Happy birthday!

Happy Fourth, everyone! And even more importantly, happy sixteenth birthday to Phoenix.



Phoenix is the old man of the house, officially an elderly guy now, but he still loves his mom and his family and greets me every morning with a bump to the forehead (as seen above) and sends me to bed every night with more of the same.

We found out this week that Phoenix is sick -- he's got both thyroid issues and kidney issues. Neither is too bad right now, but he's losing weight and it needs to be treated with a two-pill-a-day regimen. We start that tomorrow. Here's hoping he rallies, because I can't imagine living without this cat and am hoping for at least four more years of his company. I want him to live forever, but I also want him to live long enough that Sofie will remember him as her first kitty friend. If he can make it until she's four or five, I think she will.


***

Last night at the quilt guild satellite group meeting I attend, everyone except me was working on cute little patriotic quilts. I don't much like red-white-and-blue quilts or quilts with flags, but some of them were really sweet. Maybe I'll make one sometime soon.

In the meantime, I've finally sandwiched my log cabin top, so that's ready for quilting sometime this week, and I've almost finished the top for one of my three swap quilts. So I'm finally making a little progress.

***

We're enjoying our long weekend and making the most of some extra playtime. Today we got up and met friends at a local park for a couple hours of play, then home for lunch and naps and off again to Golden Gardens beach for a potluck picnic.

Brett's heading over early with the grills and some blankets to try to reserve two picnic tables withing easy eye-shot of the swingsets, so that the kidlets can play without having to be followed around too much.

Should be wonderful - the weather is good, we're making burgers and dogs, my friend Dianne is bringing STRAWBERRY PIE (my favorite), and we'll all just hang out for the few hours between naps and bedtime. No fireworks for us -- although we can see a tiny corner of the downtown fireworks from our upstairs bedroom windows, so I might try to watch a bit of them from up there.



Hope everyone is having a great day!

Monday Daybook

I've decided to start taking part in A Simple Woman's Daybook meme -- so here's a little snapshot of our Monday this week.

Outside my Window...is a garden that’s once again becoming completely out of control. But I like it.

I am thinking...I need to get moving on my swap quilts, but I’m completely stymied. I'm also thinking about how my neighbor down the road has been buying crickets intended as reptile food and setting them loose in her yard, where they're making the most delightful sounds at night. I LOVE the sound of crickets. Will they survive in Seattle, I'm thinking? Can I get some?

I am thankful for...my daughter playing happily at my feet for a few minutes, absorbed in her games. Not having to go to work today. A host of fun parties we went to over the weekend - one at Brett's VP's house, and one hosted by a former employee of mine. We had a blast at each!

From the kitchen... working on triple cooked pork for fajitas – almost done! It's been boiled, baked, and shredded and now just gets cooked in some oil in a little bit here. Mmmm.

I am creating...a big huge mess in my sewing room trying to come up with a miniature quilt that isn't a disaster, for a swap.

I am going...to go running in the morning if it kills me.

I am wearing...a red linen shirt that didn’t fit two months ago (yay diet and running!) and blue shorts

I am reading...just finished “Starting Out In The Evening” and haven’t started a new one. Also read Children of Men last week, by PD James, which I vastly preferred to the movie.

I am hoping...that Brett gets home early tonight, since they shipped last week.

I am hearing...about thirty little wrens chirping madly in the backyard – I think they’re mating. And I'm hearing Sofie mutter "BOBO!!" as she tries to put diapers on her bobo the clown doll.

Around the house...there is order in some places and chaos in others. But it’s sunny and bright and all the windows are open.

One of my favorite things...Sofie in her strawberry bathing suit.

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week... Get the back made for my orange crush quilt and deliver to the longarmer, have some kids over to play, babysit Molly (Tuesday) and Jack (Wednesday), go swimming lots in the wading pool, run, play outside, go to quilt guild on Thursday.

Here is a picture thought I am sharing with you: tomatoes!

Chocolate hugs

A few more thoughts on our trip last weekend.

First, I just wanted to mention the lovely wedding we attended in a little more detail. It was one of those events that's so free of pretension or artifice and instead just reflects perfectly the personalities of its hosts -- in this case Alice and Andrew, who chose to have their wedding and reception in this cool, quirky artists' barn in Uniontown Washington.


The wheel fence, which you can see a part of here, has over 1000 wheels and was built over a period of 50 years. Inside, there are studios, a gift shop, and a big center space where the wedding was held.

This is the only picture we took during the wedding -- Sofie didn't leave us much time for photography. I snuck this one during the champagne toast.


I'm not feeling very inspired in my prose tonight -- more sleepy than eloquent tonight -- but I just wanted to say that the wedding was sweet and touching and simple and utterly lovely, and we were delighted to be a part of it. Thank you, Alice and Andrew!

