At dinner tonight

G: "It's a shame we can't go to the neighbor's Mardi Gras party."
J: "Yeah. With Liza's tendency to pull up her shirt and dance whenever she hears music, we could have scored some serious beads."

Let it hereby be known ...

... that my daughter's first curse word, uttered at the tender age of 21 months, 1 day, was "shit." And she said it because her FATHER had just said it.

I'm going to stop and savor that for a moment. Ahhhhhh ...

Not her extremely potty-mouthed mother, who goes around spewing a stream of filth all day and was once asked by a friend to teach her to curse, since she had thusfar neglected that part of her education. No, it was her father, who rarely curses, which is probably why Liza noticed the word in the first place. I think when I curse, it just drops into the "blah blah blah" that my daughter hears - you know, anything that isn't the word "DVD" or "cheese."

Good distraction afterward, though, Jason - "Hey, look Liza! Broccoli!" Worked like a charm.

Big girl bed

Well, Liza is enthusiastic about snuggling in it, and playing hide-and-seekunder the covers, and jumping on it, and using it to peek out the window, but she's not so interested in sleeping there. Every time I put her down to sleep we read in bed, and I ask her if she wants to sleep in her bed or in her crib. She scrambles to the end of the bed and runs to the crib, hanging onto the bars for dear life, like it's trying to run away from her.

But today we're working on moving her nap later (we're headed for California in a few days, and I don't want the jetlag to be too horrible), so by the time we laid down to read, she was at that glassy-eyed, 1,000-yard-stare, "I'm going to fall asleep standing up" phase, so I decided to give it a try. Tucked her in with all of her animals, sang her bedtime song, told her to stay in bed, and walked out the door.

My computer is right below Liza's room, so it is pretty obvious to me that she's not in bed right now. So far I've heard her moving around on the bed, dragging her wooden activity cube around and playing with the beadrace on top of it, thumping across the floor while banging her heels as hard as she can, rolling hard plastic balls around, and possibly dragging books off her shelf. I'm debating the wisdom of going back in to stick her in bed ... I can't decide if that will reinforce that she needs to stay in bed, or that I'll come back and play with her if she just thumps around long enough.

We aren't quite to the point where we need to push it - she's still not quite 36" tall, and still hasn't tried to get out of her crib - but I really would like to get her into a bed before she falls on her head while trying to escape the crib. Those tent things you can buy for the top of the crib are okay, but they're $70, and I have the feeling that she would spend half of her nap standing on tiptoe trying to touch the tent fabric. Plus, the cat still occasionally jumps in bed with Liza if the door to her room is open, and I can just imagine her trying to do that the first time when the tent is in place. Not very restful for the kiddo when the whole thing comes crashing down on top of her, complete with a frantic clawed cat attached.

So for now I'll keep writing, waiting for the thumping and scraping to die down. She may end up asleep on the hardwood floor with her feet in her potty, but hey, who am I to say what's comfortable for her?

It's been mostly quiet for a couple minutes now, with just an annoyed whine every once in a while. There may be hope yet. Of course, all the things I need to do today involve having to walk past her room, which will set her off if she's not completely asleep, so I'm sort of stuck down here until she finally nods off. At least, that's my excuse for why I'll be playing Zuma for the next few minutes. I'll post an update later today ...

*******************

Update: It's been 45 minutes since I left her room, and it's been totally quiet for a few minutes. I got up the nerve to peek in (mainly to make sure she hadn't eaten half a container of wipes and choked to death), and this is what I saw:

I'm guessing the initial whining I heard was from her being tangled in the sheets when she tried to get out of bed, and at least some of the thumping was the books hitting the floor. Otherwise, no furniture overturned (good, because it's all screwed to the walls), and she's asleep. I'll call that a victory.

Now let's just hope her pull-up doesn't leak, because I can't throw that rug in the wash the way I can sheets.

$5 says ....

... the grocery store is completely sold out of milk, bread, and toilet paper, thanks to the ENORMOUS snowfall we received today.You notice that the baby didn't even bother to put on a coat, it was that nice outside. Actually, it was relatively cold, and both times we went out for a walk, Liza decided she didn't want to wear mittens, and so I got to go home early, carrying a screaming kid with cold hands.

Tonight I'm taking a craft break from the sweater I'm making for the kid, and sewing her some elbow-length, impossible to remove mittens. Because otherwise the neighbors will start calling Children's Services, the screaming was that bad.

Meanwhile, the house down on the corner has mini daffodils that are going to bloom any day now. Stupid Kentucky weather.

In the kitchen

G, breaking an egg into a bowl: "Oh, I forgot to tell you. Yesterday when I was making your cheesecake, I used an egg that had something that looked suspiciously like a not-quite-baby-chicken in it. But it can't have been that - how would an egg get fertilized in a laying house?"

J: "Maybe it was the chicken Messiah."

G: "Great - we ate Chicken Jesus."

J, turning green: "Um ..."

G: "Well, okay, I fished out Chicken Jesus."

J: "Thank God."

