Motherhood and other creative adventures
Bear and I actually went out on a movie date and that means that I get the best treat in the world – hot tamales and popcorn. I pop one of the candies in my mouth and then shove in a whole handful of popcorn and then it’s like a sweet salty spicy treat all in one. I will eat this until I literally make myself sick.
Atti has all kinds of wheels now! We got this little bike for him at Christmas time, but we haven’t used it much. Then our OT helped us adapt the pedals to keep his feet strapped in and now Atti has a bike that’s secretly a therapy tool.
It seems so important for every kid to have a bike, but the one’s that are adapted for kids with disabilities are crazy expensive. Like, you could get a car for the same money. We found this one at Costco of all places. We couldn’t believe our luck. Along with a whole bunch of safety harnesses, it also comes with that caretaker handle on the back so we can push Atti. And then best of all, as we push him the pedals go round and round and it teaches him how to move his legs.
It’s amazing how grown up he looks. My baby is totally a kid.
I searched everywhere for an Easter outfit this year and came up totally empty. I eventually bought a new top and some shoes and called it good. I wish I had known I was going to have such bad luck or I would have saved this dress for the special day.
As part of my ongoing efforts to fight the frump I’ve been itching to sew more clothes for myself. I end up needing to alter almost all of my clothes anyhow, I might as well just start from scratch. And my favorite thing to sew is dresses and skirts. I love dressing really feminine, and they’re super easy to make. Plus dresses might just be the one time it’s cheaper to sew your own clothes. In all my fruitless Easter shopping, even at Marshall’s and TJ Maxx, the dresses weren’t going for less than $50. I totally made this dress for less than that.
If I was a better model you’d see that this dress is totally a Joan from Mad Men silhouette. I’ve made this pattern twice so far and I’m sure it will crop back up in my future. It’s Simplicity 9481, one of those patterns that allows for a ton of adaptation to make it really fit your figure.
The fabric is just a plain pale yellow cotton, lined with a cream polyester to offer a little more coverage. I wanted to use the simplicity of the fabric as an opportunity for some surface embroidery, but I think it needs a little more. It looks pretty cool up close, but far away you can’t see much of anything. Then again, I might just leave it alone because it makes this dress perfect for accessorizing. I think I could totally wear this dress out and about with a little jacket and some wedges.
We got talked into taking an entire banana cream pie home from the BBQ, and I ate it from the pan with a fork like a jerk. Man, it was good.
Last weekend we got together with some long lost friends for a BBQ. A couple of our friends moved back to Canada a few years ago, so now we have to content ourselves with the internet, and the rare visit where all the people who love them fight for time. We were lucky to get a whole afternoon.
Since the last time we saw them there have been new additions to families and kids have sprouted up so that they’re almost unrecognizable. We tossed all the kids inside the trampoline and enjoyed our time to catch up.
The other parents were worried about Atti getting hurt or stepped on, but I just tossed him right in the pile. I figure that kids are supposed to come home with the occasional bruise. This is Atti’s chance. The kids are just awesome because instead of being weirded out or overprotective they just asked, “What’s wrong with his feet?” and I told them that he was born too early for his brain to tell his feet how to move, but the rest of him was just like them.
Atti giggled and shouted “Bounce! Bounce! Bounce!” while the kids jumped near him. And I tried not to cry as I saw my little guy included by his friends.
This cookbook might be old news to much of the internet. I bought it years ago, inspired by all the great reviews and recognizing the talent of the authors. I’ve been listening to The Splendid Table Podcast for years, and any time I do I feel positively chased into the kitchen.
But like many of us, I imagine, I collect recipes and cookbooks, they sit in binders or on my kitchen counter, and I go from week to week making mainly the same stuff I’ve been making for ages. Feeling uninspired and in a total dinner rut.
I finally recognized that I already had the solution to my dinner boredom, so I grabbed one of the (many) cookbooks I’d been ignoring and decided to cook my way through the whole book, making notes on what worked for us and what didn’t, how I’d change it to make it fit how we eat, and especially what was worth going back to.
That’s where I get back to this specific cookbook. It is probably the best money I’ve ever spent on a cookbook. The ratio of dishes we loved to dishes we didn’t is astounding. I’ve probably tried 30 recipes, and so far there’s only two that I didn’t immediately drool all over, and those two just needed a couple of tweaks to suit my tastes. There hasn’t been a single thing that I don’t see us eating again.
I’ve been wanting to incorporate more meatless dishes in our dinner routine, but that’s hard with the two men in my life who don’t like vegetables and insist that they can’t get full without a hunk of meat. The meatless recipes I’ve served from this book even pass their high standards. This green bean tagine in particular is absolutely incredible. I’ve been craving it ever since I made it.
My absolute favorite part of this book is how few of these recipes I’ve already seen versions of before. So many cookbooks just have the author’s attempt at a classic dish – everybody has a version of lasagna, or roast chicken, or pot roast, and if you already have a version that you like, that’s a waste of cookbook space. This book is stuffed with things I’ve never seen elsewhere, influenced by Asian and Scandinavian cooking and all the spices the world used to run on.
I think that this cookbook alone will nearly double my cooking repertoire. That was good money spent.
