Our Digital Shoebox: Ordinary days

It has almost been two weeks since I've written... but it has mostly been for lack of anything interesting to say. I spent the last two weeks just wrapping up the semester (it's now "final exam week"), and watching the first few weeks of baseball season unfold.

With that, it's been a pretty mundane span of time in our household. With school winding down, I've already started to slowly shift my attention from academics to the endless to-do list on the homefront... most of which deals with the preparation of the nursery, of course. This past Saturday, I was at least able to find time to resurrect our front and back yards from the perils of winter. It took about 6 hours of yard work... but that was probably because I took a break at the top of every inning to watch the Yankees get pummeled by Boston. That came with a pretty good sense of accomplishment (the yard work, not the pummelling) as I was reminded by our neighbor that our yard has come a loooong way since we moved in 2 years ago.

I also finally gave our scraggly Magnolia some adornment.

In other news, according to the latest babycenter.com email update, the baby now weighs almost 4 pounds and is about 17 inches long. As for mom, the emails have been spot-on in terms of documenting the ups and downs of the pregnancy. For the last two days, she's been plagued with severe and painful swelling in her feet; and sure enough the first sentence in today's emailed update was,

"Your blood volume is now about 40 to 50 percent greater than before you became pregnant". Like I said, spot-on. I also vaguely remember (see author's note) when the first trimester ended and her nausea and morning sickness disappeared. It was crazy because there was nothing gradual about it. It was like an on / off switch. It just stopped... immediately followed of course by a babycenter email saying that the worst of the symptoms should have ended yesterday. YESTERDAY! Not "in the past week or so".. but yesterday. That's crazy. Almost wicked in it's accuracy.

Authors Note: I said "vaguely remember" because my memory seems to be going down the tubes these days. I usually remember everything... but right now I'm sitting here actually thinking, "did I just make that whole thing up?" I've gotta ask V. I think I'm losing it.

But anyway, as of last week, V has officially begun to cash in her "free chauffeured ride to work and back" coupons. In truth, it wasn't by request, but from looking at her belly, I just finally deemed it time to get her from behind the wheel. It was close for a while, but it finally got to the point where my concern for her safety outweighed my desire to sleep 30 more minutes. Besides, when you've got that much going on inside of you, your reflexes just ain't what they used to be; and so we are doing what we can to minimize her time behind the wheel in general. Either way, I have to say that the extra time together hasn't been a bad thing (that's the closest I can bring myself to saying I enjoy it... just in case she's reading this) and so it looks like I have a new part time job for the next seven weeks. Wow. Just seven weeks to go. That's bananas.

Final update... With the semester all but over for me, I spent the past 2 days or so setting up new domain names and restructuring our internet presence. With that (mostly) done, this will be the first official entry into what I'm now calling our "digital shoebox". The idea is that the blog will serve as the hub for my various (electronic) creative outlets. My hope is to string them all together with some semblance of a central theme. There should be a bunch of links on the right side of this website now. From there we'll be able to keep tabs on the different things we dump in this virtual shoebox as time unfolds, the baby grows, and our sanity unravels.

In the meantime, it's time for me to get to work, but I will leave you with two more photos before I do. Enjoy.