whew

Really busy, really fun weekend. We're enjoying the down time this evening. We'll catch you up on the weekend's event tomorrow night. Until then, enjoy this little smile.

while you're thinking about my last question...

Sister pictures to enjoy.

any guesses?

Anyone? Anyone?

difficult lessons

How do you both expose and shield your children from the pain and suffering around them? How do you answer their questions about the shaking, quaking earth and the loss of buildings and cities and parents and lives without instilling fears and terrors as they sleep in the night in a bedroom three stories up, a bedroom in a one hundred and twenty-five year old house resting on stacked stones and the New Madrid? How do you explain why we reach out to those that have lost - because we ache for them and also because we know that it could just as well be us - without creating the visual of a little girl in Haiti assembling a ziploc bag of vitamins and neosporin for a little girl in this river town next to the arch?

We chose to follow a list and purchase the items instead of writing a check that means little to a six year old. The list was complied by the organizations working within our church family and included personal hygiene and medical first aid items, bagged and ready to be handed out, one by one. The two of us worked our way through the aisles and through the questions. "If we are buying these things, who is buying the clothes? The shoes? The furniture? The toys? The houses? The schools?" One hundred and thirty dollars worth of ibuprofen and gauze; a full basket, yet so very, very empty.

sunny

The lack of sunshine in our little world isn't affecting the sunny disposition of this little one.

rewrite

Heard from the other room: "There are way too many D's in dad and M's in mom". Turns out she was trying to write "Best Family in the World" at the end but was stumped by the lack of m's and d's to make it happen. I thought this rewrite that came a bit later was perfectly fine.

open house at school today

burnin' the midnight oil

Not exactly midnight, but it feels like it this week.

At least someone is sleeping...

oh

you mean I get to eat something with the words "sweet" and "potato" in it?

Good stuff.

and now her room is eighty-seven percent done

It's only taken six months to do, but I've finally gotten everything out of F's closets and her stuff, and her stuff only, inside them. Just to shame me a bit I've included a photograph of what this thing looked like a couple of weeks ago.

When the room operated as a studio space the closets and shelves were actually quite organized. But we never really converted the room over to nursery - I think there was a bit of denial on my part that all my space was going away. So I've slowly moved the projects down to other parts of the house, and you know how empty spots in closets attract junk...well, this one was a toppling pile of it.
Part of the hold up was that her room doesn't have the built in dresser space that her sister's does:

So we had to come up with a solution for her clothes that don't hang, and this elfa system did the trick. I originally drew up something a bit more elaborate for the space, but what I really wanted was the flexibility, and this freestanding unit fit the bill a lot better. Now we hang a variety of clothing lengths above, store her clothes below and have bins and hooks in the system for accessories.

There are a few toys and bins stored on the side...

...but the majority are in the bottom drawers for easy access.

So, eighty-seven percent done because we're still missing one last light fixture and we need to take out the foam core squares in the windows and do something a bit more attractive and functional back here.

That's in the works now, and includes some fabric that looks like this:

Oh, yes. One more thing someone just reminded me of...a rug.

eighty-seven percent

That's what I've been doing lately on just about everything - managing to get things done, managing to get them done pretty close to on time and with little bloodshed or tears, a good strong B showing. Sometimes a B+. But that's about it. And I should be okay with that - it's really nothing to be ashamed of. But when the laundry is about 87% done that means there is 13% undone and that just might be both pairs of the only two jeans that I own and all of the kitchen towels. And when I get that baby's closet finally 87% emptied out of my stuff, that's 13% still left in there to finish and 87% of the stuff sitting in stacks on the floor because there's just nowhere else to put it. And when I get 87% of the tiny bit of makeup that I wear on in the morning, or 87% of my lunch together, or 87% of the bathroom clean, I still need lip gloss and a couple hundred more calories and the dust bunnies out of the corner and the ring gone from inside the toilet. Turns out that our January is just as busy as our Nov / Dec. Maybe busier, because at least when we arrived at where we were going then, we could just sit around and do nothing and eat other people's food. Now we have to make food if we're going to eat, and then remember to pack the leftovers up for tomorrow's lunch. (Which I remember to pack 87% of the time.) And that leaves me hungry about every Wednesday and wishing I had just a bit more time to get my act, and that other 13% of me, together and out the door.

.....

Sorry for the 87% effort on the blog lately. Fuller, more abundant posting to come soon enough.

new 'do

It was time for a spruce up around here. (Mine's coming on Friday!) E's been excited all week about having tomorrow (Monday) off of school and the whole day to play with her dad and her sister. And then today she realized it would be another whole day before she could wear her "new" look to school, and she decided she was ready to go back. I'm sure she'll change her tune tomorrow morning...

busy

That's what this week has been and that's what this little girl is...busy.

maybe, just maybe

It might get above the freezing mark tomorrow. Which might do a little number on the lingering snow. Cold weather for one portion of the year never really bothered me too much. It is a little bit easier to nest at home and get a few things done around the house than when it's seventy-five and not a cloud in the sky. But I think I'm about done with sinking into a foot of piled snow at the curb each morning as I wrestle an eighteen pound baby in a car seat to the center of the car and then buckle a wriggling, jabbering first grader in beside her (because she can no longer reach the buckle herself now that her sister's seat is in the way). Yep, I just thought about it again and I can certainly say that I'm done.

