Monday, January 28, 2008

Double L

To quote the great poet Troy Richard, "We must be the chosen ones, down in Lafayette."

We are thankful in so many ways for being born here and being able to come back.
What really made us appreciate Lafayette was living in Baton Rouge for 3 years. Lafayette is superior in so many ways. First, we have much better food (Prejean's, Coyote Blues, etc.) and much better music (Blue Moon Saloon,'nuf said).
Second, and most important, we're not the home of LSU.

But, I must acknowledge that Baton Rouge has one upped us in a few ways. BR has a great parks system with lots of nature trails, great for dog walking, and a pretty well developed mountain bike trail system. Lafayette has nothing in that regard.

We also found out that BR has an exponentially superior Babies R Us. They have so much stuff that we don't have in our little puny store. At least we have a store now, but I see no reason that Lafayette couldn't support a full size unit.

All of that is basically to lead to me pointing out something really cool that I saw there. I happened to come across a cd made by Baby Rock Records.

The company takes the music of various rock bands and remakes the songs with lullaby instrumentation.

I, of course, couldn't help myself and had to pick up the Tool disc.


I also picked up the No Doubt disc because it seemed pretty cheery and nice. I'll probably go back later to snap up the Nirvana and NIN discs. Their website is www.babyrockrecords.com (sorry can't get the text to work as a link) and they have plenty more.

Now the kid will have have cool tunes from the get go. I'm going to program his mind right from the start. Scary, huh?

A Horse with No Name

The nursery got a new piece of furniture, and it's the best kind, rideable furniture.
Yesterday, my parents gave us a rocking horse that my Mom just couldn't pass up.

horse 001

The reason she couldn't pass it up is simple. Most of you don't know it, but my Mom has an addiction. That addiction is buying toys for small children that make noises that have the potential to become irritating to the adults in the vicinity.
So far she has mostly abused Aunt Sangee up in Connecticut, but now she has a new outlet.
We don't mind though. She put up with the sound of me for 18 years, and I've been told by many people, usually people I call friends, that is quite an annoying sound.

The rocking horse makes whatever a horse noise is called and wags its tail while shaking its head. (and in reality, it's not very loud, or very annoying)

It'll be really cool for our little guy, but, unsurprisingly, Jimmy is not its biggest fan.(It is a good bit bigger than him)

Now we just need a name for the horse. As if naming a kid wasn't enough.

Monday, January 14, 2008

It's all relative

Back at the end of October we went to Voodoo Music fest in New Orleans, as we usually do.

At that time, Joan was about 3 months pregnant, and felt like she was "showing"
Here's our photo evidence:

Voodoo 2007 076


Now fast forward two and a half months later--

week 27 004

Big difference, and we've still got three months left.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The Other New Addition

Painting the nursery was definitely the easiest part of preparing the house for our expanding family.

This place is a 3 bedroom. More than adequate square footage, but one bedroom housed the computer and an exercise machine, while the the other was a guest room, leaving no room for a nursery.

Without an office we'd be fat and dumb, and without a guestroom, Lesley would be homeless next time New Orleans gets washed away.

That left only one option, expansion. It also gave us a chance to replace the old leaky patio with something more solid.

A few months later, here it is. Basically we added an office/gym behind our bedroom, where there was already patio, then had a new screen porch built, expanding the patio in the other direction.

What was this-

House addition 017

House addition 021

Is Now this-

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house final 002

What was empty space-
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Is now an office/gym-


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and what was homebuilt patio--

House addition 012

is now professionally built screen room--
house final 1 011

We can't wait to get people back over for bbq or boils

Many thanks to the guys at Emerging Properties, who I highly recommend if you have any remodeling jobs to do.

Registering

Ahh, the memories come back from getting married 5 years ago.

Yesterday we went shopping by proxy, known to some as creating a baby registry.

I do enjoy going around the store, scanning everything I want, with the hopes that someone else will use their money to buy it for me. ( We are, of course, not that flippant about the matter, and truly appreciate any gifts, while holding no grudge for any lack thereof.) You see the true gratitude in our faces before we head out, right?

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While the registering part is fun, it's fairly difficult. So many options for strollers, car seats, etc. Then, half of the stuff (usually the half that we like) is available online only.Definite brain drain by the end of the day.

Forgive me, but I must step up on my soapbox for a minute to complain about how difficult it is to find baby boy stuff that isn't baby blue or doesn't have a baseball mitt on it. Don't get me wrong, baby blue is an ok color, in moderation, but a little navy blue, brown, red or even black in a kid's wardrobe isn't gonna hurt him.
Even prison stripes are cool by me, like this onesie sitting in our closet.


So after about 5 hours in store, and a few hours on the computer, we are registered at Target and Babies R Us. Thanks to recent new moms Heather, Amy and Virgina for their expert input.

Nursery

The adding of the new room is done, so we've been able to free up what was the office to now be the nursery.

At the same time we also got new master bedroom furniture. That allowed us to move the furniture that we were using (which Joan got in 2nd grade) into the baby room.

She picked a couple of colors to coordinate with the bedding we want, painted the walls and the furniture, and here's the final product.

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Nursery & Furniture 020



We'll be adding stuff to the walls, and of course adding bedding, but those pics are the final color scheme and furniture inventory.


Update- It has been brought to my attention by a friend that we need to be sure not to forget Jimmy in this whole baby preparation process. Rest assured, he is far from forgotten. Even though it doesn't match, he still gets to have his memory foam sofa set up in the nursery so he can sit comfortably and look out of the window all day.

jimmy nursery 2 003

Teamwork

wdw 2007 095


As many of you know, two of our very good friends Brad (Tate) & Lindsey are also expecting a little boy just 8 days after us. Joan and Lindsey found out they were pregnant within 2 days of each other, back in August.

Brad has already started with the "my kid can beat up your kid" stuff, but we'll wait to settle that when they arrive.

It's kind of like a 2 for 1 special because Joan and Lindsey can share doctor's advice, etc, as they go along. I guess they can also share weight and size complaints (and the mutual desire to eat boiled crawfish before they get too swollen)

so, for some proof, here's a side shot of Joan and Lindsey at Epcot back in January 2007.

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And here's one around Christmas 2007.

2 bumps 004

April is coming quickly.