The Miles Rausch Family Website

We’ve got a new podcast recorded and up at Dear Future Kids, so you can listen to it here. You’ve probably seen a plug for it on my Twitter account and DFK’s, as well as my Facebook profile and the DFK fan page. We’re flooding our outlets since it’s probable that no one checks for the podcast anymore. It’s about 50 minutes long, but it has been a few months and we’re long-talkers. We hope to get at least one more out before baby’s arrival. The next one shouldn’t be as long.

Here are some photos to prove the baby is growing.

6 weeks, 26 weeks, 28 weeks, 30 weeks, 32 weeks

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post…we’ll have more to post after an ultrasound this Friday. (My uterus is measuring big, so they want to see if it’s because the baby is big. Let’s hope he’s normal size.)

I’ve been crocheting hats like crazy the last couple of weeks. So far, I’ve made two adult hats and 10 baby hats. There’s been a lot of concern about how many babies I’m having. Don’t worry, I’m having just one and only two of those hats are for my baby. The remaining 8 are for babies I know. And I still have a few more on a list to crochet.

The selection for boy colors in baby yarn is quite limited. There are a lot of pastels – and even “boy” colors in pastel still look quite girly. So I bought baby yarn in colors I liked, and then a couple I thought I could deal with for boys. (Turns out one is camo – I was hoping the dye would be in longer segments so it’d be more like shades of green…but it’s most definitely camo.)

I don’t know if any of the hats I made for friends’ babies will fit any of the babies, but I’m hoping they’re close. The parents can always re-gift or save it for a future baby if it’s too small, I guess! Albie helped out by modeling the hats – it sort of gives one a sense of size, too. Though I don’t have much sense of scale when it comes to babies who are 3 months old and babies who are almost a year old…

See the whole set here.

We worked on the nursery this weekend. I decided I wanted to paint a wall, based on the colors in our nursery bedding/paintings I did. So we got paint. And I painted the wall.

Then we decided we were going to buy the crib this weekend too. And assemble it.

While we were at Target, we noted that the Pack n Play we were planning to purchase was in stock. So we bought that, too. And figured out how to set it up.

I had purchased a car seat earlier in the week, so we unboxed that.

All while rewatching season five of LOST.

Then last night we hung up the canvases I painted over my Christmas break.

You can see the whole set on Flickr. The only pictures that show the most accurate color for the wall are the ones with the canvases on the wall. The others look really bright. If I were to change anything on the paintings, it would be the triceratops. He looks goofy and has no neck. But, he looks the same on the bedding of which I was basing it off of, and I didn’t want them to not match. I guess we’ll just be teaching our son that even goofy looking people belong.

We got money for Christmas from several individuals – all put together, with Miles’s bonus, we had a pretty good amount. We wrote down a list of various ways we’d like to use it. Some would take up all of it, others only part.

This “wish” list included:

• MacBook (or MacBook Pro) to replace Miles’s current MacBook, purchased in 2006, which does need replacing sometime.
• Maternity clothes for Holli (we’d get clothes anyway, but it was still on the list).
• Paying off Miles’s car (we’re pretty close to paying it off, and my car will need to be replaced within the next year or so).
• New video camera (a small one that will be quick and easy to film moments with the baby – currently in the running: Flip Mino HD, Kodak Zi8, iPod Nano).
• Droid (or maybe the Nexus?) for Miles (his cell is pushing four years old).
• Plane tickets to Ohio (to visit Bryce and Lindsey).
• Put all of it in savings (since we’ll have major expenses coming up in a few short months).

After making this list, we found that some of these might not work out – paying off Miles’s car would take up a little over half the amount, I’ve got only a few more weeks to be able to travel via airplane (and motion sickness has been a big issue) and I need to save all my vacation days for maternity, and just decided to hold off on a new laptop. We gave me a budget for maternity clothes, and I only went $0.65 over that. I got one cardigan, two camisoles, 8 shirts/blouses, and one pair of brown dress pants (the only color I still needed). Yippy!

Since the money was given to us as a Christmas gift, we know those persons want us to spend at least some of it on fun things for ourselves. Our first plan was to save 2/3 of it and with the other third we would spend it on a video camera and split the remainder between us to spend how we want. With this plan, I would have gotten chairs for our dining table. We currently use card table folding chairs. Gag me. The problem lies in that the table will be hard to find chairs for (it was Miles’s grandparents and his mom stained it and gave it to us) and I’ll want to get six. Ultimately, we decided against the two-thirds/one-third plan as we aren’t ready to make a video camera decision and we’ll just need to consciously save up for dining table chairs. As for matching (or possibly strategically mismatching?), I’ll just need to go into a store with one of the leaves from the table I think.

So we put it all in savings and decided that right away, we both could take $100 of it to spend however we want. We’ll still possibly get some of the things on the list eventually, like the video camera and cell phone (and we already got me maternity clothes) but for now it’s going to stay in savings. Miles is still working on his $100 wish list, but I’ve already spent mine.

• $20 – Purse from Gordman’s with a coupon. Something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get and would have had to pick out myself anyway.
• $30 – Rugs from Target so my favorite rug at our entrance doesn’t get destroyed by winter and to warm up the upstairs living area. The hard wood floors make it very chilly.
• $35 – Electric griddle from Amazon, something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get. I love to cook for us and friends, but sometimes I just want to do it all in one shot.
• $10 – Dry-erase calendar board from Amazon, also something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get but I think I’ll like.
• And with the remainder of my $100, I got a special hot chocolate from Caribou.

Most of you looking at my list probably think it’s a little lame. But it’s totally me. Yes, the lame part. The things I want are almost always practical things. (i.e. dining room chairs, maternity clothes, etc.) All the fun things on the first list above came from Miles. (You can bet I’m the one who put “Pay off Miles’s car” on that list.) His list will be more interesting, and will include PS3 games and Blu-ray movies, when he decides what he’s going to get. But I’m excited about what I got and the deals I got for them.

But why am I defending myself to you? It’s my blog, anyway!

Dinos dinos dinos dinos! Preliminary sketches for canvases to be painted over Christmas break and hung in the nursery. A little something blue coming soon.