Content with life

May 28, 2008 at 10:30 am (family)
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I realized I haven’t posted in almost 10 days!  Sorry about the blip.  We were kind of busy there for a while, went out of town for an overnight and then trying to catch up with stuff after that.

My birthday was Saturday and I am 39 years old.  One whole year left til the next decade of my life starts!  It’s funny to think that in 11 years, I will be a half century old.  I remember when my friend’s dad turned 50 and we were all joking.  It seemed like such a long way off.   Impossible, even!  Now, not so much.  It’s weird what time does to your brain.  Then, if I am really lucky, I’ll have about 30 years left of my own life.  I better get busy doing stuff I want!  All those knitting projects and only 40 years or so left?

So, my birthday was really nice.  We opened presents in the morning, I got a really cool digital picture frame and a few odds and ends for the kitchen.  I also got a gift certificate for Twisted Warp and Skeins (a local yarn shop) to be used for weaving lessons and the rental of a table top loom!  I have always wanted to learn to weave and now I am going to.  I might hate it, but if I love it, it opens up a whole new addiction!  My first lesson is on June 14th.  For dinner that night, I made burgers and dogs and corn on the cob, wrapped everything up and we went to this park with a really cool play structure.  We ate outside and after that the kids played for a while.  We finished off the night with ice cream from Great Lakes Ice Cream Co. (where they make all their own ice cream!).

The next morning we went up north where my in laws have a summer home on Lake Huron.  It was a relaxing weekend, I got some knitting done and got my jigsaw puzzle fix.  I love puzzles but I don’t ever get to do them here, it would be a disaster with the kids.  Maybe someday!  But not now.  Will played outside pretty much the whole time we were there and Sophie got to splash around in the lake too with her brother and dad.  I think we all got a good rest, even though for some reason I cannot sleep up there… and of course the kids had restless nights because they don’t ever sleep well in a strange place.  But aside from that the rest of the weekend was good.

As for knitting projects, I am currently test knitting for a lady.  I have to keep the whole thing under wraps though, at least for now, and when she gives me the go-ahead to share with everyone, I will.  It has been a really nice experience, the person who wrote the pattern has been wonderful to test for and I hope to do it again.  I also decided to use some birthday money to get some wool yarn (Cascade 220) for a pair of Nordic mittens – the pattern is from Lapland actually.  Unfortunately my gauge was way off (need 13 st per 2 in and had 17 instead!) so the mitt is going to be way too small.  I was trying to decide what to do with it and I hate to rip it out because the colorwork is so beautiful.  I have more than enough yarn so I am going to take it off the needles and just leave it, and start over with bigger needles.  I will have an easier time starting over, if I don’t destroy my mistake swatch.  It went fast in any case, so before long I’ll be caught back up to where I decided to stop.  And hopefully I will actually have a mitt that will fit my hand.  Right now it would be a very long child’s size large!

Here is a picture of my “test”:

I just love the braided edge.  Now that I understand how it goes, the “real” pair will have a nicer finish to them.  I wasn’t crazy about doing a red, white and blue mitten, but I read that in the far north (Lapland is north of the Arctic circle), they knit colorful mittens during their dark, long winters.

Well, as one good friend used to say, my coach is turning into a pumpkin.  The baby is screaming (I don’t know why, she is just VERY VERY crabby these days.  Thankfully nights are not so bad.) and my son suddenly loudly proclaimed that he NEEDS MORE FOOD NOW.  Excuse me?  When do I get to eat in peace?  Oh yeah, I ate in peace the first 35 years of my life.  That’s when.

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Thrift store finds

May 19, 2008 at 4:58 pm (sewing)
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I was inspired by Mirka at Oprikka, with her wonderful thrift store finds she posted about in this post. She makes great bags out of Finnish textiles and I found a couple of curtains today that are canvas and will be perfect for some tote bags.

The next picture shows some blue and white cotton (also curtains) and some striped green upholstery canvas that will also be perfect for a bag.

My daughter Sophie loves to play with scarves so I decided to start a little dress up box for her! I’ve got an old trunk (foot locker) in the basement that is full of books, but if I can find another place for the books, the trunk will be a great place for dress up clothes.

This was a game I played about 32 years ago! It’s a fun picture game to play in the car on long trips.