And so it begins

When we bought a toddler-sized plastic potty a few months ago, Liza initially showed some interest, then a few days later ignored it completely. According to the latest potty training (aka toilet learning, aka elimination communication) literature, this is normal, and is the reason why you get the potty a few weeks or months before you plan to start the actual training process. So we let the potty sit there in the bathroom, collecting cat hair, and occasionally being stepped in when Liza was trying to get to the cat on the windowsill behind it.

Then it got cold, and Liza started to talk a lot more, and her diapers started to leak at least once a day. So we moved the potty into her room, started discussing the whole pooping process, and switched her to disposable pull-up diapers. Liza was in favor of this arrangement, as it meant she got to sit within arm's reach of her entire library of books, and she got my full attention, and she didn't have to go on the dreaded "Changing Table of Death, Disfigurement, and Banshee-like Wailing" nearly as often.

Still, Liza was only moderately interested in the whole process, until two things hit at the same time - a really wicked case of diaper rash (the sort where she screamed and cried and prayed for death, every time she peed) and the purchase of the Official Potty Books. Nothing like searing pain whenever you pee in your diaper to motivate you to pee in the potty instead - I can highly recommend it as a training tool.

The books are really what put us over the edge, though, into full-on toilet training. We went to Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago and bought two books - The Potty Book for Girls, and Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Tot. The first one is pretty much what you would expect - little girl gets a potty, has a few accidents, is successful, gets to pick out big girl panties. It's in rhyme, and has cute pictures, so I figured that Liza would like it better than some of the straight story-book-type books. The second book would be classified as "horrifying" if my daughter didn't love it so much and pee every time we get halfway through the first page. Basically, it's nursery rhymes where the lyrics have been changed to reflect on the potty training experience. So, for example, we get to sing "Tinkle, tinkle, little tot/sitting there upon the pot./Any second now, you'll see/sprinkle, splash, you'll go pee-pee./Tinkle, tinkle, little tot/sitting there upon the pot." Or, horror of horrors, "The Tushy Pushy" sung to the tune of the Hoky Poky, which pretty much has the same effect as driving stakes through the hearts of loyal Hokie fans everywhere. I'm halfway convinced that an alumnus dies every time I sing that song, but it could just be my imagination.

Liza, of course, loves this book, and asked to have it read 15 times the afternoon we got it home. Fifteen. I counted. Gaaahhhh.

Ever since we got the books (and the diaper rash - you've got to get some of that if you're training a toddler, I'm telling you, it's golden ... well, actually kinda red polka dots with open sores, but still ...) Liza has been doing really well with the whole potty thing. True, she won't even try to pull down her own pants, preferring instead to pee in her diaper, sit on the potty fully clothed, and try to use a wipe on the crotch of her jeans. And she insists on having no clothes on the lower half of her body when she's on the potty - no pull-up, no pants, some days even no socks. Not too inconvenient at home, but it's going to be a bit hard to pull off in a McDonald's restroom when we've got a flight to catch.

She won't tell us when she needs to go potty, she just takes off up the stairs with a determined look on her face, running into her room and jumping on the bed until I tackle her, pull down her pants, and sit her on the potty. But she's managed to stay dry for several hours at a time, and tonight she even managed to wear training underwear - you know, with the quadruple-thick crotch so she only leaves wet spots, not huge puddles - for two hours, going potty once in the meantime and staying dry from nap until shower time. We have meaningful (if one-sided) conversations about how she'll get to wear big-girl panties when she's using the potty all the time, and how we won't have to use the changing table at all once she learns to poop in the potty.
We're trying not to go overboard on potty training purchases, although it would be easy to drop a couple hundred dollars on this whole ordeal if we were so inclined. Plastic potty: $25. Adaptor seat for a regular potty: $15. New toilet seat to replace the one I broke trying to attach the adaptor seat: $19. Folding adaptor seat to take in the diaper bag when we go on vacation in February: $8. Pull-ups: $1,000,000,000. Dude, those suckers cost a mint. $8 for 30 of them, even when you buy the generic ones. And since she's nowhere near fully trained, we're still going through four or five of them a day. They're cheaper than the waterproof cloth training pants - $11 EACH for the ones I can buy over the internet - but STILL. What a racket. If the kid doesn't want to have to pay for her own college education, she'd better catch on to the whole potty thing pretty quick.

Like all parents, I have mixed feelings about the whole idea of getting the kid potty trained. Yes, it will be nice to not have to do diaper changes, and yes, it would be nice if FOR ONCE she did something earlier than her peers. But training means I get to spend way too much time hunched over on the floor of our powder room (actual size: 22 inches wide ... oh, how I wish I was kidding), reading the same books over and over again, while using the word "poop" at least 145 times a day, and still having to change leaky pull-ups. And I'm not sure how we're going to handle it when we go on vacation soon ... we may be far enough along that we need to stick with the program, which means lots of time spent in not-so-clean bathroom stalls at the airport, aquarium, zoo, etc. And with the potty adaptor and the changes of clothing and the extra pull-ups and wipes, I've had to switch back to the Diaper Bag of Herniation, rather than the rather svelte and somewhat trendy messenger bag I've gotten away with for the past few months.

