The Permanent Guest's Room

These are exciting days.  Since this boy is taking his sweet little time, I've gotten to do everything I wanted to do...twice!  That includes hand-crafting a mobile of woodland creatures, rolling and re-rolling every last swaddling blanket and fluffing all my beautiful cloth diapers.  But before any of that started, I was painting every crevice of this room and closet, from the baseboards to the ceiling fan.

I snapped some shots of his room for the ol' blog because I hear that after he is born, poop will explode into every corner of my house, I will never sleep, the sun will no longer rise, and there will be no time to eat an everything bagel with cream cheese, much less update a blog.  So here's to posterity.

Moving in

Everything had to be painted...

Walls done, furniture still having an identity crisis

Buttercream, finally

Dust scraping crappy laminate off the top of a sweet yard sale find

Unearthed was this lovely wormy pine.  One of the first pics of me visibly pregnant.

Found a bunch of great knobs at Anthro in the clearance bin

The beginnings of a mobile: a hoop covered in wool

and felt balls

Lindsay made all these tiny woodland animals by hand

and me and Dusty strung them up

The boy better stare at this for hours

Dust also made me some shelves for over the changing table.  Among the things pictured here: Dustan's first bear, our boy's baby book, a satisfying stack of cloth wipes, me as a little girl, one of the first bowls I threw full of pacifiers. 
(Never saw that coming).

Clean sheets ready for Mom!

Had to find a spot to keep the buttercream drawers because they house a billion onesies!

Just one thing missing...

Snow On the Beach

Snow on the beach - you can't find that just anywhere.  Canada.  And Antarctica.  Snow and sand, wool and water, sunglasses and trapper hats - things that shouldn't go together.

But there is something really, really enthralling about what Nature does here in Wisconsin.  And I don't just mean 7-foot snow drifts in front of our apartment.  It's more the combination of the power of the lake and the power of wind and snow and ice, all at once.  In the middle of it, you get that small, fear-of-God kind of feeling that rattles windows and makes you shrug inside.  Not in control, got it.  When it all dies down, there are still big remnants that something gnarly just bit into your coastal town and gave it a good shake.  Big fat deposits of snow that will sit for months.  Ice sculptures that form a slow crust on the edge of the water, and that will leave at the same excruciatingly slow pace. 

Because Winter doesn't really give way to Spring here.  It's more like Winter and Spring run into each other at a party sometime in March, and Winter squints.  "Hey...Spring right?  I'll call you sometime."  (Never calls).

Here's us before the blizzard, just enjoying some snow and beach and Trail's first experience with the Chuck-It.

Grey bell-shape

She found it this time, but it was ultimately lost on the snowy beach forever.

Prego-face

Prego...body.  And glaciers.  More things that don't go together.

Then here's a bit of live blizzard action and the aftermath.

 

 

Ferocious waves hitting the shore.  Do you see that churning swell of slush?  We will swim here this summer!

A tree that has seen it all.

Techtonic plates, shifting.

Half-lab, half-panther

 Notice above the Trail frolicking there are still Christmas wreaths on the street lamps?  Yup, there are Christmas decorations lingering all over town.  Not only the gigantic tree in Monument Square, but also McAuliffe's pub still has a 5-foot wreath on their window and all the sidewalk trees are lined with white lights.  The thing is, it's just not out of place when there's this much snow!  But red bows on blue spruce in February?  What is wrong with this picture?

Last are some stunning, bone-chilling, crystalline pictures my friend Gabe took the day after.  I ripped them off Facebook but they're straight up Nat Geo.