Baby room progress

Getting the baby room ready has become a great way to keep our minds off the wait while our paperwork is processing. 

About a month ago we decided on colors and went to work painting. We decided to go with 2 neutral greys above and below a chair rail. Brian is going to paint a mural, we'll leave you in suspense about the theme...(*might* be code for we are too indecisive to pick something and go with it...). We'll also decorate with accent colors once we know if we are getting a boy or a girl (so excited for the shopping that will ensue once we know gender and age!). 

So this is what we started with...boring beige

 

After a few hours of work....(which seemed like days to the dogs)

We ended up with this!

 

This is actually the first room we have painted in the 3 years we have been in our house and we are pretty proud of the way it turned out. 

Next up, furniture!

Ways I am keeping Brian busy

As we get finished with our parts of the adoption process, our thoughts have moved to getting our house toddler ready. We have pretty much left the "baby room" empty since we moved in, knowing that someday it would be a child's room (although if you ask the dogs, they are pretty convinced it is the room for taking naps in the sun). We chose colors and started talking about decor (more posts to come!), but we also wanted to focus on making the closet as storage efficient as possible.
Now, there are few things I love more than organization. Many many projects have started with me saying "Honey come look at this. Don't you think it would work better if we.....". And Brian always says "yes honey, I agree that more bins/organizers/shelves would make it much better! How can I help?". (ok maybe it's just in my head that he says that. Who knows what he actually says, I've already moved on to planning our trip to Ikea).

After much time spent on Pinterest, I decided that I wanted the baby room closet to look like this:

Source

However, our closet looked like this

 

So I had to reel in my expectations a little and Brian (and Kona) got to work!

 

Brian is always saying that he isn't good at these things, but he never ceases to come through and create exactly what I was thinking, if not better. 

I LOVE how it turned out! 

We are trying not to buy too much until we know the age and gender of our kiddo, but we can't wait to start figuring out how use our great new closet space!

This week's accomplishments

This was a big week folks, big week!

We both had our physicals this week that included some lab work and passed with flying colors. China has a few health requirements, one of which is a BMI requirement. We both worked really hard to be as healthy as possible before these appointments and I wanted to give a quick shout out to Brian who lost a significant amount of weight this year. I'm so proud of him and the hard work he had to do to get there. We both are committed to making these changes permanent and living a healthy lifestyle from here on out (minus this weekend when we celebrated by throwing the diet out the window! Yay junk food!)

We also checked out 3 local daycare centers and feel very comfortable with our options. Thanks everyone for your advice! It really helped us to feel more educated going into the tours.
There was one that really stood out to us. The director gave a great tour and gave us tons of information. They have a great curriculum, the kids all seemed happy and there was a good sense of controlled chaos. They do have a waiting list so we will try to decide sooner rather than later. Doing the tours definitely made everything seem real, we are actually becoming parents!

So the physicals mark the last step that we have any control over, from now on we will really be waiting on everyone else to process our paperwork and keep it moving. It's difficult to know how long it will take. Our coordinator warned us that it could be as late as January 2014 before we travel. Hopefully it won't be, but we need to be prepared to be patient. (I'm starting to really hate the word patient!)

We will be sure to keep you all updated as soon as we know more and keep the blog posts coming with everything we are doing to get ready for our baby!

Don't you hate it when you look at the phone screen vs. the camera? Brian apparently has no problem with this, but I look like there was something shiny in the corner that caught my attention.
Must work on photo skills before child comes!