One side note -- Brett was a reader during the service. Shortly before we left to go to the wedding, he snuggled up for a few minutes with Sofie on the couch at our hotel, unaware that she was clutching the remnants of a piece of chocolate chip cookie in her little fist. Which then melted all over his shirt. But, good daddy that he is, he didn't get mad or get upset -- we just brushed off what we could and went on with our lives. He even managed to work it into his speech.

What a good guy. :)

That's all for now.

Road trip

Just a reminder to go to this post to sign up for my mini-quilt giveaway! You can sign up until Friday night and if you REALLY want it you can comment multiple times. :) Winner will be posted on Saturday.

***

We're leaving later today on a road trip to our friends Alan and Beth's daughter's wedding in Pullman. This is a four hour drive that we're assuming will take six due to diaper changes, play breaks, and dinner. It's been a long time since we've been on a road trip with Sofie -- she's been on exactly two so far in her life, one wonderful and one a hellish experience I wouldn't want to relive. (To her credit, though, on the hellish one she was actually coming down with croup and we didn't know it, so there was a reason she cried for four hours straight.)

I have a feeling this one will be fine. We're leaving a day before the wedding so we have time to get out there, get a good night's sleep, do a little sightseeing and maybe visit the hotel pool, and THEN go to the wedding, where she'll be asked to behave for a couple hours before we beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel for a slightly-later-than-usual bedtime.

We also changed our room reservation from one of the wedding block rooms to a suite with a separate living room so we can put her to bed in the one room and still have lights and television on in the other room.

I've got books and lacing cards and a travel magna-doodle for the car. I already bought a supply of car snacks and bagged up beans and pasta for her dinner. We've got her cute little dress ready. We've got it covered, I think.

And yes, I will be online because hey -- three hour nap and an early bedtime means lots of downtime in the hotel. So stay tuned to see who wins the quilt and how good or bad the drive actually was.

Toddlers are weird, and other news

So today's evidence that toddlers are just plain weird? Sofie, clutching her gloworm (which she has recently named GayGay) to her chest, standing in the middle of the dining room crying big fat tears because I'm trying to get her to stay up and play for a while longer instead of taking a nap at what seems like way too early a time.


"No! Nap! Nap!" she sobbed. How could I be so cruel as to encourage her to play? I'm such a Big Meanie.


So down she went, a full 45 minutes earlier than normal, but what the heck. Apparently she was tired. Except that she's been in there yattering ever since and no actual sleeping has commenced.


***


And what is it about motherhood that makes it so you can instantly sense whether your kid is crying in their room because they're trying to fall asleep or crying because they pooped? I have poop radar. I was sitting in my office fixing a retarded mistake I made on MiniatureQuilter's wall quilt, listening to Sofie yatter and occasionally squawk, when suddenly my brain said, "Oh hey, she pooped. You better go in there." And sure enough.


Poopdar. My super power.


***


No more migraines this week, although I did take a cautionary pill the other night when I may or may not have been having my warning blind spot. Sometimes it's really hard to tell if I'm actually having a blind spot and have ten minutes before the world explodes in my head or if I just looked at a lightbulb. But not wanting to take any chances, I used one of my prescriptions.


Last night I couldn't sleep for some reason, and ended up sitting up until after midnight watching old reruns of Sex in the City. The movie of which is coming out soon, and which I will be at come hell or high water for opening weekend. Or very soon thereafter. I no longer wear fancy clothes or really nice shoes very often, but I can live vicariously through those who do.


This Friday Brett and I have a date. An actual dinner date, with Sofie left at home to play with one of her favorite other-mamas. We debated for a while trying to fit in a movie too but I'm actually dying to just have a long, leisurely, not-in-a-rush-to-get-somewhere-after dinner at a grownup restaurant - in this case Brasa, downtown. With tablecloths that little hands are not constantly almost pulling off the table. Maybe with actual candles. And wine. And - gasp - dessert. It's going to be great.


I should also mention that I had a very nice mother's day! Brett and Sofie gave me several cards (apparently Sofie couldn't decide between two and gave me both) and also a gift certificate to the Quilting Loft, a swanky fabric store in Ballard. We all went out to breakfast at our favorite diner and then had a nice day of lounging around and playing. I even got to take a nap. What more could I have asked for?


That's all for now.

Update

Not a lot happening this week. I've been having migraine clusters this week -- one that lasted over 36 hours, followed by a day off, followed by another one that struck last night and has lingered through part of today. Bleah. So I'm not getting a lot of anything done other than just managing to keep up with Sofie and do some minimal house upkeep.

Migraines are an odd thing. I get the full aura kind, where you have big huge visual disturbances preceding the actual headache -- either bright flickering rings, blind spots, or (a new one for me this week) double vision. Yay. The visual distortions last twenty minutes and then the headache kicks in. And if you catch it early enough in the visual stage and take your prescription, you just MIGHT lessen the headache.

