Sweet Sleep

Mattresses are important, people! I had the best night of sleep last night that I have had in forever: dreamless and smooth, rippling on and on, with only a few hip aching moments of dim awareness as I rolled over in the night. I usually sleep pretty well during pregnancy, I'm just lucky like that, or chilled out like that or desperate like that or something. But this pregnancy has been different...our mattress had done its most valiant but there are limits. It had been with us through a decade of marriage and who  knows how many years with another family before us. I honestly think our mattress was from the 60's or 70's. This year it reached astounding heights of absurdity. A and I had begun to joke about going sleep in the soup bowl every night but truthfully it was more like sleeping in a real life game of Chutes and Ladders. There springs poking up, gooshy holes, hard ridges, and broken plastic handles sticking out in gouge-ready positions.

Thankfully, oh so thankfully....I report to you that we are now the proud owners of a new to us, 2 year old mattress that feels like heaven. We lay in bed laughing this morning about the strangeness of sleeping on such a nice bed in our own room, we felt like we were at a hotel! So silly!

Before we carted our old lump-fest of a previous bed to the dump I whipped out a pair of scissors and zipped off the beautiful fabric that covered the box springs. I've been eying it for years and knew even when we first got it that I would someday strip that cloth off for another use. The bonus of ancient mattress sets is the psychedelic, vintage fabric that they come wrapped in. What do you think? Curtains in the bathroom or the kitchen or something more creative?

Green Dreams

Spending all my spare time reading the huuuuuge pile of garden books  you can see in the photo above, that A and I brought home from the library. There are little stacks of them all over the house...dinner table...floor....bed...end table....everywhere! And my nursing/book time is all green. This means that I'm spending all slow moments problem solving or imagining or chuckling over garden thoughts. I am having dreams filled with Latin names, people.

Tonight I thought I'd share a little video of an urban farmer I admire. I hope she's not too edgy for the audience. Please no flaming me because she makes you cringe. *wince wince wince* I think she's really cool, although admittedly what she's doing is a bit beyond the pale.



I used to dream of doing something like her, but now I think we'll probly stop at bees for livestock and not get a whole lot wilder than a few fruit trees and a small water feature in the garden department. Um...I think. Heh.

Time to get brave and go measure our plot so I can draw up the blueprints and get this garden hacked out. I am being a total wimp about the numbers. Drawing to scale w/ a million measurements? Enough to make a green thumb quake in her boots.

Now what page was I on?

The Great House Hunt

Today was an errand day so most of it I was running around town, dragging the kids in and out of places of business, buckling and unbuckling and the at the end of the day, filling the gas tank to make up for it all.

BUT...this afternoon there was a small window of time when I was home...(just long enough to gulp lunch down and pull off naps)and today I started putting together my house hunting notebook!

(an apartment we considered when hunting for this one)

I took a small three-ring binder and filled it with the Realtor.com profiles of all the houses I am interested in and separated them into "Already Drove By And Looked At Them"(Further Action Needed)and "Still Need To Drive By." I also categorized them by town within those sections so that I can make sure to find all the houses in the same area when I have the next chance to do drive bys. I have been taking notes on the back of the Realtor.com profiles as I see houses to make sure I remember my thoughts on each place and if needed (say a profile doesn't show the front of the house at all) I take photos that can supplement the photos in the profile.

(the living room of our last apartment)

Today I also added a three ring notebook pocket to hold post-its, three pens (extras for realtors and A in case we need them) and two highlighters for noting the good and bad stats on a house profile. A while ago I sat down and brainstormed the things we: Want to Have, Would Consider Bonuses and Want to Avoid in a prospective house.

 (one of the houses I looked at last week, we hope to see the inside this weekend!)

The last thing on my list is to make a collage for the cover...hence the stack of decorating magazines you see above! I plan to peruse them for dream-home ideas and inspiration and then take scissors to the pages and hack and cut to my heart's content until I have two beautiful 10X13 collages to cover the front and back of my new notebook.

(a mountaintop chalet we saw in Switzerland)

Thus armed and inspired...I plan to try to find us a home of our own this year...perhaps even this spring!