Trip to Ikea: in which we get a container for our baby

So, thanks to generous birthday gift from my parents, we bought a crib (the Sniglar one from the previous post, which looked every bit as nice in person), a mattress and also a set of bedding to put in it! The crib will arrive tomorrow, and I look forward to assembling it. It will involve a bit of rearranging of our bedroom and office, because we're putting the crib into our bedroom, right next to our bed, for maximum ease of caring for baby in the middle of the night.

In addition to good furniture, Ikea also had much more attractive baby things than I've seen elsewhere. Much less cutesy pastels and cartoons, and much more in the way of gender neutral stuff (that can be reused for multiple children). The entire style is a bit more funky, which I think works well for us.

This is the bedding we bought, in chartreuse with little white hippopotami frolicking about on it.


We also went on a container buying spree so that we can organize our closet, and more glass jars for storing bulk foods in since we've run out of space but it's a lot cheaper to buy pasta, beans, textured vegetable protein, nuts, oatmeal, etc. in the bulk bins at the store.

Also courtesy of both sets of parents, we got two dressers for ourselves, since we've been having clothing storage issues and our current dresser is falling apart. The new dressers will go in the office, and the dresser in our room will be used as a changing table and storage for baby stuff. This means that we can finally accept shipments of handed-down baby clothing from our respective sets of parents and then I can get to work cataloging what we have in an excel spreadsheet!

Baby clothing we have under our roof so far is limited to a few local items that we couldn't pass up because they were too high on the adorable scale: a onesie from our favorite conveyor belt sushi store that says "shrimp" under a piece of ebi nigiri, a t-shirt that says "Queen Anne" (our neighborhood), and a toddler shirt that says "Little Devil" from El Diablo, our favorite coffee shop. Of course we had to get the onesie and the hat that says "babycake" from our favorite cupcake bakery, too, but those are still on backorder. We'd been scoping out these items for a looong time in the hopes that we would get pregnant before they got discontinued, so it's awesome to be having nn actual baby to put them on!

Baby status: 26 weeks, wow - the last week of the second trimester. We're now at the point of having less than 100 days to go until our due date, which is amazing, because I remember looking at the ticker when it was more than 200 days to go and thinking that day seemed so incredibly far away. Baby is still under a kg in weight (nearly 2 lbs), but around 36 cm (14 inches) in height this week... getting bigger slowly and steadily!

All of this growth means Stephanie has been getting bigger, too. She's less spatially aware of the bump than of the rest of her, sometimes to comical results, but she's also has been dealing with back pain as a result of the growth spurts. Stretching and sitting on an exercise ball seem to help.

The baby seems to kick in response to my voice and in response to my hand pressing on the bump, which is endlessly amusing and probably the first official game we're playing together. The baby seems to be pretty mellow when Stephanie is walking and much more active when she's sitting, which I hope bodes well for the baby wanting to go for leisurely jogs about the neighborhood with me.

Oh, and lastly, I do not especially recommend Revolutionary Road for any expecting mums-to-be, even though it was an excellent movie, because it was really upsetting on a visceral level. We saw it yesterday, and it's really stayed with me to the point that I'm still thinking about it now. For the not-squeamish, I really do think it's an excellent, thought-provoking, haunting movie. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio still have amazing chemistry together, but in this case that chemistry is twisted and subverted into a destructive downward spiral, not at all like Titanic. Really powerful stuff, but not for watching in a fragile state of mind. Most of all, it made me incredibly happy to be me and to be married to someone that I love and get along with so well.