This is a few days late, but here’s my 14 week belly shot. Starting the 15th week today. Our next appointment is on the 10th so hopefully we’ll find out the date for the BIG ultrasound. We can’t wait! I had another dream last night it was a boy – hopefully my mind isn’t playing tricks on me and this is intuition.
Got a bit more of the patio installed today, a 7 X 8 section to be exact. Only 46 tiles installed today in total. It is taking a very long time as I have to level each tile by hand before locking it into place.
If I ever do this again I will definitley be forming it up and trying to screed the whole thing before laying down the tiles.
I intend to at least get 100 sq ft of patio in total done tomorrow that will leave one or two more days of install after this weekend to wrap it up completley.  The entire patio dimesions are 10 X 16 so I have a LONG way to go yet before I can call this job complete.
I had a photo but it will have to wait until tomorrow
Edit:
Added the photos.
Well the weekend arrived and we have been hard at work getting our new patio installed. Perhaps the hardest part about laying a paver brick patio is getting your base laid out properly. If the base isn’t level then your patio will look like shit.
Jim, Deb and John came over to help out today and I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the base put in properly if they hadn’t helped out.
f we took a tiller to the soil and loosened it up then squared off the area with mason twine and then leveled it out by hand. Then we put down some landscape fabric, followed by crushed granite, then some paver sand.
I managed to get nine tiles placed and locked in and its surprisingly square for the time being. Hopefully I can repeat the trend tomorrow and get the remaining 151 put in place. The new patio is going to be 16X10. Once that is complete we are going to put in some new rock and sod, and hopefully I can get some flower beds made. The deck was a big selling point in us purchasing this house so we are going to have to put in a lot of work to make the backyard more presentable for potential buyers when we ever decide to sell.
Kelly took some pics of he whole ordeal today so I have attached a few here. Hopefully tomorrow I have it complete and I can post some more.
Time for a shower now.. I stink.
So i wrapped up the second part of the deck demolition today. Took me quite a bit longer this time then last. I think this part of the deck was in better shape, thus much heavier. Once Kelly got home it only took about another ten minutes to wrap everything up.
Tomorrow sometime Lowe’s will be delivering our new patio tiles and the sand and rock for the installation. So Saturday we will get underway. Hopefully it will only take two days so I can enjoy the holiday on Monday. We will see, I think my boss may be out on Monday so I’m not sure if I’m on the hook for meetings. I would assume our customer has the day off as well, but HP is sometimes weird about holidays.
I just got a call back from the Maternal Fetal Medicine department at the hospital with my blood test results. Apparently everything looked good for this first part. The risk of Down’s Syndrome has dropped to 1 in 3,800! I was hoping for an even larger number but I know that’s still good. I have to go back for the second round of bloodwork as part of the sequential screening between 9/14-9/28 so I’m going to try and do that as early as possible so it’ll be over and done with. And I can just take the shuttle over to the hospital and get it done while I’m here without having to make a separate trip. The lady on the phone said the Cystic Fibrosis results generally take a little longer so those unforunately weren’t available today. At our appointment last week, the genetic counselor told us there’s a big push in Colorado for early detection and that all newborn’s are tested so I’m sure they’ll let me know if anything is abnormal. Yay for small victories!
I’m now 14 weeks along and the time is not going by nearly fast enough. This week the baby is supposed to be the size of a lemon, although last week it was the size of a peach and in my mind a peach is bigger than a lemon but okay. So far so good, still two more weeks until our next appointment. Hopefully we’ll be able to schedule the big ultrasound at that point.Â
This weekend we bought frames for the pictures we had professionally done a few weeks ago. We bought one for the picture of the whole family and then one for just Casey and I. Because we bought the frames that already have matting included, I had to find some of my scrapbooking corners so the pictures could slide into those and keep the pictures mounted in place. While going through my scrapbooking stuff, I decided I hadn’t scrapbooked in over a year so I worked on it this weekend. I manged to finish 11 pages but still have more to go before the album is finished. I have the rest of the album planned out there so hopefully next time I sit back down with it, things will move along even faster. I was sitting on the floor when I was doing this which caused my back to become really sore, couple that with my aching sciatic nerve that’s been bothering me for a couple of weeks now and I’m just a gimp today. The receptionist (who doesn’t know I’m pregnant) asked if I was limping and I told her I pulled something this weekend. Which I may have, I didn’t help with the deck for very long but I did help.
