Thanks For The Advice

I want to thank you all for writing back to me about this blog. I get really insecure at times. (Ha, that's a laugh. A better phrase would be I occasionally experience bouts of confidence.) I hate the idea of ruining my darling N's life with my discussion and talk of him, but he's so damned cute that I can't avoid it. However, unlike my husband, N has no say in whether I blog about him. So, I feel like he might dislike it one day and want me to take this all down, but by then the Wayback Machine will have recorded it!

I'm still giving serious thought to combining my two blogs, but until I can decide which URL will be the winner and whatnot, I'm just going to keep blogging about. Just keep an eye out, okay?

Helen expressed some disbelief in the idea of me running. There is a reason for this. If you do not know me personally, let's say that I do not mix well with athletics. My normal walk is more of a shuffle with my feet pointing outwards. My husband (accurately) says that you can here me coming from across the house as my feet drag along the floor. My mom says it looks like I'm continuously daydreaming since I appear to walk without purpose or aim. My feet are all kinds of screwed up as my mom decided to ignore my doctor's advice when I was younger for corrective shoes. And this is just my feet and walk.

My friends have described my running as distinctly "hilarious", "wow", "odd", and "duck like". I probably couldn't beat a tortoise in a foot race. I've never participated in foot races. I prefer reading.



So, why running? Because, much like I find my artistic drawing skills laughable, yet have always wanted to be able to draw, I want to be some kind of athlete. Me, the kid always picked last! And while I'd much prefer to be a cyclist, my mom gave me free sneakers while a bike costs several hundred dollars. As we can see, one is definitely cheaper than the other.

So, last night I ran, and today I did a pilates workout and I'm hoping to continue with running and yoga next week. I'm really hoping to turn my body around to be a little more fit. Has anyone here ever pulled anything like that off? What is your preferred way of getting in shape?

Hey, I Went Away

Having finally processed the gigantic lump of photos of Christmas, I finally feel like taking photos once again and sharing my life with the rest of the world. I'm still processing photos from January, but at least they were taken in 2011, you know? My prize Christmas photo?



I'm still hesitant about blogging, to tell you the truth. I always read advice columns where the columnist is all, "You are going to regret sharing your life on a blog or Facebook and if you don't, your child totally will, and if they don't, then your spouse will, and if your spouse doesn't, all your friends are ashamed of you. And child molesters know what your children look like. Jerkface!" Then, I wonder if I'm secretly ruining my son's life by blogging. Then I wonder if I should obfuscate his name on the internet as if he didn't exist. Then I wonder why I can't just share my thoughts and feelings with you like I want to. Then I think, "Life is hard. Let's go shopping."

Anyway, what I mean to say is, I'm also considering combining my craft blog with my 'life' blog since I spend so much time crafting even though I don't blog about it. Also, if I had one less blog, maybe I'd have more posts? What do you think? Nay/yea? Other crafters successfully do it as do some mom bloggers.

Lastly in this mostly rambling blog post, I've started to run. I'm going to admit it here so that I feel some need to update you all and thus shame myself if I don't continue to run. I saw my back view at Target today and I was not impressed. Though I do remain impressed with Target's Converse line. So cute.

Look, it's all I can do not to just randomly type haikus here. I'm sorry if you find this blog post nonsensical, but let's just go with it and see where it leads.

Should I take down that photo of my son above? Is it ruining his life?

Bought All Four Lisette Simplicity Patterns

Now I need some impetus to sew them.  Anyone want to do a sew along with me on one of those patterns?  If you haven't bought them -- Joann is having a 1.99 Simplicity pattern sale this week!

SEWING FRIENDS

Why was I the last person ever to know that Oliver + S's designer was planning on making patterns for women with Simplicity?!

I'm not even joking -- I love this designer and her use of cottons.  She makes me want to wear yellow.  And I really should not do that.

Just To Inform You

I do plan to put a tutorial for making the icing and icing the cookies you've been seeing me churn out either on my blog or Helen's blog.

I'm currently waiting on determining the final design of some cookies I've got planned.

Also, someone with a new baby who occasionally blogs here with me should start looking to her own Monkey socks. A certain ninja kitten just started her first heel.

Songs of Love

The child that only six or seven months ago was barely stringing together a word or two and was still signing the words 'more' and 'please' is now the child that gabs and gabs and gabs at me.

While he's still fairly unintelligible to most people, I'm able to decipher his attempts at conversation with increasing regularity. From these conversations, it's becoming obvious that he realizes time exists and that tomorrow can be filled with fun things to do, as can "Sunday". He's letting me know he can count now and that he likes to count. His tenuous grasp of colors is still not impressive, but since we're not taking the time to point out colors more to him, he's trying harder to figure out which colors are which.

