Bliss & Miscellaneous

Who thought it was a good idea to list our house for sale at 8 months pregnant?

…oh yeah…that was me.

I mentioned before we’d put our house up for sale but since we weren’t really in a hurry to sell, we’d just stuck a “For Sale By Owner” sign in the yard and listed it on Zillow. We’re still not really in a hurry but we’d been getting more calls about it and knowing that people were starting to look again we figured we’d give it a shot.

I feel like all I’ve been doing is cleaning…and it’s only been a week! On the plus side, I’ve gotten kind of good at the 30 minute “power-clean” (also known as shoving toys and tiny clothing in the ottoman & drawers or any other place potential buyers won’t be looking and banishing diapers to the garage trash). I guess if nothing else it’s motivation to keep the house neat so I have less to do each time I get a text that we have a showing. Luckily we told our realtor that we weren’t leaving for every showing because trying to drag a toddler out of the house and keep him entertained is more than I could mentally handle now that I’ve reached the point in this pregnancy that pretty much everything hurts after walking around for more than 45 minutes. I’ve been relying heavily on Sesame Street and games on my phone to keep him from throwing toys everywhere while people are actually viewing the house.

So there is that.

What else?

I also made a few more pages for the busy book including Imagine Our Life’s Sock Matching page (oh eem gee – that was a lot of pieces).

The second one I made was a shape matching page.

We took Baby E to the library recently and he picked out this book. Not a whole lot of text here…but he loved it and ran around for days afterwards saying “Go go go…shapes!”

Shapes have become a HUGE deal. He loves playing shape games on my phone and matching the felt shapes on this page.

Lastly we celebrated my grandmother’s 90th birthday this past weekend, which meant having my entire family to our house (I didn’t know we’d be listing our house when I offered to have it here). Here’s some prettiness from the party…

Oh yeah, and I’m nearly full term so I did manage to pull some of Baby E’s clothes out of storage for Baby 2B and I’m sooo glad I was organized – all I had to do was put them in a drawer.

Poor kid, he doesn’t even have a nursery (because really he won’t need it for a few months and we could use the guest room for visitors once he’s born).

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

 

 I recently made my first busy book page! Of course this means I have to make more than one page so that it’s an actual book (yikes), so we’ll see how far I actually get.

Busy Book Barn Page with Finger Puppets

Of course I did tons of Etsy & Pinterest research. In doing so I found this AMAZING blog, Imagine Our Life. She has the most adorable Busy Book pages (and templates!) plus lots of adorable projects she’s done for her son. She didn’t have a template for this particular page so I’m including the one I made which was kind of a combination of lots of barn/finger puppet pages I liked.

All the finger puppet I hand sewed because the pieces were so tiny, but the barn I did on the sewing machine. I did have a couple of “happy accidents” like when I realized that my five finger puppets wouldn’t fit in the pocket (whoops), I added the “grass” pocket for the cow outside and made the window a pocket for the rooster.

Isn’t this little piggy too cute?!

“Piggy” is one of E’s favorite animals right now.

My personal favorite is the cow, which also happened to be the most difficult since I had to sew it together and then add his side spots.

Barn doors closed, the animals are sleeping!

Here are my templates, free for personal use!

There are a couple of things missing that I added like the “grass” pocket, but you can just kind of cut those as needed.

OH-EM-GEE…they’ve struck.
The 2-year molars have begun their reign of terror
in our household.

This is what a sleep deprived toddler looks like…still kind of adorable
(his Mommy looks way worse).

Baby E has never been a great teether, he gets a runny nose EVERY SINGLE time and drools so much I’m ready to connect to him an IV drip to prevent dehydration. But these…THESE 2 YEAR MOLARS…they’re something else entirely. I was ready to call our pastor to see if he could perform an exorcism, but we go to a Baptist church and I think that’s just a Catholic thing (pity, because that probably would probably be a quicker solution to the problem – than just waiting it out). However, I did check to see if Baby E had sprouted horns (you know, just in case).

About a week ago he started to get a runny nose but since it’s pretty common for him to catch little colds with all the socializing we do I figured it was just that. I assumed it would get worse, he may get a fever and then he’d be over it in a few days. But it didn’t get worse, it just kept running and then he started rubbing his cheeks and his ears. And then he decided that no one in our house needs to sleep. In the past week an a half he slept ONE night thru the night…and we are feeling it.

The worst part is he’s not really all that cranky during the day. Aside from the occasion tantrum he hasn’t been too terribly clingy or whiney but at night he turns into an absolute maniac and bedtime becomes a 2-4 hour process (sometimes we’ll get an hour nap in there before he wakes up). Not just your normal, “I don’t want to go to bed” crying but meltdown, keeping-our-neighbors-awake, inconsolable screaming and after finally falling asleep around midnight, you’d think he’d be exhausted and sleep thru till morning but he’s still waking up about 4 hours later. So, lucky for us, he’s still his adorable self around family and at school but we get all the joy of Mr. Hyde for ourselves.

After a little Googling, it seems that the only thing we can do is wait for them to come in and say our prayers to St. Acetaminophen (the patron saint of teething toddlers), that it doesn’t take too long.

Plan “B” involves husband and I sleeping sometime after both the kids go to college.