the book nook.

I love to read.  I remember going to the library with my mom & brother when we were little (and were out of school for summer with no jobs!  Ah, the good 'ole days...) and checking out the absolute maximum that they would let me get and reading through them in, like, 3 days.

 

Yeah, I love to read.

 

I'm hoping that Deacon will get that love of reading from me.  His Daddy doesn't have it -- or didn't have it until just recently, within the last year or so.  Deacon does love to look at books, and he's to the point now where he'll sit through actual "paper page" books.  You know what I mean, mamas.  Yeah, he'll sit all the way through to the end.  Excited about that!

 

Anyway, over the last 2.5 years of his life, he's been given a lot of books and we've had some in the living room and some in his own room.  I decided I wanted to combine them all into one special place in his room called "the book nook".  Eventually, I picture a cute little arm chair sitting in this area for Deacon to have some quiet time to sit and read any book he wants...

I kept a couple of diaper boxes and covered them in some kraft paper for the "shelving".  I cut out letters on my Cricut machine to put all over the outside box and then I lined the inside backs with some scrapbook paper I had that coordinated with the colors in his room already.

 

The letters on the wall were cut on my Cricut machine, too. 

 

It's nice to have all of Deacon's books in one place now (and there's less to clutter up the living room now, too. :).

 

 

It is FINISHED!

The crib is done, folks!  And oh.my.word...

Take a look:

Isn't it absolutely gorgeous??!  I am so stinkin' proud of the man I married.  :)

So the nursery still isn't really complete as we're still adding things here & there but I'm taking photos as we go and hopefully I'll have some more to post later on to show you a more complete version of the nursery.  For now, I am SO excited to have this crib done!  :)

daddy-to-be is getting ready...

Ya'll, my husband is so cute.  Over the last few weeks or so, he's been doing his own things to get ready for Deacon's arrival, just like I have.  We'll call what he's been doing "nesting", too.  Just on the more masculine side of things maybe.  :)

Of course, the biggest thing he's been doing as a daddy-to-be is building that beautiful furniture for the nursery.  As you know, the dresser/changing table is done and you can see that here.  But this weekend, he officially finished building the crib!  It's not stained or anything but all building & production is complete.  Woot, woot!  It looks absolutely incredible and I promise to post about it -- once it's stained and in the baby's room.  :)

I came home from work one day last week and he had cleaned our kitchen sink with "this new product" he found at Lowe's -- Perfect Sink.  Our stainless steel sink gets pretty nasty and then usually when I clean it, it has a terrible metallic odor.  Well, I didn't even notice the clean sink at first because of that very thing -- there was no odor.  But Jeff kinda hung around watching me rinse something out and I said, "What?"  He said, "Well, I just cleaned the sink today and..." and of course, I looked again and then just went on and on about how it looked.  It really was so nice and clean.  And with no odor.  Outstanding.

Another thing he did was to put fresh new pine straw out in the front yard.  I told him that folks would not be the least bit concerned with how our yard looks when they come to see the baby but he said it was important to him to get the pine straw down.  And to be fair, I can compare it almost exactly to how I would like the house to be clean when people come to see the baby -- folks won't care one iota about how the house looks, but it's important to me to have the house clean.

Something else he did was to purchase a flip video camera.  We've never had a video camera before but up until I got my SLR camera (and sold my old Kodak one), we've had a regular camera that had short video capabilities on it.  He said that having a video camera to document certain things was a big deal to him so he found a really.great.deal. on one at Target and has been playing around with it.  I'm sure we'll be SO GLAD to have that when Deacon starts making sweet little noises and doing all that "first year" stuff.  :)

He also ordered these:

Love it.  :)  Love him.

Oh, one more thing...

One day at work this past week, I walked into the breakroom and found the sweetest set up:

This, of course, is how I set it up at home on our kitchen table, but the card was in an envelope that had "For Deacon's Mom" on the outside.  The card itself is exactly what I needed, just at the right time.  And the pumpkins -- a daddy, mommy & baby pumpkin.  PRECIOUS.  He also brought me lunch that day.  He is THE BEST.

labor of love...

My wonderful husband has been "living" in the workshop recently, working tirelessly on our son's dresser.  It has been hard work and he's put in a lot of hours but I think he really enjoyed himself and is pleased with the finished result.  I know I am.  I couldn't be any more proud with out my heart just bursting right out of my chest (I think I may have said that a time or two about my husband and his talents. :)

I tried to document, in photos, the process of building this big, beautiful dresser -- I thought that would be kinda fun to look at, see how it evolved...

Is it not gorgeous??  Aside from our coffee table (my Christmas present 4 years ago), this is the biggest thing that Jeff has built for us so far.  He did an incredible job on this thing -- I mean, it looks like we picked it up from the store and put it together, it's so professional looking.

But no.  I take that back.  It looks WAY BETTER than the one in the store.  I know because I saw it the other night when we were at Babies R Us.  See, I found a crib & dresser set that I liked there and then Jeff took off with it, tweaking it and customizing it to make it into what I really wanted.  That's his specialty.  :)  The original had 3 drawers on the left and a cabinet with a shelf on the right.  We thought we might use the drawers more so we went with that.

