Gown, shoes, accessories

I sewed this to match a nightgown I made for Mabel a few months ago. (Mabel’s is unfortunately in my mending pile while I figure out a way to alter it — I made it to tie at the neck, and after she’d worn it for quite a while (and survived,) one day I realized that the long ties could come undone and strangle her in her sleep. So I need to make some button loops or put some snaps in.) I made this from my beloved Butterick 6659, with some modifications. It’s out of a nice Rose & Hubble lawn and has a self-lined bodice and French seams and a bound waist seam. It’s very long on Rose now, so she should get a lot of wear out of it.

Capturing a non-hammy expression on Rose is a feat.

Cute as her vintage buttons

Chatting

Texting

As soon as she got her nightgown on, Rose had to go put on her “ballerina shoes.” I told her we don’t wear shoes to bed, so she took them off — and that gave Henry a chance to get in on the shoe action. (Did I mention that “shoes” is one of the few words he can say clearly? He’s worked on it so hard.)

“That’s a cool phone you’ve got there — it would go well with my shoes.”

“Am I ever going to get a turn?”

“Me and the things I love.”

Such a homely child

If you’re a monster looking for easy recipes to cook babies,

you might want to try pan-fried toddler — because toddlers already come prepared with a crumb coating.

Why we don’t have pets

We had a Mother’s Day breakfast for dinner tonight, since Dean has early church meetings tomorrow. Dean cooked French toast in the waffle iron — he said he just wanted to see how it would work. It worked fine; it tasted like French toast and looked like waffles. (I don’t really see any point to it, but at least it’s a harmless and edible experiment.) We also had bacon, and berry sauce and whipped cream to put on the Frenchwaffletoast. Henry was mainly interested in the whipped cream. Looking at the splattered cream and crumbs on the floor under him, I said, “We should just keep a layer of newspapers under his chair and change it daily.” “Mm hmm,” said Dean, “or sawdust.”

May get a little better

A bit of an update:

After Dean got home from work and had read my May day post, he lectured Isaac some — he compared homework to a job where you sometimes have to do things the way your boss wants you to do them, even though you think your way would be better. I asked Ike whether the lecture had helped him change his attitude and he said, “Yeah, some.” Then Ike had to finish a “Quizzle” for school and had gotten messed up at some point, so I created a new grid for him in Word so he could start over without having to erase all his dark pencil marks, and after he’d re-done the Quizzle and found the right answers, he was sincerely grateful for my help. Then it was his bedtime, but today he finished four of his five book report illustrations quite painlessly — they’re still black-and-white, but he did do them the correct size, and he even took my suggestion about adding a fence. (It turned out he’d been picturing a chain-link fence, which would still show the wolf and man behind it and therefore wouldn’t solve the problem of easily filling in the margins of the picture. Once he realized I meant a solid wood fence, he thought it was a great idea.)

Also I just finished a fun sewing project (pictures coming soon) and Dean is installing some new light fixtures in the kids’ rooms — one of them is already in, and it looks quite nice. Oh, and last night Dean and I finally bought plane tickets to take the kids on a trip to Washington D.C. after school gets out, which is a big relief since I thought we’d never agree on flights — he kept finding less-costly flights at what I thought were very inconvenient times to fly — but I got online myself last night and found some flights that were medium-priced (we saved money by not taking nonstop flights, but spent more to fly on the days/times I preferred) and we were both satisfied enough with that compromise to go ahead and order the tickets.

So that’s the current state of things.

(This post is pretty much of the genre where I tell you everything I did today including what I ate for breakfast (granola) but, although I’ll admit to having sometimes lofty ambitions to write actually interesting posts, yet at the same time I must remind you (my poor, bored reader) that it’s my blog — and it’s imaginary. Which can sometimes make for a dull combination. (Also, I ate smoked oysters and Oreos for lunch — not necessarily a boring fact, but perhaps not something you wanted to know.)

