It takes a while to use (I would say about 45 minutes to do a room, by the time you vacuum, then put water in this and change out the water/add solution probably two or three times per room). Jonathon does it all though so I don’t even really know how to work it- and I don’t want to learn! HOWEVER. Our carpet is now almost completely spot free and looks like a whole different floor than it did a week ago. I can’t say enough about what a great job this machine did- and now for what it would cost to get the carpet cleaned one time, we can do it whenever we want! We bought it at Kohl’s and had a 30% off coupon, in addition to the sale price, so I would look there if you are considering buying one of these.

Now our next project is to finish making the storage room a little nicer. Jonathon has converted part of it into an office space since our fourth bedroom is now MY office/Avon area. We are working on cleaning some outdoor rugs that we have and putting them down in there to keep it a little warmer for him. Someday we will have a house with more space!

I called Jonathon and told him I was coming home to get him. We had my dad come over and watch Bailey, and we went by Target and went to get lunch. When we got back up to the hospital, we changed him into some snuggly fleece NEWBORN size jammies. Which were clearly about eight sizes too big.

I love this picture with me holding him!

And one with Daddy-

I love the “drunk on milk” baby pictures. And this baby sure does like to eat!

We kept telling him that the carseat was a good thing- that it was time to go home. He wasn’t easily convinced.

One last family picture in the NICU. It was bittersweet leaving, honestly. It was the only home my baby had known. The place where I spent hours and held him and watched him get better. And cried thousands of tears. The nurses were so loving, the other moms were so supportive. I can’t quite explain but it was strange to leave.

We were welcome home by one very excited big sister, though!

Here she is holding Taylor for the first time. With help.

The view coming straight in the door… no I have no idea why there is an exercise ball in his room. It’s not there anymore. I want a picture or something for this wall though.

The crib side of the room. This wall is adjacent to Bailey’s room. His name will be above his bed once I remember to buy some letters and some paint for them. Might be doing that tomorrow since Jonathon’s off work. The baskets and stuff have been moved from under his bed, the boppy has been unpacked and covered with a new “boy” pattern cover…

And I just love this puppy bedding.

My mom warned me that I might want to cover the lower part of this wall hanging (or comforter, whatever) with plastic to protect it from pee in the beginning… His diapers and cream and everything are all ready to go. There are wipes in the warmer (okay not wipes, we had to use soft “cloth-like” paper towels in the beginning with Bailey because of her sensitive skin, even the sensitive wipes made her bleed so we are just doing the same for Baby Boy). Just need to add water and turn it on when he comes home!

And the beginning of his clothing stash. It took me a while but I have finally gotten into shopping for him. In fact I feel like I might need to go up to the mall later today and look at the President’s Day sale stuff at Gymboree. Uh oh.

Just wanted to share a few pictures I took last week when they came over. You know it’s a good friend when your kid can wear her jammies for a playdate…

The only thing that bugs me about having playdates here is our furniture. We ended up getting more of a modern furniture style and so the coffee tables and end tables had sharp metal/glass corners. They are all packed away downstairs and so there’s nowhere to set a drink etc in our living room now. But someday our kids will be grown and we will have real furniture and I will probably wish for the days when we had little kids…

Today I:

-Washed the cloth diapers, dried the inserts and prefolds, hung the covers to dry
-Started a second load of laundry
-Put almost a full basket of laundry away (Bailey helped me- she tried to put every item in her pajama drawer but it was so sweet that she wanted to help. She finally at least learned where to put socks. I should probably have her help more often. She loved it so much!)
-Put about 10 eBay packages out for the mail… only about 100 to go I think!
-Cleaned the kitchen, mostly
-Unloaded the dishwasher
-Took the trash and recycle down to the garage, where I found that my husband STILL has not brought our trashcan in from last Friday. Now that’s classy.
-Made plans for Thursday with my friend Casey and her daughter Addison

And more importantly, I:

-Kissed Bailey’s soft, puffy, wonderful cheeks at least 25 times
-Held her on my lap to read stories
-Taught her how to put her socks in the sock drawer and how to put dirty clothes in the basket- and had fun doing it!
-Ate Alpha-Bits cereal while sitting on the kitchen floor with Bailey and feeding each other the letters
-Changed three diapers
-Attempted to make a healthy lunch for my daughter (at least she ate the yogurt and banana)
-Got lots of hugs without even asking for them
-Danced to the intro on a new Dora video, several times

Some people think that once you “give up your career” and stay home, you become “just a mom.” I have had feelings from time to time, like all I have is my daughter and my life revolves around her. At times, that has made me feel inadequate or like I am not doing enough. But looking back at my day of accomplishments, I realize again that there is nothing I would rather be doing. There is nothing more important than taking care of my daughter, raising her myself, being with her to give her all those hugs and build her self-confidence, and enjoy the little things with her.

