The Weekend Before Christmas

I was up this morning and out the door way earlier than usual on a Sunday – I had patients to see at the hospital, and a football game that started at 1. I was a little late for the game (sorry, Liz!), but still had a good time, especially since the Panthers finally remembered how to play football (or maybe it was that the Cardinals forgot?) I’m not sure if Chiquitito enjoyed the game or not, but he definitely moved around a lot whenever the crowd got really loud!

The game was a nice break from the tarps, paper floor coverings and dust that are everywhere in my condo right now. The guys have been great, and overall have done a wonderful job at keeping the mess at a minimum, but really, there’s no way to avoid it. Thank goodness they’re almost done! All that is needed is the finishing touches tomorrow, and then I have a cleaning service coming on Tuesday to clean things up and it’ll be finished. And then it’s time to get to finish the home redecorating, and get started on really getting my house ready for baby. These pictures are the last I’ll post until everything downstairs is finally the way I want it - hopefully it will look as good as I imagine it will.

freshly painted new wall

new chandelier

With everything a mess, it’s hard to visualize it ever looking good, though I know I’ll feel differently by tomorrow afternoon when it’s back to just my stuff again. But that’s the easy part; it’s the task of getting things ready for baby that is a little overwhelming. My condo doesn’t have good storage in the bedrooms or bathrooms, and even the kitchen cabinets are short on space. Somehow I’m going to have to find a way to rearrange all my mess in a way that makes it easy to accommodate baby stuff while being easy to keep neat. Now is when I really wish I had someone to help me with projects like these. Putting together my nursery should be fun, but also comes with its challenges. Since the nursery was originally an office, I’m going to have to figure out how to make a built in desk and bookshelves work with the baby theme. All good problems to have, I know, I’m not really complaining – just writing it all down helps me put it all in perspective. I think I’m going to take the time to put every project that needs to be done in a list, so that I can at least have the satisfaction of scratching each one off my list as I get it done. If I’m lucky, I might have them all done by May.

My parents are coming on Thursday to stay with me over Christmas, though we’ll probably be spending most of our time over at my sister’s house. I love my parents, and I’m looking forward to spending time with them, but I’m also dreading it. My mom has been weird lately – that whole issue deserves a post of its own that one day I might be brave enough to write it – which could make for a potentially difficult weekend. At least I’ll be around my nephews for most of that time, which should make up for any unpleasantness.

Now I really should be working on wrapping presents and cleaning up my stuff that has accumulated in my living room since most of the rest of my house has been unusable. The only bad thing about the tarps going away is that a wonderful source of entertainment for my cats will be gone, too. I’m not sure how I’m going to sleep without the sounds of crinkling plastic in the air every night.

And as an aside, the ASPCA commercials should be outlawed. Don’t they know the effect they have on hormonal pregnant women?