Lately.

This is my thirty-eight-and-a-half week pregnancy picture!

Almost there...

We harvested cute little, bright red radishes from our garden a few days ago!  They grew so fast.  We planted them just three or four weeks ago!

I got a pedicure this week, too.  Very nice, as I can hardly bend over far enough anymore to do it myself!

Thank You!

My mom made this beautiful chenille baby blanket for our little one!  It is so soft and sort-of heavy in a pleasant, cuddly way!  I love the colors!

The front has such a cute, striped look, with the layers of yellow, white, and blue flannel.  It matches the vintage colors that I'm collecting for Baby--aqua blue, golden yellow, retro red.

Our Day Out

We didn't do anything we won't be able to do after our baby arrives, but it was still a nice opportunity to spend a day together, doing 'fun stuff,' just the two of us.

I'm so looking forward to adding this little one to our family, and all the new experiences and joy and love that will be part of our lives because of this precious gift.  But I also look back on the year and a half Crandon and I have had together, and feel thankful for all the things, big and little, that we've been able to do together.

So we laid aside our house painting project for a whole Friday and started our day with a trip to the local park for some ultra-micro airplane flying.  I just watched and sipped my morning coffee!

Next we headed West.  A good choice for a very hot day!  We enjoyed lunch at Mom's Apple Pie in Sebastopol, browsed Harmony Farm Supply (bought some flowers and a book on growing fruit) and continued on to Bodega Bay.

Ice cream for Crandon and an Americano for me, at a hole-in-the-wall place below Highway 1, called Captain Davey's Ice Cream & Espresso, next door to the post office.  Ummm...

We sat on a bench overlooking the bay and had fun watching a gopher poke out of his hole and quickly and cautiously pull mouthfuls of weeds back down with him!

A wall of ice plant is hard to do justice to in a picture.

No, Crandon hasn't taken up coffee drinking.  I had my hands full with the camera and keeping my purse on my shoulder!

Someone thinks these weeds look really neat stuck all over someone else...

We met up with some family, after a long walk along Doran Beach, to grill some sausages, etc. for dinner.  It was a nice bonus to our day!

Pillowcases

Here is another recently finished project.  This one has already made it's way to a new home--a gift for a bride and groom.

The pillowcases are reversible, with the print on one side and the dot on the other side.

I made the dotted fabric wrap around to the inside to tuck the pillow out-of-sight.

Painting: Bit by Bit...

The all-important coffee break (cookies for Crandon!)  Grandpa, I was thinking about you the day I took this picture!  I was wishing someone was running to the donut store for some apple fritters to go with the coffee!

A view of the main color and the darker green trim.  All the unpainted railing, posts, and door and window trim will be off-white, eventually!

Yes...

...I do still sew, occasionally!

We don't know if we will be welcoming a boy or girl into our family in the next month, but I decided to sew one special little outfit to go with each name we've picked out.

I started with this sweet little layette pattern, that belongs to my mother-in-law, for the baby girl outfit.

 I found some soft, very light-weight  dotted-swiss fabric with tiny little scattered pink flowers at Jo-Ann's.  I trimmed it with ribbon and lace that I had in my stash.  I even made the little slip from the same pattern.  The panties are the style that used to be lined with plastic, and snap down the sides; I lined them with thin white cotton.

I did a few simple little 'lazy daisy' flowers on the yoke.

 My baby boy outfit started from a modern sleeper pattern.  I found the perfect blue-checked shirting and turned the pattern into a pants romper with a little button-up shirt to go underneath.

I tried to find a very simple airplane embroidery pattern for the yoke, but wasn't successful...

I turned my dresser top into a change table, all ready for baby!  We had a little dresser that I found at Goodwill for $6. that went into the corner and is now filled with with washed and ready newborn clothes.  The basket at the end has all my baby blankets, extra bassinet sheets, etc.

 Already three weeks ago!

Painting: Actually Starting!

Our back patio cover, with the corrugated plastic removed, and the surface pressure washed.

The ground beneath looked like it snowed paint flakes!  Yikes, this took some cleanup with a shop vac.  I'm glad the house wasn't peeling!

We started actually painting on Wednesday late afternoon.  We still have some more prep work around some sides of the house, but it's really nice to see some fresh color going on. 

Painting under the eaves is one of the more tedious parts!

Yesterday we finished up the main color on our north wall and started caulking (pronounced: CALL-king, or COK-ing, depending on who's saying it around here :-) all around the porch.  This was a pretty big job, but I think the end result will look so much nicer with that detail.  Of course, some of the caulk is for weather sealing, but a lot of what we did yesterday is probably more for looks.

And last week's progress photo.  Although I feel bigger than that picture makes me look...  Especially when I'm trying to turn over in bed, or crawl under the scaffolding to get to the back yard...

We finished our childbirth prep classes this week.  Crandon says we're experts now; I wondered if maybe we should wait until after the birth to say that... ;-)