I went with my mom and grandma this weekend to several different fabric stores. We were on the search for the perfect bedding for the nursery. I had another complete bedding set, but after debating it for two months, Casey and I decided to send it back. A puppy theme was our first choice anyway, so now that grandma has her fancy new machine, she said she would make the bedding for us! We did find the material for the bedding and bought all of the fabric that was left. So hopefully we won’t need more or, we’ll have to hopefully track more down. We also picked up a couple of pieces of fleece that grandma is going to make baby blankets out of. I’ll post pics of the nursery and bedding once it’s all set up. The furniture isn’t even ordered yet, so it won’t be any time soon I don’t think.Â
I have Friday off so this week I’m working 10s so I don’t have to take any vacation time. It sucks so now I’m just looking forward to my 15 minute breaks since there’s no lunch to break the day up. I’m taking my first break in about 6 minutes and then my other one won’t be until later this afternoon. I’ve already been here almost 5 hours though.
Just wrapped up day one of our deck demolition. Was quite a bit more work then I had anticipated but its done, and only one more stage to go. We have a HUGE pile of rotten lumber near our side gate that we will have to take to the dump. We will probably rent a UHaul or something so we can get all the shit in one load.
Currently instead of replacing the deck we will probably make a hand laid brick patio. It will be a good project that Kelly and I can do easily with little to no tools other then those that we can make ourselves. Plus it will be significantly cheaper then replacing the existing deck.
Take a look at these pics and tell me if I was off my rocker by thinking that this thing needed to be replaced (aside from it not being permitted or up to code). That sure looks like rotten wood to me. Is that redwood (I dunno)? All in all I’m glad to see this part out, it really opens up the yard a lot and if we make a smaller patio and lay some sod our yard will be massive (well for this neighborhood).
And to top it all off Kelly bought me some beer for a hard days work. How great is that.
On the way back from the post office the other day and the civic rolled 150000 miles. After owning it for at least seven years I have placed over 100000 miles on it myself. It has driven coast to coast, drvien the entire length of I-70.
This car will never die.
At my 12 week appointment, we were talking with the doctor about my upcoming NT scan. I told her I read online that if the baby is cooperating that sometimes gender can be detected, even as early as the 13 weeks I was going in. She said it was true, if the baby cooperated and if the ultrasonographer was comfortable interpreting the goods, that the gender could be determined and if we wanted to know, then they’d tell us. I made it clear that we very much wanted to know when we were in there yesterday. The tech made sure to tell us that she usually doesn’t do this but while we were waiting for the baby to cooperate for the neck measuring portion, she peeked between the legs and did see *something*. She said that she wasn’t going to say out loud what she thought it was but that she’d never seen anything dangle quite like that between a girls legs before and that she couldn’t find the three tell-tale lines that would otherwise indicate girl. While all of the pictures for the hospital were labeled and she put “Boy???” on that one, ours aren’t. We did get one of the copies, but it’s still hard for us to tell for sure. She said we shouldn’t go painting any nurseries but that’s what she saw. When the perinatologist came in, he was even more hesitant to determine gender. I don’t see why they can’t just give a guess. It’s not like someone can sue them because they *guessed* the wrong sex. Or can they?Â
So along with the ultrasound yesterday and almost everyone swearing it’s a boy, we’re pretty sure it’s a boy too. As of yesterday, Justin and Robin were still maintaining it was a girl, and I guess we won’t know for sure until 18-20 weeks at my next ultrasound but now little Jude is going to have a playmate instead of a girlfriend. :) Or we hope. It seems like everything is going by so slowly. I’m hoping we can do the ultrasound at 18 weeks and won’t have to wait until our regularly scheduled 20 week appointment. I. Need. To. Know.
So I was on here last night and so distracted that I forgot to post a Happy Birthday to my Dad. It’d be one thing if I just didn’t post yesterday but I posted and didn’t even mention it. So even though I already told you over the phone and will see you tomorrow to celebrate – Happy Birthday, Dad!
