Pavlov

• I've been seriously obsessed with squash lately. I think I love it.
• I want to come up with cues that create a Pavlovian response in my babies... you know, sounds or smells that make them fall asleep or giggle. Is that cruel, amusing, or just awesome?
• I think I should go off sugar again so that my imunity is higher for winter, but I am kinda constantly craving this pudding/ mouse a lot lately.
• I realized today that I go through a costco pack of butter more than once a month when I get in a baking mood. Julia Child would be proud. 
• My babies are less anxious about moving out of mommies room than mommy is. I have a hard time falling asleep if they are not in there with me. I don't want to wait to move them until they get  used to knowing I'm there and get dependent on it, but I REALLY prefer waking up to soft voices than to screams from the other room.
• Here is a better picture of my  hole.
  

Houston, we have a hole (but the hole is not in Houston)

Brett drove by after work and took a picture in the pitch black... he was so excited. Even with the headlights pointed at it, is was pretty useless if you use your eyes to look at pictures (and even if you use your tongue).

So, naturally, he swung by on his way to work today. Admire it. Love my hole. it isn't it beautiful.

Some things I love about it:

• The pink spray paint on the curb... That's where our property line STARTS, and our home has to be at least 10 feet from that... Compare to the homes they are building near my condo, where there is only 10 feet between the homes, and they can't legally put up fences on most of the lots. 
• All the homes next/across are almost finished, so we wont be right next door to a construction zone.
• Across the street is the side yard of homes. This means we got lots of parking for all of those wild parties we throw. All of them. 
• We also have parking along our side (corner lot) and the landowners  on the other side of the street (horse trainers) refused to sell their land to our developers, so we might have that parking for a long time. 
• Animal rights. 

Downsides:

• Corner lot means we loose a little bit of our acreage to more sidewalk, and we have more fence that we have to share the cost of. 
• The CCRs don't specify much, but they do forbid goats. I can have chickens, a few behives, two horses,  some llamas, but I can't have a goat. Brett likes this, but I ain't excited for llama milk. 
• We picked a very popular floorplan. Our neighborhood has several, and that includes our next door neighbor. Oops. But we won't be yellow. 
•  

The babies made me make it

I keep coming up with more sewing projects that I typically don't finish for months, but fortunately, most get done eventually. Its more fun to make potential failures for ickle babies instead of for yourself.

Rather than hall my whole diaper backpack (with blankets and toys, and my water) into the bathroom at church, I wanted a self-containted diaper changing kit I could just grab and take with me . I used scraps, and was making it up as I went, so I would like to remake it neater with more for-thought, but, this works fine and don't want to waste time and money.

Top compartment holds spare covers, the green compartment holds a ziplock of whipes, and the bottom part is a whipeable changing pad with a pocket for holding the cloths. I usually pull them out while the  baby is on top of the changing pad. 

THe top compartments flip on top of the changing pad, then it folds in half with a handle, so I can just grab it out of my backpack and take it with me. 

THis shows where the cloths are hidden under the velcro fold over of the ch anging pad. you can see I used the fabric inside out to have the laminate on the outside... since I was to cheep to buy more fabric to have laminate and print on the outside. 

My wet bags came out lovely. 2 bags cost me little over 5 bucks to make  for both (compared to  10 15 each) and were quick. You can see how squiggly my sewing is. My sewing machine is fairly crappy and sometimes its not worth the effort to try and force it to sew strait. I mean, it's cool and I did it on purpose.

Only slightly more complicated than a pillowcase. Laminate on the inside,  velcro to cose. 

My wrist straps were surprisingly tidy

My squiggly stitches were "on purpose"

When it got really cold for a while and I didn't have hats, I made up a pattern (simple) based on a knitting pattern that was basically a rectangle with a seam on one edge. I thought they came out cute. Silly, but cute. Sometimes they look like Russian women, sometimes like little hobbits. The hats were also made  from used t/shirts and sweater linings. 100 points for being free.

