Catching up

Going to have to write this in stages, since it's almost the end of naptime, and I have to make dinner early so we can go out and get cavities.

So about the time we went to the beach (beginning of September), I realized that somebody had flipped Liza's switch from "clingy and sensitive" to "bordering on normal." It was a shock, since she'd been at her previous setting since birth, and it took some getting used to.

I took her to the first day of preschool, and she was all, "I'll see you around noon, mother, although I may be a little late - Luke and I might stop after school and get a glass of milk." No tears, no velcro-baby, nothing. True, there was only one other kid there, and it was only for an hour, but I was so relieved. Hurrah! May the massive productivity one morning a week commence!

We stayed at my parents' house for a week, and she was all, "I love this room, I love this new bed, I think I'll eat whatever Grandma fixes for me and not even try to play in the cat litter." Huh?

I took her to story time at the library, and there were 10 other kids and their mothers in there too, and she had a history of complete screaming meltdowns at the thought that someone might want to read to her and sing songs with her. This time, though, the first class went smoothly, and she got an ovation for her overly-loud rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

She met the kids of some folks I had met through an online mothers' group, and they played nicely, and Liza was even trying to jolly along the kids who were more shy than her. More shy than her? Wait, that's never happened before.

About the time I noticed her changed behaviour and started gloating about it, somebody flipped the switch back, of course. We were back to "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOOOOOOOL! I WANT TO STAY HERE WITH YOUUUUUUUUUUU!" And, "But I want that cow, and he said no! I will now have a complete screaming meltdown at the library, and you will have to carry me out of the library kicking and screaming and throwing things, at which point I will continue to scream in the car for 15 minutes, because I want that cow!"

Bedtimes started creeping later again, and she started giving up naps occasionally, and things generally went to crap. You wouldn't believe the things we had to do to brush her teeth or comb her hair. Once again, it's a good thing she's cute, because otherwise she'd have been on the first bus out of here.

After a few days of "well, maybe she'll get better again," I resigned myself to switching back to velcro baby mode, including lots of coersion and bribery and warnings of exactly what to expect from new (and not so new) situations. After two weeks of teary preschool classtimes, culminating in a third week when I thought she was going to throw up, she was so upset about going, I went back to the beginning and sat in on the class with her. I stayed for an hour, then made up an excuse to leave for the rest of the class. She stopped crying after the first 15 minutes we were there, and while she wasn't exactly participating in all the activities, she was at least happy to play by herself with some of the toys.

The next week I once again got the "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOOOOOOOOOL" business at breakfast, and I explained to her that she didn't have to stay, but we needed to drop off the treat bags Miss Donna was going to use at the Halloween party. That at least got her in the door, and I only had to stay for 30 minutes or so. Today I had to physically carry her into the room, but she was fine once we got there, especially once she found out there would be trick-or-treat time a little later, and I left after 15 minutes and she barely noticed. So I think we're making progress, albeit slowly.

The good news is that she's back to being a bit more outgoing again, and I think I know why. We noticed that her bottom molars have finally broken through - I'm guessing that the recent setback to velcro mode was a teething thing. No sign of the upper molars yet, so I guess we get to go through this at least once more in the coming months.

I think Liza is always going to be a little more tentative than some kids her age, which is fine with me. I'd rather have a child that thinks things over and checks out the situation before deciding to join in. I think more impulsive kids probably end up in the emergency room more often, whereas mine won't let go of my hand in the parking lot because "Oh no! Maybe car! Liza might get bumped by car. Ouch! Mommy sad. Liza sad."

Of course, this is also the kid who finally learned how to jump into our arms in the pool without holding our hands and then demonstrated for her father that evening by jumping face-first off of the fourth step on our family room stairs. And when she got her wind back, she brushed herself off and tried to do it again, because obviously she'd done something wrong.

Keep those suggestions rolling in!

Aw, crud. I just realized that NaBloPoMo starts tomorrow, and I haven't finished my list of potential topics. Thanks to everyone who has made suggestions so far ... keep those ideas rolling in!