So it's always a race. Like last night, when I was two blocks away from home letting Sofie "take a walk" (a veeeeeery slow affair) when the blind spot hit. I actually had to pick her up, tuck her under an arm and sprint home to try to get a pill in time. I try to keep one with me but I don't always succeed. Now I'm stocking up again -- all my bags, coat pockets, etc. Because my brain is probably going to ambush me again any second.

Makes me feel like my brain isn't working right. Which, technically, it isn't. But it's a disturbing idea, that.

On other fronts, here's a little bit of quilting news. Two things in progress right now, although neither is progressing very fast. First, here's an update on the log cabin quilt -- I showed a bit of this a week or so ago, but have since finished the top. It's on the pile of stuff that needs to be quilted:



I haven't measured this but it's something like 3 x 4 feet. I'm not sure if I like what I did with the borders, echoing the log cabin design like that. But it's a finished top and it's pretty and it'll be easy to quilt.

I'm also working on getting borders on the little quilt below and finishing it up -- this is the first thing on the work pile right now. It's for MiniatureQuilter, my Internet quilting friend who sent me the beautiful pineapple quilt earlier this spring in exchange for a piece of applique from me:



So far today I put two borders on it, decided they were horrible, took them off stitch by stitch, and put on a new inner border, then decided I better take some tylenol and leave well enough alone.

It continues to be unseasonably cold here -- mid May and it's 44 degrees every morning. I've got a tray-ful of sprouted seed potatoes sitting on my dining room table waiting to be planted, not to mention a second set of tomatoes waiting to go in the ground. The tomatoes can survive, but I'm not sure about the potatoes -- the instructions say DO NOT PLANT UNTIL THE GROUND IS OVER 45 DEGREES. Which I'm sure it isn't. But they've grown nice little eyes and the eyes are turning into sprouts and they've just GOT to go in. So I guess I better get around to it by this weekend, warm enough or not.

The lilacs are blooming, finally, and all the planted tomatoes are doing fine. Both apple trees are blooming, including the one I thought I killed last year, and the herb border in the garden is doing great. The tarragon, especially, is almost knee high and just so beautiful. I'll have to make tarragon chicken soon. I planted extra chives and sage this year, and now I've got almost everything I like to cook with (rosemary, italian parsley, sage, chives, oregano, tarragon, fennel, etc) on hand in the garden. Yum.

Sorry for this sort of flat-toned entry. I still have a headache and it's the best I can do. Signing off for today...

File this under "Inexplicable"

So if any of you reading remember my dilemma I posted last year (oddly enough, almost a year ago today) about a strange situation I found myself in at a local mall, here's another chapter in the seamier side of urban life.

Yesterday, a group of mom friends and I gathered at a local playground for a little birthday party. There was a fancy car parked there that sort of viscerally struck everyone as “wrong” somehow. The occupant, just barely visible through the tinted black windows, never came out. For two hours, they just sat there, never opening a door or a window. Facing the kids.

Of course we all thought “pedophile” and were a little creeped but basically tried to ignore it. After a couple hours, though, I went to put something in my car (parked next to it) and noticed that I could see a woman slumped over in the front seat – head to the chest, arms splayed wide. Looking more than a little dead, to be honest.

When I told the others, one of them walked over to take a closer look through the driver's window and saw what looked like a pipe in her lap, and a bag of powder, and some kind of stove-like thing. Uh oh. So of course we thought overdose, and we called 911.

And what a horrendous experience that turned out to be. What could the 911 dispatcher be thinking? They kept my friend on the phone for almost 20 minutes and kept asking for someone to go over to the car and knock on the window, make noise, try the door, try to rouse the occupant.

Who was holding a crack pipe.
And had drugs in her system.
And who was a total stranger.
And whose car we couldn't really see into clearly.

There was no way to know for sure what kind of state she'd be in if she woke up, or what or who else might be in the car. And we had our kids with us, for pete's sake.

We did go back up to the car a few times at the dispatcher's request, including setting off my car alarm to see if we could rouse her, but finally my friend (who, bless her heart, is a tough lady and can clearly stand up for herself) put her foot down and said we all were holding babies and didn’t feel comfortable fielding any more requests and they just needed to SEND SOMEONE. NOW.

At which point the dispatcher finally seemed to come to his senses and told us to “back away from the scene” and that the police were on their way. Great advice, now that you’ve encouraged us to take our little ones right over to the scene five or six times and put everyone in harm's way.

AND -- even then we had to stick around because the dispatcher said someone had to be available to direct them to the right car when they arrived, even though we’d given them the license plate, description, and parking location. So we waited. And one of us waved the cops in.

Seriously. Is this really how these situations are supposed to be handled? This is why people hesitate to get involved when they see something like this, why people might think twice about even calling 911 to help someone they don't know. It was a fragile and scary situation and the emergency dispatcher, in my opinion, was incredibly unprofessional.

The police, to their credit, were all business. When they showed up, we watched for a few minutes from the other side of the park and then finally got out of there. The occupant was alive and even standing up by the time we left. Who knows what the outcome was. It wasn’t immediately clear if she was going to be arrested or not.