-I went to a really inspiration Avon leadership meeting last night. I am working on building my business and recruiting people to sell Avon. I have a pretty good team so far. If you are interested in earning some extra money, let me know! It only costs $10 to start and there are no minimum order sizes or inventory required. Really.

- Possibly get a new couch for downstairs, but depending on finances this might get pushed back to spring

- Get some patio furniture covers. We are so ghetto looking. We don’t want the cushions to get moldy so we just keep them in the garage. Then we can’t sit on the chairs when we go outside, unless we go get the cushions. It annoys me a lot.

- Clean out all the weeds growing in the landscaping where we used to have bushes. It’s along the east side of our house. The bushes got too big and the previous owners planted them too close to the house. So we got them all taken out but now there is an empty nasty area there with lots of weeds. I think we are going to plant pampas grass there.

- Hang more pictures up in our bedroom

I thought she looked so grown up this morning so I took a few pictures of her before we left. I can’t believe my big girl will be in the Toddlers class this fall!

And finally, she cooperates!

Tonight after Jonathan got home from work, he was working on fixing some of our outdoor lighting and I was working on dinner. Don’t worry, it was just spaghetti and garlic bread. You should know by now that I don’t do anything too complicated. Anyway, I had the oven mitt out to get the bread, and Bailey found it and ran off with it. I just managed to find the camera and get a quick picture before she lost interest.

Then later this evening, I was working on cleaning my office. The endless project that never gets all the way finished. Although, someday it will, and I will show pictures! Bailey was wandering in and out while I was cleaning, and she found a Sigma Kappa hat from when I was in college. She had fun modeling it and ended up wearing it for quite a while. She announced “hat” and pointed to it every time she saw one of us. Just in case we weren’t sure.

Then my Avon order came and I couldn’t sort it downstairs because of the carpet cleaning, so I completely trashed my office trying to find room to do stuff… but at least I can deliver things tomorrow and get some money!! Bailey did a great job playing by herself in the living room and watching her Elmo video.

Tonight I had to go get my eyes examined at my old eye doctor. Apparently the crazy woman I saw last time at the cheapie place was right, and I really do have an astigmatism. So my contacts are now like $65 a box. I am just waiting to go back for my “recheck” of my new contacts and then once they give me the prescription I will go get it filled online.

After that I ran a few errands- stopped by the grocery store and stopped by Best Buy to get a new Elmo dvd for Muffie. She is absolutely in love with “Mo” right now. Then we had a late dinner and let Bailey go outside and play in her new Cozy Coupe for a little bit. She can get in and out on her own and then picks up her feet so you can push her around. I’ll have to get some pictures of her in there!

We have been kind of wanting a new cover for a while since ours is torn up looking. Our excuse was always that “at least it was functional.” Now it’s not even that. Not only does it not work, but it is ugly. So we are officially shopping for hot tub covers. We have been to a few pool places and it looks like we will end up spending between about $300-$600 on a new cover. Which stinks, since it’s not like something we are really excited about.

However, I did find one cool thing while doing some online shopping. This company makes these cool pictures that basically fit into your cover. Then when you flip the cover up, you can have an instant “background” that makes it look like you are on the beach, or in the tropics, or wherever you would rather be, other than your backyard in Missouri! The website also says that the water reflects onto the scenes and makes them appear to come to life- like with waterfalls, ocean, etc. Once we finally get a new cover, I would be interested in getting one of these to put on the flip side.

It seems like we always have a million home repair/improvement projects, though. We just got the carpet taken care of (finally) and now once we get a few extra cents we can move on to the next thing.

Here is my Tuesday Toot. I can’t really take ALL the credit for this, but I scheduled our carpet cleaning and got the carpets cleaned today. Including the oh-so-nasty downstairs carpet. We had it deep cleaned and pet odor treated and sanitized, which killed 99.9% of the germs and bacteria. NOW I feel like Bailey can play on that floor. So we are going to turn that room into a play area for her. We are going to get a big fun rug for the middle of the floor and bring her big toys down there. The ones that are cluttering up our living room and leaving not much room for anything else. Jonathon said he would set up a laptop for me down there. And there is a recliner and a tv. So this should be a very good thing.

I have been saying I wanted that carpet clean for three years now. Seriously. Then we were going to replace it. Then we didn’t have the extra money… really we still don’t… That’s why it’s such a big deal to me.

