10 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)
Both Dominica and I decided to get up at eight thirty. We had set no alarm so that we could just sleep in and relax. That felt great. Oreo was quite happy as well. He really need some extra sleep time to give his leg time to heal. He slept almost all day yesterday and did not get up all night long last night.
I am working this morning but it is a light morning. No projects or anything, just the basic support stuff as needed until lunchtime. Nice relaxing day.
Dominica went out shopping at Kohl’s for their Veteran’s Day sale to get stuff for the house like towels. There are a lot of little things that we need. We’ve never owned a house with two furnished bedrooms before and have never had three whole bathrooms.
I actually worked a moderatly long day today putting in about six hours of time sitting at my desk. Not a rough day by any means. But having a “day off” is an awfully relative term for me. It doesn’t mean what it means for most people.
Around three this afternoon I stopped working, after Dominica was back, and we set off to go to Jefferson Valley in Yorktown Heights for the first time to do some shopping out there in the big shopping center. Our destination today is Babies ‘R’ Us to get some of our last minute and highly critical baby furniture.
We placed our order for the crib and the glider (rocking chair that won’t cut off a finger or puppy paw) and they should be in the store in under two weeks. Most likely not before the little one arrives but very soon thereafter. We can easily make due for that long without. The crib is a large and very nice black distressed bass wood (Solid veneer! Almost like real wood! Am I the only person who remembers furniture made from actual wood?) and really matches the hall table turned changing table and the basement television stand and entertainment buffet. It fits our theme well.
The glider is very comfy. It is a microfiber light cream colour upholstery on an ebony (solid veneer, I suspect) frame. We are going to be putting that into our bedroom in the north west corner for rocking the baby and reading. It will also be a decent place from which to watch television in our bedroom once we have a monitor installed up there which we hope to have before the end of the year.
We picked up a number of small, incidental items while we were there as well. Dominica got the Toys ‘R’ Us store credit card which gave us 10% off of everything (almost $90 in savings) plus allowed us to defer our payment for six months! That’s awesome. We were not expecting that.
We decided to take advantage of the savings and deferment and went ahead and picked up our Christmas present to each other, for which we had already budgeted, which was a 60GB XBOX 360. They did not have a very large game selection at Toys ‘R’ Us but they did have Fable 2 which Dominica decided that she really wanted so we went ahead and picked that up on the discount. The system itself game with Lego Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda games. Dominica is very excited about Indiana Jones whcih is very funny as she would never have bought the game herself.
We already own Shenmue 2 for the original XBOX (which will play on the 360) and Enchanted Arms for the 360 that we bought when we thought that we would have access to a 360 at Eleven80 along with a pink controller that I got for Dominica last Christmas when we were sure that we were getting an XBOX 360 very, very soon and a memory card (also from Eleven80.) So on our first day we own far more for the 360 than we do for the PS3. Overall, we are expecting the 360 to be a much more serious gaming platform than the PS3 which is much more of a media platform. The PS3 does BluRay but the 360 regularly gets 1080p out of its games. We haven’t seen that yet on the PS3.
On the way home we stopped at Dunkin Donuts for pumpkin spice coffee and decided to stop into Villarinas, a gourmet deli and pasta shop next door to DD, to see what they offered. The big item is fresh, homemade pasta. Awesome, can’t buy that just anywhere. So we picked up some pumpkin ravioli and their own roasted red pepper cream sauce and headed for home.
I hooked up the 360 and Dominica made dinner – pumpkin ravioli in roasted red pepper cream sauce. Dinner was amazing. The takeout fresh pasta was just as good as the best pasta that you get in a very expensive restaurant at about the same price as dinner at McDonald’s. This is going to be one of the serious perks of living in Peekskill.
After we ate dinner, Dominica eagerly sat down at the XBOX 360 and fired up Lego Indiana Jones. She had acted like she might be casually interested in the game but now that we have it and she can actually play it it turns out that she is really excited about it. So I set to work walking Oreo and continuing to unpack.
I did some work in the basement and some cleaning for about an hour while Dominica played her new game. She really liked it. Then it was time for our first venture into our new attic. I was up there for a minute during the house inspection but now it is empty and it is time to begin filling it.
The attic trip went pretty well. I hauled myself up to the rafters and Dominica handed up tons of boxes (empty compressed packing boxes as well as empty boxes from stuff for which we want to keep the boxes) as well as some furniture bits that we do not anticipate needing to have around the new house. We have been staging stuff to be placed into the attic for two weeks so we had quite a bit ready to go. It was a very productive trip and it cleared up a bunch of space in the nursery so that Dominica can work in there again.
I also carried all of the large, plastic “under the bed” containers up from the dining room to the bedroom tonight. Those were taking up a large amount of space in the main living area. The plan is to have Dominica put as many clothes into them that we need only infrequently and then to store them under the bed, again, as we did in Newark. It is a really useful use of the space under the queen bed that we have.
Once we got as much work done as we could reasonably do this evening, around ten o’clock, I decided that I was going to get to do something fun before going to bed. So I fired up the 360 and played almost two hours of Fable 2 – which was awesome. That is a great game. Dominica and Oreo snuggled up on the loveseat and watched me play.
I played until almost midnight. Then it was definitely time for bed. Have to be up at six tomorrow to get down to Wall Street.