May day

I knew Isaac’s book report assignment was going to be a bad one for him as soon as I saw the rubric: five drawings to represent photos for the non-fiction book he read — an awful lot of painstaking realistic drawing for a kid who doesn’t enjoy drawing anything other than Nintendo characters. But it’s worse than I thought: the pictures are supposed to be 4″x6″ and fit on the page the wide way, but Isaac, who was already in tears of frustration from trying to draw one of the photos from the book (a wolf playing with a man — it looks good to me, but he thinks it’s horrible,) had chosen a vertical picture and ignored the specified dimensions — his was a wavy 4″x3″ or so. I told him where to find a ruler and suggested he could add a fence or wall on the sides of the vertical pictures to fill in the spaces on the side and fit them in the wide way, but these suggestions were anathema to him; the original aspect ratio of the pictures must be represented in scrupulous accuracy. I went so far as to use the ruler to draw the rectangles on the pages for him myself, which elicited more tears, a “Don’t I get any say in the decisions?!,” and a slammed door (he forgot the baby was napping in that room — he did come right back out to do his storming elsewhere once he’d realized his mistake.) Also, the rubric says that, among other things, the fake photo album/book report will be graded on its being “colorful and tidy,” but the photos in his book are in black and white, and he thinks that it would be a breach of integrity to add any color to them.

He’s now erased all the rectangles I drew. And is reading Dilbert.

Meanwhile, Mabel was brought to tears by my cruel edict that cleaning up from playing with the Play-Doh did, in fact, mean sweeping up all the crumbs, and no, just because I was the “only one who could see them” did not mean I should have to finish the job for her. Then she couldn’t find the dustpan, and everyone knows you can’t sweep up crumbs without a dustpan, and oh, she forgot she left it there on the counter, and anyway it’s not fair that Rose doesn’t have to do it.

Rose is recuperating on the couch, with three fresh band-aids where she skinned her knee and shin falling down outside.

Henry, who mercifully did not wake up in spite of the door slamming (I spoke too soon — there’s a wail) sneaked a mature dandelion in from outdoors before his nap, which I did not discover until my action of lifting him onto the changing table crushed it, causing a fleet of fluff bits to coat his and my shirts and embed themselves in the layer of snot on his face. Tip: next time this happens to you, a lint roller works well on the shirts. (The face can also be scrubbed clean, although you’ll still find residual peaches from his lunch under his chin later.) Then when I put Henry in his crib and was looking for his binky, I found a several-days-old sippy cup of milk under his bed, but I couldn’t reach it. So I left it there.

I’m, meanwhile, not feeling well this afternoon and have been trying to rest. I guess I’m going to have to let Isaac turn in his pseudo-album with irregularly-sized, tastefully-artistic black-and-white “photos,” although I’m tempted to make him take a note from me to his teacher that says, “I told him the right way to do it, so this is all his fault; just go ahead and dock his grade because he totally deserves it.” (That would be such a “cool mom*” thing to do.)

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I just remembered there are new episodes of The Office and Lost tonight. I hope they’re good ones.
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*Okay so I thought I was being funny linking to that Build You a Rainbow video, but in doing so I made the mistake of actually listening to it — and went and made myself cry. I guess with the correct youthful conditioning, even uncool living moms can get sentimental about cool, football-playing dead moms. Now, come to think of it, if I count Rose after she fell down and Henry when he realized he was about to be put in a nap, we’ve all cried this afternoon.

Meet Henry, sarcastic toddler

Photo taken by Mabel, at the hotel in Springdale last month.

Henry is now about 21 months old and, although extremely expressive, not terribly verbal. Many of his words sound about as clear whether he’s got his binky in his mouth or not. He can say “shoes” very well, and “mine!” and “ball,” and a syllable that means “outside” (and sounds something like “guy.”) He’s also known “no” for a long time (very important word when you have three bossy older siblings,) but somehow finds “yes” much more difficult, so, for the last several weeks when I offer him something, I can tell the difference between his yes and his no by the expression on his face — a sincere “no” is offered with a scowl and loud voice, but if he means “yes,” he’ll say “nooo” with a wry comic smile on his face, in a lilting tone, and rolling his eyes. Finally, just today, he managed to get out his affirmative response this way: “nooo–yeh!”

A couple of weeks ago I was asking Henry to point to family members: “Where’s Mommy? Where’s Daddy?” This game was a little too rote for him, so he started deliberately pointing to the wrong family member. He especially refused to ever correctly point to me, and seemed to think it was all hilarious (which, actually, it was.) Now he’s perfected the game to the point where as soon as I start to say, “Henry, where’s . . ?” he’ll interrupt me, point at Dean, and shout, “MA!”

But now I see

Mabel, feeling her way around the kitchen: “I’m blind.”

Me: “You’re blind?” (I’m reminded of an afternoon I spent being blind when I was not much older than Mabel. I was a particularly helpless, pathetic, needy blind person, and although I found my state to be quite deliciously sad, my friends did seem to rather quickly tire of giving me assistance.)

