30 weeks

As we head into the final stretch, we're FINALLY beginning to take steps towards making room for little mister numero dos. We're pretty much decided on the name and I've even been sharing it with a few so maybe we'll just start calling him by his name soon. I thought it was a lot of fun not to disclose Mateo's name before he was born for several reasons:
1. When you tell people the name of your unborn child they inevitably give you their opinion ("Oh, I like that." or if you're my mom, "How about _____ instead"). It's tough enough to give a child a moniker that will take him through his life without having to listen to what other people have to say about it. Unless they have been asked of course ;-)!
2. These days people know so much about the baby before the birth so at least the name can be a surprise!
3. It can just be strange for someone to call your unborn child by name ... seems like a right that should be reserved for the parents only, but I definitely understand this one. It's just simpler and other people want to get on with calling the baby his name.

But I digress. I'm excited to post that we are taking baby steps (no pun intended) towards prepping the house. For me, it was a HUGE goal for us to organize the garage. I don't necessarily think Javier was as excited about it (definitely not!), but I knew JUST how to get him moving .... called California Closets to have them over for a quote! When other 'professionals' start coming around his territory it has a pretty consistent effect of getting him moving :). I'm very proud to say that what California Closets quoted us $7000 to do, Javier has been able to accomplish pretty much the same thing for under $800. Although sure has spent a LOT of time in the garage. But I'm happy we've been able to save the money and he's happy to do the work himself. Next project - baby closet. Javier has done most of the closets of our house, but the spare room/office/room for new baby closet has not been completed yet. So we're going to do something interesting there by turning a small portion of the existing closet into a linen closet so that we can turn our existing linen closet into a partial coat closet as currently all of our coats are in the new baby's closet. A lot of words to basically say 'we are creating space'. It's a good thing our home has a lot of storage space to play with. The more we talk about how to shift things around, the less excited I become about us not having an office/spare bedroom so it looks like little mister numero dos will have his own bedroom only until he is sleeping through the night. Plans always subject to change, but I think it would be a shame for us to give up our spare bedroom. We love visitors and people are a lot more likely to come if there is space for them. We're thinking the boys will want to share a room anyhow, right? We'll see! And maybe it will be just more than I can handle. I can just imagine it now ... the constant bed diving contests and wrestling noises coming from upstairs. Hopefully this will become music to my ears ;-).

I ordered the crib bedding today just to jump start me in thinking about paint/window covering options. That's the fun stuff though and everyone knows babies don't need much so I'll try my best to refrain from getting to pushy and stressed about this stuff.

Junior League has kept me super busy this month. I took over the presidency in May and this month planned a Board of Directors retreat (for 11 ladies), a Leadership Retreat (for 30+ ladies), my first general meeting (for 100 ladies) and a board meeting tomorrow night. It's a lot of work, but I truly am enjoying it. It's an honor to serve the Junior League of Santa Barbara. Everyone thinks I'm nuts, but it's making me uber productive to have all this stuff going on at once. We've also begun to look into preschool options for Mateo. So far we've looked at a Montessori preschool and the Jewish preschool (even though neither of us is Jewish). I don't know much at all about Judaism, but read "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee" and really liked the Jewish principles and values as they were described in this book. It seems for Jewish people, respecting and honoring parents/elders is a very big deal. I like that :). I get concerned with the amount of child-centered parenting I see today.

Just had my 30-wk blood work done and it appears I am gestational diabetes free. Yippy!