Hello – it’s July.

I know, I know. it’s been way too long since I’ve posted to my little blog. But I have a perfect excuse – we had our baby on May 4. It’s taken me 8 weeks to finally get the hang of motherhood.

Lucy Margaret joined our family on May 4, 2009 at 9:37 PM. She weighed in at 9 lbs, 3 oz, and was 21″ long.

Labor lasted about 22 hours. I was tired, and I’m still tired. But she was worth every gosh-darn minute of pregnancy and labor.

I know it’s April, but here’s a nursery update from last month, which I think was March. I’m getting grief for not posting lately, but listen, people, I’m 4 weeks away from my due date, and a little more focused on growing a human! Seriously! Give me a break!

But overall, time is flying by in the domino world of Pam and Robert and future baby. The countdown is on to the big day, and we can’t wait.

Meanwhile, we’re hard at work on the nursery. Well, when I say “we”, I mean “Robert” because the only thing I can do at this point is point.

Robert installed the nursery closet – we went with an IKEA closet – the Stolmen. It was super-easy to install, and it is modular, so we can add to it as the baby grows into a kid into a teenager.

Here’s a lovely photo:

The closet turned out great, and so did the bright green carpet.

Here’s a photo that shows the wall and trim colors, along with the carpet. This is a photo of the baby’s room corner – “nobody puts Baby in the corner.”

Overall, the nursery is coming along very nicely. We now have a crib, so the baby will have a place to lay its little head, and we have diapers, so we can change the baby, and a car seat, so we can bring the baby home. Now all we need is the baby!

The baby’s room ceiling is finished!

Here’s a series of pictures of the progress Robert made in undertaking this giant task:

First, the demolition:

Robert ripped out the ceiling over two days, and discovered the insulation was old and bunched up, and some of it was moldy. Gross. He also discovered that the ceiling fan in the room wasn’t actually attached to anything (not to the studs up above) and was just hanging from the drywall. Fixed that problem too. Good thing, because that would have been right above the crib – not so good for a baby if a ceiling fan falls on it.

Second, the new insulation was put into the ceiling so the baby can be nice and warm during the frigid Chicago winters:

You can see the giant drywall sheets stacked against the wall.

And last, the completed, beautiful, finished ceiling!

It’s now been primed and painted, and the walls are now painted white. I can’t wait until the nursery is close to being finished and the baby arrives! More pictures to come – it’s going to be beautiful!

Hi Internet.

I’m so proud of my husband, dear Robert. The baby’s nursery room ceiling is almost finished!

If you’ll recall, over the summer, we had a leaking roof in our library, which has now been specified for the baby’s room.

The roof leaked, the water dripping ensued, and the drywall turned into a moldy mess, along with the insulation above the drywall.

Robert undertook the endeavor of ripping out the ceiling, pitching the drywall, and installing new insulation. Our very good friend Wes came over last week and they put up the new drywall. I’m currently in Philadelphia on a show, and when I come home, Robert says the drywall will be finished and ready to paint!

So the dominoes are getting knocked down one by one. We’re two weeks away from the third trimester, so the countdown is on! I can’t wait to share with you the photos of the finished nursery in hopefully a month or so – it’s going to be beautiful. Hooray Robert!

I’m happy to report we are finally liking, nay loving our basement.

As you may have read here or possibly here on this little blog, we have been plagued with basement troubles starting just a couple months after we moved into this little house.

Flooding, mold, losing carpet, flooding again, losing more carpet, finally installation and lots of cash spent on a drain tile and sump pump system, and I’m happy to say our basement is DRY. Completely DRY!

We had a giant snow melt over the weekend, where after 10″ of snow falling in December, the weather turned warm to the 60’s and all the snow melted. So confident were we in our basement and the sump pump that we left and went out of town. I will say we were a little nervous coming back on Sunday afternoon, but our sump pump works GREAT! Basement doesn’t flood anymore, although the backyard was full of water. No ducks yet, though.

Now, we have made basement progress. Official, verified, notarized progress. We’ve repainted the room, installed new carpet, and Robert just finished installing the last step – the new pretty baseboards. Now we get to decorate and put the room back together! Pictures coming soon!

I love our sump pump. I didn’t even know what a sump pump was until about a year ago, and now I can’t imagine life without it! Well, I can, and it would involve lots of flooding, mold and an unusable basement.

