Give it away, give it away, give it away now

I'm sure there's some more elegant way to cross-post between blogs, but I've written a new post in my 1000 Markets blog about my crafty charity project this weekend.

In other news, my fabulous husband cleaned out our hot tub this weekend so I could soak in it. It's got a temperature control so we've got it set low, because among the other 87,000 things you're not supposed to do when pregnant, sitting in a 101+ degree hot tub is another. They should issue some sort of handbook with a positive pregnancy test - "The HUGE List of Things You Can No Longer Do". Of course, maybe that's a consequence of having kids, too. Sigh.

I'm getting rounder and huger by the minute, but am looking forward to wearing my shiny new maternity clothes.

Must go pack up a couple more Anandi's Laboratory orders. One from Amazon.com (finally, yay!), one from 1000Markets, and one from Etsy. Yippee.

Faster than the speed of light

Wow, lots of things happening at the House of Peanut. So many that blogging has fallen by the wayside, not unexpectedly. I almost feel like I should be geeky and make a bulleted list :D

Most excitingly, we just found out that BabyX is a GIRL! YAY! And though TJ won't let me dress up our dogs, I sure am gonna dress up our baby. Woo hoo!

I also seem to be growing larger by the minute, quite alarmingly. But I still have a few pairs of normal pants that fit so I'm ok for now :) I have busted out the cute new maternity clothes, though, and they are *so* comfy. They should make all womens' clothes that comfy... Though I will say I was startled to find out that most maternity jeans have no buttons or zippers. So they're kind of like old-lady pants with all that elastic.

Otherwise, I'm surprised to find that I don't hate being pregnant like I thought I would. Of course, it's still early, and being 8 months pregnant in the middle of August may change my mind :) A friend of mine said it was like being a "walking science experiment". Which describes it perfectly.

On the crafty front, I've been having a GREAT time. I played around with a new technique last weekend, and will post pictures soon. I set aside some time to make some jewelry, after making 15 pet tags (!) and had fun with that too. I loooove making jewelry, even though it doesn't really sell in my shop. I figure I can just keep it if it doesn't sell after a while, right? :)

And in super exciting news today, Etsy featured my Periodic Table keychain in this blog post which is currently rotating on the front page. Not only that, but it made their weekly "Etsy Finds" email that goes out to their subscriber list, so I've gotten a *ton* of hits on this item, and a handful of sales today. And something like 30 people have added me to their Favorites list. Yippee!

Of course, with the good comes the bad. I have sold nothing on Amazon yet. I'm probably going to cancel my account at the end of this month (you know, that thing about not throwing good money after bad, or whatever.) So I'll need to find alternate strategies/venues that work better for me.

And then our Windows Home Server machine chose this weekend to die. Well, maybe not die, just give up in protest of the hot weather. My smart husband figured out it was overheating which made the drives fail. We didn't lose data (yay) but now need to build a machine with more air circulation/bigger fan so this doesn't happen again. It's got all of our digital pics on it, as well as our ripped music so we *really* can't afford to lose it.

But all in all, life is good. Really good. Yay! Thanks to everyone for their good wishes!!

Sleep my darling

So I guess in preparation for BabyX's arrival, my sleep schedule is already all out of joint. I can't get comfy, it takes me forever to *fall* asleep, and then in the morning I *DO NOT* want to get out of bed. Sigh.

I can only imagine it's going to get worse from here, which is sad. Cuz I'm a girl who looooves her sleep. Like a 10-hours-per night, plus a nap looooove. Sad.

I got your "miracle of life" right here, buddy. :P

On the bright side, I have discovered that Trader Joe's makes the best, and least expensive apple pie of all the area grocery stores. I have been eating apple pie like it's going out of style. And the one I like best has the most apples, and the least sticky goo. Very odd. Yay pie!

Don't forget me

Yesterday, while I was wandering around Kirkland on a gloriously sunny day, I happened upon a clothing consignment store. They didn't have any maternity clothes but they did have shiny baubles so I browsed. And happened upon this marvelous silk top for only $22! It's a plus-size top, unstructured, which will make it a perfect maternity top at least for a couple of months. It's pretty, light, and has a great pattern - everything else I've bought has been a solid color shirt. I'm so excited about wearing it. It's a little big above the waist but I figured out I can tie it back with a long sash I found in my closet and it'll fit better that way. Yay!

Yes, that is a picture of me. And yes, I'm getting larger by the minute. That, and retaining water like a sponge. Sigh. But that's the miracle of life, right? But it is an indicator that *something* is going on in there. I'm almost halfway, at 19 weeks, so that's good. It's been relatively painless so far, though of course I like to complain. And eat pie while doing it.

Today was another day of some cool bargain finds. There's a church near us that has various sales (rummage, garage, craft, etc.) from time to time to raise money for various charities. I got some awesome vintage jewelry there last time, so I thought I'd check out the garage sale they're having today. And what fun! For only $3 total, I got tons of stuff.

A 100% cotton onesie with a space theme for BabyX, for 25 cents. And boo to anyone who says this must be for a boy because it has a space theme. Girls like space too! It's clean, and soft, and of course I'll wash it like crazy before it gets anywhere near BabyX:

I think that's the first official piece of clothing I've bought for BabyX. Woo hoo to it being geeky!

I also found a very cute children's book called "Round the Garden" by Omri Glaser. Everyone knows I'm *not* an outside person, or a gardener, but this book was so cute and colorful, and only 25 cents so I figured it was worth it. Plus it has a page with all the different kinds of clouds (cirrus, cumulus, etc) and this awesome page about growing an onion. The biologist in me couldn't resist:

Another purchase was this fabulously orange ball of yarn which I think will be used for packaging my pet tags:Also, I'm learning how to use Photoshop Elements, and that was my first experiment using layers, and getting rid of a photo's background. I know the yarn looks weird and disembodied, but hopefully I'll get better at using the tools.

We've needed small plates for a while (for eating small pieces of cake or pie, or a couple of cookies), so I got these large saucers, 8 for $1 total:

In addition to all this goodness, my $3 bought me a full box of staples, a small galvanized steel box for craft supplies, a couple of bits of ribbon, and a binder *full* of various kinds of graph paper - log, engineering, quadrille, etc. Good graph paper is pretty expensive, and I know how my husband loooves graph paper, so I figured for 25 cents it was totally worth it. And I was right. He saw the log paper and was all "ooh, is that log paper in there". I love it.

So it was a fun shopping trip. I worked hard not to bring home useless things, like cool vintage glass bottles or tealight holders, because we need less of that kind of clutter around here. Everything I bought has a purpose. Yay!