Holy whirlwind, Batman. The last half of November has been crazy for us.

• Nov 10 was my birthday and we celebrated by bowling with some friends on the Friday following the bday. The actual birthday was fun - there were cupcakes that I brought to work but made Hubs make (although I frosted... artfully piped-on swirls of frosting are not exactly how Hubs rolls). And then my whole group at work went out to lunch and the Big Boss picked up the check. I had a lobster pasta dish that was super good! Then that evening my brother's fiance Kim and I went to dinner at CPK because Hubs was playing flag football. Good food, cupcakes and getting to bed by 9 - sounds like this preggo's idea of a good birthday time!
• Saturday after the bday, a couple college friends came in from out of town. One of the girls is in a surgery residency and is super busy so we hardly get to see her - but she was in town for a medical conference. So she brought her boyfriend and we all got to meet him! We headed to dinner on Saturday at Lucia's (VERY good, and very reasonable since it's a BYO. Here is a pic of all of the girls from that night! So cute.
  

Can you spot the three preggos?

• Sunday my friend Amy M (from Michigan) had stayed with me and we are both pregnant so we woke up at the buttcrack of dawn. We snagged breakfast and then she headed out of town. All week we'd been moving the little stuff in the living room to either the guest room or the upstairs den, and once Amy took off my brother came over to help Mike move all the living room furniture into the guest room in preparation for the hardwood floors to be redone. After they finished I took Jay home and then headed to Logan Bar and Grill for lunch with our out-of-town surgeon friend and some other gals. I got down a good part of a bratwurst sandwich with sauerkraut, yummy! The rest of the day was finishing moving crap upstairs or stashing it in the kitchen cabinets, and then Mike and I went through our benefits information and decided which plan to be on. I did some major research and figured out how we could save some healthcare dough even after Dos is born. Now that is grownup stuff, dude, going on an HMO with your husband and baby. Crazy. For dinner we took the out-of-town friend and her boyfriend to Pequod's pizza, our fave pizza in the city. I think they enjoyed it, and I enjoyed eating pizza and spending some more time with them!
  
• Monday Hubs and I started working on putting plastic over the cabinets/windows and making all the edges airtight. I lobbied hardcore for putting the plastic over the windows since our blinds cost like a million dollars, are cloth, are impossible to take down without breaking, and cost major cash money to clean and/or fix after I break them trying to take them down. So putting plastic over them and taping everything securely seemed to work best.
  
• Tuesday was batten down the hatches night. Everything was moved up or to the guest room and the taping and plastic was finished. We sealed off the door to the upstairs and started using the upstairs entrance to get in and out of the condo.
• Wednesday was Hardwood Day. We had scheduled to have the floors refinished AND have some of the kitchen floor replaced. I realized earlier this year that if we didn't do this project before Dos, then we would NEVER get to it! The hardwood guys showed up at 7:30 AM. Oy. I wasn't even there when they got there since they'd said they would be there at 8. Milly and I were in the process of retrieving Milk Chugs and chocolate Donettes from the gas station. But Mike let them in. Thank goodness he stayed at home for his 7AM conference call b.c when the hardwood guys started taking up the little bit of hardwood they were supposed to replace in the kitchen (from an old dishwasher leak it was all warped and messed up) - they discovered some pretty decent water damage to the sublayers/subfloor. The guy who ran the crew kept looking at me and pointing at the floor and saying "This big problem" or "This bullsh*t". I got that he couldn't just put new hardwood over the water damage and expect that to fix it, but he wasn't giving me any options. At one point, I wanted to say, "Look, you fix floors. I write checks. Let me know how much the check needs to be and I will let you know if that is OK or not. Let's talk options." Instead I went up and got Mike who ran through some possible repair scenarios with the guys. Finally they agreed upon a plan and a price and they got to work. Yay! They were pretty good too... they started the lacquer around 3 so I scrammed and headed to my friend Amy C's house, since that is the smelly part. I came back around 5:30-6 to close up the condo and make sure everything was OK and they were done. It looked great! I grabbed a few more things and headed to spend the night at Amy's since the fumes were too much for Dos.
• Thursday was a normal day at work, and Mike worked from home at our place and left a bunch of windows open to air out all day. By the time I got home it was definitely OK for me to be there. So I helped Mike with a little cleanup and then we head to watch the Bears game with friends. I stayed with Amy again that night, just to be on the safe side with fumes and Dos, and Mike and Milly stayed at our place.
• Friday night Mike and I stayed at our own place and finished packing for vacation, cleaned up lots of hardwood dust, and worked on washing the walls. There was dust everywhere! But we got it pretty cleaned up, enough to make me stop twitching at least.

That bring us up to Saturday the 20th, where we got up at 5:00AM and left for the airport for the last pre-baby vacation. That is another post altogether, but let's just say that we had 6 days in St John and they were fabulous! Pics and vacation recaps coming soon!