A Place To Lay His Head . . .

When RedDog was born a kind neighbor of the Queen's gave us this bassinet which she no longer needed. He slept in it for about two months and then it went up into our attic, where it has remained for the past six years. The other day I asked the Hubby to retrieve it so I could clean it up and get it ready for our pending arrival.

When he brought it to me, it was not as I remembered it. The great texture of the basket weaved sides was the same, but my mind had repressed the memory of the 70's era "quilted" plastic lining, covered with pastel teddy bears holding balloons. Nevertheless, I wiped it down with a wet rag and placed it in a corner in our room, where it has sat for the past two weeks, taunting me with its tackiness.

Disclaimer: I do not profess to be a sewer of any kind. If I did, it would offend the sensitivities of those who actually can craft beautiful things out of fabric and thread. Instead, I like to call myself a "fauxer" because what I do is fake sewing that usually turns out as passable, but with many glaring errors. The sad truth is that I come from a long line of talented seamstresses. That gene, however, passed me by.

Still, I couldn't stand the pink teddy bears another minute, so I grabbed some fabric from my meager stash in the basement, crafted a little pattern out of a roll of my kids art paper, and actually sewed a slipcover for the bassinet. And I think it turned out quite AWESOME! Now my baby will spend his time napping in style and I can cross another crazy pregnant lady project off my list.

If you look carefully in the above photograph, you can see the results of our recent dining room upheaval. We've needed to replace the very worn 13 year old carpet on the top floor of our house for some time now and decided the best time to do it was before the baby came. This resulted in a week of sheer chaos at our house with every piece of furniture and artwork shoved into the upstairs bathrooms, dining room and office on the main floor.

We lived in the basement for four days, with all three kids sleeping on their mattresses in the play room {what adventure!}.

To add to the madness, the Hubby and I realized the night before the new carpet went in that now was the perfect time to repaint all of the baseboards since we could drip paint on the subfloor with reckless abandon. So we spent a very, very late night putting a bright coat of white paint on all of the baseboards. The Hubby and I work very well together in these types of situations. and enjoyed conversation and laughter while sweating and painting for what seemed like hours. He is a good, good man to humor me in such ways.

I've spent the better part of the last week and a half putting the upstairs back together one room at a time, weeding through and purging any junk along the way. It has been completely therapeutic and totally exhausting. Unfortunately, it has not induced labor.

So that's the anti-climactic big news around here. We now have really beautiful, PLUSH carpeting upstairs. I want to roll around on it and find myself a little obsessive about how fun it is to see vacuum marks on it. It makes me happy to think that our new baby will eventually become mobile on this carpet and earn himself the trademark chappy knees of a crawler.