And lastly, what is a thrift store without picking up clothes for the kids. Here is a very adorable spring/summer outfit for Sophie!

I could not resist this one, even though she will not be able to wear them for a few more years. It is just too expensive to buy new, and I could not pass it up. (It’s a pair of striped leggings, from Hanna Andersson.)

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Life lately

May 17, 2008 at 9:26 pm (family)
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It has been a fair week this week.  Fortunately Sophie made it through the rest of her antibiotics without a problem.  I had gotten her diarrhea pretty much under control with diet and she had the last of the medication on Thursday.  She’s been pretty much back to normal all week, except she only took 45 minute naps for most of the week.  Thankfully she has napped a little longer the past couple of days.  Nights are still pretty much the same, waking up a lot to nurse, and occasionally, just up.  I keep trying to tell myself, that in 12 years or so when they are both teenagers, they will want to do nothing BUT sleep… but it sure seems like 12 years is a really long time for me to wait to get sleep!

We are joining a CSA (community sponsored agriculture) this summer.  I went out to the farm this week and we had a really nice visit.  Their granddaughter is Will’s age so the two of them played the whole time, and she sent me home with 2 dozen eggs and a bunch of green onions that volunteered from last year.  Very nice people and I am looking forward to another visit!  The kids had fun feeding grass to the chickens and blowing bubbles and playing outside.  How it works, is that we pay a fee, and we get whatever is ready from their HUGE garden every week.  Some weeks you will get more of one thing than another but they stagger when they plant things to extend the season a little bit.  They have chickens to help with fertilization since they don’t use chemicals at all, so we get eggs too.

Because I suddenly had so many eggs, I made quiche the next day.  I used some of the green onions – I think they were the freshest green onions I’ve ever used… they actually were crisp as the knife went through them!  I also sliced up a tomato to put in it and added some grilled asparagus from a few nights before.  I didn’t have any premade pie crust so I had to make some of that too.  It’s been a long time!  But it turned out pretty good.  I also made a dump cake.  That was the same day that I scrubbed and scoured one of the bathrooms, until it was sparkling clean.  I even bought a new toilet seat because the underside of the old one is corroded and impossible to really get clean.

The bathroom scrubbing must be addictive because I did our master bath today.  I still need to wash the floor but ran out of time.  Got a new toilet seat for that bath too, for the same reasons.

My goal this summer is to eat or freeze all of the produce we get, except for peels/general scraps.  It’s motivating to have met the people who break their backs to get stuff to grow, to make sure I am respectful of their work and not waste anything.  I do have some canning equipment but I don’t know that I want to mess with canning this year.  I might surprise all of us and cook almost everything.  Even though we got the smaller share, I have a feeling we might still wind up with a lot of extra!  I will get to learn how to cook things I don’t usually cook and that will be fun/interesting!

Lastly, today we went to the Parade of Homes.  Local builders in the area (and new homeowners) agree to open their newly built homes to the public, as a way for the builders to advertise, and for the public to check out what is new in home trends.  I am, as usual, not very trendy.  In fact, when we do finally get to building, people are probably going to drive by, scratch their heads and say, “What the heck???”  One thing I totally don’t get is spending $20,000 on a shower.  That is probably exaggerating but all of the master bathrooms have these huge showers, that are custom, covered with ceramic tile floor to ceiling, and most have extra heads here and there… why?  I understand a jet tub (we saw one with water that came from the ceiling??) but a shower, you spend only as long in it as your hot water heater can do, and you’re done!  I’d rather put it into other parts of the house you are actually IN for long periods of time.  Anyway it was interesting, people have gotten very lavish, even the most modest home we saw seemed to have a lot of stuff in it that was a little too over the top for me.  We saw one that was almost 5,000 square feet, really beautiful, no expense spared at all, the basement was totally finished and like a whole other house.  In one of those estates on a golf course!  Nice if that’s your thing, but they probably wouldn’t appreciate a chicken coop and duck pond in our back yard!  Homeowners associations are really not for me!  Also, master suites are just insanely huge, taking up a LARGE part of the house.  It is nice to have a decent sized bedroom, with an adjoining bath, and a little walk in closet, but it seems like the ones we saw went on for miles.  I sleep in there, shower, poop, occasionally read or nap, and that’s about it.  I sure don’t want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a bedroom?  Give me a good kitchen with a huge walk in pantry, a BIG family room with a fireplace, a sauna in the basement and a big yard for the kids/dog/ducks/chickens or whatever, and some privacy, and I’ll be happy.

