girlfiend

I say semi-homemade like I’m that whore Sandra Lee from the Food Network. But what I mean is that to make up for the number of crappy, plastic toys that I gifted or received I tried to give some hand crafted gifts as well. I don’t know how much a few knit items even out the environmental impact, but at least I tried. I’m missing pictures of some monogrammed dish towels I knitted for my mother-in-law, but if you’re dying of curiosity, they looked just like this one, only different color, different letter.

I made little peanut ornaments for all of the kids. I wanted to make hats for them, but it wasn’t working out with the felt so I left them as is. I also meant to monogram them with embroidery floss, but made do with sewing thread.

I made these pajamas for the Fiendling.

I made a pinwheel sweater for my niece. It took me forever to figure out the pattern (it starts in the middle) but once I got past the first four inches it was easy.H

Here is another picture of what it looks like buttoned.

I made two of these little pinafores, one for my niece and one for Pancake. The first one I made was so cute I had to make another.

My dad got a scarf I did not take a picture of and the baby was the proud recipient of a little skully hat that was supposed to be a baby gift but ended up being way too big. I only have a crappy cell phone picture that I can’t figure out how to get on to flickr. But it’s a hat. With a skull and crossbones.

The kids did receive some toys that were not environmental disasters. (I swear I was not this concerned about the amount of crap we produce until we had kids.) Some of my favorites were these two recycled  dump trucks, and the Plan Toys airport, parking garage and dollhouse.

The baby’s evaluation went well, I guess, and he’s due to receive services.  We live in a nice (white!) part of the city so his case manager informed us that he should be assigned a speech therapist pretty quickly. In some parts of the city it takes weeks or months to find the appropriate (willing) therapist.

The Fiendling is still sleeping in my bed. It’s been weeks, and most nights he doesn’t even bother falling asleep in his own bed. As soon as we leave his room he walks down the stairs, announces he’s getting in our bed, tucks himself in and goes to sleep. If we move him back upstairs he comes back down. I’ve been sleeping okay with him in bed so it’s not too bothersome. I just wonder how long it will last.

We go through an insane amount of eggs. If I’m doing a lot of baking we can easily go through a carton of 18 in a week. Eggs used to languish in my refrigerator for months, so this is taking some getting used to.  Our every other week egg share is not enough.

I’m trying to sell our Joovy Caboose stroller on craigslist. I hate it. I seriously hate it. I’m sure that it’s a great stroller for some people, but we are outdoorsy people who walk all over the place and the Joovy is best for people who mostly walk in malls, museums and parking lots. It sucks for bumby sidewalks, gravel paths, and grass. Anyway, the stroller was barely used since I hated it and is in fantastic shape. I priced it at $90, which is less than what some people have listed and more than others. I’m in no hurry to get rid of it and I know it will sell eventually for either the price I’ve listed or $10 less. But, the emails, my god, the emails. No, I will not sell you the stroller for $40. No, I don’t need to go to a website to learn how to earn money so I don’t have to sell my stuff. No, you can’t “take it off my hands” for $70.  I looked at a Maclaren double that was listed for $120. It’s on the high end of the spectrum, but Maclarens are great, lightweight strollers. Turns out the woman was trying to sell a 10 year old stroller for $120. Seriously? The model isn’t even manufactured any more. I’m more than willing to pay a decent price for a used stroller in good shape, but this stroller was a decade old. Good luck with that.

In addition to stroller shopping we’re car shopping. Turns out our 1995 Corolla was far superior to the 2007 Corolla we bought to replace it. I’m sorry to say I just don’t love this car. I loved my 1986 Corolla more than this one. I hate car shopping, but we have to do it now while we can still get a good price for it.

Boyfiend’s birthday was last week. I ended up baking a sourdough chocolate cake with fudge icing, but initially I wanted to make a red velvet cake. The idea using all of that food coloring bothered me so I found a recipe that uses beets instead. To test it out F and I made mini cupcakes. They were so good that the boys devoured them long before we even got to the part where we made the frosting ( I still hadn’t decided between a cooked frosting or a cream cheese frosting.) I give the beet cupcakes two enthusiastic thumbs up even though the reddish, purplish batter turned brown when it was baked.

My aunt gave me a stovetop cappuccino maker a while back.  The first time I used it the coffee overflowed and put out the burner. It was messy and irritating so I put it away and forgot about it. Yesterday I pulled it out and gave it another go. The first attempt was slightly disastrous- slightly because I caught the overflow before the mess was made. But I tried again and made a perfectly acceptable cappuccino. This morning it was a mess and I ended up drinking coffee flavored hot milk. I can’t decide if the pot is defective or if I am.

I’ve been knitting a lot. I’ve made a bunch of cute little baby skull hats and I’m making a cute striped pinwheel sweater right now. I should post pictures some time.

