Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

I think we’ve spent our last dollar on the twins’ room and our son’s new room (which he has done nothing but play in so far). A combination of family & friends giving us their no-longer-needed furniture, receiving as gifts, buying new and rearranging over the course of six months was all it took.

The largest purchases/decisions were actually the easiest, with the minivan only taking six hours of my life and the crib just being a duplicate that Julie spent 77 hours deciding on while I walked angrily around Rabies R Us. The smaller items and the labor involved in the rearrangements took the most time and energy by far. If I had to break it down by what I loathed the most, I would probably gripe in this order:

5. Dismantling my home studio and scattering its instruments and equipment all over my basement.

4. Rearranging our spare bedroom for my guitar lessons by re-scattering alot of the equipment I wanted out of the basement into the basement.

3. Reconfiguring the garage to fit the mini-van and my truck, which did not work any way I managed to organize it. So my truck is now out in the cold, permanently.

2. Painting my son’s new room.

1. Painting my son’s new room.

Yeah, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s fucking painting. I tape the trim and the ceiling and put down tarps and every fucking time I get paint on the ceiling, paint on the trim and fucking paint on the carpet.

I have no problem with hanging blinds or assembling cribs, those always seem to find a way towards a successful completion, but you give me a completely empty room and a wife griping over my shoulder and I will – every fucking time – screw up a paint job royally.

The only thing we have left to do is pack the bags for the hospital stay and the overnight bag for wherever my little guy is staying, since our hospital will not allow anyone under 18 into Labor & Delivery because people over 18 do not carry ze Schvine Flu.

Oh, and install the bases for the two carseats.

Bet you 5 bucks the minute I hit “publish” my wife will come up with 94 other things for me to do. *Cringing as I hit “publish”…

We’ve been trying all sorts of ways to save money around the house. From showering together (when we used to be able to fit in the shower together), reusing toilet paper, washing the cars with the windows down to get a little pre-wash action going on our laundry, and buying cheaper diapers.

All of the above might be a bit gross, but they all worked 90% of the time.

That is, until we discovered the bad side of using cheap diapers. We went from Pampers Cruisers at about 30 bucks a case to Luvs, which clock in around 20 bones a case. The Luvs were cheaper in every way including the sound they make. With Pampers you can’t tell when lil’ dude’s escaping, but with Luvs, when you hear the crinkle you can assume one of two things are happening, either he’s bout to fly to coop or he stole a few grocery bags and crotched em.

The Pampers contain a hell of a lot better than the Luvs, but saving ten bucks a week takes precedence over a few extra loads of laundry.

Until this past weekened when I went in to greet my lil’ dude early Saturday morning and discovered a full dipe inside his zip up pj’s. Yet when I unzipped him and went to yank his leg from its sheathe I felt these grainy type balls that were kind of wet and mushy stuck to his thigh.

Yes, the diaper was so full it had begun to degrade so rapidly that the chemicals that bond with the piss in his diaper got fed up and skipped town, aka the resovoir where this type of stuff normally lives, and ended up everywhere else besides IN the diaper.

Of course we have experienced this before, but never to this magnitude. It was stuck to every inch of his nearly 3 foot body and his recent pick up of the term EEWWW made his sentiments more impactful as he was clearly disgusted in the clingy piss balls attached to his porcelin skin.

We understand Luvs save us money and normally keep the 1′s and 2′s confined until we can get there, but we need to think about how this might be affecting his sleeping in. We change him pretty regularly when we’re all awake, but sleepytime is our church and we like to pray a shitton.

So we’re trying something new. We have purchased Pampers’ 12 Hour diapers and are using those exclusively after bathtime every night. It’s been 4 nights and so far he’s slept in past 6am every morning.

I’m hoping that by the time the twinvasion begins, he’ll sleep to around 10am.

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The past two weeks have been crazy busy.

