It's a.....

Joe and I received our test results from the Harmony test I had done about two weeks ago. This is a newer test that is out. It tests for chromosomal abnormalities and gender defects. The results have a greater than 99% accuracy rate, and you can have the gender determined! I was super stoked about this because we would be able to find out 8 weeks before we could if we waited until our 20-week screening, and it's 100% accurate. So there's no way getting around the results :).

So, without further ado, Joe and I will be expecting a little baby GIRL in March!!! If you recall, I had a feeling this little bean was going to be a girl. In fact, I have been thinking, and telling most, that this baby was a girl since I found out we were pregnant again. I had almost every stereotypical Old Wives Tale symptom I could have had. My skin was breaking out, I had a bit more nausea, and my hair was dry as the desert! You might scoff at these, but after some research on the matter, all those "Wives Tales" actually hold some clout. Since Little Girl is raging with all her lady hormones, I take the brunt of it :).

While we were rooting for a little boy, we are in no way disappointed with the results. Mostly because we've been prepared.

Here are a few updated pics. Not much change, but thought you may enjoy :).

Cheers!

Little Girl making herself known

First Outfit :)

P.S. Not that I am in any way against pink, but there is a whole rainbow of color out there, so I have a feeling Little Girl's outfits will have a nice wide range of shade :)

Seconds...

Baby taking a little break 

It is with much trepidation, and excitement, that I write this post. Joe and I are PREGNANT, again!! This has been the most anxious, exciting, exhausting, and surreal time in my life! It has been 4 short months since we lost Baby V. That was devastating for us, and to be honest, there was a moment when I thought that sadness would never go away. After the loss, we decided we were going to take the time to heal and just see where the road lead in the baby dept. Well in that short wait and see time, I got knocked up! If you're trying to do the math, we lost Baby V in May and got a positive test in July, so in one short cycle we got pregnant. I only mention this because I was pretty shocked to see those two pink lines appear.

Here I sit fresh after my 12-week appointment feeling very positive and excited. This pregnancy has already been soo different than my first. I've had more bouts of nausea, but I almost feel bad mentioning it because I know a lot of women really suffer from it. I just eat a little something every couple of hours or so and it stays at bay. My hair is like straw, I'm breaking out like a 15 year old, and I wake up every night around 3:30 to use the bathroom. There are some foods that I've had to cut out because I just can't stand the thought of them, but all in all I really have been feeling pretty fantastic, compared to what I could be feeling.

Joe and I are still rooting for a boy, but I am pretty convinced this one's a girl. We will luckily find out in a couple of weeks! No, I'm not wishful thinking. Thanks to medical advances, there is a simple blood test that can detect chromosomal abnormalities with a greater than 99% accuracy rate, and you can find out the gender. With everything we went through with Baby V, we felt this was an easy thing to do. Also, I don't have patience and I am not waiting till the baby comes to find out the sex. I wanna know. The sooner the better!

I'm optimistic about this pregnancy, but I still have a lot of anxiety. Everything has really been running on schedule that I feel like I am just waiting for that other shoe to drop. The good news is my doctor is amazing and very sensitive. She told me today I could come back in two weeks for another ultrasound if I needed to just to see the baby :). Here's to a healthy pregnancy :)

Here are a few stats:

Our estimated due date is March 26, 2014

I'm 12 weeks

All I want to eat all the time is cereal or tomato soup :)

Here are some pics for your viewing pleasure, or not ;p.

That blob at the top is the baby's head :)

Baby was kicking so much today it was hard to get a shot!

Getting bigger by the minute!!!

Portsmouth

Recently I took a trip to Portsmouth, NH, with my mom to meet up with my brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Susan. Just an FYI for those who may not be aware, I have a husband named Joe as well as a brother. Yes, it gets confusing sometimes, and yes, I frequently say not my brother, but my husband or vice versa.

Unlike the Montana trip, Portsmouth was not something I had dreamed about since childhood. As I got older, visiting New England became something I wanted to do for sure, but it wasn't something that consumed me like Montana. I have to say this was such an amazing trip. It is a tie between the Montana trip and this one as to which is the best vacation I have taken. Not only did I get to experience the quaint town of Portsmouth, but I also got to go to Maine! Maine has been on my list of places I have wanted to go since I was young :).

