My How Time Flies

I knew things would get hectic as the holidays (and baby's arrival!) approach. I was right. This was one of those weeks - and it flew by! (Hence the hiatus in my blog updates.) Fortunately, it turned out to be very productive.

In fact, a while ago I made a list of some of the more major tasks I'd like to accomplish before the baby is born. For example, get the carpets cleaned, hire a chimney sweep, figure out daycare, pack my hospital bag, do something about the lease that is about to expire on our car, stock up on all paper goods at Costco - you get the idea. Well, I can now cross 3 of those items of the list!

1. The chimney is now clean and inspected. I would not let Drew use our fireplace last winter because it had not been inspected since we bought the house. The chimney sweep was here on Friday for a thorough cleaning and the thumbs up so we're anxious to enjoy a warm, crackling fire this holiday season.

2. We just might have day care figured out. After much discussion, Drew & I have decided that while a curriculum based day care center is our preference for the toddler and preschool years, it is not something of critical importance in the early infant months. A colleague and good friend of mine happens to have a sister in the home-based day care business. She lives 1 block from our house. I've talked with 2 sets of parents who take their children there and both had nothing but rave reviews. She is almost half the cost of the centers at the top of our list. We spoke this week and she is certain she will have an opening come May 1. If I deliver on or near my due date, we'll be looking to start daycare in early April. The timing is close, but worst case scenario we call the grandma's and have them each "come and visit" for a week or so to get us to May 1. :) Our plan would be to take the little guy to in-home care until he's at least 18 mos. old and then transition to a center once an opening presents itself. It's not a 100% done deal yet, but it's a pretty perfect scenario and a huge relief to have that in our back pocket!

3. I've saved the best for last. We bought a new car! We knew this was a possibility as the lease on our 2005 Passat expires in February. Anticipating that we will have a 3-week old baby in February, we wanted to be proactive and get the car thing settled before the end of the year. Little did we know it would all come together in about 2 days time. After being quite under-impressed with the offer our local Lawrence dealer came back with, we decided to give a Kansas City dealer a try and took Friday afternoon off to go check it out. 3 hours later we were driving home in a brand new car. We absolutely loved our old Passat, so needless to say the tricked out new 2009 version was not a hard sell. We chose black with tan leather. I've already read most of the owner's manual (I'm a geek, I know) and I think my 2 favorite features are the built in sun shades that you can pull up in the rear windows (time to delete the suction cup kind I had on our baby registry!) as well as the built in iPod dock. The volume controls, etc. in the steering wheel are pretty cool, too.

On top of that, I am now over half-way done with our Christmas shopping. Thank goodness for on-line shopping! I even have our Christmas cards purchased. Yay!

And what's even better...there's still 1 day left in this weekend. Plenty of time to do a little house cleaning, a few loads of laundry and perhaps start wrapping gifts. Being productive feels so good!