Category: House & Home

Feeling Crafty

 

Can you see my boppy slipcover, crochet baby blanket and at least two baby hats here? No?.. Well then, I better get to work! Haha. Just when I think I am finally caught up with craft projects, I go to Joanns and Michaels and stock up on more supplies.

I can’t wait to make our baby boy a super fuzzy and warm baby blanket with the “bunny tail”  yarn on the far right. I had gone to Michaels to look for some silk flowers to put in a vase in our bedroom, but instead walked out with six balls of yarn! My stash is slowly growing out of a second storage basket. I may have a problem. :)

I looked on Etsy for pattern ideas for that fluffy yarn and found one made on a diagonal that looked 10x more awesome than any of the other ones I saw.. What I don’t understand is how they can afford to be so cheap! I bought enough for a standard sized baby blanket and it was close to $35 just for the yarn, and I see people selling the completed blankets for less than $30.. They must buy in bulk. I almost thought of messaging a few sellers and asking! And I may still do that. I’m sure there’s not that large of a market for them, I’m just curious as to how they do it.

Another random Etsy note is that I mailed one of my reindeer hats to Spain today! SPAIN! Wasn’t my first international shipment, but the first was to Canada, which doesn’t really count because there’s just a border between us and them! I was really interested to see how much it would cost using the same ‘ol padded envelope I use for all my shipments and it was $7.68. Interesting.

I think that’s enough random-ness for one post! Will mention that I am 27 weeks pregnant today and just booked my 3D/4D ultrasound for Oct 9th!! Three weeks and a day until I see our baby boy’s cute little face! :)

A Perk to Living Alone

This morning I discovered a perk to living alone.

Today marks three weeks that the hubby has been away.. Only about a bazillion more to go. Literally, probably only about thirty more weeks, give or take a month at any point in time. The thing is, we’re like 8% done with the deployment!! Yeah. I would be more excited about that, but eight percent is hardly something to celebrate. It’s the smallest piece of pie in a pie chart. It’s the one everyone saves for last.

Random rants aside, I have spent the last three weeks in a whirl-wind of activity. Catching up and falling behind on crochet orders for my Etsy Shop, and attempting to catch up on about a month of neglected house work that had been glazed over for the  most part while he was still here. I can’t even begin to describe how much stuff I found on our kitchen table! I can actually have dinner there now.

Today though, feels like a lazy day. After three weeks of just mind-numbing activity, I am ready for a break. So I’m sitting here thinking of all the stuff I planned to accomplish this weekend. Had wanted to vacuum the whole house, steam clean the hard wood floors and bathroom floors, deep clean my kitchen, organize my craft stuff, tackle the extremely disorganized office.. But instead of doing anything I am just sitting here enjoying the smell of my mulled apple cider candle; enjoying the quiet where the most I hear is the hum of the refrigerator. It’s a lazy day. I probably won’t get much done at all, and the best part is, there’s no one here to tell me to do anything.

Aimless :: without purpose or direction

I am having a hard time. I can’t exactly put my finger on a definition of how I feel, but it goes something like this.

I have a list of thing to get done today. Laundry, dishes, sort and fold some baby clothes, clean something, crochet something, get to the gym, etcetera. It really feel silly to even complain but I feel like I’m walking in circles here.

It’s been half a month since my hubby left for deployment and I feel like I’m getting nowhere; but at the same time I’m not sure where I’m supposed to be headed. I feel almost aimless, like I am just wandering around finding things to keep me occupied until our baby boy is born. That list of things to do today might as well have been copied and pasted in part, or in whole, onto every day of the past two weeks. I am quickly getting tired of it all.

And maybe that is just how it is going to be the next few weeks. I really hope they go by much faster than the last two have……… Anyway, enough rambling for one morning. I believe I have a list of things waiting for me.

Memory in the Making

A little over twelve hours have passed since I dropped my husband off at the ship for the deployment.

I said I wouldn’t cry today, but I have a feeling that I might lose it while writing this post. My eyes have been burning all day from the tears they are holding back.

I miss him, like I would on any day that he didn’t come home for the night.. like a duty day, except I won’t be picking him up tomorrow morning, or the next day, or next week, or next month.

Next year. That’s a daunting, overwhelming idea. I have nothing better to count down to than our anniversary because it’s at the end of the month they might be home. 245 days to go. That’s a school year. That’s almost an entire pregnancy. It feels like forever tonight.

I think I’ve been in denial since the end of last week. I just can’t believe that they left. And I can’t believe that it won’t just be for six weeks like it’s been so many other times this year. I don’t know when it will hit me. I don’t think I want it to hit me. I’ll wake up tomorrow and have breakfast and send off some Etsy orders at the post office and go about my day business as usual. And hopefully before I know it it’ll be another memory.

No tears here tonight, I’m too tired to break down..

Here today, but gone..

We are all struggling. The Stennis wives, fiances and girlfriends. Maybe even other family members.

They’re leaving again. Here today, gone… some time soon, very soon. It’s easy to point out the stages of grief while scanning the various support groups for the women of the ship. Most are in denial. A few are angry and even less than those have no idea what is about to hit them.

Eight months is a long time. Half way parties are being planned for December, but I’ll be having a different sort of celebration. Welcoming a son to the world with the help of my mom, while his daddy is half a world away, literally. I’m not nervous about that, but the fear idea of holding “down the fort” up until that point has started to sink in. It started when my husband began the final project he would complete here this year; fixing up our laundry room by stacking the washer and dryer. Seems like such a simple thing, but when you realize after that all projects fall on you, it’s overwhelming.

What if something breaks? What if something goes wrong? I don’t even want to think about it now. I know what’s coming on the grand scheme of things but no one can prepare you for the day to day ins and outs of deployed life as the one left at home.

Next week when the ship pulls out for the final time this year a different sort of story will begin. Another one to tell our baby boy before he falls asleep, once he is no longer kicking my bladder, that is.

I love Washington

It’s midnight and I should still be sleeping, but the rain woke me up.

It’s been a miserably hot week in Bremerton. We bought this house knowing it had no ceiling fans or air conditioner, because we were assured we wouldn’t need them. Psh!!? 87 degrees is hot at noon, but it’s even worse when it’s still 80 plus degrees inside at 9pm.

A few locals have mentioned this heat snap being out of the norm for the area, and I hope they are right!! I can’t stand the heat anymore. Pregnancy has turned me into a walking furnace as it is.

*yawn* Anyway, back to dream land I go. That’s another odd pregnancy thing, when I wake up, I am awake and ready to go, no matter what time it is! haha.

Nursery in the Making

I knew from the moment we bought this house which room would be the nursery. It was an obvious choice. The sailor thought it should be the smaller bedroom, but I explained to him that there’s no way a crib and other baby furniture would fit in there! Especially not the large glider chair I am buying very shortly.

So the “second bedroom,” – where we used to store boxes and random things that found new homes on closet shelves – was cleaned out last week by yours truly. It was a four hour ordeal. I don’t know how so many things came to be stashed there. Nevertheless, it was spotless, move in ready, so I got to work. The floorboards, windows and doors were taped, a plan was drawn up. And then I ran into the problem that nothing in that room was straight! I wanted to put up modified chair-molding, but I couldn’t measure a straight line from the floor and I couldnt’ measure a straight line from the ceiling. I called my dad and he reassured me that most rooms in older houses have settled and not even a laser level is helpful in those cases. So I modified my plan, bought a yardstick with a built in level and decided to wing it!

My “as close to perfect as I can get” line is on the wall and I’m waiting for the paint to dry before I do some more taping and painting. I can’t wait to reveal the final look! :)