As with most of my vacations, this was a trip that had almost no plans to it. I really prefer to vacation like that. I like to get up and decide what's gonna happen rather than make plans eons in advance. While this was a trip that had very minimal planning, it was a busy one indeed. I went to an authentic lobster dinner in Maine, saw amazing lighthouses, viewed some pretty awesome whales, visited some great beaches, and got to watch some spectacular fireworks from the comfort of our backyard.

My mom and I took the train from Baltimore to Boston. I seriously love traveling by train. I enjoy seeing countryside, the rocking, and the leg room isn't so bad. After a 7 hour train ride, moms and I arrived in Boston and met up with Joe and Susan. From there it was about an hour drive to Portsmouth. We stayed at Susan's mom's house. She lives in this great old home she has renovated and really made beautiful. It was a mill house at one time and backs up to a mill pond. The view is truly beautiful. As soon as we arrived in Portsmouth, I was in love. It really is the quintessential New England town. There are homes that date back to the mid 1700s. The fact that they are still standing is amazing to me, and all I want to do is sell Small House Love and head north. I love old homes! I know they require a lot of love and care, but I say the older the better :-).

Our lovely accommodations 

Portsmouth or bust! 

One of the coolest things we did was go whale watching. I have always wanted to go whale watching. We went with the Granite State Whale Watching tours, and it was a terrific tour. We started our tour bright and early. It was a beautiful sunny day, with calm seas, and a full boat. On our tour, we saw 8 minke whales and one giant finback whale. The finback is the second largest animal on the planet! They can reach up to 80ft and consume one million calories a day! Minkes are a smaller whale coming in at a sensible 20-30 ft. Unfortunately, I only got about 1 or 2 pics, but I have the memories, and sometimes you just gotta live in the moment.

We also took a visit to Nubble Lighthouse in Maine. I did get lots of pics there :). Nubble Lighthouse is set on this beautiful cliff overlooking the ocean, as all lighthouses need to, and it is spectacular. Like Portsmouth, Nubble is the quintessential lighthouse.

The only thing missing from this trip was the hubs. We forgot that Joe can work from anywhere, so he got left behind :(.

Here are some pics for your viewing pleasure :)

Cheers!

Tides out

Lighthouse every where you turn!

Poor little lobsters....

Can you guess my plate??? Lasagna anyone??

Classic New England

Cheesing it up at Nubble Lighthouse

Moms, Joe, and me :)

Lovely Portsmouth street :)

The front view of our accommodations :) 

Downtown Portsmouth

Downtown Portsmouth

Downtown Portsmouth

Market Square

Susan! Our tour guide

Susan grew up in this house!

An attempt at normalcy

Poe hard at work.

"A return to normalcy"-Warren G. Harding used these words to win the 1920 election after WWI. I think it was a great idea because people are always wrecked after war. The economy is always a mess, and all people want is their definition of normal back. It's what I've been going after since we found out about the loss of Baby V. So, as an attempt to return to normalcy, I updated our bedroom.

I posted about redoing the bedroom in this post, New Project, in September of 2011!! Since that post, I have done pretty much nothing to the bedroom. I got a few odds and ends over the past year and a half, but that was it. Pretty sad, huh? I think I have complained about the bedroom since we moved in. I hated the color! Absolutely hated it! I am almost positive it is the reason I woke up grumpy 95% of the time. The ceiling was an ugly yellow, smoke stained mess, and those air vents left a lot to be desired. As you can read, in the original post, my ideas for the bedroom were floating night stands, no head board, and some artsy fartsy thing above the bed. The only thing that stayed the same was the gray paint :).

I got our bed 1 year and 3 days ago. I wrote about it in this lovely little post, Like a Virgin. I was not a huge fan of beds with headboards, until I bought one. Once the bed was assembled, my original ideas for the bedroom changed a bit. I no longer wanted the floating shelves. We gave them a try, but they were really more of a pain than anything else. Also, they didn't really flow with the bed. When we moved in to Small House Love, I had sent my dresser to Goodwill. I thought it was too bulky, and I was just kind of tired of a dresser. Well, when we got pregnant I realized I had to stop taking over the whole house with my things. I used the closet in the extra bedroom as overflow. Clearly this would have to change with a little one on the way. I knew that Joe's parents had access to an abundance of antique furniture in storage in PA. So off to PA I went to acquire an awesomely antique dresser. A beautiful dresser was found and off to the races it was.