I'll leave the snow to the penguins.

and another one...

I don't really know how to write our resolutions this year because they would all start to sound like run on sentences. This one would begin with our desire to (finally) start our garden that we plan to start each year and then give up once the herbs start flourishing. Which prompted our discussions about what we like to eat, what's in season, how we continue to try and eat things from closer, fresher sources. These conversations occur around the dinner table and over junk food on our long car trips. Our daughter discusses it weekly in her culinary arts class and practices it daily in her homecooked lunches at her school. And now we have a fourth diner to think of as well, so we're giving our eating (and planning) a bit of an overhaul this year. 
 I've mentioned before that M does a good portion of the cooking during the week because he's home in the afternoons with the girls. So I'm pretty fortunate to come home most evenings to dinner on the table. But I really do enjoy cooking, and I absolutely love to bake, so I like to participate in a few of the weekday meals, and I use the weekends to try out new recipes or old, complicated favorites. We don't shop at one particular store, rather, we have many different stores and markets that we like for different reasons and they are near other things that we are doing throughout the week so we plan our trips accordingly. So we've started out this year with some new menu planners and grocery list planners and we're trying to work through the upcoming week during the weekend so that we have what we need for the week ahead - and hopefully with a lot less waste than you get with ill-purchased ingredients that don't actually ever make it into a dish.

The baby is helping to plan our meals as well as we think of menus around produce that's abundant right now that she can try out. We got this handy dandy little gadget from M's parents for Christmas and it is downright addictive.

I'm kind of partial to chopping anyway, and so it's a lot more fun to chop up squash for a pasta dish and a bit extra for the steamer. On our snow day Thursday, while F napped, E and I chopped the afternoon away, steaming and labeling and freezing a nice stash for this week and next. 

We've discovered that the kids currently have this perfect symbiotic relationship - we cut up the fruit for the baby while her sister eats all the peels. (I'm not sure why she thinks I can't see her grabbing pear slices while I'm looking through the camera.)

She labels frozen ones while more steam on the counter, and we make up funny recipes and combinations to try out on her in the future.

She continues the list of foods, marking down the reactions so far and guessing at future ones. We think they will all receive a smiley face - one thing we know for certain from this past week - this kid likes to eat. So skip that long run on sentence I mentioned before. Let's just call this one "Eat".

the halfway point

We thought about getting some type of dessert to celebrate this milestone, but after a very rich and yummy breakfast at Local Harvest and an afternoon of errands and projects around the house we decided to have a pie of a different kind - Chicago deep dish pizza (new recipe - yum) and put a candle in food #3 - steamed pears.

This week we've not been able to shovel in the winter squash fast enough, and pears were met in the same delighted fashion so I don't think the lack of dessert was noticed. And we weren't left with a lot of extra cake or pie - except that savory pie, of course.

It's been a fun week of firsts, and a nice lead up to this half year mark. After months of quietly drifting off to sleep at night, we've had a few nights of angst as our roly-poly-oly flips to her stomach and then protests the action until flipped back again. The first night it took about three flips before she tired of the game and went to sleep, last night I gave up at seventeen and told her she'd have to work it out on her own. Which she promptly did, and hasn't gone back since. I miss seeing that sweet little sleeping face looking up at me when I come into her room at night, but that sweet cuddly bug on her tummy is nearly as cute. I think the tummy is here to stay.

Lots of transitions this week, to solids, to tummies, to the downhill slide to one year. Each morning I ask her to slow down a bit when she babbles up new sounds at me and manipulates those tiny fingers around more complex things. Each night, as I hold her and feed her and read her to sleep I stop asking and start begging. After all the excitement of pears(!) and a candle tonight, she was extra sleepy before bed. I gave her one last snuggle and final plea to slow down a bit and she opened one eye and grinned her big grin and snuggled in a little closer. I suppose as long as she wants to snuggle, I'll be okay with her growing up. But ahhhh - six months old is an age worth freezing, or at least pausing for an extra bit of time. I'll let you know if I find that magic button somewhere.

.....

Happy half birthday my sweet, sweet one.

another good reason to have children

Snow Days.

Yes, I know, most of the time they are a royal pain in the neck as you try to juggle busy work schedules and figure out who's taking which kid where and how you're going to get your work done with a child (or two) sitting in your office all day. But sometimes, when the stars align in just the right way, they are an absolutely perfectly good reason to call in sick. And stay in your pajamas all day. And play.

I wasn't sure why everyone in the hospital had to be lined up, but I found out later it was a for a field trip to the local pirate ship.

Um, I think it's a bit too late to call an ambulance for that one at the end of the pier...

We did do a few minutes of this - slowly putting things away from the holiday...

But way more of this...tending to the infirm in our jammies. Hope you stayed warm as well.