It looks like I may be away from my computer for most of Friday and/or Saturday. I'll do my best not to let the funeral interfere with my blogging, especially in the first three days of the month (!), but I'm sure you'll understand if I have to backdate a post or two. Right?

In the meantime, it's not too late to sign up to participate in NaBloPoMo - just visit http://nablopomo.ning.com/ to sign up. And if you don't have a blog yourself, you could get in the spirit of things and show your support for those of us who do by commenting every day :)

Ooh, good idea

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/slinks/picket-fence-cord-managementslinksn-slingks-surreptitious-web-links-to-other-good-sites-035012

I'm not sure ...

... but I think Asha posted my pumpkin hack sometime this weekend. Hmm, let's take a look at the site stats, shall we?

Guess so :)

Really cute Liza video

... but you have to go to my other blog to see it:

http://lazymamadesigns.blogspot.com/2007/10/signs-im-raising-my-daughter-right.html

because it's craft-related. Bwahahahahaha - my evil plan to drive traffic to my other blog is working!

Hey, Ya! Charlie Brown Version

Hee! Bet you Liza's going to love this when I show it to her tomorrow

More fun with the sitemeter

Continuing my plan for blogosphere domination, I'm now the third AND fourth results if you search for "i'm about to kick somebody's ass" on Google. Hurrah! Maybe if we all pull together and a bunch of people link to my posts, I can hit #1 :)

Oh, and howdy, Parenthackers! Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and stick around for a while. I'm bound to say something interesting eventually!

Congratulations to the contest winner!

Congratulations to fellow etsy seller idiomsyncrasies, the winner of the first Show Cleveland Some Love! contest, which ended at noon today.

If you participated in the contest but didn't win the main prize, watch your e-mail for a consolation offer from the participating shops.

Thanks to everyone for participating ... now, get out there and buy all the stuff you bookmarked when you were browsing through the shops for the contest!

My current favorite place on the planet

It's the intersection of two rivers in Olmsted Falls ... take the nature path from the library, go under the covered bridge, and there's access to the rocks right where the trail takes a hard right to switch from following the small river to the large river.

Sorry the video is shaky - it was cold, and I was tripod-less. My broadcast journalism teacher would be horrified. TFB :)

I'm gonna try it this year

Well, this year I finally remembered about National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo to those of us in the know) BEFORE it started, so I'm gonna give it a whirl. Basically, all I have to do to participate is post something - anything - every day during the month of November. I could post something to the effect of "I think paper clips are stupid," every day and it would count. But being the geek that I am, I'm compiling a list of possible topics, since every time I need to think of one I can never remember the awesome one I had while driving 70 miles an hour down the highway the day before.

So if you've got any topics you'd like me to cover, leave a message in the comments section. I'll use as many as I think have the potential to be interesting or funny. No, I won't be posting about Darfur - there are plenty of other places you can go for that sort of blogging. But if you want to know my favorite flavors of Tasty Kakes, let me know!

Oh, and I may start a blogroll of fellow participants, so if you're participating, let me know and I'll include you. Gotta spread the NaBloPoMo love around, you know!

And if there's anyone left on the planet who doesn't understand what's written in the badge above, it's paying homage to www.lolcats.com, where people put funny sayings with bad grammar and spelling over funny pictures of cats. Sounds lame, but is really trendy right now.

Baby news

Frequent Mind Flush commenter MLF hasn't been around quite so much recently, with good reason ... he and his wife had their third child earlier this month!

Welcome to the blogosphere, Esther!

And yes, I did title the post with an eye toward getting my mother-in-law's hopes up. Face it, Susie - I'm serious about the only child thing. Only way I'm going through this again would involve changing my name to Mary and wearing celestial blue robes all the time.

Have you taken the pledge yet?

