Home Improvement

Unfortunately, Rachel and I have both been under the weather recently, so we haven't made much progress on getting ready for Zia.  The issue is that we (and by "we" I mean "me") are huge babies when we are sick. And maybe it is the vicious Sheen-like cycle of DayQuil / NyQuil, but all I can do when I am sick is think about the following 6 things on a loop: how much I hate being sick, how much I love NyQuil, how much I hate phlegm, how is it that a can of Cambell's chicken noodle soup is half the size it was when I was a kid yet cost 4 times as much, how much worse work is when you are sick, and how "phlegm" is probably the greatest hangman word ever.  So, not very productive lately. 

But we have both turned the proverbial corner, so although it's not quite time to be productive, it's time to start thinking about being productive.  What we really need to do is get Zia's room ready.  Luckily for us, we have a lot of offers for help from our family, so that is good. The offers for help greatly outweigh the amount of work that needs to be done for a baby's room, so we are trying to leverage the offers into general home improvement projects. The only hard part will be convince our helpers that the projects we have are actually part of baby preparations. Not quite sure why having a kid means we need to reseal the driveway, but we are going to try anyway.

We feel so lucky to have people offer to help, but I gotta admit I'm a bit embarrassed that I'm so inadequate in basic home improvement projects. With two carpenters and a roofer on our two man crew, I feel really ridiculous when I'm asked to get a socket wrench and come back with a fork.  But, I have learned the most important home improvement skill, and that is the ability to size up any project, shake your head slowly and say "whoever did this had NO IDEA what they were doing.... this is all wrong!"  I've spent the last few days looking disgustedly at random things in our house and grumbling about the workmanship of whoever it was who did that, so hopefully at least I have saved some time for when the help arrives.  Step 1 - accomplished.

With not knowing the sex of our kid, we're not quite sure how to decorate.  Is it too much to ask for something awesome like this?  If only we knew someone so talented....