I really like my . . .

iPod . .
brother's skate board . . .

hat!

Things to know:

1) Soren and Ultimette's room is 1/2-way to being done. The room is painted, the chalkboard is up. The closet still needs a system and then all of Soren's belongings need to be put back in. Grandma Peg's quilt, that she made for me when I was wee, needs to be hung by Ultimette's bed and we need to resolve the issue of curtains (yes or no) and lighting. It feels so good to be close to being half-way there.

2) Our master bedroom is next. After that we begin the process of replacing the ugly, cheap mouldings with beautiful new mouldings. After that is the Monkey Room/hall bath. After that is the master bath. After that is the Grandma Room closet. After that is painting the Grandma room. After that is the kitchen (Thorne . . . you out there?). All these things, except the kitchen, will be done by the time Lars is done with paternity leave. There are 6-weekends left until we imagine paternity leave may start, and then 6-weeks off until he goes back to work. We can do it! Oh, after the kitchen we need to paint the rest of the interior, then finish landscaping, paint the exterior, replace windows and install a pool (if we win the lottery).

3) It has been said before, but it is worth mentioning again, Ultimette gets the hiccups with unusual frequency. I always assume she's having in utero seizures or something. It's mind-draining being me sometimes, hokey Pete!

4) I have heartburn. I treasure this heartburn as much as I loathe it. The degree and extent to which one suffers from heartburn during a pregnancy is directly correlated to the amount of hair a newborn will have on its cute little cone-head. This is an old-wives tale, but in a double-blinded peer reviewed scientific study all the data would support the old wivery. Since my babies arrive in this world generally very ugly and resembling amphibian off-spring more so than human progeny, I fully believe that a little hair on their heads doesn't hurt. Oh, and this isn't to say that they don't go from ugly ducklings to beautiful swans, because quite obviously my children are breathtakingly breathtaking.

5) The HOA in our 'hood wrote us a letter. They wanna know what we're doing about the dust patch in our front yard. I would have thought getting rid of the rats was enough for now, but apparently not. Lars got Kristen to come over yesterday and sketch out a quick plan, then he went to Home Depot for some Birds of Paradise, bronze flax, and some mulch. He and Soren dug some holes, dropped in 1/2 the plants and spread out all the mulch they bought. Now a quarter of the dust patch is landscaped. Hopefully it will be enough to keep them off our backs until the kitchen is done, though I suspect we'll hear from them again soon.

6) We do not have a name for Ultimette, yet.
7) I'm working tonight. The full moon is tomorrow. I'm very tired.

8) I need to hire a cleaning lady, our previous cleaning lady (er, me) was not doing her job so I had to fire her.

9) This week marks the week where I start twice weekly prenatal visits. Ugh. Mostly the visits will be just monitoring and scanning the amniotic fluid index. Of course, the major concern still remains the placement and the interface of the placenta with the rest of the surrounding tissues. The current delivery plan includes an operative delivery at Thanksgiving, exact date TBD (I was asked to commit at the last visit, but got a bit scared because the word hysterectomy came up twice). I'm still eating ice around the clock. It's gotten to the point where the children have come to regard ice as an imperative food group. They know that they get extra kisses when they bring Mommy a big, plastic cup filled with ice and just a smidge of water -- enough water to make the ice crack and accelerate the melting process, but not enough to melt it. Last night, Annike brought a big tumbler of ice into my room while we were blow-drying Petra's hair. Each of my children reached into the tumbler for a piece of ice and proceeded to crunch on it. Two things crossed my mind at that point: 1) I should probably have all of their hemoglobin's checked, 2) that's a helluva lotta root canals to be paying for.