Feet, fathers, and a cold jar of something

I haven't had much to blog about this week. While recovering from a summer cold, I've been spending most of my down time backing up photos and burning our family movies to DVD. I don't even try to "keep up" with things like that--I just take care of it all in one big effort every six months or year or so and that seems to work well enough. It's fun when I do, because we have a great time reviewing Dorothy's progress and re-watching some favorite old family movies.

The picture above is Worth's feet this morning. I made these shoes (crocheted then wet-felted) during that last painful week of pregnancy, when I just kept churning out booties and hoping to go into labor. I watched the Olympics while I did these one night. I love them, but I don't know what they are supposed to be. Jester feet? I think they look a little like leaves, as if his chubby little legs just sprouted out of them. I've been waiting for him to grow into them, and now he has. Fun!

This project was actually from a couple weeks ago. I was tempted by a set of clear plastic iced tea tumblers at Costco, but felt like I didn't need any more drinking plastic in my life. So I assembled this instead. It's a wide-mouth canning jar with a stainless steel drinking straw. I used a metal punch to poke just the right sized hole in a heavy-duty plastic lid, so it's reasonably spill-proof, easily washable, not plastic (except the lid), and cheap! This week I've been guzzling juice out of it as I try to kick this cold. This size jar fits nicely in my car drink holder, but I can use any size wide-mouthed jar.

And last but not least, Father's Day! Dorothy and I put together a nice little gift bag for Rob with a Dorothy-decorated coffee mug, a picture for his office, a whole stack of Dorothy art, and an impish pair of cufflinks from Etsy with little treasure maps on them. I think he likes it all (although he unintentionally attempted to dissassemble some Dorothy art that was supposed to stay folded--oops!), and now we're off to spend the rest of the afternoon appreciating him however he wishes!

Holidaze

Two days of painting by my Dad and one late night (pictured) from my husband later, and we now have an extremely attractive newly exposed front porch that in no way resembles the screened-in haven of tea party dishes, half-burnt candles and caked-on playdough we had before. Although I have to admit I was rather fond of my dusty old front porch playroom, this one should look much better to potential buyers.

With the house all cleaned up for the open house, my little family skedaddled out of town to a lovely outdoor wedding picnic and a day at Holiday World. The park was just right for us--I couldn't believe how family friendly the whole place was! From the clean, safe rides for the four-year-old to the pleasant, air-conditioned space with stacks of clean towels and comfy gliders for nursing moms (hell yeah!), we all had a really terrific day. Dorothy rode the canoe ride (above) so many times that when Rob finally went to drag her off the friendly ride operator told him "Dorothy is a very polite girl." Apparently they'd developed a relationship and exchanged names during her multiple trips through the start!

Our only unpleasant moment at the park was right after Dorothy and Rob exited the log flume--soaking wet. We hadn't prepped her that she'd get wet on the ride, oops! She recovered (and dried off) pretty quickly though.

After we arrived back home, however, our little happy holiday was over. We realized we'd left an big wet bag of dirty cloth diapers back at the hotel room. Ick! Cloth diapering only saves money if you wash and reuse--not if you leave them at hotel rooms to get pitched out by horrified cleaning staff. Darn. So I made a little trip to Mama's Hip today and did some diaper shopping. Luckily, my little chunk is now big enough for the next size up, so although it hurt to replace the wet bag, at least I was able to buy some diaper covers we'd have ended up needing anyway.

Can I haz a tiny little cheezeburger?

Some random things that have made me happy this week:
1. Doing modeling clay with my daughter.

2. Cute, freezing children who are snacking in the shade after running through the sprinkler in the sun for hours.

3. This sweet face.

4. My family's help getting ready for this weekend's open house (thanks Mom, Dad and Cam!).

5. My hydrangeas.

6. The one-hour setting on my bread machine, so I can decide mid-morning to have fresh-bread peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with last week's jam for lunch!

A deer and more house effort

Given that we live on a busy street in a fairly large city, it was quite surprising on Tuesday morning when Dorothy and I looked out our window and saw a deer in our side yard. Rob phoned animal control, but they said they do not deal with "indigenous wildlife." (Which is cool, I guess, except isn't it a little dangerous to have deer near busy streets and the nearby airport runway?) We left for a playdate and some errands, and he was still there when we came home six hours later, just bedded down and looking more comfortable. We watched him for a long time--we had a great view! Dorothy felt a little frightened of him and was resistant to taking her nap, and although I was not scared of the deer, it did feel really odd and alternative-universey to be staring at it out of my own window. The animal left maybe thirty minutes after we came home. I guess our presence back in the house made our side yard less comfortable for him.