But I really wish I knew where to direct a complaint or inquiry about this. Perhaps the dispatchers of this town need a little more training in what is and isn't the job of a bystander vs. the police. A lot of bad things could have ensued from an innocent bystander's being told to go meddle in a potential drug bust. Thank goodness none of that came to pass.

I’m thinking our next outing is probably going to be indoors.

Second swap quilt finished

Here's the second of my swap quilts that have to go out in April -- all finished and ready to be shipped, today or tomorrow:



Looks a little wrinkly, doesn't it? I need to figure out how to use my new macro lens so I can get better closeup detail on these kind of pictures.

And here's the back -- which isn't really period fabric like the rest of it but the colors go and I liked it.



Two other bits of news -- yesterday Brett let me escape the house for a few hours to go fabric shopping and see a movie. I went and saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was really great. I never used to like going to see movies on my own, but since Sofie was born it's all I can do not to run around in the lobby twirling and shouting "I'm ALONE! I'm BY MYSELF! Hallelujah!"

Lesson: If you see someone alone in the movie theater chortling and giggling before the movie even starts, rest assured it's a mom of a toddler out for a few hours of peace.

Second, last night around eleven, I closed the catdoor and headed upstairs to bed while Brett finished up some stuff downstairs. When I got up there I noticed that Max and Phoenix, our boy cats, were acting a little odd. Not upset, just odd. They were... very alert. And sitting in places they usually don't sit. And they both seemed really interested in one particular armchair that sits at the top of the stairs.

I finally put two and two together and realized something was under there. Fearing the worst (rat? possum?), I got down on the floor, lifted up the blanket that hides the underneath of the chair from view, and found this tiny little gray and white cat blinking back at me. Blinkblinkblink.

I called Brett up and we soon figured out from his collar that it was Dexter, who lives down the street a ways. He must've come in to explore and then gotten trapped under the chair by our overly watchful duo. We carefully peeled this very freaked out little cat out from under there and let him out for the night.

Bon voyage, Dexter. I don't think he'll be coming back anytime soon.

Today's random bits

In no particular order:

• Things I did not expect to learn from my child, part 403: Pickle juice, when rubbed in the hair or secreted under the neck and not immediately washed off, takes on an odor eerily similar to body odor. Which I discovered while sitting with Sofie in my lap at Gymboree the other day thinking, "Man, who smells?" only to lean forward and discover it was own darling baby who reeked. Wow.
  
• Sofie has taken to sharing her lunch with Phoenix, who comes over every day when lunch begins to sit on the table right next to her high chair and wait for what Sofie calls "gobble gobble" (turkey lunchmeat). When I give her a slice, the first thing she does is rip off a piece and put it on the table for the cat, who happily eats it up. This is so cute I can hardly contain myself from smothering them both in kisses. Sometimes, like today, he then happily follows her into her room for naptime and sleeps in the rocker until she wakes up. They're becoming fast friends.
  
• Right smack in the middle of about five quilting projects, several of which have to be done this month, my machine has gone bonkers (threads breaking off inside the machine, lots of nesting problems), and I'm forced to put it all aside and take the darn thing in for service. Yikes. It'll be a whole week before I get it back. Arg!
  
  What am I gonna do in the meantime? And will I get my two swap quilts done by the end of the month with this interruption? Will I have severe withdrawal? Stay tuned to see.
  
  Luckily I'm done with step one of the mystery quilt, and step two shouldn't be coming out for another week or so, so that will hold.

It's a beautiful day, in the 50s and sunny, and we're going out to play soon. As soon, that is, as the kid and the cat wake up from their naps. Any minute now.

These noses, will they ever stop running?

Sofie and I both had a bad cold almost two weeks ago. We both felt bad for about three days, and then got mostly better. But man, the noses!!! Poor Sofie leaks like a faucet, and I'm still using like a box of kleenex a day. This constant mess is getting old, old, old.

The good news is that she's picked up the word "booger" -- such a nice word for a little girl to spout off at the drop of a hat. Add that to the way she shouts "poop!" when anyone goes into the bathroom, loudly says "cock" at the zoo for peacock and calls her private area "hoo ha", and we're succeeding admirably in setting her firmly on the road to being the life of the party someday.

***

Brett is back, home a bit early yesterday from his conference. I was a bit worried that Sofie might be all nonchalant about his return, but she did a good job of running into his arms when he arrived, and settled in happily to read a bunch of books with him shortly thereafter. We celebrated by ordering Chinese food, which is Sofie's favorite food in all the world, and we had to laugh when she took one look at the delivery bags and ran to her high chair screaming "cluck! cluck!" She knows there's chicken and broccoli in those bags.

***

We went to Sofie's 18 month checkup yesterday, and although there was a mixup in the appointments (it got deleted somehow), they fit us in with another doctor, Doctor Sarah. Sofie was not pleased with the whole endeavor, having been woken up mid-nap to go there, and she was pretty pathetic, sitting on my lap in just her diaper, clutching Gloworm to her chest and bursting into big, fat tears whenever anyone touched her.

