Twins: Week 17

 Special thanks this week (and every week) to the Beband from Target (hand-me-down to me) for letting me get away with only having to buy one pair of maternity jeans and helping me feel like I can get away with wearing all of my non-pregnancy pants...hopefully for the remainder of the twins life in utero...and probably beyond.  Also to Shiva Rea and her incredible Prenatal Yoga dvd (and to Farrah, who let me borrow it), which has somewhat soothed my aching, stretching abs and back only at the cost of me looking quite silly while trying to imitate her.  Thank you too to a somewhat stranger who told me during a convo about twin pregnancies that I was going to get so wide come 8-9 months that I wouldn't be able to wrap both arms under my belly and touch my fingers...just what I wanted to hear. 

And last but not least, to my Aunt Angie for giving me this rad, sequined number of a shirt, thereby making me my own personal disco ball to which I can jump, jive, and wail all night long...or at least for a few minutes before my body shuts down due to fatigue and my legs feel like they're going to give out.  :)

One Down

Three sections to go.  Hopefully priming and painting the next three won't take me two weeks each either.  My fun-filled schedule of babysitting, eating, napping, and painting in between isn't really conducive to a kitchen remodel.  But, the next few weeks seem a little more lax so hopefully I'll have this baby done by the middle of March.

As far as priming and painting go, I followed the same process I used during our master bath paint fest, except I rolled on two coats of paint instead of one.

Primed:

Painted:

Of course we still have a couple of things to do like add a light fixture and some molding to cover the gaps between the sofit and cabinets near the window but that's all on Anthony's to-do list so I'm free to move on to the opposite side.

Speaking of the opposite side, late one night last week we also managed to mangle some shelving and trim to finally make way for the above-the-range microwave we've had living in our guestroom closet for the past year.  Three cheers for getting our old microwave off the counter soon, thereby uncovering some coveted counter space and making our kitchen step even further into the 21st century!

Fingers crossed and hoping upon hope, our new countertops will be here and in next Friday (they were supposed to be here yesterday but were 'back-ordered'), so I'll be sure to squeeze in some exciting pictures of those.  :) 

Have a great weekend!  I'll be spending some of mine doing prenatal yoga, hoping it'll cure my aching abs.  :)

Happy Valentine's Day from a 16 Weeker!

I thought I'd add a little bit of a smile/smirk since it is Valentine's Day and all.  I'm not really one to take self-pictures so don't mind the half-hidden-behind-the-camera-awkward smile...my sis was the ham in our family, always stealing the show.  :) 

The twins are growing...rapidly I feel.  Also, depending on when I take their weekly pictures, my belly changes a little in size.  In the morning I feel like I have just a tiny bit of show but come nighttime, I feel (stretching muscles tired of stretching all day) and look a couple of inches bigger.  Funny how that is.  But either way, I'll take it.  Anywho, not much time for chit chat cause our double stroller just waltzed...er, heavily slid...through the front door courtesy of UPS and an unknown as of right now gift-giver!  Boy did reality hit me seeing it sit in our foyer!  Off to opening it and further getting enthralled with the ever-solidfying reality that we're having two children at once!  Oh my goodness!

Have a wonderful, love-filled Valentine's Day everyone!

Sandpaper, Nails, and a Mask

Finally!  After living without the oh-so-necessary-these-days internet for a week and getting a run around from our service provider, our web is finally back up and Bean In Love is back in business!  Oh happy Saturday!

As you might know, we've started another project to bring our kitchen out of the dark into the light.  We've already picked out and ordered new countertops so the next step is to get started on re-painting the cabinets.  When we first moved in, we had the great idea to paint the cabinets a chocolate brown using left-over/free paint from our previous house (see here).  Well, it was all great and dandy and looked pretty good when we were done but for some reason the paint remained a little sticky, even to this day.  One cabinet door also had lots of little pieces of roller lint plastered underneath the paint, leftover from the previous owners paint job and it always irked us.  So after we painted our master bath cabinets and fell in love with their look, we decided to carry it into the kitchen as well.  This is the story of how I, during my 16th week of pregnancy with twins, began this somewhat large project while Anthony helped here and there in between work and studying for a masters' exam.  :)

   With our countertops due in on the 17th of this month, I decided to complete the upper cabinets first before they arrived so that I didn't have to worry about accidentally ruining brand new tops with endless piles of paint chips and sawdust and 'oops' drops of primer and paint.  So it began with the upper left side:

 

For starters, I removed all of the doors and hardware and then removed everything from inside the cabinets.