Meanwhile, inside the house. We're still preparing in a fast and furious way for Sunday's open house. My brother and mother came over yesterday to help, and we (meaning actually my brother and a friend) took down the entire screened-in front porch. I hate to lose that indoor/outdoor space, but the front of the house looks much nicer now, since the screens and frames were really not in very good condition. Tomorrow we will repaint the newly exposed porch. I've been working on taking down and laundering curtains, and I also made a little skirt and tablecloth (above) for the kitchen microwave cart, which was also looking pretty shabby. It looks nicer now, and I think sewing the skirt was much easier than trying to scrub up the grimy toaster oven that is now well-hidden!

Saint Louis and home again

We had a great weekend visiting my in-laws in Saint Louis. We took the kids to the City Museum, and it had to have been one of the most interesting kid-oriented places I've ever been to. Things to climb on and through, slides everywhere, secret tunnels. We had a nice time and the travel part went okay, all things considered.




Yesterday was back to real life in hurry, although it was our wedding anniversary. Seven years ago today we were driving back up to Chicago to unpack and repack and leave for our honeymoon! We had so many boxes of gifts (crammed into our car and the cars of guests who also drove down from Chicago) that they filled an entire wall in my little apartment. What a generous way for our family and friends to send us off into married life! We unwrapped and made a list, but left them boxed along the wall until we moved into our house in August. I took almost a whole year to send thank-you notes.


I celebrated my anniversary yesterday with a pleasant if not-so-romantic dinner out with my parents and kids, while my husband taught a night class. There will be other years for romance. But Rob did keep with his tradition of purchasing a "traditional" gift for me, according to anniversary gift charts. He has fun thinking of something that fills the requirement and makes me happy. I particularly liked year 3--leather. He bought me cowboy boots! This year was copper or wool, which was almost too easy. The good people at Grinny Possum helped him out, and I'll be sporting beautiful handmade woolens this fall just for me.

Now I'm turning my attention to our house. We rescheduled our open house for this coming weekend, and I'm really trying to get the place in shape for a good showing. I'm washing curtains, scrubbing nooks and crannies, driving myself crazy. One of yesterday's projects was recovering our dining chair pads with new fabric. The others ones had gotten too worn from years of use and accumulated car fur. They never looked nice even after a good cleaning. These at least looked good for about four minutes, until the cats realized they were done!

Jam session

Busy day today! Trying to clean up around here for an open house this weekend (crossing fingers that we'll get some interest), got new tires on the car, and made strawberry jam with berries from my brother and sister-in-law's garden. Yum! Here's Dorothy with her jam face. I didn't bother processing the jars, as I learned last year that just one batch only lasts us a few weeks. They won't take up much room in the 'fridge until they are eaten up, especially since Dorothy is going through a stage where she'll only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I love the sweet, homemade taste of the old-fashioned recipe with just strawberries and sugar, where you boil the s#!t out of it and it sets up on its own, but given the time constraints inherent in jam-making with a small baby I used pectin this year. So it tastes more like grocery-store jam, but I know it's not. :)

Now I'm off to party with my Mom who is retiring today. Hooray for Nana! Dorothy says "after today, Nana will be a stay-at-home-mom." Amen to that!

Mommy's new toy

We had a lovely, full, long weekend. Rob and Dorothy took their tandem bike on a several-mile stretch of the mayor's Bike and Hike, we relaxed, made homemade ice cream, grilled out, drove to a nearby woods and took a nice walk. There was also lots of complaining, because, well, we have a four-year-old. But Mommy did some complaining too this time because the new toy she'd ordered fully a week ago had not yet arrived and she had to wait until Tuesday for the UPS dude to deliver it. (Incidentally, why do mothers often refer to themselves in third person?) Anyway, today my parcel finally arrived and I somehow managed not to run out to the sidewalk, pounce on the UPS man and rip it out of his hands when it finally got here.

One of my very favorite things in the world is taking photographs of my beautiful kids. I consider it a hobby, privilege, duty and job perk all in one. My favorite method of storing our family photos is to put them into books using the software available at Blurb.com and have them printed. I'm holding our most recent edition here in my hand. I choose different layouts for different batches of photos and add some text--it isn't complicated, it doesn't take long, the results look great, and I don't have to go to one of those schmaltzy estrogen-filled scrapbooking stores at any point in the process. Anyway, it felt like the weak link in our photo situation was our camera, which does a perfectly fine job but not a beautiful job like some nicer cameras. So we upgraded, and it finally arrived today! Now my next crafty project is definitely going to be to learn to use it better so that the new weak link in the family photograph situation is not the, er, photographer.

But happily it seems to do a pretty good job without me even knowing how to use it properly yet. I'm afraid my sewing machine might get dusty in the next week or two while I'm chasing my poor kids (and maybe even the long-neglected cats) in my attempt to master the digital SLR thing.