10 Weeks and Counting

I promise that once I get through the worst nausea of my life, I will blog about something other than our little bean, but right now, I have nothing else going on besides this nausea....it has taken over my life. Talk about a run-on sentence. Point being: I have to update you on the baby because it's the little things that keep me going at this point.

Size of Baby Mitchell: Barely the size of a kumquat (just over an inch)
How can something so small cause this much change in my body?

All vital organs are in place and are starting to function to some capacity.

My belly: Barely showing, but I do have a small bump....which could just be the bloating. :) No need for maternity clothes yet.

Baby Mitchell is growing finger nails and peach fuzz this week. It's arms and legs are longer now and the fingers and toes are no longer webbed (whew!). In fact, Baby Mitchell is apparently kicking up a storm right now, but is still to small for me to feel. Weird huh?

Intentional Thankfulness

When I'm tempted to complain about my nausea or exhaustion, I try to redirect my thoughts and words to thankful ones....

Meet Baby Mitchell-8 weeks old

Our Living Room Revisited

Sorry I've been MIA. I've been battling awful nausea and "morning" sickness that lasts all day long. I hardly want to eat so I definitely don't feel like blogging. BUT, today has been a good day, which includes eating a bowl of soup for lunch, so I thought it might be good to update you on a few changes we've made to our living room. We've made some changes to other rooms, but I need to save those so I have something to blog about another day. :)

Most importantly, we painted the walls. I liked the off-white look we had when we moved in, but since I put a light slip cover on our couch and got white lamps, it all looked like a wash to me. I needed to make the light accessories pop, so we had a painting party and painted the living room Favorite Tan-a Sherwin Williams color. I love it! We actually painted our bedroom the same color, but those pictures will come later. While we were in painting mode, we painted the entry way Comfort Gray-another Sherwin Williams color that looks more like light blue than gray.






In addition to painting the walls, and adding some bookshelves, I added the colorful pillows to the couch. They matched perfectly with the red ones and brought out the home-made $11 blue curtains behind the couch. Now, I must pat myself on the back for the thriftiness here. I searched high and low for these pillows. I didn't know exactly what they would look like, but I knew what I was looking for. I looked frantically and waited patiently for months....many months. I looked online, at fabric stores, and everywhere in between...no luck. My sad story turned around when I saw some cheap laundry bags at World Market that had the print that I needed for my pillows. I looked everywhere and asked if they had the pillows, but no pillows....just a laundry bag. I quickly realized that this was even more perfect because I could slip my pillow right into the bag, cut the extra fabric and I would only have to sew one side shut. So....that is exactly what I did. It isn't pretty if you look at that one side, but shame on you if you look at the seams on pillows when you visit your friends.

Finally....

Sorry it has been forever since my last post. There has been a lot going on in the Mitchell house. This being one of them:



No, you aren't seeing things....we are indeed pregnant with our first baby! We announced it to the facebook world yesterday and have been overwhelmed by encouragement. I have been off the pill for 6 months. Our theory was that we would just live life and see what happened. No temperature-taking, no counting days, no charts-I didn't want to become obsessive about the whole thing. BUT, month after month, nothing. I was getting a little ancy when a friend of mine, who just had her first, gave me a book entitled "Plan to Get Pregnant." It charted out what your body is doing all month and taught you how to recognize the best times to try. I have to admit that I had already thrown my hands in the air because my body just wasn't following the chart. I was convinced something was wrong with me. But, what do you know...I was already pregnant.

Please be praying earnestly over the next couple of months during this crucial time. We are so excited and can't wait to experience pregnancy and a baby for the first time! For all of you mommas out there....I would love any bits of wisdom you have!

I Got An Itch

With school starting and the scortching sun simmering down a bit, I begin to get ancy for Fall kick off to come. Not just for college football, but for my fav shows:

House


Will he and Cuddy survive the dysfunction of their crazy relationship?? What will come of them? Will House stay clean or fall back into his addictive cycle? Will 13 and Foreman get back together? Will Taub ever become content in his marriage? Will Cameron show up and confuse Chase all over again?

Community

super funny...mostly clean. Really hoping Jeff and Britta end up together...totally confused by the ending of last season.

and the newbie....Parenthood

This show started right after the Olympics last year. It's not super climatic, but it's a clean, fun, family show that is more realistic than "reality TV." LOVE the cast.

