Nearly There!

Wow…I blink and two weeks go by, and, suddenly, I’m doing a crummy job at keeping up with my blog anymore!

Life has been rapidly marching forward.  Fortunately, progress on our basement has also proceeded rapidly.  Our new carpet was installed on March 1 and 2, and it is beautiful!  Jeff put the trim back up in the family room and hallway, which means that we could put up the toy shelving/drawer units that we had purchased right before the flood.  This, in turn, means that we could start unpacking boxes whose contents haven’t seen the light of day since we lived in France.

Because the carpet is finally down, I could also finally order the kids’ new bedroom furniture.  It should arrive by early next week, which means that we will finally be able to get Charlotte and Elijah’s stuff out of the baby’s room and the baby’s stuff out of the laundry basket in the middle of the living room floor.

My life has turned into a giant game of dominoes.  I’m just hoping that last one falls before this baby arrives in four weeks!  But, even if it doesn’t, I guess I can live with it.

Jeff has made the quickest progress on our new media room in the basement, since he has all of the components he needs to get that set up right away.  He’s mounted the screen and the projector and set up the computer, DVD player, and gaming systems.  He’s painted the room a flat dark gray, and we had dark gray carpet installed in there.  We need to buy trim, which we will paint black, paint the inside of the door black, and get black, sound-dampening ceiling tiles up.  Then, we should be good to go.  On our wish list are some theater-style seats.  We found a place in Florida that actually sells refurbished theater seats, so we’re going to look into that.  Soon, the Wilkes family theater should be up and running!

In other news, I’m feeling pretty decent for advanced pregnancy.  The baby is riding high against my lungs and ribs, so getting a deep breath is problematic.  But this, too, shall pass soon.  I’m keeping an eye on my blood pressure, but so far, so good.  This Thursday, I will have a sonogram, which will hopefully show how the baby is presenting, and the sonographer will take an educated guess at his size.  I had some maternity photos taken with the kids last week; if you’d like to take a peak, go to www.sonshineportraitdesign.com , click on “clients” at the top, and type in "jeremy” (minus the quotes).

Jeff starts six weeks of family leave on April 12; we are all excited about that!  He will teach the kids, run them around, and basically take over my daily job while we all adjust to the new baby.  He will also be the head coach of Elijah’s soccer team during his leave, which is rather hilarious since he’s never before played.  Beware of putting down that you’ll coach “if necessary”!  It’s apparently ALWAYS necessary! 

He’ll  probably be happy to go back to work so he can get some rest.

I’ll end this post with some photos from Jeff and the kids’ ski trip to Sundown Mountain, near Dubuque, Iowa, with Mike and Andrew Fiedler.  They had a blast!

   

Have a good one!