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!

Here’s our backyard last week in the snow.

As you can see when this photo was taken, it was snowing. We have over a foot of snow on the ground right now, and average snowfall in a normal Chicago winter is 38″., and we’re at a total of 39″ so far this year.

That’s our little detached garage off to the right, and Robert’s trusty shovel leaning against the garage. We don’t have a fence in the backyard yet that separates us from our backyard neighbors, but we hope to someday, maybe by the time the baby starts walking!

I like winter, but this winter of 2008-2009 in the Chicago-land area is getting me down. I think it’s just the lack of sunlight, because we have had millions of cloudy days and not very many sunny ones. And now the freezing arctic cold has set in, when it’s too cold to even venture outside unless you’re seriously in dire need of takeout Chinese food.

I know we’re almost rounding the bases into the home stretch of winter, but it seems endless. But on the other hand, I don’t want it to be spring because we have more and more baby preparations to do! This weekend, the goal is to paint the nursery. At least we don’t have to go outside to do that.

Oh, and by the way? More snow predicted for tomorrow.

The baby is kicking a lot these days. It’s the coolest feeling I’ve ever experienced. Today, I flew to Philadelphia for a show, and the baby kicked almost the entire way on the plane!

It’s fun. At first, it felt like tiny mouses running around on the inside of my abdomen. Now it feels like there’s a person inside there, a tiny person, knocking like on a door.

I really love the feeling. 24 weeks!

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!

Our good friends Anthony and Jodi just welcomed a New Year’s Eve baby – little Alexander!

We’re so excited for our friends and can’t wait to meet the new little guy and hear all about him. Congratulations Anthony and Jodi!

We’re only sad because we live in different states, and wish we lived closer so our babies could be friends, like Anthony and I were as kids living in Chatham, IL. Maybe someday!

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!