I must add that I haven't decided how committed I will be to The Office now that Steve Carell is out.

So, what shows do you watch???

The Room We Live In...

Did you think I was done blogging forever? It sure has felt like forever! Moving takes over your life, but we are finally getting settled into a new routine here. Patrick and I have both started our new jobs. I am teaching again, which is FABULOUS! I am co-teaching Pre-Kindergarten at a private school just 5 miles from our new place. Speaking of our new place.....here are a few glimpses of the living room. We live in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath condo. It isn't much, but we love it and it is 500 square feet more than our place in California....and $500 cheaper every month. It's amazing how much farther your money goes outside of Cali.

So, I am taking the whole decorating thing one room at a time. I'm doing that for 2 reasons: 1-so I don't go crazy and 2- we have to budget as we go since we don't have a billion dollars in our "decorating" account. I imagine people with money have an account just for decorating. I might consider it if I were in their shoes. I know "time is money" but I don't have money...I have time, so that's what I am using. :) Don't worry, this isn't the finished product, this is just where we are right now.




If you can remember from our last place, we have a brown leather couch, which I love for all of it's practical purposes (like dog hair and spills), but I really wanted to lighten up the space we have since it isn't a super huge room. So.....I put a slip cover on my leather couch. Who says you can't do that? And even if you found the guy who says that....who cares? I've been a rule-breaker my whole life anyway. :) Take note of the curtains. Got the fabric for $11 and made those bad boys myself. Just used some no-sew hemming tape and my handy iron.

I found the white table on the right at a garage sale. It was yellow so my wonderful husband painted it white for me. The black tables on the left side (which you can't see in the pictures) are from T.J. Maxx. There are actually two tables. A smaller one fits right under the big one and we can pull it out when we need it and put it right back when we aren't using it. Beautiful. Snagged both tables for $50.

The large black table in the center of the room, aka the "coffee table" (I don't drink coffee so I need to find another name to start a trend for the non-coffee drinkers) was a craigslist buy. Got the table for $30 and my lovely husband sanded it and repainted it for us.


Don't freak out about the brown leather recliner. I am very aware that this doesn't match, but I am patiently waiting for a solution to come to mind. I may end up having to make my own slip cover that can still function on a recliner. How? I have no idea yet.



The red table under the TV is one of my favorites. Just ignore the guest room in the backroom. It currently serves as our storage room for things we still have to find a place for. Moving on....I had been eying a Pottery Barn table for almost 6 months, but it never went on sale. So, I started looking online for a look-alike. No luck. I really wanted something that had separate places for the the DVR and DVD player, but I wanted something that resembled a table. Not an easy find. After many weeks of searching I finally found one online and a store about 2 miles from us carried it. BUT, they didn't have the price listed so I had no idea if it was any cheaper than the Pottery Barn table I adored. Off we went to find out. As the salesperson was checking on that, we plopped down on one of the couches in a "living room" they had set up. We both noticed the table that would be our Plan B....the red one that you see now. The first table we loved ended up being over $1,000 which is not even close to being feasible. Luckily Patrick pulled out some Dave Ramsey techniques and haggled them down to almost half the asking price. Heck Yes!

I still have plenty on my to-do list for the living room. I have to figure out what I am going to do with the top of the red table, get a couple of ladder bookshelves for the corner behind the recliner and put some pictures in our new, white picture frames I got on clearance at T.J. Maxx. One question: Do the pictures I have hanging on the wall leading into the kitchen look too high? I feel like they need to come down a tad, but don't really want to go through the hassle of re-hanging unless I have to. Thoughts?? Do they look awkwardly high enough for me to hang them all over again??

I'll be back....

Hi readers! I just wanted to let you know that I haven't forgotten about you. We made it into St. Louis a week ago and have been unpacking and getting settled ever since. Things are finally coming together in our new place so I will be sure to post pictures soon! We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of the Harvester Christian Church community. Everyone has given us such a warm welcome. I start my new teaching job on Tuesday, which I am thrilled about, and Patrick hits the ground running this week as well. I will be sure to post a more detailed update soon. Thanks for reading!