And even once we get her trained, then instead of changing diapers, we get to have to ask her every 30 minutes whether she has to pee, and plan trips and errands according to their proximity to a bathroom in case she has to go. I think driving 13 hours home for any holiday is going to be out until her bladder is larger than a walnut, that's for sure.

So, basically, if you try to reach me and I don't answer, it's probably because I'm stuck on the floor of the powder room again, wedged between the toilet and the sink, singing "The Pee-Pee Dance" and bribing my daughter with the promise of M&Ms if she stays dry AND pees in the potty. I'll let you know how it goes.

So I guess it's not just Jason

Back from Mom's Weekend Out

When I got the invitation to go to a friend's baby shower up in Cleveland, I immediately saw it as an opportunity to finally spend more than 6 hours away from my daughter. Hooray for baby showers! Hooray for weekends spent away from kids!

Some thoughts from the trip up to Cleveland:

• Why would anyone be carrying a toilet plunger in their car/truck in such a way that it would end up as roadside debris?
• Why would anyone be carrying a loaded paint roller in their car/truck in such a way that it could fall out, bounce along the highway, then roll into the median, leaving a trail of paint behind it?

I stayed with our former next door neighbors (hi, gang!), and I had a really good time visiting with them. Astounding how well we did on the Totally 80s version of Trivial Pursuit, especially considering we were not-particularly-news-hawkish teens during the actual 80s. I managed to put in quite a good performance (although not a winning one) by answering either "Roots" or "The Thornbirds" anytime the TV question was about a miniseries, and by dredging up the name of an occasional politician or sports figure from the time. Although really, who can be expected to remember who Spud Webb was? And how does somebody that short have a 42" vertical leap? That's just freakish.

We also discovered that it was possible to guess who had filled in various lists for the game Scattergories, just by hearing what the responses were. Strange thing is, the last time we played Scattergories was probably a year ago (or longer), and with some of the responses I could vividly remember what was going on when we were debating them the first time. It's strange the stuff our brain hangs onto. Between that and the obscure 80s references we managed to dig out of our heads, it was definitely a trivial couple of nights.

The baby shower was very nice, with WAY too much good food, a ton of friends from when I used to work in Cleveland, and a lot of adorable baby outfits bestowed on the mother-to-be. My handmade gifts seemed to go over well, and I even managed to hand out a few of my Lazy Mama business cards to folks who suggested that I try to sell my stuff. How's that for advance planning?

By far the most exciting part of the trip was the last hour before I headed home, during which time the owners of the quilt store I used to frequent in Cleveland agreed to sell some of my patterns in their store, for a price that was pretty much what I hoped to get for them. I've still got to ship them the patterns and remake one of the prototypes (gave the original prototype to the mom-to-be) to use as a display in the store, but in a few weeks my designs should be available for sale in a real store. How cool is that? Very!

Jason managed to handle Liza the whole weekend without once breaking down and calling for help, advice, or to get me to come home early. He even had time tonight to do a little video work. Working title: Feeding her lines, and mac 'n cheese.

I'll admit that I missed Liza and Jason more than I expected to - I was barely even tempted to pretend I had car trouble and stay up in Cleveland for a few extra days. I think it was good to get away for a couple of days, just to sort of reset things and start the rest of the winter off refreshed and ready to tackle the not-quite-two-year-old again. But it was also good to be back and watch her running around in training panties for the first time, reveling in the freedom afforded by cotton instead of scratchy disposables. Of course, I've been home two hours and have already been peed on twice, headbutted once, and screamed at full in the face for about 30 seconds, so I can't say it's perfect around here. But I've also been snuggled and talked at incessantly since I walked in the door, so I guess I'll stay.

Why I will never be a size 8

Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author, died Wednesday after having been ill for several years. He'd withdrawn from dialysis treatments a year ago, with the expectation that he'd die within several weeks ... but somehow he kept going, writing columns until very recently. He wrote his own obituary, and recorded a video obituary which was available on the New York Times web site.

I usually don't read obituaries, but there was one paragraph in Buchwald's final column that caught my eye. Made me cry, actually, because I know so many people who are going to end up thinking the same thing. Here it is ...

For some reason, my mind keeps turning to food. I know I have not eaten all the eclairs I wanted. In recent months, I have found it hard to go past the Cheesecake Factory without having at least one profiterole and a banana split. I know it's a rather silly thing at this stage of the game to spend so much time on food. But then again, as life went on and there were fewer and fewer things I could eat, I am now punishing myself for having passed up so many good things earlier in the trip.

Maybe it's shallow, but this strikes a chord with me. I've always had the philosophy that we work to make money to use to both save for the future AND enjoy ourselves now. We have friends who were raised in families with a "save save SAVE" mentality, and they squeeze the most out of every penny now with the expectation that they'll be able to retire early and comfortably. But right now they scrimp and save and don't use the money they have for fun things ... which is fine for them, if everyone in the family is okay with that. But I'm much too pessimistic to be sure I'm ever going to live long enough to retire - I want to enjoy myself now, as much as I can while still making prudent plans for the future.