But she's doing fine -- less tall than she used to be, average weight, still developing a big giant head (but not anything medically worrisome; I have a big head too). The doctor looked over a list I'd been keeping of what she ate in a week and pronounced her diet fine, even with her paltry meat consumption, suggested we switch to cups instead of a bottle before bed, gave her a couple shots and sent us on her way.

The shots really got to her -- she cried all the way to the car and then most of the way home, until I told her she could go see Grandma and Grandpa when we got back. A visit to see them invariably cures almost everything that ails her. Lately she's started running back and forth between them when we're leaving after a visit, throwing herself into Grandma's arms for a hug, then Grandpa's, then Grandma, then Grandpa. It's awfully cute.

These are the last shots for quite a while, so that's a relief. Now once her final molars come in later this year we'll be done with a lot of unpleasantness for several years -- no more shots, no more teething. I can't wait.

And that's about it. I'm not getting a ton of quilting done because of the sickness and how tired I seem to be by the time she goes to bed. But I'll catch up soon. I'm almost done with the applique part of my swap quilt and still hoping to finish it by Friday night.

More soon!

Alone time

Brett's off in Portland for a conference for four days, marking only the second time he's been away since Sofie was born. Last time he was away I talked all confident but felt kind of nervous about parenting alone while he went camping. This time I'm really unphased. It's interesting how you can see yourself grow as a parent without necessarily seeing it happening at the time. All I know is that every so often I stop and look back and realize that I feel *so* much more comfortable and secure than I did at 'x' point in the past. This is one of those moments, I suppose. It feels kind of nice.

Sofie is aware Brett's not just at work and seems to be thinking about it. Over lunch today we had this conversation:

Sofie: <sees her big green ball on the hutch> Ball! Ball! Ball!
Me: Yes, that's your ball!
Sofie: Daddy! Daddy!
Me: Yes, you play ball with Daddy!
Sofie: <thoughtfully> Bye bye.

Then she got down and got her ball and threw it like she throws it to Brett when she wants to play soccer, and stared at the ball for a while before turning away to do something else. I don't play soccer. That's a special Sofie-and-Daddy game that I don't want to pre-empt.


Me, I'm using this time to try to get my spring swap quilt mostly done. I'm doing applique, which takes longer, but it's just one small piece, 20x20, so I think I'll have it pretty much done by the end of this week, aside perhaps from adding borders. I'm also working on Andrew's quilt, and thinking about maybe getting ready for Quiltville's mystery quilt that's posting next week. I've never done a mystery quilt. Can I manage all three of these projects at once? Probably.

Several people have asked me how I get so much quilting done with a toddler. Two answers: 1) my kid is a very good sleeper who goes to bed by seven p.m., and 2) I don't clean as much as I probably should. Or rather, I've gotten more comfortable with what really has to be done and what doesn't.

Which segues neatly into my next item. In addition to getting a lot of sewing done, I'm using Brett's away time to actually get the house clean. Really, really clean. It's hard during a normal week to make much headway on it -- I just get one room cleaned and suddenly Brett's home from work and there are shoes on the couch, mud on the floor, socks under the dining room table, and fifteen things piled on various pieces of furniture.

It's not all his fault, either, but I'm more prone to putting things away when I've finished with them than he is, and with the three of us bumbling around using the kitchen and the bathrooms and engaged in all our various activities it can be hard to make a dent in things. So now I've cleaned the upstairs bathroom, deep cleaned the kitchen floors (another part of my strategy for an easy week is to try not to use the kitchen much for the next few days), and done a thorough job on the living room. Tonight, I might vacuum the stairs. Big fun, woo hoo!

By the end of the week I know I'll be anxious for him to get home and start throwing his shoes on the furniture and tracking mud onto the rug again, anyways, so let me have my little moment of calm. :)

In which I whine a little

I have both my usual March allergies and the world's nastiest cold. Should it be possible for both of these things to happen at the same time? No it should not. And Brett's on deadline, so despite my desire to hole up in bed for 24 hours, I'm on kid duty from sun-up to sundown. Someone should start a service of soothing, nurse-like people who can come over and play blocks with your kids while you lie on the sofa and moan. They'd make a fortune.

Today, an immediate dose of Dayquil followed by two large cups of coffee managed to give me enough of a jolt to stay on my feet until 12:30, when I put Sofie down for her nap. She's NOT sleeping. She asked for a number of her stuffed animals to be put in her crib with her for this nap -- never a good idea, since it just leads to lots and lots of playing -- but I was too woozy to resist her indomitable little will so I gave in. And sure enough, she's screeching away and jumping around in there, having a wonderful time.

