Eleven Pairs of Maternity Pants???? Twenty-seven weeks along now! Somehow the time suddenly seems to go much faster than earlier this pregnancy. The baby is still kicking a lot, and I am doing very well, the only little complaint I have is heartburn and even that isn't too bad yet. I have tons of energy, which is really nice after being so exhausted for such a long time this pregnancy! Oh, one other small complaint is that I sometimes have pain in the back of my left hip and in my left leg, but I had my chiropractor look at it and he took care of it and also showed me how to deal with it myself if I had the pain. Now every time I get it, I do a certain exercise and it helps! Almost like magic! :-) I am still decluttering the master bed room. I have made a lot of progress though. I got all the boxes taken care of, some of them by just moving them to the basement, but I also unpacked a lot. Of course, that means our book cases are now even more full than they were before, but that's another project, at least these boxes are gone from the master bed room and have been unpacked! I rearranged some of the dressers and I put an extra dresser in the room, so that we now have enough room for all our own clothes and the Kate's and Jane's. I even have small dresser to use for the new baby's clothes, but it still needs to be emptied, since there are still some of Kate's clothes in there. Not only did I go through all the girls clothes, got them labeled right and put away the ones which were outgrown by Kate, but I also labeled all the drawers of the dressers, so that every body can put away clothes and will know exactly where they should go. Somehow my husband seemed to have a hard time remembering which clothes went where and this should take care of that! I was pretty ruthless in throwing away things, or donating them to the thrift store if they still were in good shape. I found that I own at least ELEVEN pairs of maternity pants! I never knew I had that many, but then I also never saw them all together in the same place :-) I had a few pregnancies when my stuff was in storage, so then I needed to buy all new clothes, and I think that contributed to the maternity wear overkill. I selected four I wanted to keep, and put all the others in the thrift store box. Those will make somebody else happy and it gives me a lot less clutter! Same procedure for things like sweaters etc. I designated one place for my sweaters and decided that I only could keep as many as would fit there. So there are a lot of sweaters in the thrift store box too! It feels good to see the bedroom slowly transformed into a much bigger and less cluttered place. Of course I have a few more rooms to go after this one is finished. Actually I started on Tara's room already too, when the baby is asleep at night in our bedroom. She had lots of 'clothes to be sorted through' in her closet, which I got all taken care of! And I put away all the summer dresses, and sorted all the winter dresses, so they all have the right labeling for the right kid in them. So I am making progress, but I still have a long way to go too! But I think I will get the master bed room finished within a few days. One reason it is taking me so long is that I have a lot of interruptions while I am working on it, so I don't get that much done every day, but still, it is neat to see the improvements I have been able to make! On to another subject, car seats again! I went to a car seat check yesterday, for the first time ever! It turned out that all the seats were installed correctly, so that was good! I ended up donating Jane's seat to them, since it is a Dutch seat and legally I am not allowed to use it here in the States anyway. I only found out about that a few weeks ago. They wanted to use it for education purposes and I really like the idea of her old seat being used for that! I am in the process of replacing it with a Cosco Maxi Cosi car seat, but that one is still being shipped. So they gave me a loaner Evenflo car seat to use till I get my Maxi Cosi in. They were very thorough in checking all the seats. They looked at the kid in the seat and checked the snugness of the harness and the position of the chest clip and such. Then they took the kid out and checked for things as correct use of locking clip (if needed), using the right seat belt path for the position the seat was in. How much the car seat moved around. Whether there was a tether and whether it was installed the right way. Also, they checked every seat to see whether there were recalls on it. Apart from Jane's seat, since they don't have info on European seats of course. So I am glad I went to that check, I was pretty sure my seats were installed correctly, but it is nice to know I was right :-) And it was just plain interesting to see them check the seats, especially for a car seat addict as I am! :-) Page design by mabear | Send email to Karen | Page last updated: Dec 29, 2001