So we save in our 401Ks and mutual funds ... but we also go on vacations and have expensive hobbies and go out to eat and don't scrimp on gifts for holidays. If I was diagnosed with a terminal illness, forget hospice care, I'd set up a bed in the lobby of a chocolate factory. And they can bury me in a piano crate, along with copies of all the photos we took on our vacations; at least I won't die thinking I haven't had enough eclairs.

Huh.

I was just flipping through the list of videos I've posted on YouTube, and while most of my movies have only been viewed a couple of dozen times, the one of Liza carrying around my flip flop has been viewed 1600 times. Huh? I didn't think it was that funny, but maybe so ...

Scene from this weekend

Picture a family eating at Chick Fil A, toddler happily eating her fruit cup and chicken nuggets, mom with a sandwich and some fries she's hiding from the toddler, dad eating a wrap sandwich. The parents are actually having a conversation, one that isn't peppered with "stop throwing your milk on the floor," or "If you hit mama one more time, you're going in time out in the car, and I won't let you have your kid meal toy."

There's a lull in the conversation, and mom looks up at dad ...

Mom: "You do realize your sandwich was wrapped in paper, and you're eating it, right?"

Dad looks confused, then pulls a strip of paper out of his mouth. He looks at the half of a sandwich in his hand, then at the paper-covered half he hasn't started to eat. Mom starts giggling.

Dad, incredulous: "I couldn't have eaten all that paper and not noticed it. I must have unwrapped it without thinking, and just gotten down to the paper in the last bite."

Mom, snorting uncontrollably: "Sure, whatever you say. Paper is a good source of fiber, anyway."

Oodles o' photos

The kid's starting to earn her keep - I put her to work yesterday when I was making pizza, and she actually helped. Sorta. Okay, she ate as many onions as she sprinkled on the pizza, but at least she didn't make a bigger mess than pizza is to begin with.
Of course, during the pizza construction process she ate so many onions, pieces of ham, pieces of pineapple, and handfuls of cheese that she was only lukewarm about eating the finished pizza.

"You say I'm supposed to pick it up and eat it, huh?"

"Maybe I've got it upside down."

"Hmph. This pizza is useless. Got any more of that pineapple?"

Returning from the Crochet Cave, at least temporarily

I've been in the zone, trying to finish a sweater, so that I can move on to all the other projects that sound like much more fun than something crocheted out of chunky wool. That means I've been devoting all of my evenings (and some nap times, too) to yarn, not blogging, which is why I've been sort of quiet this week.

You can tell I'm Mama first, crafter second nowdays ... when Jason asked me how much longer before I'd be able to sew it together, I told him I'd probably be able to finish by the end of the next Baby Einstein video. I actually needed to use the special features on the DVD to drag it out long enough to finish, but I was pretty close.

So here it is:

And yes, that's my minty fresh bathroom, and yes, those are my pajama bottoms, which I didn't change out of until about 4:30 today ... now that's what I call a Good Day!!

What I did this weekend

Here's an updated list of what I actually managed to do ... things in italics at least got started, and bold italics got finished.

Get a replacement toilet seat for our powder room, to replace the one I sort of broke when I was trying to install the toddler seat adaptor. Stupid old houses with their stupid rusty toilet seat screws that snap when you try to unscrew them. Eh, the old one had a chip in the lid, anyway, and it weighed about 14 pounds, so Liza was bound to break a finger in the thing eventually. Right? No, I managed to restrain myself and not order one of these. Just barely.

Take down and store the Christmas decorations, which are cluttering up my dining room table so I can't invite any of Liza's friends over to visit, lest they choke to death on one of my father's carvings.

Fit and glue the veneer I'm using to repair the gaping termite damage holes in a chest of drawers I'm refinishing (sound familiar, Joy? You ought to see it now that I've got the paint off ... I'll send photos when it's done, just to make you jealous). ***See previous post for an accounting of how much fun THIS project has been.

Stain the chest of drawers.

Start varnishing the chest of drawers.

Clean my kitchen floor and vacuum the living room carpet. Liza has started wanting to have a granola bar in her hand 24/7, just in case she should, for example, want to sit there for 10 minutes pulling all the granola out of the way so she can get to the chocolate chips. There's granola on the floor, on the couch, up the stairs, and in my bed from where it got stuck to my feet in the hallway when I got up to comfort Liza for the THIRD TIME LAST NIGHT and didn't wipe my feet off before I got back in bed.

Start making the squares for my challenge quilt; probably order more of one of the six challenge fabrics, since I'm almost positive I won't have enough to do one part of what I want to do. I won't bore you with details here - that's what the Lazy Mama blog is for - but suffice it to say that it's going to be unique, and it will totally kick ass. Two blocks down, 12 to go.

