Quite the busy week

This week has just been full of interesting things. I finished the bunk bed last weekend and the kids have just loved it to pieces since we assembled it. The set of stairs as opposed to a ladder is a total winner. They both run up and down it just for the fun of it multiple times a day. The bed ended up a tad higher than I expected it to be, but with the railings, the kids seem to do really well on it. We've already outlawed jumping on the top bunk, so without that it feels alright safety wise. I certainly was concerned about it once we had it all setup and the kids were going wild, but as expected they calmed down and that helped me to relax a bit as well. Genevieve took one very slow motion tumbled off the staircase one day and that's all it took for her to be careful on it. We've done some very fun things with it already, such as some good old indoor hammocking yesterday. The kids loved it so much:

Another thing I did this week is get well on my way to finishing Genevieve's bed. I'm just building her a platform bed to slide under the bunk bed. It'll only be about 18 inches off the ground, if even that. The wood is all cut and sanded and I'm just waiting for a good time to to stain it and then it can be assembled. I have some polyurethane on order that won't come for a few days, so I'm not in a huge rush to get it done. For the moment her mattress is just on the floor and that works just fine. She looks so ridiculously tiny when she's asleep on a full-sized mattress, but it's awesome at night when we're doing our bedtime routine and reading stories. We can all pile on that bed and it's fun.

Our apartment started to feel like a construction zone this week because we took down both the toddler bed and the crib in order to put the kids' room together. They hung out in our hallway stacked up all week and the wood for Genevieve's bed is half in our living room and half on our back porch. It was getting a bit crowded, so Bill and I tackled another somewhat big project, re-organizing our storage garage, yesterday morning. That makes me feel so much better. The toddler bed found a home in the back of that, as we won't need it for a long time, our bikes are able to just be wheeled in there now instead of getting stacked on top of everything, and we can actually walk in and out. What a relief! The crib is just stored in the corner of our office for the moment, but that's fine until we want to pull it out. It'll be a while because I have an awesome mini crib my friend lent me that will last for probably six months.

Since I was in the middle of several projects, plus trying to read my book club book for the month before I had to take the book back, I figured heck, why not start something new? I had seen a tutorial to make some of those gauze blankets that are all the rage for a way cheaper price than they come at the stores, so I've been working on some of those. I've still got several to make, but they are going to be amazing and those lucky souls that I give them to, plus my baby here in a couple months, are going to be very happy. :)

Oh, and one other very exciting thing happened this week. I did my level best to break my pinkie toe walking it into the leg of my desk on Friday. Oh did it hurt! Still does, actually. I don't think it's broken but it's got a lovely bruise and is super sore when it gets bumped or moved around. It doesn't really matter if it's broken or sprained or just bruised. I'm sure it'll take a while to feel better. For now I'm just avoiding my children's feet as much as possible. It's amazing how many times they step on mine in a day. Please ignore my somewhat chubby pregnancy feet anyway in this picture. I just feel like showing off the impressive bruise. It was a bit darker the first day, but I don't often get good bruises, so this one is impressive. Case in point, the headboard of the toddler bed totally crashed on my shoulder yesterday while we were moving stuff around in the storage garage. There's a huge sore spot there without the slightest hint of color showing.

And finally, amidst all the rest of the craziness going on around here, the kids just continue to do amusing things. Case in point, the way Genevieve decided was comfortable to play a game on Bill's tablet:

Or the way they watched a movie together one day this week:

Teaser

The loft bed is essentially done! I'm just waiting on it to dry before we assemble it and I have to cut the slats to hold the mattress tomorrow. It looks great, but since I haven't taken any pictures of it and am not going to until it's all assembled, everyone will just have to take my word for it. :)

Next on the list: build Genevieve's platform bed to go under it. Well, for now it'll just be a mattress on the floor until I save a few funds to get the wood, but it'll be super cheap to build, so no worries. It's going to be this bed sans headboard. I was about to say I wasn't going to modify it at all this time around, but actually I'm going to change the legs for something nicer, so nevermind. Good times.

