twenty minutes

I've been procrastinating, but that's part of the problem.  I'm like a strange blend of uber-getting-things-done-girl, and slacker queen.  Once I'm off and running, I'm charging through the finish line before you know it.  But just as often I'm standing at the starting line making excuses about what else I could be doing or should be doing.

I'm worst at making decisions to get things done that are just about me.  There, I've said it.  I've confessed.  

It is much easier for me to tackle another load of laundry or throw all the toys up on the couch and vacuum the rug, or even to sort through photos for albums for others or make a toppling pile of Christmas cards than it ever is for me to pick up a book and read for pleasure, or drop everything and take a quick stroll around the block.  I make up millions of excuses in my head, and this year I'm going to do my best not to default to those.  I started making myself take twenty minutes for me each day.  And before you start thinking I'm such a selfless person in perpetual service to others - let me dispel that myth.  I'm not.  But on a very, very personal level, I do not make myself a priority.  I let my hair get too shaggy between cuts, I rarely escape to my room for a catnap, I never pick up a book and read a chapter to myself in front of my kids.  And that extends to taking the time to exercise as well.  It's just so rare that we are all home together and hanging out (and awake) that I make a ton of excuses for not going.  

It takes next to no effort for me to do this, and I'm quite sure everyone will survive without me for twenty minutes a day.  They survive just fine without me while I'm working, or running errands, or showering, or baking, or ignoring them, right?

I guess the real "resolution" part of this is that I thought I might just record what I've done - to force myself to actually do it.  I'm not sure if it will stick - the recording part - but I have found that I've needed and looked forward to the twenty minutes I've taken to myself over the last few weeks.  I'm into a great book, I've squeezed in a bit of exercise, I've sat in a tub with a goal beyond getting myself clean.  Baby steps, but I gotta take them.  I'm just not the marathon-goal-setting type of gal.  Twenty minutes - more my speed.

busted

Two things:  One - I should have bought a yard of the curtain fabric, and not a chintzy 1/4 yard.  But I still dig it.  It just looks like a silly little valance hanging up there right now.  And two - I'm not sure why it looks so creamy in this picture, but the background looks more like the background of the pillow on the couch in real life.  I was a little concerned in the store that the background wasn't white enough for this room with an abundance of white painted trim.  But it's more of a gray background, and I really do like the contrast in person.  

Two more things:  Third - the real curtain won't hang from clips, but will be mounted to upholstery hooks so you won't see a gap at the top, and likely won't see much of the track either.  And last - I went to get the camera and came back up to find this.  Um, hum.  Sneaky.

52 projects: week four

This week's project might seem like a silly one - pick a fabric already!  But F's curtains are something that I've put off for a long while, and if I plan to actually get the car sheets and the foamcore out of the windows, then I have to start somewhere.  (Side note:  M and I have been scratching our heads over the location of all of E's flat sheets, and it really took me typing that sentence about the car sheets to realize that they are hanging in F's windows.)  More on where we currently stand on the curtains here.

Picking a fabric is daunting for me.  So is calculating how much I will need, purchasing it, buying a fabric liner, hiring someone to make the curtains, and then installing them.  But until I actually pick a fabric, nothing else can get done.  I keep my eyes peeled all the time for something that really grabs me.  Lots of things do grab me, but I still think it's hard to decide what I like on a bolt of fabric, and what I want to live with for a long while on the most prominent wall in her room.  

I like birds.  But I've got a lot of them.  I like small, simple prints, but it's a big window, and little things tend to get lost.  Just seeing the small blue striped sheet and the sheet with little cars on it hanging there showed me that if the pattern is too small, and too faint - well, it might just look like I'm trying to hang bed sheets at the window.  It's a huge three sided wall, and the neutral nature of the gray walls and white woodwork gives me the freedom to get a little bolder on the curtains.

I think I may have found the fabric.

It's an Alexander Henry fabric and I can purchase it locally here at Fabric Nosherie.  I bought 1/4 of a yard today to bring it home and see the colors and the scale in the room.  I've photographed it below to give you an idea. 

It's one of those strange kind of things that I can't really explain.  If I look at the fabric swatches that I've collected and admired for awhile and I place this one among them, it might not be the first one that I gravitate towards.  But there's a reason I haven't pulled the trigger on any other fabric - and I wanted to figure out just why that is.  So I gave myself a little exercise.  I put together a sort of quasi-mood board or images of the room, images of other things that I love, images from the past, and photographs of some of my favorite moments in this room.  Here is it - you can click on it to view it much larger.

There is a special light that comes into this room that is so different from any other room.  I have shades of pale blue and white in other areas of the house, and those rooms really receive a great north light - very white, and very diffuse - throughout the day.  It's calming, and the calming colors look great.  F's room is south facing, and it's up in the trees, and it gets the afternoon light, and the setting sun light, and the gray walls aren't in the least bit institutional.  In fact, her room kind of glows.  I started out thinking that I loved a bolder aqua in that room with the gray, and I still do.  But I've noticed I've shifted to golds as well, and I think it's really because of the light.