Me? I'm on the couch, three feet away on the other side of the wall from her, listening to her, hoping she'll sleep, staring out the window and half-napping myself, listening for the electrician who's due here at 1:00 to attempt to fix our wiring problems in the kitchen, wishing I could just go to bed for a few hours.

The good thing is that Sofie weaned herself about a month ago, just as the pollen counts began to rise, so I can now take whatever allergy or cold medicines I want to, night and day, without worrying about what they might do to her. What a considerate little girl! Thanks sweetie.

I love a bargain

I went to one of the local preschool's annual sales today -- these are events where all the parents associated with a school sell off their kids' clothes, toys, gear, and books that are no longer needed. For fantastic prices.

For $70, I got probably a few hundred dollars worth of great quality stuff, including:

• Four pairs of really nice shoes in the next size up from what Sofie is wearing now, including a beautiful, hardly worn pair of a great brand that can be her every day shoes for that size
• A winter coat for next year
• A bathing suit for this summer that would cost $20 new
• Four pairs of shorts
• Three dresses that would have cost at least $15 each in a store
• Three hats
• Three shirts
• Tights
• Seven books
• A wooden plane
• A dress-me doll, the kind with laces and zippers and buttons to practice on
• A play phone
• Doll accessories
• A puzzle

May not seem like much unless you're actively shopping for new toddler stuff these days. I swear, I can't believe what retailers expect you to pay just for a pair of tights. Or a swimsuit. Why should I lay out $20 or more for a toddler swimsuit? I've been watching catalogs for a good deal on these but have yet to see anything as good as the one I picked up today for $5. And the books! I paid $1-2 for hardback picture books that go for $15 each at Target.

So I'm feeling thrifty and like I accomplished something today. And I saw about half of the moms I know -- one from our main group of playfriends, one from PEPS, one from childbirth class, one from Listening Mothers, etc. Apparently lots of people have the same idea.

Fun with babies -- dog groups on Flickr

Among the many things I didn't anticipate about having a kid is how much she would like Flickr. Specifically, looking at dog pictures on it. Nearly every day we spend a few minutes pulling up dog after dog from a group like Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! and laughing at their silly expressions. I can never quite predict which pictures are going to tickle her the most. Today, she thought this one was a riot -- must be the way perspective makes his nose look sooooo big.

Seattle is having it's customary February warm snap right now, with beautiful sunny days and temperatures in the 50s. Sofie and I went out this morning with her little plastic car and careened up and down the sidewalk for a while. She had a fantastic time, pushing herself along Flintstone-style with her little feet, stopping to feed handfuls of dirt and leaves to the concrete lion in front of one of our neighbors house, then hopping back on her teeny car to zoom a little further down the road. Phoenix accompanied us for the whole adventure, keeping an eye on us from various front yards. He likes to know what the kid is doing.

After she went to bed for her nap I got outside to do some much needed yard cleanup. Somehow I never really get around to that in the fall. I was surprised to find how workable the dirt is already, not all hard and wintry like I expected. Crocuses are almost up, daffodils are budding, primroses are blooming here and there, and I was excited to find about a thousand foxgloves that are on their second year cycle (meaning they'll be blooming this spring!) in the rose bed.

It's almost gardening season! The pot that had my peas in it last year has four or five little pea plants coming up, reseeded from last year's crop I guess. Later today we're going to Swansons to get some more pea seeds, the big vining kind this time rather than the small grow-them-in-a-pot ones. It's time to plant them, believe it or not, and to set up your teepee in anticipation of their little tendrils.

Sofie's loving digging in the dirt, and I have to admit I ran out on a whim the other day and got her this little set of kids' gardening tools so she can join me outside in the spring. I can just see us out there digging holes together. Or rather, me planting things and her digging them up. Whatever. As long as she learns to love the process.

Random bits

Let's see - what's new:

• The Patriots lost the Superbowl, and within an hour of turning off the television Brett was prostrate with grief, followed by vomiting, followed by not getting up from a horizontal position for almost 36 hours. When Sofie came down with it too I had to concede that it was the stomach flu and not grief, but for a while there I wasn't sure. Both are fully recovered now. I seem to have gotten a free pass from this bout, thankyoukeepingmyfingerscrossed.
  
  
• Yesterday in the grocery store, I stopped for a second to the side of the big huge doorway to fasten Sofie's hood more securely before we went out into the freezing cold, torrential rain only to have this old, white-haired gentleman stand there impatiently waiting for me to move. I was completely tucked over to the side of the very wide aisle and in no way blocking the door, and when I looked up and indicated that my hands were full of toddler and could he please walk around my cart, he called me the C-word. I was so shocked I almost dropped Sofie.
  
  Really, was this necessary? I wasn't doing anything, and I was really polite to him. And just hearing something that foul coming out of this nice-looking white-haired gentleman's mouth was a real stunner.
  