Make an entire quilt for a friend who's having a baby shower in a few weeks (hi, Saho!). I've got the fabric, and sort of an idea, but we'll see if I can pull if off in time. If not, I guess I need to go to Toys R Us.

Crochet the living heck out of that sweater so I can wear it whenever it decides to go below 60 degrees this month. Sixty freakin' degrees. My kid is outside in shirtsleeves, playing in puddles, in January. Stupid Kentucky weather. All I can say is, it had better get cold before we go on vacation, or San Diego isn't going to be such a nice change of pace. Now I've got the back and one sleeve done. Halfway home! Time to drop it and start something else so it never gets finished!

Start crocheting one of the projects I came up with last night as I was trying the new knitting technique (I know, I know, keep my mind on the craft at hand). This would involve frogging out all of the stuff I knitted while Sybil was here (hi, Sybil!), which looks suspiciously like it won't end up working the way I wanted it to for that knitting project, anyway. It would look much nicer as a felted neckroll pillow cover. Not that I have a pattern for such a thing, which means that it will end up two sizes to small, require more yarn than I have, and take three times as long as I expect.

I've got one of the elf stitchettes from wee wonderfuls finished, but I've yet to start the second. I'd really rather avoid doing redwork elves in August, so I'd better get cracking. I got half a head done when we watched a movie last night.

Supposed to be warm again this weekend, so it would be nice to transplant the boxwood bushes in our backyard to make room for a vegetable garden this spring.

And then I need to actually make the vegetable garden, which will involve liberal amounts of soil amending. I'd like to actually do this right and do the double row method, where you end up digging down two layers, amending the first and sticking it back in the hole, then amending the second layer and putting it on the top. That'll show the weeds who's boss. Stupid nutgrass.

Vacuum cheerios (and sludgy sippy cups) out of my van. And get the oil changed. And change the windshield wipers. And swap the CDs out for new ones.

Finish editing the instructions for my next project to sell on etsy (which involves taking pictures of the finished project, once I dig it out from the bottom layer of my desk). Post on etsy. Reformat to be able to sell it in stores. Make a list of stores to call to see if they'd like to sell it.

Start writing the instructions for the quilt I finished like a month and a half ago, and have been stalling on ever since, so now it's covered in cat hair from sitting next to my desk.
Invite the neighbors over to play the new game we got for Christmas (Settlers of Catan, in case you were wondering).

Finish making the vacation plans (call Enterprise to find out why they're half the price of the other car rental companies in San Diego, make final flight arrangements, start pricing sanity-saving portable DVD players for the flight, start making a list of things we need to bring with us on the trip, start obsessing about how we're going to fit two weeks' worth of stuff into one week where we only get to use half of the days because Liza needs her naps, etc.). That is, of course, provided that we hear back from Jason's sister (hi, Jen!), who is the whole reason we're going to California in the first place. Flight booked, but I still have to do the rest.

Write thank you notes for Christmas presents, including some very expensive things, and some very thoughtful things, so I can't just phone it in and do the generic "thank you very much for the gift. I'm sure we'll get a lot of good out of it. Hope you had a good holiday!" I'll have to write more about the extremely thoughtful gift, as my mind just boggles that one of my mother's friends (hi, Grace!) would spend so much time putting a gift together for us. Maybe I need to crochet something for her cats ...

Finish sorting out Liza's unused toys for the consignment sale, which isn't until the first week of March, but it's never too early to start obsessing. I've got most of the clothes on hangers already, or at least as many as will fit on the proper hangers I have in stock (need to buy more metal hangers). But Liza has way too many toys, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what needs to go to make room for the birthday onslaught that will hit a few weeks after the consignment sale. Gahh

Warning - mature content

If you either a) don't care a fig about woodworking, or b) are easily offended by mature language, please stop reading now. Seriously, go visit CNN or read my archives or something. You're not going to enjoy this post.
*****

It started innocently enough (doesn't it always?). It was trash day, and a neighbor asked me to help him convince his wife to throw away a crappy old termite-chewed, painted, antique chest of drawers she had inherited from her mother. She wanted to keep the drawers to make shadowboxes ... enormous shadowboxes ... and was willing to throw out the cabinet. In the end, we convinced her to just take the mirror from the cabinet, and I would attempt to rehab the cabinet (and drawers) for use at my house.

The first day I started to strip off the paint, I should have run as fast as I could in the other direction. It would not strip. After five coats of stripper - the good stuff, not the pansy-ass ecologically friendly stuff that's about as effective as ketchup - the base layer of paint was still there, looking virtually untouched, giggling at me.

I gave up for a few months, then called a local furniture refinishing place to check on prices to just have it stripped. The quote of $150 was less than it would have cost me to buy a new dresser, or an antique one in better shape, so I figured it was worth a shot. The dresser came back completely naked, bald as a cue ball, untouched by even the idea of paint.