Now, if you ask me, he started on this WAY too late.  But I think Jeff must work better under pressure.  To get ready, he took some photos, wrote down some dimensions, made some notes and then got to work.  A month and a half later, THIS is what we have:

This is just perfect.  It's exactly the color I wanted it to be and we have plenty of space in each drawer for Deacon's sweet, tiny little things.  :)  Jeff even built in 2 secret drawers above the top 2 drawers with pulls -- for a fun 5 year old to keep his baseball cards or GI Joes in.  Or whatever.  :)  Whatever boys like to keep in secret drawers.  As long as it's not frogs, snakes or bugs.  Nothing living.  Absolutely not.  :)

This photo of it was taken in the nursery.  On the left side is a sweet, soft, cuddly giraffe with a blanket that Jeff's youngest brother and his wife gave us at a shower.  Just love it.  The right side is the framed ultrasound that Jeff's sister-in-law made for us for the shower she threw us -- you can see that a little bit better here.

I don't think those will stay there once we figure out where "all this stuff" is going to go but for now, I like to look at them.  :)

**If you'd like to see more photos and a more detailed description of the dresser, you can check it out here, where Jeff has a profile and has uploaded a lot of the stuff he's built recently.  This is a place where his fellow wood-working peers can make comments and boy, have they been raving about his dresser.  And rightfully so.  :)**

nesting...

Last night, I guess I engaged in what they call "nesting" when you're pregnant.  When you're NOT pregnant, it's just called "cleaning out".  Well, since I AM the former, we'll go with the term nesting.  Especially since I was working in what will be Deacon's room.

The room that we have currently designated as the guest room will eventually be the nursery, once we get everything out and in that we need/want.  Right now, there is a full-size bed in there, along with a bookcase, a mirror and a side set of shelves that serves as a "night stand".  There is also a closet that we've used as storage for this or that over the last (almost) 3 years.

Pretty much EV.RY.THING. will have to come out of the room so we can put the crib, dresser and a rocker in there, along with maybe a small set of baskets or something for storage.  And the closet now holds our stuff that we've been storing along with stuff for Deacon that we've been receiving from kind folks since we found out we were pregnant.

That is, it DID hold all that stuff.  Until last night.  :)

I worked between the closet in the guest room/nursery and the linen closet in the guest bathroom (which is right next door) trying to move stuff from "here to there".  There was actually more room in the linen closet than I thought, once I refolded towels (and banished some to the shop for "shop towels") and reorganized them, and moved things from this shelf to that.  I was able to get most of the stuff that wasn't specifically for the baby out of the guest room closet and into the linen closet.

I don't know what we'll do the next time we get toilet paper & paper towels (from Sam's)...but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.  :)

There were a couple of things that I couldn't fit in the linen closet so I looked to the coat closet we have in the living room.  I was able to take quite a bit off the top shelf to put into a big yard sale happening at our church this Saturday*, and then I was able to organize some of the stuff on the floor in the closet to PUT on the top shelf, so I could fit the things from the guest closet into the coat closet.

Is this all starting to run together??

Suffice it to say, that the only thing in the guest room/nursery closet now, besides the vacuum *sigh*, is baby stuff.  And things are a little more organized in the linen and coat closets, too.  That makes me happy.

The next job to tackle, I guess, is to figure out where we're going to put the bookcase that's in the guest room now.  The bed will go into the 2nd extra bedroom we have in the house, which is now designated as the craft/computer room.  It's where both of our computers are, along with all my scrapbook/card-making stuff.  There will be some cleaning out -- er, I mean, "nesting" to do in there, too, to make room for the Murphy Bed my handy husband is going to make for the full-size bed in the guest room now.  And yes, he SWEARS he'll get both the crib and the Murphy Bed done by the time Deacon gets here.  

Okay, sweetie.  *she bats her eyes and pastes a big 'ole smile on her face*

He's nearly finished with the dresser/changing table, and I just have to brag a little on my man, ya'll.  He is so good.  :)  Just WAIT until you guys see this dresser that he's built FROM.SCRATCH. with his own TWO.HANDS.  I'm just about to burst with pride.  I'm not sure at what stage I want to share this with you (some of you may have seen it in different stages), whether I'll just share a photo of it done but still in the shop, or done and in the baby's room.  Still thinking about that, but it will be worth the wait.  It.is.beautiful!

*If you're local, come out to Scotts Hill Baptist Church Saturday from 7am-12pm!  We're having a pancake breakfast (from 7-10am, $5 a plate), silent auction and HUGE yard sale to raise money for our sweet friends, the Moshers, who have a 3 year old who has had undiagnosed gastrointestinal issues for the last 4-5 months.  Poor little guy.  They've been in and out of 3 hospitals, including Boston Children's Hospital.  They await results from their last trip there even now.  It's for such a good cause (I'm telling you, these are really good, kind people) and you'll have good food and a chance to win/purchase some really nice items.  What better way to spend a Saturday morning??

somewhere to sit...

Jeff has been working on a project since before we even found out we were pregnant but it's gonna come in real handy, now that we are...

Can you guess what it is?

You may be saying to yourself, "Why does it have to be so tall?"  Well...

Do you see how PERFECTLY the highchair matches our table & chairs?  Like we bought it with the set, right?  Yeah, that's just my husband for you.  Mad skills.  Brilliant.  Love.him.  :)

At least our kid will have somewhere to sit.  Now to work on the "somewhere to sleep" project... :)