I’m taking a sewing class too. We haven’t actually started sewing yet since our last class was canceled because the instructor was sick, but I have high hopes that I may actually conquer the sewing machine.

So what’s up with you?

These are in no particular order, but the books grouped together are by the same author.  I don’t  mind reading these repeatedly and don’t roll my eyes when F wants to take them out of the library again.

Lost and Found
The Incredible Book-Eating Boy
The Way Back Home  (Oliver Jeffers)

And the Train Goes (William Bee)

Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing (Judi Barrett)

A Color of His Own (Leo Lionni)

Knuffle Bunny
Edwina the Dinosaur who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct
Leonardo the Terrible Monster (Mo Willems)

You Can Do It, Sam (Anita Hest)

Ten Apples up on Top (Dr. Seuss)

Why is Blue Dog Blue? (George Rodrigue)

Angus Lost (Marjorie Flack)

Let’s Go! (Lizann Flatt)

Are You My Mother?
Sam and the Firefly (P.D. Eastman)

Freight Train (Donald Crews)

A few days ago I went to log in to my breastfeeding website and found I was locked out. I feared that I had been fired for not posting for months. I tried to log in to the food site and found I was locked out of that one too. My name had been removed from all of the posts and I was no longer listed as the author. I did a quick google search and found nothing, but a search on Twitter came up with a tweet about 451press going under. A day later there was more information. Some people had even received official emails about the network closing. I had not. So it’s a good news/bad news kind of thing. I’m out $50 a month, but at least I wasn’t fired.

My plan, once I’m able to force myself through this dry spell, is to put the assorted breastfeeding and cooking posts back here where they used to be. There’s someone who gets to this site using my meatloaf recipe as a bookmark, and I still get several hits a week for Lidia’s Eggplant and Country Bread Lasagna. Great recipe. Cook it when it’s not so hot using all of your fresh garden tomatoes for the marinara. I also have a giveaway for an alcohol test strip kit for breastmilk.

I don’t what I’m going to do about the small income. It wasn’t much, but it did fund all of the outrageously expensive phthalate, paraben, sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate, PABA, formaldehyde, Polyethylene glycol, Octyl methoxycinnamate, and oxybenzone (among others) free soaps and sunscreens for the children. I’d add ads here, but I don’t think I’d make any money.

In other news I still can’t drink. Well, to be fair, I haven’t tried to drink since last Thursday when four sips of wine made me violently ill and I think I may wait a few more days to try again. I am bitter and I fear people are starting to think I am pregnant. I am not pregnant.

We have so many, that after five years I let my subscription to Real Simple lapse. There may be a few I’m forgetting.

1.  Metropolitan Home

2. Elle Decor

3. Self

4. Good Housekeeping

5. Woman’s Day (was a subscription to the now defunct Home)

6. Esquire

7. Wood

8. Boating Life

9. Martha Stewart Living

10. Yachting

11. Kiwi

12. Parents

13. Parenting

14. Family Fun (was a subscription to the now defunct Wondertime)

15. Organic Gardening

16. Old House Journal

17. Gourmet ( not exactly free. it’s through B’s MS bike race- he could get $12 back, but I like the magazine)

18. Newsweek  (my dad gets it for B for Christmas every year)

It rained on Friday. I wanted to go to the Y, but F said, “The problem, mama, is that I don’t like it there,” so we decided to stay home. The baby took an early nap and F was playing nicely with his trains so I figured I’d try to knock off the easiest item on my list, organizing the books by color.

Of course T woke up after 40 minutes and there were great stacks of books everywhere. It was a disaster. F’s trains knocked stacks over and T ripped pages out of an already falling apart dictionary. I had to climb on the couch and tables and windowsill to get books up and out of the way. I wasn’t quite sure how to divide the books between the two bookcases and had tried a few different arrangements before deciding on what looked best. When I finally got all of the colors up and in order I had about 100 books that still needed to be shelved. I had to go back to work, arranging and rearranging the stacks to accommodate everything. All together, with a Margarita break, dinner and bedtime, it took about 9 hours to get everything up on the shelves.

Beige and white dominated, followed by black and brown and blue. I have a decent amount of red books, orange made a good showing, and yellow, with the inclusion of cliff’s notes has a small section. I do not have a lot of green books. I only found two pink, which is surprising, considering how much chick lit I read.

I think it looks pretty good.

I finally finished knitting a massive project. I laid it out to see how much blocking was required and my mother said, “What happened there? Did you drop a stitch?”

Thanks.

Mother’s Day wasn’t bad. The Fiendling spent Friday and Saturday night with my in-laws so we could get ready for the party on Sunday. The baby woke me up at 6.30. At 9 I woke B with coffee in bed. I was only slightly bitter.