With the paint gone, I decided to tackle the termite damage. Only, with the paint gone, you could see that the termites (or wood worms, or whatever they were) had really done a number on this sucker, leaving places where the wood was so thin you could punch a fist-sized hole all the way through the side of the chest, if you wanted to. I chipped away some of the loose wood, looked at what was left, and decided that the mature thing to do would be to walk away now, while I was only out $150 and a few hours of my precious free time.

But Jason didn't want to lose the $150. Not that he volunteered to be involved in any way with the rehab, he just kept talking about how it was dumb to waste the money without trying to fix it. My argument that I have better things to waste my free time on made no impact. So it sat in the basement, mocking me every time I went down for a lightbulb.

My father agreed to take a look at it when he was here over Christmas, and his verdict was that replacing the actual side panel would be too much work; we should just patch it up with wood filler and veneer over top of it. Several phone calls and a trip to Lexington in the rain later, I had the veneer, I had the first coat of filler in, and I was feeling pretty good about the project.

Then the filler shrank, necessitating three more coats to fill in all the cracks and voids. Finally, I was ready to apply the veneer.

***

The directions on the veneer say to apply it using contact cement, something I have never used before. It made me nervous, because it bonds instantly, so if you get it in at a funky angle, you're totally screwed. The guy at the woodworking store where I bought the veneer said he thought regular wood glue would work, as long as I was able to clamp the stuff in place.

I went to Lowe's today, fully intending to buy some contact cement and do this the right way. Then I read the directions, which involved everything being at least 65 F and in a place where the fumes can be vented so they don't make the house explode when they get to the furnace. Ordinarily I don't pay attention to these sorts of warnings - which is why one day I will perish in a fiery inferno of paint thinner and super glue - but since I was going to be gluing several square feet of surface area, I thought the fumes might be a bigger problem. If I had done this earlier this week - when it was 60F and sunny - I could have just opened the basement door and said it was good enough. But today it was 45F and pouring rain, not exactly the best conditions for drying the contact cement.

So I bought the kind of wood glue that is stainable, just in case any squelched up when I applied the veneer and didn't get wiped away. I carefully fit the veneer, measuring twice and cutting once, and only chipping one corner a little bit. I spread the glue in a generous, even layer, as per the directions in the bottle, and nestled the veneer into its new home. I grabbed a handful of leftover bricks the previous owners had left in the basement, weighed down as much of the top as I could cover, including the edges and the middle, and left all of this in place to dry for the hour suggested on the bottle.

****

When I came back later this evening to check on the progress, it was a disaster. The wood glue made the veneer buckle anyplace it wasn't actively weighed down, and quite a few places where it was, making a lovely series of foothills (some 1/2" high, honest to god) on the side of the cabinet. One buckle I would have been able to deal with - I've read enough of my father's Fine Woodworking magazines to know that you can slit them open, inject some glue in, then clamp the living shit out of it. But I'd say at least 20% of the side of the cabinet was buckled, well beyond the amount that "slit and glue" is designed to handle. Okay, I thought, I'd better go ahead and peel the stuff off now before the glue hardens completely.

The phrase that best describes this experience is probably, "Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw, it would be more fun."

Far from uncured, the glue was lovely and stuck, necessitating the use of a chisel to chip it off. Not only did the veneer crack and split, peeling parts off but leaving others stuck to the cabinet so I'll have to use a power sander to get them off later, but the veneer was nice and stuck to the wood filler, too, which wasn't so nice and stuck to the cabinet. So not only do I have new chip marks in the wood and wood filler from prying the veneer off with the chisel, but also about 1/3 of the time when I could peel the veneer off, it brought a big chunk of wood filler with it. You can once again see through places in the side of the cabinet.

The remains of the veneer

Trust me when I say this used to be nice and smooth, even the filled parts

See what I get to work on for the next week or two?

I've set myself back by at least seven naps' worth of work, given that I'm now going to have to sand down the minefield that's left, fill in all the chips and holes, refill the deeper holes, refill the refilled deeper holes, and THEN redo the veneer.

But now we're into the cabinet for more like $175 dollars, what with the veneer and the glue and all, so I doubt I'm going to get away with throwing out the useless piece of motherfucking shit. No, I'm going to get to waste even more of my time, freezing my fingers off in the basement, fixing this thing that I don't even have a spot for in my house.

Before I make another 2-hour-round-trip drive to buy more veneer to replace what I ruined, I'm going to try using contact cement on the veneer for the other side of the cabinet. If that doesn't work, the whole shebang is going out to the curb the next day, and Jason can just bite me.

****
postscript: The original quote from the movie Heathers was, "Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Teresa to you?" I've never had a chance to legitimately use it ... until now. So, I guess one good thing has come out of all this. Nothing like woodworking projects to expand your vocabulary.

Warning - cute kid video

See, I'd get much more done around here if I'd just turn off the computer and go to bed. Maybe tomorrow ...

Feeling hormonal

Thanks to the wonders of birth control pill dispensers with little numbers on the slots, I've noticed that my instances of "Oh, I want to do that project, and this project, and refinish this piece of furniture, and plan a trip, and bake cookies, and crochet 14 different things, ALL TODAY" tend to occur right around day 14. Coincidence? I think not.

