Into the third!

Oh man, second trimester, am I right? ::wistfully looks backwards in time::

I'm one whole week into the third trimester now - so you know, basically a pro - and I already can tell this is going to be... interesting? Not as awesome? Challenging?

Yesterday, at 1 day shy of 28 weeks. Stretching out and ruining non-maternity clothes because it is still inexplicably in the 50s and raining here EVERY DAMN DAY. WHY SPRING WHY WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO ANGER YOU SO. 

A few weeks ago - right around when we moved into our new place - I started getting these paralyzing, shooting pains through my right butt cheek. At first, I thought I had pulled my glute from all the squatting I'd been doing while packing (since bending over from the waist has become increasingly uncomfortable / impossible) but realized that there was no actual strained muscle to rub that would offer relief. After some research I concluded it was most likely my piriformis muscle, which is a wee muscle waaay under the glute that is next to (or intertwined with) the sciatic nerve. Which often gets strained or compressed due to the shifting pelvic alignment of pregnancy. Well! There you go. Luckily that only lasted about a week and a half, because there's not a whole lot you can do to treat or relieve that particular pain.

This was only 25 weeks, but at a day-long conference in downtown DC. My options for Preggo Business Wear are, uh, limited, to put it mildly. That tight white tank was not doing me any favors in the size olympics. 

Unfortunately, that transitioned into more traditional sciatic pain, and I now have a near-constant tight pain in my right lower back any time I'm sitting. Which is.. kind of a lot, considering I sit at a desk all day. I did get myself one of those exercise ball doohickeys though, and I spend about half my day bouncing around on that, which seems to help a little.

27 weeks. I took the picture on the right, then had a strong sense of deja vu.. and yup, I'd taken a virtually identical photo almost exactly a year prior. Total samesies, right? 

Other than my own literal growing pains, though, things continue to go pretty swimmingly. I'm more often just in a state of shock & dumbfounded-ness at my ever-increasing girth, and at the *violence* with which baby girl is moving around in there. "Active" seems to be an understatement for her. If I wasn't so sure there was only one of her in there, I'd assume she had recruited some friends for daily mosh pit sessions.

26 weeks. But the real excitement in this photo is I FINALLY GOT MYSELF A FULL LENGTH MIRROR!! 

I definitely miss the awesome renewed energy from the second trimester, though. That cut off dramatically, like a faucet being turned off, just days before officially hitting third tri. I now want to do nothing but lie on my couch with glazed eyes. Dragging myself to work every day seems challenging and unfair. I'm pretty useless every night once I get home, especially if I manage to also make dinner before collapsing prone onto the sofa.

And I still have THREE MONTHS to go! This seems both insane (HOW MUCH BIGGER CAN MY BELLY PHYSICALLY GET) and alarming (ONLY THREE MONTHS? I WILL HAVE AN ENTIRE HUMAN CHILD IN 3 MONTHS?!?!?!) and I flip smoothly between these two reactions about 14 thousand times a day.

The first thing I (finally) bought for baby girl's nursery! It's a print of a paper cut by Sarah Trumbauer, and I loooooove it. If / when we ever pick a name for this kid, I want to get one of her custom versions with  her name included on it, too.

On the one hand, it's awfully good there are still three months to go because WOWZA are we not ready for her yet. We officially moved into the new house 4 weeks ago, and it's been a slow process getting everything set up & unpacked. We have a lot more house than we did before, so trying to figure out what to put where, how to distribute our now-seemingly-meager furniture supply between rooms, and ordering more furniture to fill the most egregious gaps, is slow going.

The cats testing out our new-to-us chaise longue, toted back last weekend from my parents' house in NJ

In a ridiculously well timed twist of fate, my parents ended up selling their house over a year before they initially intended to and are closing this weekend - meaning they had to downsize dramatically at exactly the same time we found ourselves with a new house with excessive storage space. And with a lawn and property that requires maintenance and care, but no tools with which to do so.

...So we went to NJ and loaded up a 15 foot UHaul with virtually the entire contents of their shed and storage room. BOOM. We now have a lawn mower! And a snow blower! And a circular saw, and a jigsaw, and like 12 other kinds of saws, and a power washer, and a power painter, and shovels and rakes and belt sanders and every other tool my dad bought over 40 years for house projects. It's kind of awesome.

Oh, and also the PIANO.

::heart eye emojis for days::

I need to find the box of piano books (oh. hmm. and figure out a storage solution for piano books!) and get playing for baby girl.

BUT, all of this means there has still been almost no focus on preparing for the whole BABY part of things. I did finally register, because my mom was getting increasingly alarmed at my inability to set a date for a baby shower, but I couldn't send out invites to a shower until I had a registry, and I had no time to research enough baby items for a registry soooo nothing happened for many weeks. BUT it is now done, invites have been sent, date is set, and I now get presents every day in the mail and it is VERY VERY FUN. Newsflash, guys: baby things are FREAKING ADORABLE! So many cute tiny articles of clothing are showing up on our doorstep!

And, uh, it all goes, still in the box, into the empty room that will be her nursery. Eventually. Once we buy furniture and stuff.

We're also holding the shower at our house - in exactly 4 weeks - so we're using that as incentive to get our asses in gear in terms of finalizing the house layout and acquiring the bare minimum of furniture (and, say, getting backsplash tile installed in our kitchen after having half of the old stuff ripped out during counter installation) before then.

