The Last Trimester

     With an abundance of devastating and catastrophic weather events over the last few week its been a long three weeks at work. Though I can't even imagine what the last three weeks has felt like for the people of Texas and Florida. I am just thankful that we only lost power.
     Its been over a month since my last post. A lot of things have happened!
We renovated and renovated and renovated and we still are. We also have gotten baby stuff going full speed.  We took a baby class this month and learned some pretty interesting things from some veteran dads (that's at the end of this post).

The entire kitchen was hermetically sealed.
We joked that it was like we were in a scene from Dexter...

     For starters we finished the nursery, the upstairs hallway ceiling, and the kitchen ceiling!  Safe to say we will NEVER. EVER do more than one room of spackling at a time.  We both thought, to minimize the dusty mess drywall sanding is, that doing them all at the same time would make clean up easier. I mean it did...but at the expense of our complete and utter frustration and aggravation.  Choice works were exchanged...more than once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily we were covered with spackle dust. So much that by the end of the projects,
the shower drain was clogged.

So lesson learned. Next project (which isn't going to be for a LONG TIME) is going to beone room at a time. The amount of dust on US was intense. So much so that it started to worry us if showering all that dust off would clog the pipes.

Dustin never had a problem with the closet...until he was trapped in there renovating it...
What else would a gay boy do in there??

For the last day of sanding, we literally went outside and sprayed ourselves off with the hose. The driveway is still white.


 
 As we painted and shopped and built, August came and went...we found ourselves at Ikea buying some pieces for the closet on our wedding anniversary.
     Three years of marriage. Its not that the day wasn't important to us, it was just that we had MORE important things, like Beastie, to occupy our time with.
     But the day was still wonderful.






     Sitting down to eat...we heard our ACTUAL wedding song playing on the PA system.  Crazy moment. Its not like our song is a common, pop song. 'Close your eyes,' by Michael Buble was not a top 40. It barely made it to the top 100 for 2 weeks in June of 2013.  So that was a cool moment. You can BARELY hear it in my video...

 

     Closing up the renovation on the nursery, one of the last things that needed to happen to the room was to paint the doors.  We have these beautiful solid wood doors in our house. I love the look of wood, but the dark, stained wood look is a little outdated and makes everything seem so, well, dark. We needed to paint the closet and the bedroom door white. I'm taking them off, the hinges and removing all the hardware because I am going to spray them to make the process faster. I get them both off and Dustin says to me, 

      "If you're going to spray those two you might as well do the rest of them...hahaha."
I stopped, wiped the sweat off my forehead, cause you know, SOLID WOOD doors. 

      "You mean you want me to paint ALL the doors up here white?  All five of them??"
He peers around the closet door, 

      "You might as well."

As I rolled my eyes, I knew he was right and removed the rest of the doors and their hardware and brought them down to my makeshift spray booth in the garage. 

Five doors sanded and ready for paint

I was so OVER this by midnight.

     It took me all day. I started sanding them at 1pm. Had them all set up and started painting by 2pm. The first coat was a little dicey. I haven't had to spray paint anything that one might see up close. You can't see runs in the eaves of my house...but I could really see them in the bathroom door. To give you an idea, there was a PUDDLE of paint on the garage floor under the bathroom door. By the last few coats I had it down and the flip sides looked pretty good. They really do look cleaner.
     When we put them back upstairs that night at 1am. The hallway was so much brighter.

     When we were done and sat down to breathe, Dustin pointed out a perfect photo of our lives. Coffee, baby stuff, power tools.  Welcome to what's to come HOMOwners...

  Transitioning from the construction for the baby to planning for Beastie's arrival.  Things have gotten SUPER serious...

     I've submitted for my time off and my FMLA (since men only get 2 weeks parental leave regardless I have to use FMLA and PTO) and that should give me just a little over 6 weeks off, thankfully.  Going through all the PTO I've used and haven't used and those days I volunteered to work have given me enough to enjoy a good duration of Beastie's arrival. 

    We booked the Air BnB (the same place we stayed at when we went up for the anatomy scan ultrasound) and paid for it and that was huge. Like whoa.
     We've also realized that Beastie can change Plan A, at any time.  With that in mind, we had to think of plan B, C, D, E...I gave up. basically we have to be ready to fly and drive to Wisconsin at any moment. I looked up EVERY available flight from Atlanta to the Wisconsin area and put it in a spreadsheet. Depending on the time we get the call, I can get on the road, and Dustin can get in the air, or we can both go in the car.  I was pretty thorough.

Its easy to decide when you know all the options and all the timing.

   Most recently we took a daddy boot camp class last weekend with a friend from work (who's expecting in October). Have to say I wasn't sure how I was going to feel going in, but walking out we felt like we had a pretty good handle on baby things.  It was definitely a class for heterosexual men, but I think I broke the ice well. We went around the circle and said our names and our due dates. Dustin was before me in the circle and when everyone looked at me, I said my name and then I said, 

     "...and spoiler alert! We're due November 28th."

    I'm pretty sure the whole room was both surprised and humored at the same time. Mission accomplished.
    The best bits of advice I got from the class were:

Diaper First

When changing a baby at night, change the diaper first, then feed. That way when the baby is milk drunk, you can just burp them and put them to sleep without the startling and stimulating event of a diaper change.
The 5 S's

Also referred by the instructor as, "The Happiest Baby on the block."  When the baby is fussy try these 5 things. Swaddle, Side, Shush, Swing, Suck.  Swaddle the baby, hold the baby on their side or stomach or over your shoulder, shush the baby (the sound in the womb is pretty loud and comforting), sway them back and forth in your arms (or swing), and suck (the pacifier is the be all end all)

Video Gaming

When talking to a bunch of dudes, at least SOME of them will have played video games. The leader of the boot camp used this analogy and it made me feel pretty confident that, I got this. Having a baby is like playing an RPG (Role Playing Game) wherein you are dropped suddenly into a world where you have no skills, no idea where you are or what to do, but you need to save the world. So you start by doing little tasks and get little achievements and each time you do a new task you gain more knowledge and the tasks get harder, but you have the underlying skills to accomplish it and move forward.
The Trimesters of Fatherhood

The leader also shed light on the fact that when the baby is born you are going to be excited, but you also may be disappointed that you won't be feeling that instant love. For a mother, she's bonding with the baby in utero, while we're not. So for a male, the bonding takes place after birth at basically the same pace.  Months 0-3 are deprivation, you're tired and exhausted and don't know which way is up.  Months 4-6 are discovery, you learning about the baby and bonding with them and they bonding with you.  Months 7-12 is delight, or what they suggest that mothers experience not long after birth. So we have some work to do.

I know Dustin and I are going to be super in love and super tired, but we're a team. The great thing about us is that we can manage our sleep. We can take shifts because neither of us is mandatory to feed the baby. I think this is where we're going to really surprise ourselves and others.

These interesting sculptures were outside the women's hospital where we took our class.
Vagina.