Silly warm boy. 

a month and a half later,  I finished the second hat. In this photo, I still need to do a top stitch on the one on the right, but I did finish it last night!

Then, looking for more sweaters at kid to kid (a lot of my hand me downs were short sleves) I found a sock monkey sweater, so of course, that meant the day before the church halloween party, I had to make a second costume. I thought it would be easy, but I forgot that picking a non streatchy fabric is hard to get over baby heads, in the end I made it work, but it took 4x as long as it should have. I'm pretty proud of using no pattern though.

In the end I used a green onesie underneath. The back was sliced from top to bottom,  and I had to reconnect it with lengths of elastic. 

And lastly, I felted an old cashmere sweater that had a few holes in it to reuse the wool. It's all fluffy now. Wool, from what I read, is amazing. It insulates your body temp well whether it's hot or cold outside, it breathes well, and It absorbs alot of moisture and pulls it away from your skin without wicking and transferring to the other side of the fabric... so it's good for keeping you dry in rain, and for pulling sweat/urine away from skin, and its antibacterial so it can absorb urine many times before it smells and you have to hand wash it. Usually you can air dry, swap for another pair, then reuse, washing 1-2 times a month. Hence, some people love wool soakers, aka diaper covers, especially for night time. For all these reason wool is apparently amazing, so I've been wanting to make something with it.

See how fluffy it got!! Sadly you can still see the holes. I was hoping they would felt in, but I cut around it . 

It shrunk a bit when I felted it. shame I cut of the sleeves when the elbows wore through. I could have made nursing pads from the cuffs. 

Well, one of my little ones has started getting some rashes, so I need to change him often, and even though I use disposables at night time, I was looking for something better. the velcro tabs seem to irritate his skin though the disposable diaper, because it is scratchy. So I finally broke down, and yesterday I took a free wool soaker pattern, and made a test diaper with some scrap material. Its a bit feminine in color, but kinda cute. I then made a fluffy soft wool one cutting up my now felted sweater. With the cloth diaper underneath, it makes a supper fluffy butt. I want to put a tail on it.  I need to lanolize it (incase my sweater was processed) just in case, but I'll be trying it out soon.

TEST Material., but without the cloth inside. I think he looks like a boxer. 

Gotta love the paint  on the fabric. Also, I sewed the waist band to the wrong side. 

I decided to make him wear it today with a diaper underneeth. Because it was just sweat shirt material, I did have to use a cover underneath. 

Voila, soft fluffy wool with a cloth inside. I ended up making the legs shorter to to use smaller scraps of the wool, and I had to make the legs tighter. Not as cute, but it works. 

Next time I wont skimp on the length of the leg cuffs so it will be cuter. 

Inside out . I patched together scraps to make an extra thick "wet zone" area 

Happy Thanksgiving

I love him, spit up and all

He looks innocent here, but I'm convinced he's plotting 

What to Expect When You're Expecting

If I've said this already, I apologize.

I thought I'd share with those of you who have yet to have babies one of the most graphic things I learned about babies; by the end of the first week home with your LO, your home will look like this:

Urine, spit up, everywhere . Everywhere. You may not see it, but it's there.

Neighbors

So I have this one boisterous, Kentucky raised, praise-the-lord-christian, moved-to-hollywood-to-become-an-actress neighbor. She is a hoot and a half, and the loudest, most talkative, most cheerful person I have EVER met. Like I said, Boisterous. If I am getting redundant here, forgive me. I have never met someone quite that... potent. I really enjoy her.

Well, we were talking about going walking, so naturally that led to talking about my face. You see, she's also the queen changing subjects; in a typical 5 minute conversation with her you will cover 10 topics.