Mabel: “Yeah. What time is it? I can’t see.”

Me: “Um — 10:28.”

Mabel: (Still with her eyes closed, she makes her way into the living room, where the little ones are watching PBS): “What show is this? I’m guessing it’s just the ads.”

A couple minutes later (10:31) Mabel comes downstairs with her eyes open. “What would be really bad would be to be deaf and blind, because if you were deaf, people would have to do sign language with you, but if you were blind you couldn’t see the sign language.”

Me: “Yeah. I should have taken you to that play at the Hale theater — the one about Helen Keller.”

Mabel: “I already know about her. I read a book.”

Mabel alternates between being blind and peeking at the computer screen while I’m writing, offering some minor corrections in between glances. Returning to blindness, she gropes my face with her hands, and says, “Is that your face? Or is that [starts to choke with laughter] a pig’s rear end?”

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A bit later (10:42) Mabel asks, “Mom, how old were you when you were blind? Twelve?”

Me: “Yeah, something like that. Probably 10.”

Mabel: “That’s kind of old to be blind.”

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Mabel’s suggestion for alternate post title: “The Hilarious Mabel.” Yes, indeed.

And while we’re on the topic of things I loved,

Bound on Earth, by Angela Hallstrom

I also loved this book. Loved, loved, loved it. Highly recommend it. This tag line describes it as well as I could: “Combining deep emotional candor and spare, elegant prose, Hallstrom’s debut novel is a poignant exploration of family, faith, and the ties that bind.”

(I have a nagging feeling that I’m overselling everything tonight, and I don’t want to ruin Foyle’s War or Bound on Earth for anyone by making them sound better than they are . . . but they really are that good — if you like the kind of stuff I like. Which you totally should. Because I have good taste. And I’m sure you do too, since you’re reading my blog. Also, I may or may not have extreme sleep deprivation right now, so I’d better go remedy that before I make a further fool of myself talk myself into a corner fall asleep at the keyboard say anything else that might keep you from wanting to read this wonderful book.

Seriously the best entertainment to come around in a long time, really

Foyle’s War.

The premise of this series is that detective Christopher Foyle is fighting home front battles against crime while younger men are out fighting the larger war. He is helped by war veteran Paul Milner and his driver, Samantha Stewart. It is set during World War II in Hastings on the south coast of England, and all of the mysteries incorporate World War II events and their influence on daily life.

My mom sold me on the series when she said that both Dean and I would enjoy it — I would enjoy it for the good writing and acting and period costuming and romance, and Dean would enjoy the mysteries and World War II history. She was right — we have both thoroughly enjoyed it, and I can hardly recommend it highly enough. In particular, Michael Kitchen as DCS Foyle is spectacular; there is always so much implied in even his smallest gestures. The research and attention to historical accuracy in every detail is also meticulous and amazing. Many fine actors make appearances (James McAvoy even has a bit role in the first episode.) If you like period dramas like “Pride and Prejudice,” or if you or your spouse enjoy crime dramas like “Law and Order,” or if you have a husband who’s always watching the History Channel, you’ll like this series.

How to find it: Currently the first five seasons are available in four DVD sets of sixteen episodes total. Three more final episodes have been made and aired in England, so I assume they will also be available on DVD soon. I don’t know if you can get them on Netflix (because I don’t have Netflix,) but if you live in Utah County they’re available at the Orem Library. (If you go this route, here’s a warning: They’re cataloged a little bit weirdly — the first and fourth seasons are listed by the episode title, with each episode checked out separately and nothing on the boxes or DVDs to indicate the episode sequence, whereas the second and third seasons are checked out as sets. The easiest way to find them is to search by “Series Title Alphabetical” and then for the 1st and 4th seasons, copy down the episode sequence from the catalog.)

I don’t know what else I can say about this except: get it and watch it! I don’t think you’ll regret it.

If you are eight, and you are eating an apple,

and you see a pink spot in your apple,

and you feel something hard like a seed in your mouth,

it’s probably your loose tooth that just came out.

(I’ve always heard the apple theory of loose-tooth removal, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed it — and she wasn’t even trying to test the theory.)

(P.S. If you’re a grownup,

and you’re squeamish about loose teeth or blood in apples,

and you were just eating breakfast,

I hope you’ll accept my apologies.)