I seem to have what we stitchers refer to as start-itis. Some of the most fun in stitching comes in the planning of projects – picking a pattern you love, sorting among gorgeous fabrics and fibers to pull together supplies, and dreaming of what you’re going to do with the finished project. Then you actually have to get down to a lot of time-consuming work. Most of my stitching friends have tons of projects started that they’re working on off and on as they savor the joy of that beginning stage.
Among hard core stitchers there are several pieces that are looked at with awe and envy, massive undertakings that become a needleworker’s white whale, but there might not be any design that better fits that description than the Marbek Nativity. I looked and looked for a great picture online, but I came up short. The thing is so massive that it really doesn’t photograph well.
I spent an absolutely joyous day at my local needlepoint store as we piled fabrics around and discussed the changes we’d need to make to get what I want. The piece is designed to be mounted as panels in a special frame, but I wanted to stitch it all up as one big piece. This presented a bit of a problem because it required me to reconfigure the whole pattern, which I did by making working copies of the pattern and cutting and pasting them together, and then I had to get a piece of fabric big enough to fit it all. Making some changes to make it as small as i could, this is still going to be about a yard wide.
After going a few different directions, we decided on this gorgeous linen that is dyed twice to create a beautiful mottled effect in blue and sand. I think it will be perfect for a desert nativity scene with angels flying overhead.
As if reconfiguring the whole pattern wasn’t enough, we also decided to change out a lot of the special fibers they used. This part gets really inside stitching, but to get the size fabric I needed I had to choose a very close weave. Which means that some fancy fibers are too hard to use. If you have these tiny little holes, then some of the metallic or fuzzy threads just won’t fit. Plus, this was originally designed in the 80’s, and some of the colors they chose weren’t, shall we say, subtle.
We swapped out the metallic colors the designer suggested with this beautiful palette of muted golds and pearls.
I think in ten years, when I finally get this thing finished, it’s going to be absolutely stunning.
Atti’s still on Spring Break and all he wants to do is sit on my lap while I play this silly PC game. It’s one of those games where you try to accomplish all the tasks before time runs out, and this one is on a farm. There are all kinds of silly noises if you do something you’re not supposed to do, if the animals run out of food, if a bear attacks an animal, and Atti thinks it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen.
When I got him out of bed this morning the first thing he said to me was, “Sheep game?”
I feel like the laziest time waster ever, but then I have to remind myself, I am playing with my son. It might not be blocks and bikes like other kids, but this is what my little guy wants, so this counts.
I am such a child about drinking water. A total baby. It tastes like dirt to me, but I know, oh how I know, all the benefits of drinking it, and all the evils it will save me from in the juice and soda I drink in it’s place.
I’m also really sensitive to any kind of artificial sweetener. Every time a new one comes out people swear to me that you can’t taste a difference, but I can. Every time. So that makes just switching to a diet drink impossible.
I saw a commercial for this stuff on TV and hoped it might be something that could work for me, and I really liked it. There is a little artificial sweetener taste, but since you just squirt it into water, you can control the balance of flavoring and I can make it light enough to not notice the sweetener while also making it heavy enough to not taste the dirt.
3 years into Atti’s little life, and I’m just now addressing the mess he makes at food time. A mess so great that we can never dream of eating together at our dining table, lest we want our carpet to be covered in a dense matting of crushed cheerios and cast off pieces of fruit. Which means that Atti usually eats in the middle of the kitchen, marooned on an island surrounded by linoleum.
I’d seen these vinyl splashmats in fancy kid catalogs, but rolled my eyes at them. I do that with a lot of stuff people try to sell moms – stuff that maybe could solve a problem that’s not really a problem, or will only be a problem for a few months until the kid grows into a new skill. But, my kid has reason to take his time at developing those skills, so it was time to put my eyes back in my head and recognize that this might actually have a point.
I bought 2 1/2 yards of the main colored vinyl, and 1/2 a yard of a contrasting vinyl for the binding. I knew I wanted it to be roughly square, so I folded the main vinyl in half and then cut it to the size that would work for my high chair.
The vinyl can be a little tricky to work with, so with the wrong sides of the font and back together, I zig zagged the edges. This keeps things in place as you’re trying to attach the binding.
I cut the contrasting vinyl into 3″ wide strips, and sewed it on just like quilt binding. Here’s a great tutorial for that. Once you have the binding sewed on to the front, bend it over to the back and pin in place. I used bobby pins to hold it down so that I didn’t make holes in the vinyl. If you pin it so that the binding covers the seam line on the back, then you can sew the binding shut on the machine by carefully sewing on the seam again. Sometimes, just to make sure I catch that back, I’ll sew a line on just the very edge of the binding on the front. This secures the binding on the back, but also adds a little look of topstitching on the front.
If your child will master eating within a short enough time frame to make all this work excessive, you could skip the binding and stop with a zig zagged edge. Actually, you could just lay down one piece of vinyl and not even worry about the back or the edge. But since this will most likely be a part of our lives for the next few years, I wanted to make it as nice as possible. Before it gets covered in so many crushed cheerios and cast off fruit that it becomes unrecognizable.