in the guest bath and the handle just came right off in my hand. So today was the first day Chad has been able to look at it, and when he started looking at it to see what kind of replacement faucet we'd need to buy, the water came on, and even with using the pliers he wasn't able to turn the water back off--it just kept coming out of the faucet. So the first priority was to turn off the water coming in to the house, which has now been off since about 8:30 this morning (it is now 4:30). We also noticed that the job wouldn't be as simple as going to Home Depot and buying a faucet to repair it, because as you can see the pipes for the faucet itself are behind the tile in the wall (the fixtures are so old that we couldn't just buy handles to screw in to the existing pipes). I had some stuff to take care of to finish up at school and at the district office, so Chad and I left the house for a while to get that done. We picked up a new faucet and handles on the way home, and soon realized when we got home that this was a job for a plumber, mostly because Chad has to work tonight and he needed to rest up instead of spending a frustrating afternoon with our plumbing. So the plumber finally got here about a half hour ago, and as you can see he quickly went to work getting in the cabinet that is behind the shower to check it out. Luckily to get to the fixture pipes, we didn't have to bust through the tile. Apparently a previous owner needed to access the plumbing as well, so there was already a piece of drywall cut out behind the plumbing and duct taped into place in the cabinet. So I emptied out the cabinet, and the plumber got to work. By the way, I took the picture below while the plumber was out in his truck getting tools. Even I'm not desperate enough to get a picture for the blog to ask a plumber to move for a second so I can take a picture. So 45 minutes and $180 later, we have a brand-spankin' new shower faucet and handles. It couldn't have happened much later either--we're expecting multiple guests this next weekend, so we needed the guest shower to be available! (Not to mention I needed the water to the house to be turned back on STAT). Speaking of homeownership, from what I hear our cabin is ready for occupancy. The well pump is working and the pipes are running to the house. The electricity is up and running. Our builder said he turned on the water to make sure everything is working and that the water pressure is GOOD. Can you believe it? We actually have a cabin at Blue Haven!!!! It makes me so happy that just thinking about it right now almost makes me cry.

And so begins the great furniture migration of 2009. This weekend Shawn, Paul and Chad are making a trek up to the cabin to move in most of the major furniture that we will need. Shawn is bringing a refrigerator from Georgetown. Paul is bringing multiple pieces of furniture from Tyler. They're picking up pretty much a UHaul's worth of furniture from mom's house in Weatherford, and then they'll stop off in Lubbock to get a sleeper sofa, twin trundle bed, queen mattress & box springs, etc etc. It's going to be a long weekend of driving and loading and unloading furniture. Have I mentioned how glad I am that I'm over 7 months pregnant and literally CAN'T help? Selfish, I know, but I'm pretty sure the guys would just as soon have me out of the way to get this done faster. Then, hopefully in a couple weeks, Chad and I can take another trip up to the cabin after the guys have so graciously gotten it ready, and we can spend a couple days getting it MORE ready for people to stay there, and also just to be able to enjoy it after spending most of last year getting this place built. I am excited that we now have this little place to go to and enjoy anytime we want to get away. More pictures to come, I'm sure! Although I'm not going to ask Chad to take pictures this weekend...I think they'll have their hands full with all the manual labor, probably won't be much in the mood to be the historian. Anyway, I'm excited, and we will let everyone know when it's ready for habitation (we are still lacking flooring and painted walls, so it's really dependent on how much you want to "rough it.")

And that's about it. Did I mention I'm done with school? I know I posted after the last day of school on Thursday, but I still had a work day and had to empty out my classroom and do all of that other end-of-the-year checkout stuff. Well, I finished that today. I turned in my keys to the office and officially gave up my rights to the classroom. On to a new, very different, chapter in my life. And on that note, I will be 33 weeks pregnant on Thursday. 7 weeks sounds like not very much time. It also sounds like a short amount of time when I say that it is now June and the baby is due in July. I am excited and can't wait to meet our baby boy.

**EDIT: Much more excitement has happened since I posted this afternoon! After the plumber left, the hot water would not come back on. Also, there was the issue of the natural gas smell in our house. I thought I had smelled it earlier in the day but Chad didn't smell anything, so I thought I was just being paranoid or smelling the some excess gas from the stove not lighting right away earlier in the day. But after a few hours, the smell really began permeating the house, mostly when the A/C would kick on. Wonderful. I walked out to the garage, where our water heater and furnace are, and I could smell the gas the strongest in our laundry room (which is connected by a wall to the closet with the water heater and furnace). So I called the gas company and they came out around 6:30, and the source of the gas was the furnace in the garage closet, and the pilot light on the furnace had gone out, but the gas was still turned on. So the guy turned that off and the gas smell has gone away. The water heater was a separate problem. The pilot light had gone out on that too (the gas company guy was kind enough to check it and re-light it for me since Chad is at work).

So, it has been quite a day filled with numerous, all unrelated, house maintenance issues. I had plans to continue checking other things off my list like cleaning, de-junking the house, and grocery shopping, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Which is okay, because I don't have anything else going on. :)