The baby’s first birthday party was big and fun and the house is mostly cleaned up. We have more leftover cookies than we know what to do with.

His actual birthday isn’t until Wednesday. I’m not crying about it yet, but all of the newborns I see are brutal reminders that my baby won’t be a baby for much longer. I anticipate tears on his birthday proper.

I did something to my big toe. I’m not entirely sure what I did to it since it’s not bruised or swollen, but I’ve spent the last two days hobbling around. It is incredibly painful to walk without shoes. I must have pulled something. The few steps from bedroom to bathroom in the middle of the night are excruciating.

Speaking of the middle of the night, I just learned from B that I somehow managed to get him to take care of two middle of the night wakeups. Both F and T woke up and I have no memory of either. He says the Fiendling was at my side of the bed imploring me to get up and get him his water from upstairs and I made him go instead. He claims that he also rocked the baby back to sleep after I woke him up and told him to. I find this most difficult to believe. I posited that perhaps he dreamed it, but F remembers that he wanted me, not B to get his water and was sad that I did not. I must have been exhausted.

I went back to the pulmonologist this morning for my three-month check up. She wanted to put me on a lower dose of my asthma medicine but didn’t because I’ve been hanging on to a cough since we all got sick a few weeks back. (Shit, it was a month ago. ) She gave me a prescription for the lower dose and told me to cut back my current dose to once a day instead of twice over the next six weeks and see how I do. She asked if the summer would be a tough time to do it because of the heat and it sucks because I just don’t know. I started coughing the first summer after F was born and didn’t get an asthma diagnosis for a year after that. But it wasn’t until this fall that I was finally given an inhaler that actually controlled the asthma. After close to three years of non-stop coughing I don’t know what seasons are worse than others. Childbirth really did wreck my immune system.

The Fiendling has been a complete shit about going to sleep the past few days/weeks/who-the-hell-knows-how-long-it’s-been. It’s maddening because he knows he’s having trouble falling asleep and is torn between wanting me to help him fall asleep and trying to get out of falling asleep. His stall tactics include needing a diaper, being hungry, and insisting that it is not bedtime it is morning.

He goes back and forth between wanting to sleep upstairs in his green room and wanting to sleep in my bed, but in both locations he wants me to stay with him until he falls asleep. If I leave or try to leave he screams, begs, pleads and cajoles or he blatantly leaves his room and comes downstairs. The most irritating part is that the other night, when B was out, Mix came over to help me with the boys and successfully got the punk kid to bed in about 20 minutes. Show off.

Is there some sort of common three year sleep regression I don’t know about? *** Yes! It is nice to know it’s not just me, but at least Moxie’s kid would stay quietly in his own room. Mine has a full library and a fucking train table in his room and he freaks out at the very suggestion of playing quietly without me.***

The garden is doing well. The strawberries are thriving, even  the two plants we thought were goners are coming back to life. The blackberry bushes, which looked even deader on arrival than the bare root strawberry plants, are showing little bits of green despite the fact that we still haven’t put them in permanent containers. The first round of seeds I planted directly in the boxes, lettuce, spinach, broccolini and peas have mostly sprouted. The peas are the slowest of the bunch- I only saw two that have officially sprouted, but the broccolini has grown about an inch since yesterday.  If the wildlife doesn’t get them first, it looks like we’ll have home grown spring vegetables.

I got pretty drunk at book club last week. Mixing red and white wine is never a good idea.

The theme for April at nablopomo is Growing Up. I don’t know that I’ll actually sign up for the challenge, but April is a good month to talk about that particular subject.

I have basil seeds not yet sprouted on the kitchen windowsill, a birthday gift of two green bean plants sprouted beside them, and several packets of seeds that need to get in the ground quickly. The plan is for three Square Foot Garden boxes- two in the proper 4×4 set up and one longer 8×2 box. That makes 48 squares altogether. With 9 spinach plants in a box, 16 carrots per box, 4 strawberry plants, etc. we’re in for a lot of food this summer if we (or the wildlife) don’t fuck it up.

Right now in the backyard or the garage (I have no idea because I haven’t left the house in 36 hours) is a package of 25 strawberry plants and a blackberry bush that I hope haven’t died yet. We haven’t yet gotten the garden boxes together, and by we I mean Boyfiend because I am not the one physically sawing and hammering, but we do have the ingredients for our Mel’s Mix and by this time next week we’ll hopefully be on our way to a proper vegetable garden for the summer.

Two years ago, after knitting a sweater for my soon to be born niece, I started knitting another sweater for the Fiendling.  I’m still not done.  It may not fit him by the time I’m done, but I’m going to finish the damn thing even if my head explodes. However, for the sake of my sanity, I think I’m going to omit the cute teddy bear ears.

I hate knitting.