New Items

Well, we're making some progress around here.

First, we did manage to go furniture shopping this weekend. And we picked out a sofa. And it was even slightly under our budget. Hooray for success!

We went with this one:(This picture seems excessively orange-y; the sofa is much more cranberry-y / darker than this. Also, those pillows are not going to be in our living room - we'll be going with dark blue and beige pillows, I think.)

To be fair, this wasn't one of the choices on the great sofa poll post. But it was the one we liked the best in the store. We did seriously consider the red microfiber one (this one is a tightly woven chenille), but I was a little weirded out by the suede-y feel of the microfiber.

We got a matching loveseat and ottoman. And we got the stain protection on all the pieces.

The furniture arrives Thursday. Yay! Now all we need are some bookshelves (and to get our books out of Mike's office at work) and we'll be in business!

In other news, Mike's department hosted a shower for us last Thursday. It was really, really sweet - especially since we've only been in town for such a short time.

Here are a few pictures from the shower:In addition the above-pictured rocker and many small items, we were also fortunate enough to receive our stroller. Here's a picture of the stroller:Again, I swear I am not turning into red person. I still like blue! And purple! And green!

We also picked up some of the baby furniture this weekend (this furniture is also part of a very generous gift from Mike's family). We had ordered it from JC Penny a few weeks ago and we'd selected the shipping option where they send it to the nearest store rather than to your house (this was a serious savings). The first part of our order came in last week.

We'd planned to go and get it on Saturday afternoon. Alas, there was an extremely intense rainstorm. First, we lost power, which meant that we were essentially locked in our house since our garage door opener wouldn't work (of course, we could have manually opened it, but that would have been a lot of work - and then we'd have to figure out how to close it securely). Then the power came back on, but it started hailing! This was only my second time ever in a hailstorm, so I wasn't even really sure what the sound was at first (now I know that that sound is property damage). Luckily, our house and windows seem fine; some of our veggie plants look much the worse for wear, but hopefully they'll pull through. So, finally, we accepted that driving around was just not in the cards for us on Saturday afternoon.

On Sunday morning Mike picked up the changing table and the rails needed to convert the crib into a big-kid bed (the crib itself is back-ordered until the end of the month). Here's the changing table (although ours is in a darker wood):