  I gotta admit, I didn't just quietly let it pass. "Wow, that was really rude!" I said as he huffed around me and out into the parking lot. Then as we got to our car with him just a few feet in front of us, I called out sweetly, "Have a nice day, sir!" (And, I have to admit, added, "And thanks for cursing me out in front of my toddler!") Because really, if you're going to do something like that, there should be embarrassing consequences, no? Someone should definitely follow you around for, oh, the next 24 hours pointing out to all and sundry that you're an unhappy, angry bastard who yells obscenities at people who are minding their own business. In hearing range of their children. Jerk.
  
  
• Sofie's getting two MORE teeth (bringing her to sixteen, I think), which is making her miserable and wreaking havoc on sleep schedules. Yesterday she took two and a half hours to fall asleep for her nap and then only slept 30 minutes. Today she went down almost two hours earlier than normal and was asleep in about 30 seconds. I wouldn't normally put her down that early, but she was yawning so hard she almost fell over. So that'll mean an early wake up and a long afternoon today, but the kid really needed her sleep.
  
  
• In other cuteness, Sofie has been carrying around the Northwest Life section of today's Seattle Times because there's a great big picture of a Woodinville dog who's going to Westminster on it. "Pup! Pup! Pup!" she keeps muttering, while clutching it fervently to her chest. She's particularly interested in dogs right now because our friends Ann and Jim brought their 100 pound labradoodle over on Saturday night to visit. Even standing up, Sofie barely came to that dog's shoulder. She did, however, like him enough to hug his butt several times.
  
  
• I was all set to do a whole bunch of sewing today during today's nap and had just started when my machine locked up in a way I'm not confident enough to fix. So out to the car I hauled it, so that when Sofie wakes up we can motor over to the place where we got it, where the helpful salesladies will often just fix it right there on the spot for you without even sending it in. Which is what I'm hoping will happen today since I'm really on a tear and don't want to not be able to sew for a week. The repair place, incidentally? In the same parking lot of the complex where the nasty old guy yelled at us yesterday. Yay. Maybe we'll meet again.

Good news and bad news

The good news -- we found a gloworm!! One of the local targets had them in stock, and we made a quick trip out this morning and found one. Hallelujah! For now I've hidden it away but soon it needs to join the regular bedtime rotation so that it smells "used" if we ever need it to become the primary nighttime toy.

The bad news -- I seem to have lost my brand new cell phone. Which is the first phone I've really used a lot and liked. It disappeared on trash day, which worries me. I had it out that day because I was waiting for some calls. It was sitting on the living room on a table, and the next morning it was nowhere to be found. So I immediately started calling it to see where it was, assuming I'd hear it ringing somewhere in the house. The call rang and rang, but there was dead silence in the house. Hrm. Later that afternoon, it ominously stopped ringing all together when called, going straight to voicemail. Which could mean the battery died (which I doubt, since it had been charged recently).

My fear is that some little busybody threw it in the recycling bin and it went out with the trash, and then got compacted and smushed around the time it stopped ringing.

*sigh*

We're still looking for it, but we're hampered by the fact that it's so freaking small. Sometimes I can't find it when it's in my coat pocket because it's so small and thin and light. On the bright side it's magenta, so it should stick out visually. I've been through all the toy boxes, the book basket, every coat and sweater I wore that day, all the bags we used (diaper, library), and a half-hearted sweep through the car. I've looked in the stroller. I've looked under furniture. I called one of the two stores we went to that day to see if I lost it. (I'm pretty sure I didn't, though. The other store doesn't open for another hour. I'll call them later but I'm not expecting much.)

I think it's gone... Bummer.

Dipping back into the workforce - a little

Yesterday was an extremely good day, for several reasons:

• I did my first hour of work on a small editing job that I've taken on, editing a series of technical papers for a programmer who works downtown. Each job is only three or four hours of work, but it's fun to be doing it and it brings in a little bit of money.
  
  
• I had a great business meeting that morning with someone else I might do some work for. Being home with Sofie has added many wonderful things to my life that I wouldn't trade for the world, but I'd kind of forgotten the pleasure that can come from feeling like a competent professional with all your ducks in a row.
  
  Many of the mothers I know with kids the same age as Sofie are successfully balancing part-time, at-home work, and I'm now at the point where I feel like I could do that too. This is helped by the fact that Sofie is consistently napping for about three hours every afternoon.
  
  
• I started a Yoga Mama class which is meeting just up the street from me. Yoga Mama runs a series of classes for women that start late -- 7:45 to 9:30 -- so that you can go after you tuck your kids into bed. It felt great to take some time for myself, but I also have to say that this one session of stretching and salutations and lots of downward doggies did more to ease some chronic pain issues I've been having in my neck and right shoulder than four weeks of physical therapy has done. I'm seriously considering cancelling my last PT session this weekend and going to another yoga class instead.

So yes, as you can tell from the first two bullets, I'm starting to do a little work again. Not much - I think my maximum time output I can manage right now is around 15 hours a week. But I'm going to start looking more seriously for paid freelance writing and editing work that I can do from home and which will help add some new skills to my resume for my eventual return to the fulltime work force.

