We're home!

Hey, y'all:

We are safely ensconced back in our beloved Tallulah House, with our beloved furry children, and are happy to be here :)

Ireland was absolutely fantastic. I've been fortunate enough to see a lot of the world, and Ireland definitely rates in the top three of the most beautiful places that I've visited. The people are friendly, charming, and full of life. I can't fully explain how strange it was to stand in a country where I've never been, and yet have it feel so much like home. Maybe there truly is such a thing as ancestral memory, who knows?

We learned so much (even Chris, whose brain was already saturated with knowledge about Irish mythology and history), and are incredibly grateful to my school for giving us this opportunity.

Today is all about resting, playing with the dogs, doing laundry, and getting ourselves ready to go to work tomorrow. Over the next few posts I'll be sharing the highlights of our trip, as well as lots of pictures. In the meantime, here's one of my favourites. It's of a Neolithic age portal tomb called Pol na Bron and seeing it is truly a mystical experience. Chris has played around with the colour and this actually does a lot to convey the mood of the tomb and of the place. I hope that you enjoy it.



Kimberley

Hi from Ireland!

Just a quick note to say that we arrived safely in Ireland six days ago, and have been having an amazing time. I'll soon be inundating you with photos, so get ready ;)

Kimberley

Let's talk baby bedding...

Hi, friends!

I've been neglecting this blog shamefully, and missing it (and you) as well :(
Between wrapping up the end of the school year, preparing for our trip to Ireland-- we leave Saturday, eeek!-- and being so blooming tired from growing a human, blogging has fallen by the wayside.

But! I hope to change all of that, and begin blogging regularly again.

Before I shamelessly grovel and ask for your help, let me catch you up on the news:

1) It's a boy! I knew it all along, and kept telling my mom and aunt to stop with the buying of everything pink, but they wouldn't listen. When Chris and I went for the ultrasound, I wasn't a bit surprised when his gender was confirmed. "He", by the way, is Liam Edward Charles. "Liam" because we're of Irish descent and like the name, "Edward" for both Chris and his dad, and "Charles" for my dad. Hey, this is likely to be our only child, so we had to pile on the names ;)

2) What have I been up to lately? Hmmm, working, sleeping, and, in a rare burst of energy, baking scones!



I usually bake scones at least once a month, but since I've been pregnant they've become somewhat of a rarity. I make darn good scones, if I do say so myself, from a recipe that I found in a book and modified to suit me. One of my secrets is the scone pan that I received as a wedding gift (and some people thought that I'd never use it, muwahahaha!). When I try to bake them on a stone, it just doesn't work that well. I plan to share my recipe, but not today-- today I need your help!

The dilemma:

Chris and I are turning my sitting room into Liam's nursery. I never got around to posting pictures of my sitting room, but it's decorated in green, white, and red. I know, I know, it sounds very Italian, but it doesn't look that way ;) It actually looks very shabby chic/cottage, which suits me down to T.

The walls are a lovely pale green Behr color, called Rejuvenate. I was going to post a swatch of it, taken from the Behr website, but it looked all wrong-- far too olive. This is more of a "spring" green. I have a white sofa (slipcovered-- I'm not THAT crazy),



with some beautiful red floral/green ticking pillows that my mom made (they match the valances that I designed and that my mom also made-- me with the sewing... not so much).

Then there's this plain bookcase from Ikea



that I filled with books, pictures, and miscellaneous treasures. There's also a dresser that I painted white and distressed, and a pine chest.

My plan is to move the furniture around a bit and put the crib in. Oh, here's the crib:



So, at last we come to my dilemma!

I want to go with chocolate coloured bedding for the crib, preferably with some pale green in it. So far, however, I've had no luck in finding it. Any ideas on where to look? A chocolate background with pale green polka dots, perhaps stripes would be nice. I also like brown toile, but that is proving EXCEEDINGLY difficult to find.

I found a chocolate crib sheet:



but the other things are proving elusive.

Help me, you clever, design-savvy people! Any leads that you could give me would be most appreciated.

Have a great day,
Kimberley

Which Austen Heroine are you?

Well... absolutely no surprise here, lol.

Take the Quiz here!

Surprise!

So, you may have noticed that I've been absent from blogging for a while.

Well this is the reason:

Yep, I'm pregnant :) It was unexpected and the way Chris and I found out is a pretty good story.