Oh, and building a bed during my third trimester? Surprisingly not that bad. The first few days I worked on it were hard because I was moving a lot of wood around and that made me tired, but I actually ended up finding some more efficient methods of doing some things since my back or legs or some other body part would get tired and sore more easily. Bonus for me!

Happy Mother's Day!

I like Mother's Day. It's nice. It doesn't make me feel inadequate or like I'm doing a terrible job. Yesterday was a good day. Everything wasn't perfect. I have a really strange cold that is playing havoc on my ears. Yet church was nice. I got to work on Spencer's bunk bed during the afternoon and chat with Bill while he made a delightful dinner. The kids were somewhat crazy, but honestly, that's the phase they're in, so it's pretty normal. Life is pretty ordinary right now, in that good kind of ordinary where lots of things are right and the things that aren't I can handle. I'll take it!

Real adults

Bill and I have entered the world of real adulthood. Why, you ask? Weren't we already adults? I mean we're in our late 20s/early 30s, so doesn't that just automatically happen? Well maybe, but yesterday we made a defining decision that makes us actual adults. We went out and bought a minivan. lol!

See this is the thing. He and I regularly get mistaken for early 20s or sometimes even teenagers. I think I do less now because I usually have a couple of tagalongs with me and of course I'm pregnant, but honestly, if I didn't have the kids and wasn't wearing my wedding ring, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I got sidelong looks wondering why I was so young and pregnant. This isn't a bad thing, I know. I appreciate that in 20 years if we still look super young that others might be jealous. I hope the young genes stick around. I like them. By the same token, it's nice to be taken seriously. If I roll up in a minivan and my two and soon to be three kids hop out, there's no question I am at least somewhat capable. :) But when we explode like sardines out of the tiny Elantra? Yeah, that gets no respect.

Hahahaha! Whether any of that is true or not, I'm really excited about the fact that we got our van now. We had planned to wait until after next year's tax return and get a new-ish model, but after talking through our Dave Ramsey financial advice influenced goals, we realized we were going about this purchase all wrong. I had a couple good conversations with my mom and sister this last week that triggered a great conversation with Bill about what we really wanted and needed at this point. So rather than getting suckered in looking at pretty new van options, we decided the best idea would be to get a van not necessarily much newer than the Hyundai we already had, with a reasonable number of miles on it, and have it get us through the rest of grad school and hopefully a while longer. At some future point we can upgrade if we like, but for now it's really just that we need more seats and cargo room than in our current vehicles, not that we needed an upgrade or could even really afford one. I have been feeling uneasy about the whole purchasing a vehicle thing for a while now because it didn't feel like the financial part was going to work right, but this all fell into place literally Friday night. We ended up searching online for a few hours that night, found a promising van fairly close by, went out there Saturday to test drive, and ultimately negotiated what felt like a very good deal on it that we were able to pay for with the cash we've been saving. What a fantastic feeling!

So there you have it. We are official minivan owners and quite pleased about it. And now for a tip or two on what made the buying process way easier. First, shopping online is wonderful. We didn't have to drag the kids from dealer to dealer and deal with asking the salespeople to show us what they had. Since it was last minutes, we took them with us. Instead we just went in, said we wanted to test drive this one vehicle, and then negotiated from there when it fit our needs. If it hadn't been what we wanted, we would have just left and gone to our next option another day. Two, we had a plan for what we wanted to spend, so nothing they said made us suddenly interested in blowing our budget. Three, we did our research beforehand on this particular vehicle and what Kelly Blue Book said it was worth. The dealership was one where they claimed they set good prices so no negotiation was needed, but they were still way higher than they ought to be. Since we printed off the KBB report and brought it in, we had a place to negotiate from and were able to come up with a deal that worked for both of us. Knowledge is power! Four, I'm pretty sure bringing along two little kids made the whole process go faster. No salesperson shooting the breeze just because, dragging stuff out. It still took a lot longer than I expected to do the paperwork, despite not doing any financing. My heavens, they need to speed that process up, but we made it through. :) Anyway, it was fun and I really appreciated being armed with some understanding of how to negotiate. Thank you Negotiations class in my Master's degree program!  You have come in handy yet again!

2006 Nissan Quest.