Where the flip is everyone tonight?

My mom is not online to chat with. This always leaves me unhinged. I tend to do just fine living 3 hours from my mom; we talk almost every day, and having Google chat is so nice when it comes to needing my mommy 24 hours a day. HOWEVER, she hasn't been online all day. I sit down at the computer and look at my buddy list and think, "Well, now what?" I really should be able to entertain myself at this point...I'm guessing Lucy thinks the same thing when she just HAS to crawl into my lap to read the same book for the 23rd time. ..."I really should be able to entertain myself at this point..."

We had a very nice day. Lucy was a doll, as usual. She got up at 6 and then hung out in our bed until 8:15 or so. THAT is very nice. I just can't bring myself to think that this little routine could be a negative. She goes to bed at 7pm, sleeps without a peep until 6am and then plays in bed with us until 7:30 or 8. She drinks her milk and babbles and falls back asleep while Andrew and I have the chance to wake up slowly. Very nice.
Once we were all up, we puttered around the house and cleaned for awhile and then went out around lunchtime, when Lucy really needed a change of pace. We headed to the mall for lunch at Jerry's and a walk, and then we did our grocery shopping. We got home around 1:30 and Lucy went straight down for a nap while Andrew and I read our books and relaxed. When Lu woke up, she and I cuddled for about 45 minutes and tried very hard to wake up. We spent the late afternoon and early evening playing upstairs and discussing our next round of home improvements.
We really made no progress on the home improvement front. We haven't really discussed where Phoebe will live when she's ready for her own room, so that's what started this nonsense. We've been trying to decide whether we'll move when Phoebe moves out of our room, to be closer to the girls, or if we'll wing it and stay where we are. It's a big decision because it would be a lot easier to be closer to them, but we'd also have a lot to do upstairs before that happens. Lucy is getting to the age where we'll start talking about "big girl beds," but for now she's still tiny, so we have her in her crib where we control where she's sleeping. That's all well and good, but her room is loft-style, upstairs where there are no doors. That wouldn't be an issue if weren't considering moving upstairs. If we move upstairs into the loft-style rooms without doors, we'll have a toddler sneaking into our bed at all hours of the night. Not that we'd care too much, since we love sleeping with her, but we do want boundaries and independent sleepers, so we have to draw the line at morning cuddling. So, we'd have a fair amount of construction to do upstairs before we all move rooms. It would be fabulous to just stay where we are, but I don't like the idea of my babies being that far away when Phoebe is so little.

So, we started talking about how we'll renovate the upstairs, and I think we're onto a good plan. It's a way off, but I think that a lot of the early stuff is stuff we can do on our own. When we bought the house, it was a 4 bedroom. Technically, I think that's true, but we already knocked a wall out between the kitchen and back bedroom and the upstairs rooms aren't really private, so it feels more like a 2 bedroom right now. I'm pretty sure there's another room downstairs that is meant to be bedroomy, but it's mostly just creepy and pink. It will eventually be an older kid's room, since it's one of those basement "I'm not supposed to enjoy my family at this age" rooms. I think that when all's said and done it would officially list as a 4 or 5 bedroom, but we have no plans to sell. I think we've decided that our mortgage is low enough that even if we relocate, we'll keep the house and rent it while we're away. We just love it too much and I think this is really our "forever home." We're very fortunate that it holds so many possibilities and has so much space to spread out. It's just hard to see the possibilities when your list of renovations is a mile long! It's an older house, but we sure have a lot of choices as far as what to do to really fit it to our needs. I just had no idea that renovating with cash meant taking 30 years to see a project through to the end...it's a work in progress, to say the least!

I think that Andrew has a small list of projects to do while we're in our last few weeks of pregnancy and living downstate. Since he'll be here alone he'll have a chance to work upstairs and hang a couple of doors, and he can work in the kitchen to repaint. We still haven't found the magic color for the kitchen and I can't stop thinking about it. The stainless appliances in a kitschy, 40's kitchen is a tough combination and we're trying to come up with just the right color combination. We have dark wood trim through the entire house and the kitchen is no exception. We were thinking maybe a sunny yellow so that we can bring some of the color out of the wood, but I'm not sure about the cabinets. I don't want it to be like stepping into the middle of the sun...I need to think more about this.

I've been typing for way too long. I'm feeling very chatty tonight, but Andrew is watching "Mystic River," and I doubt he wants to hear about paint colors. But if I keep typing here, I'm risking losing my readers to, well, someone who isn't so long-winded. Guess I'll take advantage of some library books. I've already read two today, so the thought of diving into another book feels a little...repetitive. Maybe a non-fiction would snap me out of it.