Well, our entire house is this beige-type color, and we plan to paint every room at some point. We wanted to take it one room at a time, and we figured the nursery is the best place to start since it doesn't have any furniture in it yet.
We had considered a darker beige and green, but we just weren't sure. On Friday night, we just got some balls and went to Home Depot, and we found the perfect color. It's called Nurture (very baby-ish, right?), and it's a grey-blue with a hint of green. I'd call it a super-soft, super-muted seafoam color. We looked at each other and said, "That's it!" So, we ordered up a gallon of it, and went home victorious.
On Saturday, Derek started painting, and I helped some with the trim. I pooped out pretty easily since we had already spent the day at the Historic Bluffton Arts and Seafood Festival (which was lots of fun). We really loved this photographer from Edisto Island. Her name is Susan Roberts, and I may purchase some of her bird photographs for our nursery in the future. :)
Back to painting, Derek painted the entire room Saturday evening, and this morning we got up to finish up the trim and clean up. Sounds pretty standard, right?
Hah - It wouldn't be a Ratcliff Family activity without some sort of disaster. As I was working to clean up the white trim, I had moved the plastic drop cloth so I could get to the trim better. Woops! I dropped an entire quart of white semi-gloss paint all over our brand new carpet :( I immediately started crying and screaming that I ruined the entire nursery. Derek quickly jumped and said, "Get me a towel!" I was like, "Ahhh, I don't know where one is!" He said, "Get it together and act like an adult. Get me a towel." I managed to grab one of our brand new (yes, it pissed me off) towels from our linen closet. We sacrificed t-shirts, old boxers, and some stinky pajama pants to the clean up cause.
I googled what to do - in typical Ratcliff fashion - and discovered that laundry detergent with club soda works perfectly to get it up. We used a lot of hot water as well. About an hour and a half later, the mess was totally cleaned up. At the end, Derek was sopping the leftover water out of the carpet with our Sham-Wow. We were in fact saying "wow" as we used it.
Yeah, this crazy thing.
The mess was cleaned up, and we finished up the trim duty. Derek actually managed to completely save the carpet, and you can't even tell it ever happened. As for finishing painting, we're going to have to buy some flat white ceiling pant to touch up the ceiling for next weekend, so it's not TOTALLY finished yet.
We took some pictures of the process:
Derek doing some touch up
Me looking hideous and half asleep
(this was just before the quart of paint incident)
Derek stared being goofy during clean up:
He decided to paint the chair he had been standing on
Now, here's the final product:
As you can see, it's a really light color
Oh, and that corner is where the quart of paint incident took place, so I think it's pretty much back to perfect.
We're super happy with how it turned out, and we think it's going to go really well with everything we've already picked out. We're still trying to decide on a crib, but we've agreed that it will be really dark wood, maybe even black. We're going to look at some more in person before we make a final decision, so next weekend will include a trip to Just for Baby and Babies-R-Us in Savannah. We've found some that we really like on Overstock and Amazon, and we may just go that route. I guess we want to play it safe and see some stuff before we go ordering anything. We all know what happened with the Ikea nursery furniture last weekend.
Aside from painting, things have been going well. I've had a lot more energy, and yesterday morning, I ran for 40 minutes. I was so happy! I had been making it about 20-30, and this was really good. It made me feel like myself. I've suspected that I've felt the baby a couple times, but I'm not entirely sure. On three separate occasions, I've felt like someone poked me with their finger about 2 inches below my belly button. It could've been me being gassy, so I won't jump to conclusions yet.
Baby Ratcliff's heart rate has been around 155, so that's good. I haven't had too many intense cravings lately. Mostly, I've craved shrimp (that's why we ended up at the Festival yesterday). Tonight, I plan to make some shrimp as well. It's like I can't get enough. I've been trying to eat more protein, and I've been trying to avoid carbs if possible. This morning was the exception, and I had some super delicious pumpkin pancakes :) We were total fat kids at the Festival because we split a funnel cake (we call them flannel cakes in honor of Kurt Vonnegut). Hopefully, I didn't do too much damage.
Overall, things are going well, and I'm so happy to have more energy. And before I forget, I went ahead and registered for our baby classes. One of my coworkers told me they fill up quickly. We're doing Baby Basics in January, Childbirth and Breastfeeding in February. I'll definitely post about them, and I completely expect something hilarious to happen. Derek's going with me, so I'm sure he'll do SOMETHING ridiculous.
I can't believe our baby is now the size of an avocado! That's just crazy! I feel like time is going really quickly, and I'm really ready to meet our baby :) Derek thinks that's a funny phrase, so I used it deliberately :)
I'll post more updates as they come!