Well, we're a week away from the madness called Holiday Shopping Season, and I'm here with two suggestions on how to make it simpler this year:

1. Make them something. Yes, you can. Trust me, if you can sew a straight seam on a sewing machine, or manage to sew a button on by hand, or even make a basic knit stitch, there's something you can make for just about anybody on your list. See those patterns over on the left side of my blog? Anybody could make those, even people who flunked out of home ec and get a rash when words like "seam allowance" and "purl" come up in conversation.
2. Buy handmade. Sure, you can go to the mall, wade through crowds of people, find out that the size you need isn't available, go online, find out that the size isn't available there, and end up getting the person a gift card that they'll lose or forget who gave it to them. Or, you could go online to someplace like etsy.com, where everything you see is in stock and hand-crafted, and you can pick out a thoughtful and unique gift for pretty much everyone on your list. The first place to visit, of course, is http://lazymamadesigns.etsy.com/ :)

I'll be the first to admit that for the past few years I've been more interested in getting my shopping DONE than in getting it done right. But this year I've taken the pledge, and I'm going to try to stick to it. Okay, my father-in-law may be getting more gift certificates for ammunition from a local store instead of some artsy t-shirt he'd never wear, but I think I can find something for darn near everyone else.

So check it out, and if you're with me on this, take the pledge at http://www.buyhandmade.org/. And pass the word along to your friends, family, and coworkers - make it a great holiday for them, and for the crafters and artists they'll be helping to support. I'll be posting updates to let you know how my shopping is going - feel free to do the same in the comments section of the posts. Thanks, and happy shopping!

You're running out of time...

... to enter the Show Cleveland Some Love! contest at www.clevelandhandmade.com . Entries will be accepted until midnight on Friday, Oct. 26th. So if you want a shot at winning a $65 credit to use at any participating Cleveland etsy shop, get a move on!

(and buy lots of stuff while you're checking out the shops in order to enter!)

Oh, how I need this

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=7474484

As if I don't already have 15 bags to carry my craft projects around in. But it's so coooooool .... And I do have a birthday coming up (HINT HINT)

From the garden - fall round-up

It took them long enough - the FIRST of the red peppers ...


Still haven't harvested any of these yet ... but I think they're finally almost ready:

Still going strong:

We dug out and prepared a second 4' square for next year, which I think I will designate as the "mostly herb" garden. It's in a shadier spot, and I think that will hurt the herbs less than it will the yields on my tomatoes and whatever else I put in. Maybe it will get enough sun in the spring that I can throw in some salad crops before the leaves come out. I wasn't able to find any manure for sale at Home Depot when I was working in the amendments to the soil, so I have to remember to double up on it this spring when I turn it over again.

New things I'm thinking about planting for next spring:

• peas
• lettuce or spinach (probably spinach)
• zucchini (with a barbed-wire fence around it to keep out the deer and groundhogs and raccoons)
• rhubarb (although I'm not sure I want to devote that much room to a pie filling)
• cherry tomatos
• more onions, staggered in planting time (maybe try for some green onions?)
• maybe some radishes? Not a lot, just a few to see how they do.
• maybe some carrots? I know that garden-grown ones are really ugly, but I remember them tasting pretty good.
• maybe a Japanese eggplant

Things I'll skip next year:

• corn - I don't have the room to plant enough to get it fully pollenated
• broccoli - it takes too much room for one head of so-so stuff, and it attracts caterpillars
• cucumbers - they're fun to watch, but I don't like them enough to use them up fast enough
• zucchini, if I don't come up with some way to protect it. Pest magnet, those things are.

So, we've probably got another few weeks I can baby along what's left in the garden, and then it will be time for the mass purge and returning to the soil. I'll pitch the tomato stalks and whatever the deer have left me of the zucchini plants, since they seem to have some sort of white powdery mildew on them, and I don't want to put that back into the soil. But the rest I think I'll have Jason run over with the lawn mower, then I'll turn it back into the garden as my own cheapo compost. Worst case, when I turn over the garden in the spring I can pull out any big chunks that are left.

So that's it! Thanks for sticking with me for a whole summer of posts. It's been fun for me to have an excuse to have to wander back there regularly. Hopefully the wealth of veggie photos haven't scared away too many potential readers!

Easiest. Pumpkin. Ever.

