Introducing Derek Kingston Gene Mast

He's finally here. Derek made it into the world on March 12, 2009 at about 10:30 am. His delivery was relatively easy. I was induced at 5:30 am and 5 hours later he was here. He weighed 7 lbs 14 oz and is 21" long. He's a great baby. Generally eats every 4 hours and sleeps in between those feedings. He's pretty happy unless he has to wait on his bottle, then he turns into a grumpy old man. The girls are absolutely in love with him. They love to hold him and feed him and give him kisses any chance they get. Willem is very happy to have some testosterone in the house. Derek has already been introduced to the tractor and the dogs.

As promised I took some pics of his room. We went with an extreme sports theme. We'd love him to be into skateboards and bikes like his daddy. Only time will tell. In the meantime he seems to like looking at the lines on his walls.

Master Suite Update

Finally we have a fully functioning bathroom. It is still void of wall trim, doors and a little paint but for the most part it is finished. I'm so happy to have tiled floors and no more plywood subfloor. Our bedroom is much cozier since the addition of the changing room/closet. We still have to put flooring down in our closet but we're going to just put down the old carpet for now until we can afford to floor the entire bedroom and closet at once. Our closet is going to be filled with wall to wall wardrobe units from IKEA called PAX. We have a few units and will be putting those up this weekend. Anyways, here are some pics so you can see the dramatic difference so far.

MASTER BEDROOM

The second pic is a pic from the bed and it's at the entrance to the closet.

MASTER CLOSET/DRESSING ROOM

Picture of closet entrance and the lighted room at the end is the bathroom. There will be a wood door with a frosted glass panel in it into the bathroom.

MASTER BATHROOM

The First pic is to the left of the door. The second pic is to the right, note the toilet area will have another wood door with frosted glass panel and the shower will be in that heavily junked up area. Shower construction will begin in a couple of months so that we can take a break and spend some time getting adjsuted to the new baby.

BABY UPDATE: As of Wednesday, I had already begun dialating so the doctor is thinking he'll be here by the first week of March for sure. We'll post pics of the little guy and his room once he's here.

Kicked out of our room!

Last I left you we had gutted the bathroom and were well on our way to driving ourselves to delirium with construction. Since that time much has happened. For starters the bathroom got a lot worse before it got better! Then just in case the bathroom wasn't enough we decided to dive into the dressing room/closet project in the master bedroom. Willem began framing up the walls and laid out the electrical. Literally the bathroom and closet project were getting closer and closer to our bed making it feel as if it was out to get us! Finally all has been done that we can do and drywallers are coming in tomorrow to finish it all off. I can't tell you how happy I'm going to be when there will be no more drywall bits and dust finding its way into every room in the house. Here are some pics of it tonight before the drywall guys do their magic. (The pictures have captions on them, just click on them to get a zoomed in version)

Sometime during all this construction I managed to pull Willem away to get the painting done in the baby's room. I knew this whole project was going to come very close to the baby's due date so I wanted the baby's room to be ready. Now that sheet rock day is here we have had to move out of our bedroom and we are now sleeping in the baby's room for the next week or so. I took a few pics of the baby's room since it's been painted. It was difficult getting pics taken as our bed is in there and a ton of other crap that we had to put somewhere until our bedroom is complete. I'll take better pics when we are all back in place and ready for baby boy to come home.

Also in the past two months we had a contractor come out and replace our siding that had gotten destroyed by Gustav. Thank you Vance Henry! You did a great job! We also had our buddy Addison Henry and his crew come out and put up a privacy fence along the side and back of our property. I'll post some pics of that sometime in the future.

I'm getting bigger, due date is getting closer, winter is leaving us and we're looking forward to a spring with our new baby boy and lots of down time!

I'll show more updates as they happen!

By the way, I just wanted to say a public and very big THANK YOU to my husband! He has worked almost every weekend from morning to night since MARCH to make this place my dream home without complaint! I couldn't ask for a better, more loving best friend! Thanks Willem for not giving up and walking away, God knows you have had every right to! I love you!