On January 3rd, I woke up at 1:30 in the morning feeling bad. I progressed to throwing up bile and things only got worse from there. It eventually became apparent that I was passing a kidney stone, and Chris and I left for the emergency room at 8:30am.In an amazingly different scenario from the LAST time I was at our local ER, they saw me right away. As I've had several kidney stones in the past, they took my word for it and got me started on a morphine IV. They did ask for a urine sample to check for blood (that's a common indication of a kidney stone) and after obliging them, I crawled back to the gurney and prayed that the morphine would start hitting my system, which it eventually did.About 20 minutes later, the doctor came back in and said, "We checked your urine sample, and the pregnancy test came back positive"

....

From my gurney, I peered owlishly (and druggedly) at the doctor. Her words seem to move very slowly into my brain.

"I'm sorry," I said, "you mean negative, right? The pregnancy test was NEGATIVE".

"No," she huffed. "I said positive-- you're pregnant!".

She started talking about how they were going to take some blood to confirm it and Chris said that they took 5 vials, but I don't remember any of that. I just (barely) remember sitting there wondering if any of it was real. (Oh, I do remember trying to pull the IV out of my arm and the doctor saying frantically, "No! Morphine won't hurt the baby!". I also remember thinking, "I can have MORPHINE, but not a Hefeweizen??")

I've not had a bit of morning sickness, just a lot of fatigue-- hence the reason I've not been in the blogosphere. I'd sleep 9 hours at night, go to work, and come home to take a two hour nap. That seems to be getting better, though, as I've not had to take a nap in about a week :) This means a much- longed for return to this blog and to your blogs, too. I've missed all of my blogging friends and can't wait to get caught up on all of your news!

Have a great day,

Kimberley

Bah humbug!

Well, friends, I just couldn't do it.

I was all set: I was justified in my outrage. I had a valid complaint. I'd planned out what I was going to say.

But then...

Well, I just couldn't go through with it.

I still don't like my haircut, but I can live with it. When it came down to it, I just couldn't go back to the salon and tell this perfectly nice woman that I hated what she'd done to my hair. I envisioned her dissolving into tears. I envisioned the manager giving her what-for over it and then her dissolving into tears.

Oh, I know: some of you are thinking that I wimped out, and that's ok. I can live with that ;)

Nope, I didn't go through with it, but it sure was fun to get it all off my chest-- even if it WAS just in my head.

Ahead in the next post: THE SURGE MILKER!!

Happy Wednesday!
Kimberley

Hermit's weekend

Do you ever have those days where you feel that you SHOULD leave your house, but you just don't want to? I had a day like that yesterday. I knew that I should go to yoga, and to the grocery store, but... I just didn't want to. I even got as far as taking a shower and getting dressed, and then at the last minute just decided that I didn't want to go.

Instead, I took Kira for a nice, long walk around the neighborhood. When we got back I decided that egg salad would be just the thing for lunch (hence the picture above-- I just love those gorgeous, earthy tones) and set them to cooking. Leaving the eggs to cool, I lay down for a nap and when I woke up I finished up the egg salad:



I make mine with a combination of mayonnaise and sour cream, salt and pepper, herbs d' provence, and dried dill weed. Add some organic green leaf lettuce and organic whole grain bread, and it's darn near perfect.

And that, friends, was probably my biggest accomplishment of the day :)

Chris has been in Florida for most of the week, and he's coming home today, hooray! It's just the motivation that I need to actually, REALLY, TRULY get to the grocery store today.

In other news, I received an awful haircut on Friday (I won't be sharing pictures of THAT!). Having had time to think it over, I've decided that I'm going back to the salon on Tuesday and talk to the woman who cut it. I'm not out for blood, but I just really want her to know that what upsets me most is that I ended up with all three things that I specifically told her that I didn't want. She seems like a nice enough person whose feelings I'm not out to hurt, but darnnit! I have to live with this thing, and it seems fair enough to tell her that I'm not happy about it. I'm so mad, as a matter of fact, that I've woken up the past two nights seething about it. Of course then I feel like the lowest scum because it's not genocide in Rwanda or Darfur that I can't sleep over, it's something as frivolous as my hair. How blessed and spoiled in equal measure I am that that's my most pressing worry.

Whether your weekend was spent in solitude or surrounded by people, I hope that you enjoyed it!
Kimberley