Since most of the time I end up moving agitatedly (is that a word?) from one project to the other, not much actually gets finished, and I end up with a house full of UFOs it takes at least a month to clean up. Today, for example, I've made another set of flashcards for my daughter, worked on the sweater I'm crocheting for myself, added a handful of clothes to my store on eBay, made a sample block for a challenge quilt I'm working on for this spring, done some correspondence for an etsy collaboration I'm trying to organize, made all the paper foundations for the challenge quilt, and found a ridiculously perfect hotel room for a vacation we're working on in February. Yesterday, I made flashcards, worked on the sweater for two hours, finished a pair of pants for my daughter, started editing the ridiculously cute video of my daughter, stared longingly at the challenge quilt fabrics, and stayed up way too late trying out a knitting technique I had read about online (despite the fact that, given my current list of projects to work on, I won't have a chance to make anything with that new technique until, oh, 2009 or so). Oh, and did I mention the three or four new project ideas I've come up with and jotted down on random scraps of paper I'll probably lose before Sunday?

All these projects and plans and things I've done and things I'm planning to do and schedules and whatnot are what prompted me to start blogging in the firstplace, a little less than a year ago. Sometimes it helps to dump it all down on paper (or into cyberspace); sometimes it just makes it worse. So here goes ...

In no particular order, here's a list of what I have to, want to, and need to do this weekend:

1. Get a replacement toilet seat for our powder room, to replace the one I sort of broke when I was trying to install the toddler seat adaptor. Stupid old houses with their stupid rusty toilet seat screws that snap when you try to unscrew them. Eh, the old one had a chip in the lid, anyway, and it weighed about 14 pounds, so Liza was bound to break a finger in the thing eventually. Right?
2. Take down and store the Christmas decorations, which are cluttering up my dining room table so I can't invite any of Liza's friends over to visit, lest they choke to death on one of my father's carvings.
3. Fit and glue the veneer I'm using to repair the gaping termite damage holes in a chest of drawers I'm refinishing (sound familiar, Joy? You ought to see it now that I've got the paint off ... I'll send photos when it's done, just to make you jealous).
4. Stain the chest of drawers.
5. Start varnishing the chest of drawers.
6. Clean my kitchen floor and vacuum the living room carpet. Liza has started wanting to have a granola bar in her hand 24/7, just in case she should, for example, want to sit there for 10 minutes pulling all the granola out of the way so she can get to the chocolate chips. There's granola on the floor, on the couch, up the stairs, and in my bed from where it got stuck to my feet in the hallway when I got up to comfort Liza for the THIRD TIME LAST NIGHT and didn't wipe my feet off before I got back in bed.
7. Start making the squares for my challenge quilt; probably order more of one of the six challenge fabrics, since I'm almost positive I won't have enough to do one part of what I want to do. I won't bore you with details here - that's what the Lazy Mama blog is for - but suffice it to say that it's going to be unique, and it will totally kick ass.
8. Make an entire quilt for a friend who's having a baby shower in a few weeks (hi, Saho!). I've got the fabric, and sort of an idea, but we'll see if I can pull if off in time. If not, I guess I need to go to Toys R Us.
9. Crochet the living heck out of that sweater so I can wear it whenever it decides to go below 60 degrees this month. Sixty freakin' degrees. My kid is outside in shirtsleeves, playing in puddles, in January. Stupid Kentucky weather. All I can say is, it had better get cold before we go on vacation, or San Diego isn't going to be such a nice change of pace.
10. Start crocheting one of the projects I came up with last night as I was trying the new knitting technique (I know, I know, keep my mind on the craft at hand). This would involve frogging out all of the stuff I knitted while Sybil was here (hi, Sybil!), which looks suspiciously like it won't end up working the way I wanted it to for that knitting project, anyway. It would look much nicer as a felted neckroll pillow cover. Not that I have a pattern for such a thing, which means that it will end up two sizes to small, require more yarn than I have, and take three times as long as I expect.
11. I've got one of the elf stitchettes from wee wonderfuls finished, but I've yet to start the second. I'd really rather avoid doing redwork elves in August, so I'd better get cracking.
12. Supposed to be warm again this weekend, so it would be nice to transplant the boxwood bushes in our backyard to make room for a vegetable garden this spring.
13. And then I need to actually make the vegetable garden, which will involve liberal amounts of soil amending. I'd like to actually do this right and do the double row method, where you end up digging down two layers, amending the first and sticking it back in the hole, then amending the second layer and putting it on the top. That'll show the weeds who's boss. Stupid nutgrass.
14. Vacuum cheerios (and sludgy sippy cups) out of my van. And get the oil changed. And change the windshield wipers. And swap the CDs out for new ones.
15. Finish editing the instructions for my next project to sell on etsy (which involves taking pictures of the finished project, once I dig it out from the bottom layer of my desk). Post on etsy. Reformat to be able to sell it in stores. Make a list of stores to call to see if they'd like to sell it.
16. Start writing the instructions for the quilt I finished like a month and a half ago, and have been stalling on ever since, so now it's covered in cat hair from sitting next to my desk.
17. Invite the neighbors over to play the new game we got for Christmas (Settlers of Catan, in case you were wondering).
18. Finish making the vacation plans (call Enterprise to find out why they're half the price of the other car rental companies in San Diego, make final flight arrangements, start pricing sanity-saving portable DVD players for the flight, start making a list of things we need to bring with us on the trip, start obsessing about how we're going to fit two weeks' worth of stuff into one week where we only get to use half of the days because Liza needs her naps, etc.). That is, of course, provided that we hear back from Jason's sister (hi, Jen!), who is the whole reason we're going to California in the first place.
19. Write thank you notes for Christmas presents, including some very expensive things, and some very thoughtful things, so I can't just phone it in and do the generic "thank you very much for the gift. I'm sure we'll get a lot of good out of it. Hope you had a good holiday!" I'll have to write more about the extremely thoughtful gift, as my mind just boggles that one of my mother's friends (hi, Grace!) would spend so much time putting a gift together for us. Maybe I need to crochet something for her cats ...
20. Finish sorting out Liza's unused toys for the consignment sale, which isn't until the first week of March, but it's never too early to start obsessing. I've got most of the clothes on hangers already, or at least as many as will fit on the proper hangers I have in stock (need to buy more metal hangers). But Liza has way too many toys, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what needs to go to make room for the birthday onslaught that will hit a few weeks after the consignment sale. Gahh