Now that we have a deadline – officially set by the coming, future baby – we’re beginning to be more ambitious with our house projects.

Currently, the house projects are stacked up like a line of dominoes…each project hinging upon another project. For example, we want to work on the baby’s nursery, but we can’t start the nursery until we move my giant book collection to the basement, and we can’t move the books to the basement until we finish the basement floorboards, and we can’t finish the basement floorboards until we have time enough in the day to do it. It’s a house of cards, stacked up. Ok, maybe not a house of cards, but a complicated, interconnected puzzle with multiple, tiny, perplexing pieces, some of which have been lost or are stuck to the bottom of someone’s shoe.

I’m feeling a little holiday stress, can you tell?

Robert and I are having a baby! Good thing we moved into a house with a yard. I’m 20 weeks along, and due May 2, 2009.

We are beyond thrilled – now that we’re well into the second trimester, we feel really good and have had very positive results from the blood work and ultrasounds, baby looks awesome. I’m starting to feel it move around, which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, and the coolest. I feel pretty good, although I usually have to go to bed by 8:30 PM.

We’re not going to find out if it’s a boy or a girl – we love surprises and suspense. We have 9 nieces and nephews between the two of us – 4 boys and 5 girls, and they are all amazing people, so we would be happy with either kind of kid.

We’re also not telling anyone our name selection because we aren’t interested in a lot of unwanted advice – although we are leaning towards the name Shecky, which works for either a boy or a girl.

It’s official. I’m growing a human. Hooray!

We recently acquired a new appliance for our kitchen. Now, usually, I’m not much for extra appliances lining the countertops – I prefer uncluttered space in the kitchen.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about sandwiches. Thinking a lot about them. So my dear husband Robert went to the Target and purchased A PANINI MAKER.

Ladies and Gentlemen – the Panini Maker is the evolution of the perfect sandwich. I’m a fan of grilled cheese, but this takes the humble grilled cheese to a whole new level. And it’s so easy to use!

We’ve had paninis three nights in a row, going for the fourth. Turkey and swiss on rye, with tomato, yum.

Panini makers would make the perfect holiday gift. That’s my holiday tip for the day as the holidays are rapidly approaching.

It’s raining here in Chicago. And when I say raining, I mean that the Hurricane Ike has made it all the way up here and is pouring its anger and tropical storm rage down on Chicago.

The rain is now coming in our house, it’s raining so much.

Our upstairs guest bedroom (which has a flat, but slightly sloped roof) is leaking. At first, it was just a small leak, a singular drip out of the ceiling fan. Next, it became a steady drip. Then, a stream. Next, a raging current of rain.

The rain has decided that it’s not satisfied with only coming in through the hole of the ceiling fan. Water has begun dripping from about 12 places in the ceiling. I think we’re going to lose the drywall ceiling.

And yes, we’ve had the roofing guy out, apparently it’s a flashing problem that will be fixed this week, of course, after Ike is long gone and the sun is out.

Stupid rain.

Basement, you may ask? Basement is bone dry.

Monday night Chicago was plagued with scary storms, including a series of tornado warnings that even caused the fair city to blare it’s warning tornado sirens.

Out in the western suburbs, we were quietly enjoying some tivo, but keeping one eye turned towards the sky, which was an unnatural, otherworldly color. Suddenly, the tornado warning sirens went off and our adrenaline started surging. TO THE BASEMENT, we shouted, and grabbed what we could as we ran downstairs – computers, i-phones, and for some strange reason, I grabbed Robert’s wallet. In case we needed to buy something down there, I guess.

We discovered we’re woefully unprepared for any type of emergency. The basement is still in a state of disrepair, and the flashlights were no where to be found. No bottled water, no emergency radio, no ponchos, no umbrellas, no first-aid kit, no nothing.

We used our wireless internet on our laptop to track the thunderstorm from the basement.

The first warning we saw on weather.com was for a tornado in our area and possible nickel-sized hail.

About 10 minutes later, after refreshing the page, the warning was changed. No tornado, and the hail size reduced from nickel-sized hail to penny-sized hail.

Robert turns to me, and without missing a beat, says “Recession”.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Luckily, we didn’t get hit by a tornado, and the Mini didn’t get hit by either nickel- or penny-sized hail. We lost our cable but not our power, but all of our neighbors across the street were without power for a day. I’m glad we weren’t swept away by any tornado or pelted with any type of money-sized hail.