Anyhow, Face: So her boy is teething, and I'm a gross slob— so naturally neither of us were wearing make up. She proceeds to tell me that, as a hopes-to-eventually-finish-beauty-school esthetician, she thinks my skin is decent and that I don't need a lot of make-up anyway. "Just light foundation, blush, eyeshadow, powder, and mascara." And while I'm not offended and know she doesn't mean to be rude, I can't help but hold back a smirk and think "oh good, so basically my skin is so good, I only have to wear EVERYTHING, except for eyeliner."

Good times.

Logoless in Ikealand

My Poor husband has been legoless for years (har har har har har). He had a box of Lego parts when we were married. He touched it once. So, when we moved outta Wymount, I convinced him to get rid of it.

Jerky wife.

Well, our puzzle collection has gotten out of control.... enter LEGOs, the real man's puzzle. Especially the technics with gears. Real men have gears on their legos.  I dared get Brett a little crane set for his birthday.

Well the little crane i got him started something, and used birthday money from parents, work, etc to buy the most complicated lego kit lego has yet made. A bigger crane that is WAYYYY cooler than the one his wife got him. 

So this Gargantuas crane set took up our entire table. He worked on it when he watched the boys while I got my hair cut ( makes babies seam like easy work, he does), worked on it while I walked the dog, worked on it 'till 1 am. At least I had him do some dishes before he started it.

Here is the kit when I woke up this morning (with my little crane ridding on top)

Halfway done. The thing only came with 6 instruction books. 300-something pages, Brett tells me. I'm pretty sure it is the l
ongest thing he's read in 5 years that wasn't a programing book.

This brings me to my theory on IKEA. Everyone is always poking fun at Ikea furniture like it takes a devil and his minion of fleas to understand the instructions. 

You'd be surprised how many images come up when you google "IKEA DEVIL."

We have NEVER EVER had an issue with that. I've put stuff together no prob. Brett, granted, has always done the more complicated stuff while I engaged in domestic stereotypes, but he made it look so easy. So, naturally, I assumed that people who claimed to be confused by IKEA furnature were lazy idiots who never figured out that setting a desktop  computer was as easy as trying all the cables until they fit somewhere (Yup, that's how I set up all my computers before I had my own Brett). Totally works.

And then I get it. LEGO was designed as a training program for IKEA purchasers. They couldn't have been more blatant. The company names and logos are both all caps and only 4 letters. They boldly use primary colors in their logos. They tell us one is from Denmark and the other from Sweden, but lets face it. the countries are the same. Denmark is just Sweden's little training subsidiary, separated by a little bit of water. Just look at the instruction/assembly manuals. the only difference is that one is in color. You have an illustration of a placed peice, and then an expanded view of the smaller part with an arrow going to where it is in the assembly.

So, the moral of the story is that if you think your kids might only be able to afford IKEA furnature when they grow up, you best train them in the ways of the LEGO.

Hair hair hair

I never intended my hair to get this long. My hair cutter moved out of walking distance, so a combination of no car and two babies kept me from going. Last night I decided to do it an Brett could handle the babies. 

It's the longest my hair has been, so I took many before pictures hoping one would be good, but I liked them all.  

I couldn't decide how short to go. I'm not obsessed with my hair, but it's kind of become part of my identity now. People recognize me and remember me better because its freekin' long. When we move I figured it would help people get to remember me faster

On the other hand, I don't shower enough, I only blow dry for special occasions (funeral/baptism), and I often go more than a day without combing it. Those kinda people don't do well with long hair, and babies don't pull that hair, they get stuck in it

Well, I had decided that when I poop on my hair, it is too long. It didn't come to that, fortunately, but  like I said, I'm a certified baby trap; you could use my head for baby hunting. Can take 5 minutes to untangle a strangled baby hand.

 I debated between a few inches and a foot... Then even considered really short—even though my no maintenance hair tendencies have oft taught me that short hair is worse than long.  In the end I let Geneva, my hair cutting guru, pick my length. SHe chose to take just a few inches off, so I didn't take an after picture. Technically it is still long (just below the milk makers), but to me it looks dramatically shorter. Weird.