36 Week Appointment

Well I had my 36 week appointment today. I had a growth sonogram to see how big he is. Well after she took lots of "pictures" and took lots of measurements they told me he weighs 7 lbs. I don't know how accurate they are with this number, but JEEZ. I still have a little under 4 weeks left until my due date. Most of my friend's have had babies that were that big and they were at 39 or 40 weeks. The doctor basically said if I go to term he would be AT LEAST 9 lbs... I thought they might push my due date up, but no such luck. I'm hoping he comes over Labor Day. My doctor is also on call over Labor Day so that would be nice.
Besides how big he is everything is fine. He had a good heartbeat and he is head down. Also, you could definitely tell he was a boy this time HAHA! He isn't down into my pelvis yet, so we still have some time before he is ready. Also I was dilated 1 cm. I told John we should pack my hospital bag this weekend just in case. It doesn't hurt to be prepared :). John is going out of town next week for business for two days, so Austin has to stay in at least one more week. I would probably kill John if Austin came and he was out of town.
That's pretty much all that's going on. I'm now working from home until he comes, going into the office was getting to be too much of a chore. I can't wait for my new couch to get here on Tuesday. I think I will sleep in it the first night :).

Christmas Travel

Well its already that time of year again...time to book our Christmas travel. John and I always book early. I'm not a person who likes to search every day and try to wait it out for the best deal. I just want to get it done and move on it with it. So we booked our plane tickets today. I figured we should do it while we don't have much going on.
Austin and I will be in Dallas for 20 days. If you want to see us let me know and I will tell you the exact dates. I'm a little nervous about flying with and infant AND that I will have to do it by myself the first time. I'm sure it will go fine and even if he screams the entire way, its only 2.5 hours :). I just don't want to be one of THOSE people. Oh well... we are going to be on his schedule by then and I'm sure we have a lot of changes in store for us.
If anyone wants to get together, let me know. We will try to see as many people as possible.

Update on this week

I wanted to give a quick update on what we have been up to. John is feeling much better. He went to the doctor on Monday night and got something for his sinus infection. He ended up staying home on Tuesday, but was much better by yesterday.
We are looking to refinance our house since interest rates have dropped so much. We have a meeting on Saturday with a guy we are going to refi through. I didn't want to do this AND couch shopping because they are in suburbs on opposite sides of Chicago. Yesterday I drove to work, it is just too hot here. I know you are judging this Texan, but we have been having heat index over 100 and with all the walking I have to do its too much for this pregnant lady. Anyway, at work I didn't have much to do so I left at 3:30 and drove out to get John at work so we could go couch shopping by his office. WE FOUND ONE!! We went to La-z-boy, Carson Pirie Scott Furniture Gallery (a department store), and Ashley Furniture. At each store we found one we liked, but at Carson's they had the floor model of the one we liked marked at 55% off. The couch at La-z-boy was more comfortable, but it was also $1000 more. We just couldn't do that because the one at Carson was VERY comfortable as well. So we will be getting a new Lane reclining couch on the 24th. Unfortunately they couldn't deliver it to our house any sooner :(. Oh well, that's something else we can mark off our list of things to do before Austin comes!

New Couch

It has come to the time in our married life where we are going to buy our first NEW couches ever! Yay! Its a little scary though since I've never bought a new couch before and we want something that will last. The couches we have now we bought from Allyson and Jeff when we still lived in Wichita. They have been great couches, but we want something that reclines. We are going to the suburbs to look. We were going to go today, but John has some type of head cold, so we are going to go next weekend. We are buying them with the points from our credit card. We might just replace the big couch and keep the small couch we have. I'm not sure yet. I want to get something nice and we have a budget so we might only be able to get one for now, but that's ok because the love seat barely ever gets used.

Cloth Diapers

I looked online today and found a diaper service in the Chicago area. What surprised me the most is there is only one I could find. Chicago is such a "green" city I can't believe there aren't more options. We are going to go with Bottoms Up Diaper Service. They deliver the diapers to our house once a week and pick up the dirty ones. You don't even have to rinse the diapers out. The cheapest way would still be for us to wash them ourselves, but after we found out we weren't getting a washer and dryer I decided it would be best to have a service. I'm going to call them tomorrow and get us set up. I will let everyone know how it goes. The only thing I don't like is you don't get to choose what kind of diaper you use. From the info I saw online it looks like they have one option. Oh well, less decisions to make!

NO to washer and dryer

Abt came by today to give us a quote on what it will take to put the tankless water heater, washer, and dryer in our condo. As we are talking to them they are adding to the cost left and right. Talking about drilling a hole in the roof, re wiring electricity, re wiring gas,... Then what I thought was the worst news of all came out. The guy's that came were plumbers and so they called an electrician to see how much it would cost to add another electricity line from our breaker box into the utility closet. While he was on the phone he explained what we were trying to do. We heard him say "Oh I see" and we couldn't tell if it was a good thing or bad thing. Then he hung up the phone and said the manufacturer will not allow us to stack a front loader washer and dryer on any floor above the first unless the floor it will be on is concrete. Of course we don't have concrete, so basically we would have to get the crappy washer/dryer that come stacked already. We had one of those in our downtown condo and we could barely do six shirts at once.
One of the other things the plumbers were concerned about was whether or not we had enough gas to power all the appliances in our house once we add the tankless water heater and dryer into the mix. John took the guys to the basement so they could see our gas supply. While down there they determined that if we did put the tankless water heater in we WOULD NOT have enough gas power. That was the real kicker right there. There are tankless water heaters that are electric but we would run into the same problem with the amount of electricity it requires and the gas ones work much better.
Basically there are options we could do to get a washer and dryer without removing our water heater. We could take out our half bath and put in a washer and dryer, but we would still have to re-wire and drill a hole in the roof to vent out the dryer. We could also get really small stack-able and put it in the closet with the water heater, but again we would have to drill a hole in the roof and it would be really tight and we don't think it would be safe. Basically after going through all the options we decided if we can't get a tankless water heater and we can't get the front loaders, then it isn't worth doing...

Washer/Dryer Update

We drove out to the suburbs today to go to the one store, Abt, that sells a tank less hot water heater in the Chicagoland area. Traffic was SO bad and the money was burning a hole in our pocket. I already had everything picked out, we just had a couple questions left to answer. We went to talk to the people about the tank less water heater first. OMG, the instillation cost more than the water heater AND there are all these stipulations on where in your home you can put it. The more we talked to the salesman the more discouraged we got. I'm not sure if we will even be able to do it! We scheduled a free home estimate for Thursday. They are going to come out and let us know whether or not we are able to put this in or not. The problem is we live in a condo and I'm not so sure our condo association is going to let us put a hole in the roof. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Even though we didn't get the news we wanted to hear, I really recommend Abt to anyone. I'm not sure if they are in other cities or not. It was HUGE and they sold everything home appliance/electronic you can think of. The sales man were also very knowledgeable, which will make me come back anytime. There is nothing worse than going to a store and the staff can't tell you anything about what they sell.
We found out that if we are able to put the tank less water heater in our condo that we will be able to get FULL SIZE front loader washer and dryers and have them stacked!!! I'm so excited, so I'm hoping Thursday goes well :).