My new view for the bedroom was: new paint and to update the dresser. We got new nightstands at IKEA when we got the chairs for the living room. I was not sure about them at first, I thought they might be too short, but I am really enjoying them now.

As I said, I stuck with gray for the walls. I know, I know, it's super trendy right now, but seriously it has to be the best neutral color out there. Everything goes with gray! Joe and I made our trek to Wal*Mart to get supplies. I went with Glidden's Pebble Gray for the walls. I know lots of folks out there are die-hards for Behr and Sherwin Willams, but I've done a lot of painting over the past 2 years and have really found no reason to spend so much. At the end of the day, paint is paint and it all covers the same for me :).  For the dresser I chose Blue Ocean Breeze by Krylon. I'll get into that process in a bit :). Here are a few pics of the bedroom with its new paint job.

Before

Before

After- aren't those nightstands great! 

 

Before

After

I feel like the new paint and furniture really opens up the room. It feels more relaxing and inviting than it did a few days ago. I actually wake up happy in my bedroom instead of blah. Oh! I forgot to show the view that I was waking up to every day for the past two years. Every morning I had to wake up and see these ugly air vents and that damn spot! I don't know if you notice it, but it's there in the lower right-hand corner. Apparently the previous owners were freaks and had smoke detectors in EVERY ROOM of the house! Sometimes there were TWO! When we moved in they were taken down and the outline was left behind. It was very annoying for me personally. Really just a huge eyesore. Also, those air vents were just terrible and made me feel gross. They were just dirty and dingy. To update the air vents, I just added a few coats of white spray paint :). Easy peasy.

The eyesore

Before

After- Much cleaner and no eyesore :)

Onto the dresser. I had not originally intended to spray paint the dresser or use such a bright, bold color. I was always going to paint it, but I was thinking more along the lines of an antique white with a pretty paper Modge Podged on top. Well that all changed with one simple trip to Wal*Mart for a new blind. Joe, aka Hulk, had accidentally broken the other one :). While browsing through, I thought I'd pick up some paint samples, when I stumbled upon the spray paint section. I had read a lot about spray painting wood so I thought what the heck, I'll give it a try. It's cheaper, easier, and quicker. I found a lovely blue, which actually went great with our bed set. There is this sweet little strip of bright blue that runs the length. I have to say I am very pleased with the outcome. Spray painting furniture is actually pretty easy. All ya do is sand, paint, sand, paint, sand, and paint. The last two sanding and painting can be adjusted as needed depending on how many coats ya need. I did this all by hand sanding, but it would have been a lot easier with an electric sander, but we don't own an electric sander so I was left using my own elbow grease. The sanding was not actually that challenging, but an electric sander would have made the job even quicker and a bit more uniform. There are a couple of spots that I just kind of gave up on. Either way you choose, it is still a very simple project. Oh yeah, just make sure you invest in a mask. Safety first, folks :).

I bought one can of primer and 5 cans of the color. Instead of investing in new hardware I updated the old. First, it is beautiful hardware, and second it is beautiful hardware. I mean why reinvent the wheel, right? I chose brushed nickel spray paint, also from Krylon, for the hardware and I was set to go. I personally like Krylon better than Rust-Oleum. I like the spray nozzle on Krylon better. It has a wider path. Another word of advice on spray painting furniture, make sure it is not 100 degrees outside or the paint won't lay right. I got lucky and it was actually pretty pleasant out. 

The wonderful thing about wood is that it is easily updated. Thanks to modern advances, if I get tired of the paint I can remove it and start fresh :).

Here are some pics of the dresser before and after :)

Before- A seriously beautiful piece the way it was. Excuse the white mark- That is some wood putty to fill in a dent :)

Hardware- before. Gorgeous, right??

coming along

Seriously, why would I want to replace this?

Supplies

After

The final product :)

   

A little pop of fun inside the drawers :)

**I don't know if you noticed, but I also spray painted the light next to the dresser using the brushed nickle spray paint. It used to be black.