Battle of the (Baby) Bulge

After years of trying to stay a certain weight and continue to fit into a particular size of clothes, it's an interesting twist to be OK with weighing more than I've ever weighed and not be able to even zip up most of my pants, let alone button them.

I had been able to wear my "normal" pants (with a few of them phased out) up until week 15. Then most pants started getting a little too tight and I used a ponytail holder to keep the button part together. But it was only a few days until I realized that strategy wasn't going to last and I had to move on to the Belly Band. A big thanks to my sister-in-law who gave me hers to use (along with a ton of other maternity clothes). The band is a stretchy fabric circle that goes over your normal pants and holds them in place, so you don't have to button them.

As we hit week 17, I started to think that the band wasn't going to last much longer either as zippers started to not go up very well. This kid REALLY hit a growth spurt!! Thankfully, leggings are back in style and I've been able to wear those kind of stretchy pants without fail, but yesterday I gave actual maternity pants a try.

Without further ado, I present the Baby Steinhoff-bump at 17 weeks:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but I find it hilarious that my rib cage is the same size, but then there's just this incline as you look down my torso :)

What will this baby look like?

While it's a pretty safe bet that Baby Steinhoff will have dark hair and dark eyes (though you never know what kind of recessive light-haired gene is out there in our family trees), it's still fun to think about what this little boy or girl might look like. Though the better question is how tall is he or she going to be?!? :)

Luckily for Baby Steinhoff, its parents were pretty cute babies themselves. Exhibit A:

That's me on the left and Chris on the right. That hat kills me every time!!

(Thanks to our parents for supplying such adorable pictures...and children)

And while I always have had dark features, Chris actually did have lighter hair when he was little, so it's possible our baby could too. Exhibit B:

Too cute :) His aunt Joyce sent this to us last week, saying she is sure this Baby Steinhoff will be just as cute as its dad. I agree!

Now, the baby can look like either of us all it wants, but I hope to God that some of the trends we both fell into (hello, we grew up in the '80s and '90s!) never, ever resurface.

Exhibit C:

May the bright "Bill Cosby" sweaters and the neon backgrounds that graced our school photo sessions never return in our child's lifetime.

Exhibit D: 

And please, please, please may glasses that take up over half your face never come back in style. Fingers crossed that our child gets its father's eyes anyway, so it won't even have to deal with glasses in the first place.

It will be fun to look back on our baby pictures and compare features once Baby Steinhoff arrives!





The making of a nursery

Our house currently has three bedrooms - ours, a guest room and one that pretty much only housed my keyboard and guitar. It was a pretty easy choice to make that the baby's room. It wasn't long after Christmas that Chris decided it was time to get started on the nursery. I believe this was for two reasons - one, he loves projects and has run out of other things to do around the house until he finishes the basement this spring, and two, to get the big stuff done before he gets really busy at work.

Since we didn't know the baby's sex and are probably not going to find out, picking out a color scheme was the hardest part. We looked online for ideas and came across a room that was one base color with a set of stripes around the top. We loved it and also decided that we were going to go with an ocean-theme for the decorations. This just made sense because a lot of our time is filled by fishing! We went to our local paint store and found a nice blue that didn't look to "boyish" and was named Watery, as well as a nice cream color to make the stripe. And away we (and by we, I mean Chris because he did it all) went!

He started with the cream stripe and then began taping around the edges of everything before starting work on the blue. He had to use a couple of different techniques to get his lines just right for the stripes and I was very impressed with his craftsmanship. *Note, that grey thing hanging in the middle is a ceramic fish my sister-in-law gave me a long time ago. We thought it was perfect to hang from the light fixture. Chris just has to watch his head when he goes by it :)

I didn't get any action shots of the actual painting since I was supposed to stay away from the fumes, unless we would have gotten some air moving through there. But here's the "after shot" of Chris taking off all his tape and hoping his lines came out OK.

And as you can see, the stripes look AMAZING! We've had people ask if it was a stencil or if it's wallpaper, but nope, it is all paint and some skilled measuring and taping done by my dear husband.

Now you may be wondering, what are you going to put in that big stripe? Well, the pictures we found online had artwork, shelves and a cool artwork piece with the baby's name on it. So we are stealing all of those ideas, but we'll have to wait until after it's born for that name one.

Chris got right to work some of the wall art. Not many people know this, but besides his talent in painting walls, my husband is also an extremely talented artist. We have three 2x3 paintings of his hanging in our house and a few things he did in high school art classes around the house too. So he started on the pictures of ocean creatures we wanted to put on the wall. We found a clip art image of some online, so he used those as a guide to then freehand draw and paint on canvases.

A fish, seahorse, crab and turtle. Chris also built and painted the frames.

A jellyfish, octopus and starfish. Chris also built and painted some shelves to go up in the stripe.

Last weekend, we went and looked at furniture. We found a glider at HOM Furniture that will be a cream color to match the stripe, but it won't be in for awhile. We then went over to Babies 'R Us and found a crib and combo unit (dresser that can also be used as a changing table). We were able to take home the floor model of the combo unit and the crib came in last Friday. So it is really looking like a nursery in there!

 The view when you walk in the door. *Note, the glider will go in the empty corner.

And the view from the back of the room.

So even though we've got about six months left before baby arrives, we're sitting pretty good on having its room ready. We've got some bedding in mind and need to get the stuff for the changing table on top of the dresser, but we're well on our way! It's pretty cool looking in there and thinking about the person who will one day inhabit that space :)