A return which is still years away, for sure - there are no changes in my plan to be home with Sofie until she's in school. But my secret goal is to build up enough experience to support myself as a freelancer or a consultant once she's in school, so that I can have more flexibility in my schedule and be able to be home when she gets out each afternoon.

As with all things in life, I have a very strong sense that the right thing will come along at the right time to make this happen, if I stay open to the possibilities of what's out there and just kind of let the universe provide. Opportunities come up all the time if you pay attention. I'm trying to.

Random thoughts

Random things on my mind this morning:

• My Christmas cards, I just noticed, are made in China. I've been sitting here all morning having visions of George Costanza's fiancee and her untimely cheap-envelope-caused death in my head as I lick and seal them, wondering if I'm about to keel over from massive quantities of lead or some other badness.
  
• My daughter, I just realized, will eat almost anything if it's presented to her in matchstick form. Present the same food in bite-sized cubes? No way. We've now tried this out with dried apricots (matchsticks? Yum! cubes? grooooossss), cheese, and apples. I'm wondering how many other applications this has. Can I get yogurt, formerly her staple food but now the most disgusting thing on earth, into a matchstick shape, somehow? Could I finally get her to eat tofu this way? Parenting is one big science experiment.
  
• A new list published of most popular names for this year has Sophia as the number one most popular name for girls. Sheesh. So much for being original. We're glad our spelling is different than the most common variety, but still! And our second choice, Isabella, is now number two. How does this happen?
  

That's all for now.

Little bits

Things are settling down around here after last week's emotion-laden events. It's nice to have the highlights of my day be less momentous and happier. 

For instance - this morning, Sofie surprised me by picking up a spoon and feeding herself oatmeal, completely out of the blue. I've been quietly worrying about the fact that I haven't bothered to try to teach her to eat with a spoon yet -- truth is, I'm being terribly lazy about it; it's easier and cleaner for me to feed her than to wait for her to feed herself.  Every now and then I give her a spoon and encourage her to do something with it, but mostly I forget. 

But deep down, I know she needs to learn and was wondering what to do about it. Well, problem solved - like so many things with kids, she did it when she was ready, with no fuss at all. True, some of her spoonfuls (well most of them, if we're being honest) were upside down as they went into her mouth. But she's doing the motion pretty competently and repeated it at dinner, and I feel a little foolish for having devoted any portion of my brain to trying to figure out what to do about this nonproblem. 

Phoenix is still acting lonely. Most of the day, he's the only cat around the house now, which must be a little weird. Max spends his entire day sacked out upstairs, and Maddie spends it all outside. I didn't really notice before how much time Phoenix and Cassie spent wandering the house together during the day - following me from room to room mostly - but it must seem weird to him to be the sole cat all of a sudden. But he's eating again and acting pretty chipper, so I think he's starting to move on. 

Sofie's also on a language explosion right now. Every day brings new words. Car, truck, cow, whooooooo (owl sound), woof... these are just a few of them. She tried to say camel earlier today and did a passably good job. It's really fun to watch language start to take off! Such a verbal little girl. I'm convinced she's going to be gifted with language, but then again I'm just a proud mama so who knows.

Posting (and emails, for anyone waiting on one) will be slow for the next few days as my laptop power supply has died and we probably can't get out to the Sony store to get a new one until Sunday. It's remarkable how much harder it is to get time to sit down at my desktop computer during the day than to sneak a few minutes on the laptop here and there. Sofie keeps me hopping, so to speak... 

That's all for now!

Clean clean clean

One great thing about hosting Thanksgiving is that it's a great excuse to really get the house clean. Like, REALLY clean. Brett went into super-cleaning-guy mode this weekend and scrubbed all three bathrooms, and together we removed about six bags of stuff we no longer needed from the house, all of which went to Goodwill, and probably a metric ton of recycling. There's no feeling like giving away big tons of stuff - you come home and the house just feels physically lighter.

All that weekend work meant that I could concentrate on just the finer-tuning stuff this week during Sofie's naps. A half hour a day scrubbing some part of the kitchen means that now it's REALLY clean in there - I've washed all the counters, cabinets, cleaned the fridge out enough to hold our turkey and trimmings, cleaned the stove, swept, vacuumed, and mopped the floors, cleaned the windows -- everything.

Yesterday was laundry day. Today was floors day. And now I'm sitting on the couch preparing to read a book for the next hour while Sofie naps, while my glistening-clean floors dry and I bask in the knowledge that pretty much everything is done. No frantic running around deep cleaning the house tonight. Even the closets are organized. All the old phone books have been recycled. The dishes we need for tomorrow are clean and ready.

Hallelujah! I love those times when attempting to be organized actually works out.

All this said, I'm tempting fate here and probably just begging for our old, infirm cat to have some kind of biological explosion all over the dining room tonight, leaving me with a frantic last-minute mess to clean in the morning.