Thursday, March 06, 2008

Tool Time

The Liliputian has slept through the night a couple nights in a row now. By George, I think we've got it. Although, maybe I don't have it yet. I accidentally let her fall asleep on me last night at about 5:40 for 20 minutes or so. She ate a good meal first, but I swear she wouldn't wake up for singing, burping, jiggling, cold hands, nothing. Until the Husband came upstairs and suggested I just put her down on the bed next to me. Oh...yeah. Oops. I think I just spend so much of my day with her sleeping on me, thinking I can't put her down or she'll wake up, that I forgot to use that quirk to my advantage when I could have. Oh well, she just stayed up about 30 minutes later last night than usual, so no disaster.

Today we've got the contractor in here doing some demo and construction. There's a room in the back of our house that leads out to the deck that the previous owners used as a family room. We're convering it to a pantry/utility room. The current door is into the hall. We're closing that off and adding a door through the kitchen. The kitchen's not tiny, but it's small. Perfectly functional for me, but we wanted a place for our chest freezer. We don't have a coat closet. We need a place for Chewy's crate. And I can't stand having the washer and dryer in the basement, so we're moving those up to this room, too (maybe the basement would be find without a baby, but lugging her and baskets of laundry up and down those stairs, in addition to the stairs to the top floor? No way, Jose.). So today they're just moving the door. The Husband is thinking about trying to put the tile down himself--it will be the same tile we have in the kitchen, extended into this utility room. He's never done it before, but he works with a few guys who have a lot of experience with it and they say it's easy as long as you read up on how to do it. And you save a ton of money.

Anyway, the Liliputian is sleeping upstairs in her crib right now, as they tear giant holes in my wall. She fell asleep in the Moby, while I was puttering around trying to make space for my coffee maker among the workmen. I was just settling down to nurse her and let her nap on me at about 8:00 because I realized she'd been up for over two hours...except that she hadn't, I realized, when I looked down and saw that she was already asleep. I walked upstairs, gingerly unwrapped my little Papoose from the Moby (a tricky thing, if you've ever seen one of those Mobys [Mobies?]. They're about 27 ft long. Well...maybe not quite that long.), and put her in her crib. Half an hour and enough noise to wake the dead later, she's still asleep. Amazing. I told the Husband yesterday that, although I had planned to wait until next week to start the sleep training for naps, I felt like she was ready now. But I thought we'd have to get blinds or something up on her windows first. Apparently not.

Window treatments are such a nightmare. There was hardware up on her windows for blinds, but we took it down because there were no blinds. Then the Husband found the blinds in the basement, but now we don't know if we still have the hardware somewhere or threw it away because we didn't think there was a reason to save it. Of course, you can't find anything because the house looks like a moving van threw up in it. So all she has on her windows right now are some flimsy white curtains that don't even cover the four side by side windows in her little dormer. And the Husband needs serious darkness in order to sleep, so I have to either buy or make some curtains with blackout lining for our bedroom. It kills me to buy them because they're so expensive and so easy, in theory, to make. But making curtains requires unpacking enough stuff from my sewing room to find everything I need and finding a place to set it all up...eventually we're going to finish the basement and I'll have a sewing room down there, but in the meantime we'd hoped to just leave it all in boxes. So, I don't know what we'll do there. Any thoughts?

3 comments:

Sarah Berry said...

I can't believe you guys started the construction projects only a week or so after moving in! You have some impressive stamina! Then again, not being a home-owner, maybe that's how it's done.

As for the curtains, I firmly believe that there are times when life is chaotic and solutions are needed that you just have to buy your way out of them. I know very well the husband's need for blackout curtains, so I would just buy them and cross it off the urgent list.

die Frau said...

Yeah...that's not how we've done it.... Curtains, I say sew 'em yourself, normally, since I know you can, but I have to agree with Sarah here--save yourself aggravation, buy the damn curtains, and move on to the next phase. Do you really want to drag out your machine, eke out a temporary space, and sew curtains while workmen do their thing and you attempt to nap train the baby? Let it go, Indiana!
We have old curtains my mom gave me that we'll put up in the living room, although I'm sure they have to be altered in some way and I really don't have the knowhow to do it myself. They'll need shortening--is that difficult?

OK, now I've been talking about me, me, me. Whoops. I'm sure it will all go fine.

Strongmama said...

I also say just chalk it up to getting settled into your new home. There will be plenty of opportunities to save money and sew once the boxes are unpacked and there isn't a demolition crew in your house. Just another thing to add to the ever growing "we need to buy" list you have when you buy a house.