• We gutted my old office, spackled, painted and parked the race car bed for our son’s new room.
• We’ve moved my guitar lesson station into the spare bedroom.
• We’ve nearly finished Christmas shopping, knowing that Jules won’t last on her feet into December.
• We’ve celebrated our favorite season with pumpkin carving and pumpkin seed toasting.
• I’ve learned to appreciate a fine scotch.

Might not seem like much, but we’re excited for today’s two doctor appointments to find out how Julie will be progressing in the work world, as well as peek in on our two little sacs of awesome. Our last doctor visit included an unscheduled cervical exam across town and then a follow up scan a week later.

We’re hoping our visits today are nothing but “BEAUTIFUL CERVIX LADY!” and “YOUR HUSBAND IS MIGHTY ATTRACTIVE, YOU SHOULD BUY HIM A FINE LEATHER RECLINER WITH A RICH MAHOGANY HANDLE!”

So rather than bore you with text, here are some pictures of our past few weeks.

I saw a book about deducing what your little babe was crying about just after my son was born in 2008. I found a youtube video that talked about it too. Here is the video link:  What Baby Cries Mean

After a few months I was pretty good at determining what to do in any situation based on the intensity and starting sound of the cry because of this video’s suggestions, but normally these things are happening at 1, 2, or 4 o’clock in the morning when I’m admittedly, not at my best mentally.

So I just found a little gadget at Think Geek called the Why Cry Baby Analyzer.

Using this chart:

Think Geek's Why Cry Baby Analyzer chart

Pretty interesting concept, but I can’t see spending 100 bucks just to know what my kid is crying about. At the early ages there are pretty much only four potential reasons (basic, I know) why a young babe would be wailing.

Hungry, Tired, Poop or Annoyed.

I learned to check the neck for any tags or annoying little things poking the skin, then smell the ass, then determine if it’s nap time or if teet squirts are needed.

Yes, I just called breast milk “teet squirts.” I’m copyrighting that for a line of clothing made for moms that is pre-dirtied with yellow and white stains in the breasticular area. If you steal my idea, I will crush you greco-roman wrastlin’ style.

When my wife was pregnant with our son a few years ago, we spent about three evenings a week standing around our local Babies R Us. When I say local, I mean it was the closest one. When I mean close, I mean it was only 45 minutes from our house.

Day after day, after week, after month I spent following her around the furniture section of the store measuring, sizing up, matching up color swatches to wood tones, scratching the varnish to see how easy it was to divot, scratch or peel, demonstrating the features where the bed grows with the child, etc.

photo credit: TedsBlog

We ended up deciding on a set that was discontinued in the store, so it had to be shipped. What we had taken 89 years to decide on couldn’t even be taken home with us that day! 6 weeks later I borrowed a truck and went a picked it up (I have since purchased my own truck thankfully), took it home, assembled the crib and dresser, and marveled at the beauty that was new baby furniture.

18 months later I can’t even count the bite marks, dents, divots and gouges in the crib alone! The fancy changing table/dresser? My son has managed to break the wood frame for the changing table top, and now we only use the dresser to store the 79 receiving blankets we received prior to receiving our son who really hasn’t received anything since needing a receiving blanket to be received in!

So now, twins are on the way.

New furniture shopping!

F*&#@ that noise.

My son’s bed is now one of the twins beds and the other twin will get his/her’s nephew’s current crib and I will buy my son a new bed AND put him in a new bedroom for good measure!

All of the hype and excitement of the first child was necessary in your adult maturation to realize that furniture is just furniture and, like everythying else in your house besides your kids, will be trash or ashes one of these days.

I’m not saying me, my wife or my kids will sleep on hardened elephant feces or just anything, but we can do without the artesian cherry finishes and the expandable bed frames and all that jazz.

Bed, dresser, lamp, night light and a ceiling fan.

Where did the old me go? He left when he realized the value of food over chic kid furniture that 5 people other than my family will ever see.

2.2lbs of cheeseballs vs. a crib bumper made of italian chiffon?

CHEESEBALLS!

photo credit: GregPC