(If you are local and you want the name of the company, contact me. They have a special, 5 rooms and a hall for $40. What ran the price up was all the extras we had done to the downstairs.)

If I thought we could sell right now we seriously might be interested. I would just be afraid our house wouldn’t sell. We started looking at online mortgage stuff and it looks like we could get even a lower interest rate than what we have now. (Just under 6%). Gah, I know it’s not realistic but it’s fun to dream. I should be content with this house for now. Why is it that we are always wanting the next, bigger, better thing?

And the other thing our check is getting spent on? A new part for our air conditioner. We were lucky and Jonathon found a guy to do it after work at his cost plus just a flat $75 for labor. Jonathon always finds nice people who want to help him. He’s just a likeable guy Seriously though this is still going to run almost $500. So now you can see that we have no stimulus check left once we’ve paid for these two things. That sucks. There goes my dreams of shopping, vacationing, pedicures, The Melting Pot…

Oh and I forgot to mention that we will definitely be replacing the faucet, I know it’s old looking. But here is the rest of the bathroom. And we are NOT spending the time or money to replace the stupid gold shower doors. Someday we might pull the glass doors out and just put a curtain up to cover it. The walls are more of a sage green and match the rest of the decor. For some reason they have a more blue tint to them in these pictures.

And I know the cabinet locks are classy. Link a doos, baby.

Anyway, we survived. The babies (and moms) seemed to have fun. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got mad at me. For some reason, I am really worried about people being mad lately. And I have been stressed out about my blog. Learning WordPress. Griping about our server. (Basically talking a lot about things I don’t understand). But enough of that. Here are some pictures from the playdate. And a promise that I will be back to my regular posting. I can’t believe how much I have missed blogging!

Bailey has a serious fascination with waterbottles! She has managed to take the lid off of one of them and spill it all over the floor. It may have just been an accident but I keep a close eye on her now!

Can you believe all these babies in one room? And it’s not a Gymboree class or anything; it’s my house!

Bailey with her friend Kaitlynn, whose birthday party we went to this past weekend… more on that later.

My friend Sarah invited us to come over and bring Bailey with us. It turned out to be a really nice night of just snacking and hanging out together. It was very low key and Bailey got to play and then sleep in the pack n play in the other room. She did pretty well going to sleep. We watched Finding Neverland, which I hadn’t seen before.

By the way, Sarah, my friend Faith said it was definitely Tuberculosis.

Today I got to see Faith for a while, I worked on straightening up my office (trust me, I have a long way to go) and we went shopping for new carpet. We went three places and I think we finally decided to buy from GCO but it was getting close to dinnertime and Bailey was about done with looking at carpet. We will probably go back tomorrow to do the paperwork. Tomorrow we are also thinking about taking B to Gymboree Play and Music to try it out. Jonathon has off until Monday so I wanted to do something family-ish at least one day

Tonight has been spent listing on eBay. Not very exciting, but hopefully profitable. I am selling some of the cloth diapers that I don’t like, such as the Fuzzi Bunz which leak horribly out the legs on Bailey. (I have been trouble-shooting and we determined that it is really just that they don’t fit her right).

Wow, enough rambling. I’m heading off to read a little bit before bed.

Today and tonight I have been running around trying to get things ready for our “real” Christmas celebration at my parents’ house tomorrow. I had a few things left to wrap, and I have been trying to unpack and get the endless loads of laundry done from our trip. Our downstairs is still a mess and I feel like I haven’t gotten a whole lot done. I took Bailey to my parents house to play for a little bit because they couldn’t wait to see her. I listed a bunch of stuff on eBay tonight.

Jonathon has been talking about what he is going to do with the Best Buy giftcard from his brother. He really wants to get some sort of flat panel tv for downstairs. He also wants a plasma mount thing to put it on the wall. I told him we should at least get it carpeted before we worry about stuff like that.

Big news: WE ARE GETTING CARPET FOR THE DOWNSTAIRS ON TUESDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am just so tired of looking at the downstairs and how awful it is… not to mention that last night Jonathon dripped rotten potato juice all the way down the stairs and across the basement floor on the way to the garage and then didn’t clean it up. I wasn’t home at the time and I got home and asked him why he didn’t clean it up. His answer was that he thought we weren’t going to keep that carpet anyway. Lazy man. Then when he finally DID clean it up he used Fantastik bathroom cleaner and paper towels. If you want something done right you might as well do it yourself.

Wow, this turned into an unexpected rant about my husband