Making Room

My nesting instinct has kicked in!! I keep coming up with things that need to be done before this baby comes and I'm feeling very anxious to get it all done NOW! Mentally, I still feel like we have a long time before the baby comes so I feel a little silly about all this anxiety, but when I really think about it I realize that we are only about 3 1/2 months away. That really isn't that much time and since I'm not Super Woman (despite what I want you all to think) it is going to take me some time to tackle each task. Joel has been good enough to humor me these past couple weeks and we have been working hard to get things ready for our baby boy's arrival!

Our first step was going to the storage unit to bring some things over to the house to be sorted through. We only brought the most neccessary things for this first trip and the stack of stuff we gathered compromised our entry way for about a week. The good news was this gave me a week's worth of work to do so my nesting instinct was satisfied for as long as the pile lasted. The bad news was that this stack was in front of our coat closet and we couldn't get anything in or out for a week which created a pile of stuff on the living room sofa which drove me and my perfectionist personality crazy!!!

The second step was for us to switch the kids' rooms. So far, Isabel has always had the bigger room. She was the first born and received the bigger room my default before and as she got bigger she accumulated the larger amount of furniture. So, when we moved she got the bigger room again. At first I was thinking that we'd have to split the baby stuff up between hers and Gabe's room because I didn't think we'd have the space in any one room to store two kids' stuff. Originally the plan was to put the crib in Isabel's room and the changing table in Gabe's room. I made the mistake of voicing this thought early on and getting myself into a bit of trouble. After careful consideration I began to realize that putting the crib in Isabel's room was a bad idea. She is a very light sleeper and would inevitably be kept awake when the baby was up. Gabe, on the other hand, could sleep through an earthquake so it just seemed like putting the crib in his room was a better idea. Plus, the two boys sharing a room is also more logical. Unfortunately, Isabel had been looking forward to having the baby in her room and was pretty disappointed when we told her it wasn't going to happen. We decided to move the boys into the bigger room and move Isabel into the smaller room and we smoothed over Isabel's disappointment by promising a new bedding set to go with her new room. (She's had the same one since she was 2 and it was beginning to show it's age) So, last week Joel and his dad moved all of Gabe's furniture into Isabel's room and all of Isabel's furniture into Gabe's room and then set up the crib and the changing table! I was surprised when this task only took 1 day!! The guys moved the furniture and I moved all of their clothes, toys, etc. Once the rooms were switched I could begin to put away the things in the pile compromising our entryway!!

SCARY!

The boys' room. Still needs some work, but all the big stuff is in place!

Isabel's room. Again, still needs some work, but the worst is over!

The third step, which wasn't as much essential to making room for baby as it was ridding me of a major annoyance, was reorganizing the play room. I had this room in pretty good order before, but had been dying to get some shelves in there so that I could stack the toys up instead of having them neatly spread out all around the room. The kids didn't have much room to play in the playroom before. It only served as a home for the toys, but was pretty much wall to wall stuff. So, we went to Walmart and found a bookcase that would serve our purpose! Joel put it together for me and I spent the next few days organizing and consolidating toys so that they would pretty much all fit in the new bookcase and the one existing bookcase that we already had. Thanks to my super-human organizational skills all of the toys are shelved, there's plenty of room to play and I even scored myself room for a sewing table!!!!!

The mess!! I forgot to take "before" pictures, but this is what it looked like half way through.

Almost done!

The finished product!! All of the toys are right here and to the right is my sewing area!!

The last step in phase one of making room for baby was getting Isabel that new bedding! I had picked up a few catalogs for her to browse through and told her to pick something that she liked. She looked through the catalogs and announced that there was nothing there that she wanted. She had her heart set on ladybugs ... not just any ladybugs, they had to be black and red ladybugs. Having previously broken my baby's heart by taking the baby crib away from her, I wanted to get her exactly what she wanted if I could do it in a costly manner. So, I began to search the internet to see if there was a black and red ladybug bed set anywhere out there. Thanks to overstock.com I was able to find exactly what I wanted and at a good price too!! The bedding arrived yesterday and I had it all set up when she came home from school! She went up to her room to change when she got home and I heard a very excited gasp when she turned the corner!!!! She loves it!!!!!

There are curtains that match, but those aren't hung yet.

So, that is what we've been up to lately. The next phase is cleaning out dresser drawers and washing baby clothes!!!! Should be very exciting! And then after that.....YARD SALE!!!!