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?

Stone Walls and Kitchen Stoves

The weather is crisp, the air still and all of the leaves are starting to blush yellow and red. A and I spend the early morning hacking out the burning bushes and jet-berry that have grown up around the back edge of our property and then weeding and reassembling (in a rough way) the resurrected stone wall we hadn't known was along the back edge of our yard. Lovely to discover these little secrets. I had some qualms about ripping out the burning bushes right before they put on their amazing fall display but after the main trunks were sawed off and their various myriad sprouts trimmed away we were amazed at all the wide open space we'd been hiding there at the back of our lawn. I am still not sure what will go there to replace the errant shrubs. A second row of vegetable beds? A row of blackberries? A long strawberry bed? Who knows! But even if nothing else goes in there, it is amazing to discover that we have this hidden asset in space.

In other news, our rather ancient stove is now a bit dysfunctional. Not completely, just in a creeping sort of way. You remember this stove I'm sure...I mentioned it here and here. Well, welcome to a new stage in the saga.

First the oven thermostat is quite off...by as much as 50-100 degrees...too hot, oddly enough. I fixed that by adding a little temperature gauge that hangs inside the oven door. Then the broiler has never worked, which never seemed to matter much until our grill stopped working and then I was very sad about the whole notion. After the broiler the oven door stopped opening all the way. I had to move the racks up higher in the oven in order to be sure that I could get pans in and out without burning myself on the oven door. And sometimes it still makes me spill food off the pan, into the bottom of the oven with the angle of tilt that is required to maneuver the food in through the reduced opening. Pizzas are a particular challenge. Then this weekend two more disabilities visited our poor stove. First the oven door handle came off...fixable for now although hard to say how sturdy it is in the long run. And then one of the burners on the top of the stove had a sudden glitch which means that it now won't turn off.....worse yet, it is stuck at high power. We have resorted to popping the breaker after we finish making a meal to keep the stove from burning our house down while we're not looking.

Time for a new stove. That's expensive but also kind of exciting so, I'll go with the excitement part of it and be glad that we have a new subscription to Consumer Reports online to help with selecting a good bet financially. I am really relishing the thought of a modern self-cleaning oven, a smooth-top and another appliance with all the buttons and knobs working appropriately. Cold weather is calling and that will mean more baking and roasting and braising, and doing all of that in a newer oven sounds really alluring. I have a bunch of bananas in the freezer that want to be made into chilly leaf-kicking day, slices of toasty quick-bread with generous dollops of butter and hot mugs of tea. I can't wait to meet you, New Stove! Somewhere you're out there sitting in a giant box in a company warehouse, and soon you'll be in our house and I can promise once you come to live with us, the happy task of baking many birthday cakes, roasting many family Sunday dinners and a lot of happy wiping with toddler sponges! Please come quickly!

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Busy Lizzy

 Cherries ripened so fast that we missed the picking season window! Oops! On to blueberries and peaches!

Here I am late at night, finally blogging for the first time this week. We've had a real doozy of a week beginning so far. Nothing terrible. In fact, nothing bad at all...just a whirlwind of activity. We've had home inspections, I had a visit from a friend, I've been painting with my Tuesday art group, the boys have been to the park and every night when we drive A home from work he's on a constant stream of phone calls. "Hello, this is A calling, I'm: looking for a stone mason, checking on the results of the radon test, wondering what paperwork you still need form us, wondering if we can arrange a walk-through, returning your call, trying to see if we can get a reference, hoping you can meet at 4, wondering why the document never showed up, and leaving you my fax number." Etc.

Whew.

Yeah. And that's pretty much what it feels like around here. Panic, rush, run, dash...and yet somehow, things are remarkably cheery. We all wish that Dee would take notes from the baby on sleep habits and work through this latest round of nightmares he's cultivated but, otherwise, life is pretty great. A bit over manic but great.

The boys, unimpressed with the endless stream of phone calls in the car

on the way home.

Today the landlord did that walk-through of our apartment with his realtor that I was stressing about and the house is frighteningly clean and orderly. Mostly orderly, don't look too closely at the mirrors or the cupboard doors and please don't inspect under any of the beds but, hey...it looks a whole lot better than it did. We haven't heard anything from him so we're hoping we passed muster and that things continue to move on well. The home inspection on our prospective white colonial went very well so from our end of things we're chugging right along on the moving process. Just before I let the landlord into our place he told A on the phone that he wants to start setting up showings with hopeful residents so, that means he's planning on our August move being real too. And I am saying over and over to myself..."I can keep this house orderly enough for impromptu showings non-stop from now until the end of August. I can." (Tell me you all believe in me...even if you know me well enough to know better.)

Our prospective home!

Planning big urns of annuals on those from steps in front of the pillars, a flag in the 

flag holder and a big excavation of those tired crew-cut yews!

But yes, life ticks on. The baby is one month old already...two days ago. I can't believe it. I am planning to take his one month portraits tomorrow...acne or no, my conscience wouldn't let me rest if I didn't give him his photographic due. And um...I'm getting some of the birth announcements all addressed and am hoping to mail them right soon. After I take said one month portraits I will share with you all the newborn portraits that I never did get around to posting because I was hoping to get the birth announcements (on which a few are featured) out first so as not to spoil the effect but, we're about to get quite behind if I don't just share. So, yes...I will.

Smiling for Daddy at his Father's Day meal

 

And also...the baby is smiling. Really, responsively, gurglingly smiling...(first daddy-grins were on Father's Day, no less!) And he's grown out of newborn clothes and I really, really need to figure out what I'm going to call him here. Need inspiration.

Listening to the rain dribbling blackly outside my bedroom window and feeling very cozy and as it is now the very late hour of 9:38 in the evening, I think I will retire. "The early bird....etc!"

Savoring Minutia

Sometimes you just have to stop and appreciate the tiny things. Stunning little bits that you miss if you're always dashing around with the diaper bag falling off your shoulder shouting, "I really mean it! One more time young man and you will have a time-out!" You know.

Last night A took the boys outdoors for me after he got home from work (as is his fairly frequent habit now, bless the man) and I took the camera to the back yard where I enjoyed the blessed quiet. Mmm....nothing like you, the camera and a little natural minutia to take your breath away.

Look at that dew! Stunning, I tell you!

And here I am, putting my John Hancock on the official paperwork to seal the acceptance of our offer on the big white colonial. (which will need much cooler name if we end up living there) Tonight we went over with the inspector and he gave the whole place the once over. And the long and short of it is that its a very sound old house. I was delighted. The very friendly neighbors came over the hedge to cheer with us and let their pug dog lick the boys faces and then we meandered around the yard and dreamed about which shrubs to tear out and how to prune the apple tree and which spot was best for the vegetable garden. The neighbor gardens. *grin grin grin* Am very happy.