Fun filled baby inspired weekend!

What a fun weekend we managed to have! Marco was off, which only happens every third weekend so we got to spend the entire weekend together. We managed to do some baby stuff shopping and actually made some decisions on some things, which thrills me to death. I'm a planner and it kills me when I can't have everything done immediately.

As of Friday we hadn't bought one single thing for the baby yet. Well I'm only 19 weeks to that's normal you say... please go back and re-read the first paragraph... I'm a planner and I like things done immediately. At first we didn't buy anything because I wanted to make sure we were going to make it past the first trimester without any problem. You know, the whole jinx thing. Then we just never bought anything because we couldn't find anything we really loved or thought we "needed" right at the moment. Even now we're still way ahead of the baby game but it feels good to have a few things known, if not bought.

First we picked out a travel playpen type thingy for Marco's parents house. They'll be providing our daycare needs, at least in the beginning, so this seemed to be an important item. Plus we hit a great sale in a nearby town. We also couldn't pass up this super soft plush square thingy with a little rattle in it just for kicks really.

Saturday we also continued fruitlessly to shop for cribs. Well I did have some strawberries but you know what I mean. The thing is that I found some beautiful cribs on a few US websites and fell in love. There is nothing remotely similar to any of them here. Every time we shop we go home frustrated because we don't see anything that even makes us stop and take a closer look. That's never a good thing. After shopping Saturday Marco wisely told me, we better get over the fact that we aren't going to find cribs like we wanted from the US so we may as well open our minds a little bit and find something here that we can live with. Today we did exactly that. We took ourselves to the nearest Prénatal (a baby store here) and voila! We've ordered our crib to be delivered in just 6 to 8 weeks. WOOHOO!

We also popped into IKEA and found the closet/wardrobe and chest of drawer/changing table we will use in the baby's room. Funny thing, if you buy a closet and chest of drawers at IKEA in the normal section you pay a few hundred euros. If you go to a baby store and buy a very similar closet and chest of drawers you pay about 7 to 8 hundred euros. Now I know IKEA is supposed to be cheaper (and a lesser quality I suppose) but really there is no difference in quality that I can see between the baby store's items and what we've found at IKEA so why the enormous jack-up in price other than one is labeled and marketed for babies and expecting parents? Do they use magic nails that sound an alarm when the toddler decided that climbing the chest of drawers is a great way to spend the afternoon? Do fairies come and alert the parents when the child opens the closet and flings every newly laundered and folded article of clothing onto the floor? I somehow doubt it (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!).

We've also decided on a stroller, the Quinny Speedy, but are still doing some shopping around for the best bargain. What's sad is that the stroller, of all things, seems to be the most expensive item! It will get a lot of use for many years though so I think it's money well spent. Plus Marco's totally in love with it.

I've also decided to order some maternity clothing from JC Penny online because they carry quite a range of plus size maternity clothing. I honestly cannot find one plus size maternity shop in the entire effin country and I have searched like Holmes. Saturday morning we exhausted our last two options for stores here and came out of both places empty handed. I give up! If any of you are regular Penny's shoppers can you please tell me how their sizes run in comparison to Lane Bryant? I am probably going to err on the safe size and order larger than I think I need because I really really don't want to have to have them shipped over to not fit and have to ship them back. Pre-pregnancy I was 18-20 on top and 20-22 on bottoms. Just in the past two weeks I've been unable to comfortably zip/button my 22's due to pg belly. According to JC's website I could probably order a 1x in shirts and 2x in pants but I'm thinking of doing a 2x and 3x. Any advice is appreciated!

So I'm not quite halfway through this pregnancy and already I feel like we have a big jump on things, finally. Once we have the ultra sound on the 5th of March (clearly marked on all your calendar's, no?) we'll pick a definite theme for the room and get the whole she-bang-a-lang started! WOOHOO!

Hope you all had a wonderful, successful and healthy weekend!