Testing out the size of the new, larger dining room table we need for our new, larger, AWESOME communal living/dining space at the new house. 

Luckily, I am a great help around the house right now and have boundless energy! ...oh wait. Haaa.

Life status: overwhelmed

Guuyyyysssss. There is SO MUCH going on. I need three of me to even start to maybe sort of handle my life right now. Baby girl continues to get the shaft in this process because she's not making an appearance for, like, MONTHS at this point, and we close in a week and a half and need to make arrangements to hire movers and oh god I need to start packing but that means I need boxes first but also we're not moving right away because we want to redo the kitchen first which means I need to pick new flooring and new counters and new backsplash ASAP and once that's finalized we need to schedule them to come in and measure because it will be another week before they install and I have to be available for that too but we're going away for a week in the middle of April with the in-laws and also I should be looking at appliances too but also my parents just sold their house and we need to make arrangements to go up there and sort through everything and bring back all the furniture and tools they no longer need but we do so I need to rent a truck and also get train tickets but we can't move the piano because you need special movers so I need to find them and get those guys hired and when should I schedule that for but also we need to tour daycares because around here you need to reserve a spot months and months in advance and also we probably need to try to find a pediatrician soon and shit we should take some childbirth and babycare classes also one day I need to actually start researching baby gear and oh maybe name this child but before that we need to figure out when the grandparents will be around and if/when they want to provide any childcare so that I know when we need to reserve the daycare spots for and sometime during this we also need to find renters for our current condo for once we do move but ALL of that is taking a back seat to work which is still awful and I'm doing three jobs and OH. MY. GOD.

This is my brain. At all times of the day and night. It's very sustainable.

The first major change I've had to make is at work. I had been trying to negotiate some perks for myself due to the fact that I'm doing three jobs (including that of my VP-level ex-boss) but just learned that all sort of fell through, so effective immediately I have decided not to work more than 40 hours a week anymore. If nothing gets done anymore as a result, I no longer care. (Easier said than done, but I'm working on this new mentality.)

I more or less finalized movers for us for April, a piano mover for my parents' piano, and a truck for May to cart back everything we want to take from my parents' house now that they're downsizing.

And I *think* I might have decided on floors and countertops for the new kitchen, which has been MAAAJORLY stressing me out. I am very much NOT adept at interior design of any sort. I can't tell what will look good together, I can't look at a 6" square of marble and know if it will work on a 12' length of counter, and I definitely don't know if a floor tile I'm looking at in a different store matches the marble we saw three days ago.

So! I talked the marble guy into letting me take a chunk of marble home with me, and I went to Lowe's and bought one (1) floor tile in the color we're considering, so I could hold them up next to each other:

(They're both sitting on our CURRENT countertop, which will play no role in this at all). I think they will go together? Yes? But I was still having a RULL hard time envisioning whether these materials would work in a larger scale, in a full kitchen. Here's the listing photo of our new kitchen, for reference:

I cannot handle the green countertops, and while I have very few feelings about the floor, it's very squeaky so Chris desperately wants it ripped up so that we can get the subfloor fixed (and then put in something nicer since we will have already ripped out what's there). The appliances are pretty old, so we'll be replacing them with updated stainless steel. And hopefully I can switch out that ugly fluorescent light pretty easily. But the layout will remain the same, and the cabinets are in great shape, so this reno will just be on surfaces: floor and counters (..and backsplash).

BUT here's the other tricky bit: I do WANT to redo the cabinets at some point - they seem solid so there is likely no need to rip them out anytime in the near future, but I'd love to stain them dark sometime down the road. So whatever finishes I pick now need to look OK with that light wood, but also not look stupid if I do go dark in a few months/years.

And I have NO IDEA how to extrapolate any of that from one floor tile and a hunk of marble.

Luckily, the internet is full of helpful tools for helpless people like me, and I found a site that let me mess around with a mock kitchen, changing up the floors, counters, and cabinet colors. This is CRAZY USEFUL for someone like me who desperately needs to see things mapped out like this.

First I started with light wood, what I thought might approximate the floor tile color we were thinking of, and I couldn't find a marble that matched, so I went with a flecked white version in case our marble at large scale read mainly white:

I think they mostly go, right? I don't know? Opinions? (Obviously this is not the actual layout of our kitchen, and we will not have a giant stone (?) hood over our range, but you know. Materials & scale.)

Then I switched the wood dark to see if it would still work:

Ooooooooh. Well that's not terrible. 

Then I went with a more-obviously-dark-flecked marble, which is closer to how I'm *hoping* ours actually reads in person:

The default backsplash I'd been using doesn't work so well here, but LOOK when I change it to dark wood!!

Still not loving this backsplash but I love the marble and dark cabinets together. Uh, assuming that is what my marble would look like. Sigh.

So tell me - what do you think? Am I going down a terrible, regrettable path here? Anyone have or used similar colors or materials and would like to adamantly warn me away from them, for example?

(Next up is dithering on backsplash, because I *think* I probably want glass subway tile or a glass mosaic pattern, but the online tools tend to not have that sort of granularity of choice so I can't see it in context and waaah life is hard.)

Oh right. Also I'm still pregnant! That is still happening! But second trimester continues to be absolutely thrillingly boring, which I love and am extremely grateful for. Assuming I keep this "meh, work" attitude going, I'll hopefully now have bandwidth back for actual pregnancy updates.. not to mention one day finishing recapping the Iceland/Ireland trip. Dream big, friends.