There's more, but I need to get to bed if I'm going to get anything at all done tomorrow. Hope you all have slightly less manic weekends planned!

Room with a view

Yesterday marked the beginning of the end for Liza's crib. While she's never actually made an escape attempt, Liza is now tall enough that she technically could vault over the side of her crib, with predictably concussion-inducing consequences. Our crib isn't convertible, and the toddler beds I've seen are either too pricey or too tacky to appeal to me, especially since that's just one more set of sheets and blankets I'd have to buy, only to have them be outdated a few months later.

Liza has recently started laying down on her big bed and snuggling for a while before we put her in the crib, so I figured we might as well give this whole bed thing a try. Hopefully she'll be out of the crib in time for us to hock it at the consignment sale coming up this spring.

Now that we have installed the guardrails on her "big girl" bed ($40 at Baby Depot, in case anyone else is in the market for side rails), there's no reason she can't take her naps (and eventually nights) in a real bed. You can see she hates the idea ...

That's (sniff!) my big girl ... She's particularly excited that there's a window right at the head of her big girl bed, a window she can look through to watch the traffic on Main Street. And, in one of the cutest moves I've ever seen in my entire life, she decided to share the view with her posse:

From left to right, Bob the Blanket, Warren the Pink Kitty, The Duck of Doom, and Anya the Bunny

Also attractive in the new bed is the concept of "sheets," which she loves, despite her total spurning of anything covering her in her crib. I guess the sheets work better for peekaboo than a crib quilt does ... you be the judge:

Peeka ...

Boo!

Cue hysterical toddler giggles

Ya gotta love that hand-and-foot combination for working the sheet - she's nothing if not devoted to her peeking.

So far I've worked her into hanging out in the bed for stories, peekaboo, and singing, but she still asks to go to her crib for the actual sleeping. This isn't a bad thing, as we're simultaneously trying to break her of the habit of jumping - really high - on beds. "Only little girls jump, and they jump in cribs. Big girls don't jump on their beds," is the party line for now, which means that for now she's got to do her five minute pre-nap aerobic workout in her crib. And once we get her taking naps in the crib, I'm going to be posted outside the door to nip any jumping in the bud. Fun way to spend my afternoons, huh?

More in a little while, once I edit the ridiculously cute kid video and dump it to Youtube.

Yet another resolution I won't be making ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070103/ap_on_re_us/shopping_sabbatical

As much as I admire the intent of this idea, I just don't think I've got the willpower - or the time - to do it. I'm sorry, but I don't want to spend hours on freecycle trying to find a used waterproof mattress pad for my daughter's bed ... ewwwww. And the timing is a little funky, especially since I've got three auctions for spring Hanna Andersson clothes for my daughter ending tonight ... oh, yes, those red capri cargo pants WILL be mine ... er, HERS. And Jason's birthday is coming up, and I don't have squat for him yet.

It's an interesting concept, though. I wonder if I could pull it off for a month? Kid clothes excepted, of course, because now IS the time to get good deals on last year's stuff on eBay. Anyone interested in joining me if I decide to do this, in, say, February? I could open up the comments section so that we could discuss our progress/setbacks/complete lack of dedication to the plan. Might be a fun group project, especially now that I'm actually getting some traffic on the site from people who aren't already known to me (I know you're there, person signing in from a server in Washington state! I just don't know who you are!). Talk amongst yourselves ... and I'd better see someone in addition to K's mom and MLF doing the talking!

The secret of my success

Baby Einstein videos and a wicked sense of determination to finish a sweater for myself before spring.