Starting with the doors (the easy part), I set up a workstation outside and got to sanding, first with a coarse-grit sandpaper and then with a medium-grit until all sides were as smooth as two babies bottoms.  :)

Before:

After:

Since I was just going to paint right over them again, I didn't sand all the way down to the wood.  I just sanded enough to make sure that I had a non-sticky, smooth, flat surface to apply primer and paint to. 

To get in the grooves on the edge of the doors and inside the decorative routing on the fronts, I wrapped some sand paper around the thin, rounded end of Anthony's grill brush and went to town.

Then, a probably unnecessary step but just for good measure, I quickly rubbed each door down with a thin layer of Crown Liquid Deglosser NEXT (from Lowe's) to further ensure a good paint stick.

Then, it was on to the cabinet frames where I employed the same sanding process.

Just for kicks, here's a quick, all-around view of other happenings in the kitchen:

Me - prepped, pregnant, and fully protected.  :)

And, the new tablescape I created:

Lovely, innit?

Anyway, back to the cabinets.  After a couple days of sanding, sore arms, and lots of pregnancy bathroom breaks, I was ready to prime.

And that was that.  Except you quick ones might've also noticed one tiny thing missing...

The gaudy scalloped edge above the sink (if you thought "the light bulb", I'll count that too)!  Hooray for 2012 and modern design people! 

How'd I get it down?  Well, after noticing it appeared to be attached with two screws on each side...

...I simply removed them and tried my hardest (without Anthony's knowledge or approval) to bang, pull, and rip it down but to no avail.

It wasn't until my sweet, unknowing husband came home that night that he noticed my apparent deviousness and hesitantly removed it for me - after removing molding from behind and ripping it from six unseen nails from above (no wonder!) - and thereby exposing the ugly baby florescent light we've got goin' on.  But it's okay, we've got plans for that thing and they don't involve keeping it.  Stay tuned!  :)

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Well, I'm off to start painting and eating, painting and eating (and scouting for the mail man who just might have my Gap maternity jeans in his possession).  Have a great weekend everyone! 

Twins: Weeks 14 & 15

Week 14

I was given a BeBand (from Target) by a fellow mom and began using it this week instead of the usual rubber band act to magically turn my pants into maternity wear and I am convinced thus far that it is the greatest maternity invention ever!  I'll have to take a picture this week so show exactly how the thing works but the point of it is, obviously, to hold up your regular pants so you can get away with wearing your own pants during pregnancy.  I'm not sure exactly how long I'll be able to cheat with the band, but my goal is the entire pregnancy, although I did invest in some Gap maternity jeans I scored on sale for $33.   

As for pregnancy woes and cheers this week, I feel like pre-pregnancy with a little hill around the middle and a little sleepiness following me around...a.k.a. pretty darn good!

Week 15

Even though it seems as if things haven't changed much from week 14 to 15, I definitely feel like I'm looking more pregnant and maybe a front shot would show that more.  A stranger (maybe just the one brave enough to guess that I'm pregnant and don't just have a little beer belly) even asked me for the first time when I was due.  :)  I'll have to admit, my first "proud mom" moment came a few seconds later when I piped up and answered "almost 4 months".

On the flip side of side bright and sunshiny, my back and upper abs are starting to feel the stretch.  I ridiculously thought for two seconds this week that one of the twins was maybe kicking, only to realize a few minutes later that it was only my upper left ab spasming as it was pulled to make room for two growing chitlins.  :)

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Side(view) note:  To make things a little easier and just a tad bit more organized...and, well, just because they deserve their own post each week...I'm going to start posting baby belly pics sometime during the week instead of the normal Saturdays starting this coming week.  Stay tuned for regular programming later on today as our internet is now up and running after a week of being MIA!