So easy, even a toddler can do most of it (2 1/2 year old Liza picked out most of the pieces, although I made her put them in roughly the right places. Usually her potatoes end up sniffing through their armpits and growing hair on their feet.)

Step 1: Buy a pumpkin. You don't want a huge one, lest is dwarf the size of your Mr. Potato Head pieces.

Step 2: Decide where you want the body parts to go, and press the posts firmly into the pumpkin so that you make a dent in the skin (the posts aren't stiff enough to actually penetrate the skin).

Step 3: Use a small screwdriver, awl, or ice pick to poke holes at each dent. Each hole should be a little smaller than the actual post, so the pieces won't fall out.

Step 4: Insert pieces into the holes.

Step 5: Wash the ice pick, and any pieces that get pumpkin guts on them.

This craft was inspired by the Mr. Potato Head pumpkin pieces you can buy to make various characters (ninja, pirate, etc.). But why would I spend $10 on more Mr. Potato pieces when I've got a billion of them at home? I'm guessing the official pumpkin pieces are a larger scale than the potato pieces, and they might be pointier and stiffer so you can skip the awl ... but I have to admit, taking an icepick to the eyeballs of my pumpkin was a good way to let off steam this morning :)

Color possibilities for the kitchen

I'm leaning toward 6484 or 6485, I think the designer is leaning toward 6477, 6478, or 6479. Since we'll be knocking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and there's already no wall between the dining room and living room, this color is going to have to go in the kitchen, dining room, living room, and up the hall outside our bedrooms. So we'd better like it, is what I'm saying.

Boo at the Zoo

It was a beautiful autumn evening ...

And a certain fairy princess was ready for her first "Boo at the Zoo."


We've been at the zoo for five minutes, and already she's lost the wand. Good thing we have three more at home.
"I'm a beauuuuuuuutiful faiwy pwincesssssssss!"


Look! The lions are actually moving! (note the use of temporary, "I don't care if they get broken" wings, necessitated by the 40-mph winds that day that would have caused liftoff with the bigger wings on loan from a friend)

There are certain downsides to the costume ...

Liza's favorite parts of the night were watching the cellists at the Wolf Wilderness lodge, and getting up the nerve to dance at the Monster Mash. Here she is, checking out the crowd with Daddy.

Here she is with "Blue Ghost," which is what she calls anything vaguely ghostlike, thanks to a blue ghost-shaped nightlight that was pressed into service as her official sleep guardian back when she was refusing to go to sleep before 11pm. This guy's a little bigger.

busy, busy

What happens when you get fed up with the three trees that are annoying to try to mow around and a large plastic castle that has to be moved every time you mow so that you don't kill the grass?

Somebody pass the Tylenol, because my back and one butt cheek muscle are in a world of hurt. And I still have to strip off all the sod on the back half of the new bed (Gretchen sobs quietly).

Oh, and remember the Cabinet of Mature Content?

One coat of stain, almost a whole can of stainable wood filler, a lot of swearing, and fifteen cans of spraypaint later, I've got a new cutting table and fabric storage cabinet for my sewing room.

See all the gold details? That finish comes from a metallic gold paint pen, just like the ones we all used to color on our book covers in junior high school. Oh, the smell will take you back. I couldn't believe it covered over the black in one coat. I've got two extra ones that I need to return to Home Depot before I find something else to color in. That was fun!

See, Joy? I told you I could make your dresser pretty again!

Did you know?

If you search for "how to turn a bathtub into a couch" on google, I'm the first result?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4SUNA_en___US206&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=how%20to%20turn%20a%20bathtub%20into%20a%20couch&spell=1

And if you search for "I'm about to kick somebody's ass" on ATT/Yahoo, I'm number 6.
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu5TqihlHaXQBfVJXNyoA?p=%22i%27m+about+to+kick+somebody%27s+ass%22&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-471

Great, now that song's going to be stuck in my head for a week. Everybody sing along now ... And watch the Ze Frank shows on that page, too - I had forgotten. Oh, how could I forget you, Ze? You're on my list of five, you know.