He's here!

Our son arrived very late on Wed night (May 27th). He's a healthy 7 lbs 4 oz with a full head of reddish blond hair. We have lots of recovering to do around here (let's just say it will be quite a while until I'm back on that bike), so details and pictures may be slow to appear, but know we are all doing well.

Container Gardening, My New Hobby

I've wanted a good hobby for a long time. Dorea has her knitting, but the only hobby I've been able to come up with is reading books. I enjoy it, but it's pretty lame as hobbies go.

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to take a stab at growing some vegetables. We have no ground for a garden, so we have to grow in containers. Dorea took charge of making self-watering containers with instructions from instructables.com. She used some rubbermaids and other material we had around the house to make them and some tools borrowed from a neighbor.

Here is one of the finished containers:

The containers turned out great, and the whole family got involved in planting seeds, and eventually planting seedlings in the containers. The plants, however, seem to have become my own personal babies. Sometimes I feel the need to check on them multiple times in one hour. In addition to the tomato, zucchini, and basil plants we have outside, we also have some lettuce and other seedlings growing on our sunny porch. And we stuck some green onions into some soil in order to grow those as well.

Now our little seedlings have grown into great big plants and we couldn't be more proud!

So as we wait for a real baby to arrive (any day now), at least I have a hobby. I just hope that I remember to keep watering everything after our new addition throws the house into chaos!

Retail Therapy

I've learned something about myself in the past couple of weeks -- I'm not immune to retail therapy. Since Dorea got diagnosed with a semi-rare pregnancy complication, we've been bleeding money.

Some of the spending is legit. She's been having acupuncture appointments and we've spent money on medications of various sorts. But looking at my purchases, it seems that I think the whole problem will go away if I just spend enough money at Cambridge Naturals on natural products of questionable efficacy. And earlier today I accidentally bought two metal water bottles and a baby doll. I'm a far cry from the woman who wrote about buying everything used.

Maybe I should  be happy with this development. I was starting to worry that by saving my money and spending as little as possible, I was hurting the economy. There's no danger of that now, and I expect a call to come through any day from the president or at least the chair of the Fed thanking me for my patriotism.

I have learned two important things through this.

• Being anxious, tired, desperate, and fearful leaves you vulnerable to purchasing things you don't really need. Like all of the essential oils I bought last week because they might be helpful during labor.
  
• I hate spending money on things, but I actually really love spending money on people. We're having not one but two birth attendants at the hospital, and I'm happy to give both of them my money. In the past few weeks Dorea has seen a number of holistic/natural practitioners and I'm happy to spend money on them as well. I feel really happy knowing that these transactions are going to help us have the best birthing experience possible, and to know that I am helping to directly sustain alternative practitioners.
  

Making some room

As we've blogged about before, we have a small condo and we are soon to be a family of four. With the baby coming in just a couple of weeks, we realized a few days ago that we don't actually feel like we have enough room for the baby, either time-wise or space-wise, despite our protests otherwise.

So we finally got around to converting H's Ikea dresser back into a changing table. We cleaned out H's closet and made room for baby things. We donated all of the junk we have been collecting for a garage sale (finally admitting that the garage sale wasn't going to happen). With that done we were actually able to get to the crib out and set it up beside our bed.

With our physical space a little more freed up, we are starting to believe we have the mental space for a baby as well. Our goal is to be ready to welcome the baby next weekend!