I've liked those colors in clothing as well, and I can see hints of these colors and patterns showing up in some of my favorite things the little one has worn.  I see the colors in her favorite friends, in her photo albums, in artwork that I particularly love in her room or have made for others.  I see them in found objects, and displayed objects around her room.  To me, it makes it feel like it belongs.

I also love the departure from the birds, and the focus on botanical prints.  To me the two are very much interwoven, and they compliment each other.  I love the simple flower shapes - they remind me of a favorite invitation I made for E's second birthday party years ago - it's a shape that shows up in cookies that I make and drawings that I share.  It feels like it will grow with her, and even as her room evolves as she gets bigger, there are plenty of jumping off points from these curtains.

It looks great with the things that she already has - particularly the couch that it will frame, and the collection of pillows that reside on that couch.  It's a vertical print that I think will look good in a floor to ceiling curtain, with just enough color and just enough white space to not overwhelm.

So I've done it.  I've picked a fabric.  It's going to take me some time to take the next jump - I need to track down some options for getting these things made.  But I've picked a fabric so I can take the next step - it's a fabric that's new, available, and that gives me a little time to order and get it made without worrying about missing the boat.  Hooray!

friday finds

We found ourselves up to a few things this Friday, but the best thing we found was some time in a bookstore - and a new llama llama book.

I also love finding a book that seems so particularly appropriate at the moment.  A few things I've noticed reading and reading and reading to F (and watching her operate in a bookstore) - she loves letters, she loves flaps that she can lift, and she loves remembering the sequencing in a story, or how one thing builds on another.

I found this alphabet book today, and besides having all sorts of quirky things for the different letters...

...it also has a "door" on each page that opens to show the alphabet room slowly filling with the cumulative menagerie of items from earlier letters.  The relationships between the objects and animals and characters change on each page, and we spent ages looking at this book again and again.  One of my favorite parts is after you pass "I" is for "Ivy", the pot of ivy in the room grows and grows, and then every once in awhile gets eaten by the lamb.  You can see the poor pot of ivy with just one lone stem, and the telltale ivy hanging out of the lamb's mouth.  Hope this Friday finds you well.

to be fair

Today at lunch I asked F to split up the remaining blueberries between our two plates while I made the rest of our lunch.  The photo above shows her first go at it.  Can you guess which plate is mine?

I asked her if that seemed fair, and she didn't seem to grasp what I was saying.  Equal didn't work either.  "Same" seemed to do the trick.  She quickly made adjustments, and later on as we were eating and I finished my half of the blueberries first, she offered me some of hers.  She is fair, more than fair, most of the time.  Even with blueberries.

She's gotten a bit of the short end of the stick on the blog and around town lately.  It's easy to isolate out those moments of independence as measures of our day.  It's not as easy to remember that although those moments might be louder or demand more attention, they do not represent her on the whole - they are not the biggest part of who she is and who she is becoming.  She's delightful, and inquisitive, and loving - not always free with her affections, which makes those hugs and kisses that much more treasured and appreciated.  She's smart, and funny, and precocious in the best sense of the word, and she persists until she masters something new.  Good girl, my girl.  That's what we want you to do.

To be fair, she's amazing, and I'm lucky she likes to spend her Fridays with me each week.

stinker

If I could bring myself to type OMG, you would know how I might choose to preface this brief chat about the current state of affairs in our house with this two-

"and a half!!" she yells from the wings, interrupting my train of thought momentarily, 

-and-a-half year old.

We know, dear one, we know.  We haven't forgotten.  How could we?

I remember this, I've lived it, I've survived it without visible scars.  I should be prepared, and really, I think that I am.  But I've reached that point when I can no longer hit the snooze button until the last possible moment in the morning, content in the fact that we can accomplish all that we need to do to get up, dressed, fed and out the door in a set amount of time.  Because that is no longer a guarantee.  It's not even a strong possibility.  It laughs in the face of any hint of optimistic leanings.  It's a big, fat joke.

She wants to do everything.  Every last thing.  I love the independence, but holy pete, it can be such a chore to watch, and you cannot imagine the wrath one might face if you dare intervene too early or too forcefully.  She had a particularly lovely meltdown this morning in the kitchen over something that I can't even recall now.  Her older sister took the brunt of this one (although, in the little one's defense, her sister has been told one blue-zillion times to back off a step or two).  E was frustrated, F was screaming, I was just trying to put some oatmeal on the table while resisting the urge to fling it across the room onto the wall, and I turned to E to try and fix the one kid that still lets you fix her.

"I know this is frustrating.  This is a frustrating age, it's a phase that we went through with you, and we'll get through this with her.  She just wants to be her own person, and do her own thing, and she doesn't want any help, and she's going to scream and yell about it all the time.  It stinks, I know it, but we'll get through it, and she'll master some of this stuff and give up on the rest.  But I know it stinks.  It's no fun for anybody."

E looked at her sister kneeling on the floor over the giant bin of oatmeal she had wrestled out of the pantry on her own, scooping dry oats from the bin onto the overturned lid, and spilling most of them in the process.  She rolled her eyes and then corrected me.

