The Baby-Sitter's Club #37

Today I've reached the 37 week mark, which is a milestone because it means my pregnancy is full term!  As I understand it, the baby's lungs are the last thing to finish developing, and from this point onward she would be able to breathe unassisted if she were born.  Since she could survive on her own outside the womb, there's no longer any need to worry about pre-term labor!

In celebration of reaching full term, I spent the morning reading through the pregnancy notebook I have been keeping along the way.  While reading old entries did nothing to alleviate the feeling that I've been pregnant forever, it did help me reflect on how far the baby and I have come since conception.  Pregnancy doesn't feel quite so unnecessarily long when I think about the fact that Baby D started out as a single cell and has grown into a fully formed infant that currently weighs somewhere around six pounds.  Bringing the baby to full term also makes me really appreciate my body's ability to endure so many difficulties in the process of getting her ready to be born.  Healthy babies might be born all the time, but I have several healthy friends who have lost babies at various stages in pregnancy, so I feel especially fortunate that all signs continue to indicate that our little one will be healthy when she joins us fairly soon.

I also thought posting some pictures of our recently completed nursery for everyone to see was another appropriate way to celebrate reaching full term.  I know I have been promising a video, and I tried shooting one, but it turns out that I'm not capable of showing the various features of the room without inducing motion sickness.  I think the pictures capture the look of the room pretty well, and if you want to see the baby's room in real time, you'll just have to come visit!

I always thought it was a bit strange to devote a lot of time and energy to decorating a baby's room because the baby doesn't know the difference.  What I realized after I'd repainted the room and began choosing wall decals, however, was that I was decorating the room for myself and not for the baby.  When we first purchased our house, I decorated the whole thing one room at a time.  I really enjoyed the process, which made our house feel like home, and I've enjoyed living in a space that felt right for our personalities ever since.  Once all the rooms were done, though, and I returned to graduate school, I guess I forgot how much I enjoyed decorating.  Since I had plenty of time this summer, making decisions about the room and executing them also gave me a productive way to channel my excitement about the baby into a task that has measurable results.

This first photo is the view from the hallway.  We decided we wanted to be able to see inside the crib from the doorway, so that made space planning for the room a little complicated.  Thankfully, we have enough clearance to put the crib here without blocking the entrance to the bedroom.  From this angle, you can also catch glimpses of the window valance and crib skirt my mom sewed for the room.  I think they look great!  She custom made both of them with the measurements I sent her, and I am really excited to have a crib skirt which goes all the way to the floor because it means I can store things under there while also keeping them out of view.

Right now the crib is holding the various baby toys we have to keep out of Oscar's reach, but we'll need to find a new home for them when the baby is ready to sleep there.  This angle does a pretty good job of showing off the purple and green butterfly mobile I found, and here you can also see the child-size rocking chair Billy's Aunt Nancy repainted and reupholstered for the little one using our color scheme.

Here is another view of the left side of the room, which also shows the bookshelf we put in the corner.  This gives us a place to store the baby's books and a counter on which to put the owl lamp Patti found.  We put some baskets on the bottom shelf for some extra miscellaneous storage.  I didn't want anything above the crib that could fall off the wall, so I put up some purple and lavender butterfly decals to compliment the mobile.  It looks a little strange in this photo, but in real life the mobile creates shadows on the wall, and I like how this gives the decoration a little bit of a multi-dimensional effect.  We have something else to put on the wall above the bookshelf, but that can't go up until we announce the baby's name. : )

Here you can see the other corner of the room-- the one that is off to the right when you walk in.  This corner is dominated by the glider Jacelyn and Allen very generously handed down to us.  You wouldn't know it, though, because it looks brand new!  We just got it from them over the weekend and I love it already.  I imagine our admiration for this chair and our appreciation for the gift will grow exponentially once we have a baby to rock in it!  The Jimmy Buffett quote painted on the wall above the chair is the only remnant from the original room decor.  I measured off a rectangle around it to leave alone when I repainted the room, and when I ordered the vinyl decals I had them send me a few strips of purple so I could frame out the quote.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the green paint I used to write the words even matches the green vinyl decal perfectly!

This last picture shows the corner of the room opposite the bookshelf, which is next to the closet that is immediately adjacent to the doorway.  I posted a picture of the tree decal when I first applied it, but now you can get an idea of how it really looks.  We had a different Ikea dresser in this spot that we were planning to keep, but we decided that we wanted something a bit sturdier that had more storage, so we replaced it.  The baby's great grandparents helped out a lot with the furnishings for the room because Mimi and Papa as well as Nana and Mr. Dick gave us monetary gifts so we could buy the things we really needed for the baby.  Their generosity made it easy to get pieces that fit the space and our storage needs.  This dresser is also a little bit taller than the last one, which made it the ideal place to mount the changing pad, negating any need for a separate changing table.

Now that the baby could theoretically arrive any day, and I no longer have the excuse of working on the nursery, I guess it is time to direct my nesting instinct toward cleaning the house.  I'd like her to arrive a little early (even though I know she'll probably come late), so I keep saying that I hope the baby inherited my aversion for procrastination.  I have told her several times that I take due dates very seriously and have never once asked for an extension on anything in hopes that she will take this advice to heart.  : )  Meanwhile, I keep putting off cleaning up, even though I know that if I don't want to do it now, I certainly will not want to do it after she arrives. : )

(I loved The Baby-Sitter's Club when I was growing up.  I think Ann M. Martin kept publishing them after I grew out of them, but up to that point, I had read them all.  My favorites were the Super Specials because I got to read about the same events told from the various perspectives of the different girls.  I guess my appreciation for these focalization shifts this should have foreshadowed my somewhat sophisticated interest in books. : )  The 37th book is "Dawn and the Older Boy," but I will not go into detail about what I remember from this issue because it is too early to be scaring Billy with the possibility that our daughter could fall under the spell of older boys.  Don't worry, Billy-- her friends are looking out for her.)