Xiaoniu 小妞

This weekend I was uncharacteristically productive. I was able to kick Sue and Emelia out ask Sue to take Emelia out for a few hours so that I could get some stuff done.

Saturday I was finally able to put on the first rust-primer coat on the iron railing from the garage. That takes 24 hours to dry so I finished up cleaning the basement, including vacuuming all of the dust and nails. Moved all the stuff that has accumulated in the garage to its rightful place.

I already took care of taking the lights and tree down on Friday. I packed it away for another 11 months in storage and pulled out some basics for the new baby. The workshop is now clutter free and usable.

Sunday I was able to put on a thick (it goes on thick) coat of gloss black oil based paint. Excellent stuff and what a finish it makes for iron. It looks very impressive. I can’t wait to get the thing out of the basement and screwed down to the stairs. I’ll be using stainless steel fasteners instead of the cheap steel ones I pulled off. I’m hoping to keep rust to a minimum.

I put up some decorations in Emelia’s room, including a picture from great-grandma and put on a new toilet seat. With all of that done I was able to start working on other small projects: Fixing the cabinets in the 2nd floor bath, hanging a curtain in the 1st floor bath and building a shelf in the basement for electronics.

I need the shelf to hold some networking equipment; I’m moving it downstairs in preparation for running network cables into the living room and possibly hooking the telephone up for Vonage. I still need to work on the phone wires though. They are in rough shape and I’m sure that at least one or two of the six lines hooked up are not used.

I rounded off the night by putting the second car seat into the Accord. Emelia needs to get used to riding behind me and with mommy in front. That also means having her sister right next to her in the carrier/car seat. It fits perfectly, which is why we got the bigger car. It’ll be a full car with all four of us in there, but it is designed for it. Things will only get more interesting as the kids get older.

As for number two, we are still trying to figure out where we are. The doctor seems to use a different calendar which means they figure in one more week in the number of weeks to go. We can’t seem to figure out why. In addition Sue seems to feel this one might be a little earlier than expected. Not imminent, but maybe a little earlier than the estimated due date. Mother’s intuition.

This is important to us since the doc wants to do another ultrasound, but not too early. They want to do it three weeks before the due date, but that may be later than reality. It also plays into our plans for which hospital we go to this time. Different hospitals offer different levels of service and different hospitals offer different kinds of service. Go figure.

One last note before closing (and heading for bed). Emelia has recently started to string together words into short sentences. She’s still amazing in what she can comprehend and respond to, but now she can really get her point across using her own words. It is simply amazing to watch. Her ability to do things physically has improved well. She uses her doodle pad (magnetic thingy) and holds the pen like piece properly. We never pushed her on proper holding, she just picked it up. That’s our little person.

So I lied. One very last note. We now have a Chinese name for number two. We’ll share it when she’s born. It’ll probably be a little easier for most to pronounce than Xuemei.