"It's fun for her." 

(F this morning - pre-kitchen meltdown - wearing the just-returned sweater portion of her 2010 Halloween costume.  The smile is post-bedroom meltdown over having to wear a shirt under the sweater because her insistence that she wear a sweater sized to her body a year-and-a-half ago left her forearms and belly exposed to the world.  She could wear that sweater, by golly, but she was not wearing it as a midriff.  Is it wrong to bask in the glory of that tiny victory?)

Also - I know by writing OMG, I actually did write OMG.  I swear it won't happen again.

auctions

Tis the season for fundraising auctions, which means donation collection begins.  Both girls' schools actually have a trivia night this weekend, and I threw up my hands between the two of them and decided on neither.  I'm just a bit worn out.  

I do always contribute to the auction part when asked (my "no" button is stronger now, but still no match for my "sure, no problem" button).  Custom cookies are what I usually settle on.  They seem to go over well, and who can't find a reason to eat or share good cookies?  The problem is I lack good marketing materials.  Let me back up a bit.  The problem is I had really good marketing materials and they got pitched.

Several years back I had accumulated quite the collection of cookies.  I know that sounds gross - keeping cookies for years and years, but it's not like they mold or anything.  They just harden and still look good.  When an event like this rolled around I just put together a "platter" of individually wrapped cookies for the display.  And because I'm paranoid, all of the little cellophane packages had labels on the back that said NOT FOR CONSUMPTION - FOR DISPLAY ONLY!  I thought that should cover it lest someone actually pick up an item off a display and think it was actually placed there for them to eat.  

So one year at E's school someone bid on the cookies, and when they went to claim their gift certificate, they also walked out the door with all of my cookies (and my really nice platter from Williams-Sonoma).  Later that night as I was preparing to leave the event I noticed it was gone.  At that point I was really freaked out that the person might eat the cookies and keel over or something.  I tried to track down who claimed the prize, but they were only listed as a guest of another school family, and that school family wasn't even in attendance.  It was after midnight and I had no choice but to worry about it all night and then start making phone calls at the crack of dawn that Sunday morning.  Long story short, I finally got the phone number of the lucky purchaser.  I called her and blazed through the phone introductions.  Breathlessly I asked her if she had eaten any of the cookies.  She replied that she hadn't.  She had seen the warnings on the back, and she had pitched them in the trash.  I asked her (nicely) to retrieve them (carefully, please!) from the trash, and she said it was too late.  Her husband had taken the trash out to the dumpster.  Before seven o'clock.  A.M.  On a Sunday morning.  Ugh.  All those cookies were gone.

I've never saved another cookie since.

Epilogue:  She ended up returning the platter and ordering pirate cookies for her nephew's party.  She was delightful, and to tell you the truth, I don't really miss having a bowl full of stale cookies lying around anymore.  And I also just realized that I should have included those pirate cookies in this brochure.  Because they ended up being some of my very best work.  

And they were 100% fresh and edible.

busy

Seems like I use the word "busy" a lot lately.  Busy we are, but a lot of it's fun and involves leftovers.  Like leftover chocolate cupcakes with chocolate mint filling and mint buttercream icing.  That's the kind of busy I like.

Photos from the Open House at E's school yesterday afternoon.  Lots of good food from school parents.  And a few yummy leftovers.

52 projects: week three

 

Do you remember Y2K?  Do you remember all the hysteria around the "end of the world"?  The world's computers would crash and the planet, perhaps even the universe, would explode at that moment?  The only explosions I remember were the amazing fireworks displays across the world, one timezone after another.  And lucky for us all, the end didn't come - which is a good thing, because I was in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and I didn't really want to spend my last moments there. 

What I remember most about that New Years Eve was receiving these earrings from M (who was still my boyfriend at the time). 

And I don't need to tell you that when you receive a box like this from your boyfriend on such a momentous occasion like the precipice of the apocalypse, you might just think it contains another piece of jewelry.  That piece of jewelry came a few weeks later, and proved not to be the end of the world either.  We're still around and ticking together twelve years later.

And what does this have to do with 52 projects you ask?

Well, I didn't take those earrings off for over a decade until one of the backs was lost awhile back.  And it's been one of those tiny to-do's that never got done because it required a trip to the jewelry store (that I don't frequent) with the earring in hand (which I never carried around with me).  It felt so good to get this little sparkle back (although it didn't feel too good to put them back into my ears after the hiatus).  And while I was there I had the diamonds checked in my anniversary band and one was very loose, so I sent it off for repair as well.  No sense backtracking on the diamond years, right?

So even though I was so incredibly busy this week, I still got to mark another thing off my list, and I have the earlobes to prove it.

f is for family (and you-know-who) and mmm is for cupcakes

This Friday found us busy with errands and tasks for E's school's Open House this weekend, so there wasn't a whole lot of fun going on this morning.  But we tried to make our errands enjoyable, and we finished off the running around with a great lunch.  I love that cupcake face.  It just about sums up the cupcake experience at SweetArt.

(Side note:  The veggie empanada is to die for.)