My absolute favorite part of this new talkativeness, though, is his singing. The first few times he'd try to sing, it would be what you expect: the Alphabet Song, Jingle Bells, or Happy Birthday To You (and Beverly Hills by Weezer). However, as he realized we liked his singing, he branched out to other harder Christmas carols such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas. Then came the Beatles tune Hello Goodbye! When he first started chanting that to himself, the husband and I looked at each other to confirm that we were hearing.

Rapidly, then, he began to take other songs he knew and add his own lyrics. He often changes the Farmer In The Dell to use new words, and just today he changed both The Wheels On The Bus and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It's fascinating because I had no idea children who were this young could be that creative. I love to know what is going through his mind too, and it gives me a glimpse of what he's thinking.

I can't wait to have further conversations with this child!

Still Creating, I Swear

I just am not creating anything fabric-y.



My obsession nowadays is cookies. They taste so good too!

But, fear not, I've started to knit once again. I shall show you the Monkey sock that I've secretly plugged away at over the last week when I get up the energy to post photos again of my knitting.

I Want To Quilt -- No, REALLY

I know I'm not crafting much recently, but I've been really big into drawing (another creative hobby) and playing Japanese video games (another gigantic and useless time suck that leaves me better able to determine that the Japanese are really weird, but kind of awesome) and baking cookies (third batch of royally iced cookies so far). However, I was just sitting at my computer, trolling through my feeds, when I came across a fabric line that made me want to quilt HARDCORE.

Anyway, there I was, innocently looking at sewing blogs when Bookworm Bethie attacked. All sweetly, she posts about how she got a charm pack of Sherbet Pips from Moda. I hit NEXT SEWING BLOG on my browser, but then, I stopped and went back. Were those people on scooters? Were they wearing scarves? Were the scarves striped? Was it impossibly adorable? Check, check, check, check.

This line is done in red, pink, turquoise, grey, and white! It features people on scooters in the winter. It features little girls swinging. It was possibly designed with me in mind. I'm fairly sure of it!

I tried to think of skirts or sleep boxers I could make from some of the yardage, but I knew what I really wanted to do. I wanted a quilt. A nice simple quilt with lots of white to offset the busy patterns. I'm pretty sure that as soon as yardage becomes available in April, I'm picking up several yards of various pieces so I can make my dream quilt. Then that fabric can sit with my neglected needles and sewing machine and they can all cry about the fact that I ignore them.

Still... it's so cute that I suspect that I will not resist.

Bye, 2010, Someday I'll Miss You

I don't think 2010 will go down as the best year ever for me. I'm not going to rank it too lowly, because my son did learn to give me a giant hug and say "I love Mommy", but it kind of sucked early on. There were too many hospital visits for N, serious and horrible illnesses and death within our families, and too much time for P in a completely different state while I attempted to see what single parenting felt like. I think N experienced over fifteen colds in the last year, but who's counting?

I will say that things perked up greatly come autumn, excepting the issue of colds. The arrival of fall always makes me incredibly happy. There's hayrides, the start of the holidays, and having my child really recognize that seasons change.



One of my best friends had a baby girl. One of my other best friends (and N's godparent) announced her pregnancy. I made a few good friends this year and I think I've found one or two other moms that could be good friends.

Christmas was also excellent this year, but it normally is. I got a lot of video games and N got a boatload of toys and P got a peacoat that makes him look hawt. I have such excellent taste.

Let's hope 2011 is a lot calmer with smoother sailing in the health issues. If so, I think it could be a fine year all around (except for my favorite season autumn when you'll possibly see me sob over everything when my son goes to school for the first time ever).

New year, new look for my chairs!

Many, many moons ago, my chairs were looking pretty grubby, and I hatched a plan to recover them (and Jenn hatched a plan for me to blog it.) Easy peasy, right? All you need to recover chairs like these are some fabric and a staple gun!



WRONG. The fabric was easy to acquire. Jenn escorted me to Jo-Ann's, and we selected a lovely navy pattern... in 2009. And then it sat, and sat, and sat, waiting for me to do something with it. First, I needed to borrow a staple gun. Then, I needed staples. How long can this take? A mighty long time. Finally, the impending arrival of a new baby provided sufficient motivation for this long-overdue craft project.

For the first chair, I decided to remove the existing cover. It was also stapled in place, with a far more powerful stapler than any I have encountered. To pry that fabric loose took roughly 2 hours, screwdrivers, two people and quite a bit of elbow grease. Needless to say, the subsequent chairs have their original covers under the new ones.



The only upside of all that work? I could use the existing cover as the template when cutting the new fabric.

Stapling is a two-man job. You need a second person to hold the fabric taut while you staple. Additionally, I had to hammer the staples in a bit to get them fully flush. Each chair takes about 5 minutes, once you have your system down.



Once we finished the first one, though, the other 3 flew by. Before I knew it, my capable assistant was reassembling the newly covered chairs!



So, over a year, 2 hours, 20 minutes and 9 months later, I think we can call both of our recent projects a success. And now I'm considering another, similar project... recovering my bed frame, that is.