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She is FINALLY better

May 10, 2008 at 10:12 pm (family)
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Today was the first day in a really long time that she went the whole day and night without a fever.  And this morning when I woke up, I was drunk on sleep.  It was really the first night I’d gotten several blocks of 3.5 hours or so at a time.  And, we have managed to stop the diarrhea with food so that’s good too.  It will make the next 5 days of antibiotics a lot easier to deal with.  And I plan to have a bottle burning party on Thursday next week when she is done!  She isn’t fighting us so much now either, but I think it helps that she isn’t getting several syringe-fuls of medicine every 4-6 hours.

This was a nasty, nasty bug, whatever it was.  I am glad now that we did the antibiotics, even though I am really against the use of them unless you really have to.  She seemed to be feeling better after just a couple of doses.  It had been going on far too long.  What a miserable couple of weeks.  Since she does not tolerate dairy, I bought her some soy yogurt (not hot on giving soy to babies either because of the estrogens and tendency to screw up thyroid function) which she is eating, thankfully because she needs the probiotics.  I hope she does not wind up with thrush after all of this.

Now we just need everyone to be healthy for the rest of the summer.  We have a wedding in June in Wisconsin, my mom is coming to visit after that and we will probably go to the UP sometime this summer as well.  I haven’t been home since Christmas and I am homesick.  We haven’t even talked about when to do that this year.

Today I felt good, and rested for the most part, better than I have felt in a really long time.  Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and I told Clane I wanted to go somewhere for breakfast, but in the middle of the afternoon when it’s not busy, and hopefully when the kids will be able to make it through a meal out.  I still feel like I could sleep for weeks and weeks.  It seems like the kids tend to sleep really well after having been sick, so hopefully Sophie will do better at night now.  Her naps are terrible, today she slept for 45 minutes tops, once, and that was it.  Crappy nappers, both of them.  Someday they will pray for someone to put them down for a nap!

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Sick baby

May 8, 2008 at 3:11 pm (Uncategorized)

I haven’t blogged in a while, because Sophie has been pretty sick.  Long story short, she got worse over the weekend (crying in between passing out from sheer exhaustion) and her temperature kept going up, and she was rubbing her face and clearly miserable.  Back to the doctor Monday and she said it was probably a sinus infection.  Asked me to use saline spray often, try a decongestant and if that didn’t perk her up by the end of the day, to get some amoxicillin.  She seemed better by the end of the day so we did not fill it, but night was a new level of hell, so the next day we started it.

It seems that within a couple of doses, she was better than she’d been in a long time.  In fact, she is having so much fun playing that she is refusing to sleep.  And she needs it.  This is what makes me want to rip my eyeballs out with my fingernails.  She was up til 11 pm last night and up at 8 this morning, plus now she has diarrhea from the antibiotics.  She is so tired yet absolutely refuses to sleep.  She napped just under 45 minutes this morning.  She needs to sleep a few hours but I can’t even get 1 hour out of her.

I am glad she is better but now we are back to this shit again.  I can’t win.  No matter what I do.  It just doesn’t ever work out so that I can ever feel better.  Thanks alot.

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Shoulda just gone to medical school

May 2, 2008 at 3:37 pm (baby stuff)
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Because I am an awesome amateur pediatrician.  I wound up taking Sophie to the doctor yesterday because I called them about her fever.  She was on day 3 of on and off high fevers (over 102) and they are closed on Friday.  She wanted to see her so we went in.  They were insanely busy, but she doesn’t turn anyone away so we waited.  When she checked her over, said her ears looked fine, and told me it was probably what they call “viral syndrome”.  I told her, that was my diagnosis as of the day before!  She also said it could be the beginning of roseola and if she gets a rash once the fever is gone, that’s what it is.

Otherwise we are going to keep treating the fever (medicine if she’s uncomfortable) and give lots of fluids.  Today she was still feeling pretty hot, so she got medicine because she was whining and clingy.

Last night I gave her medicine at 2:30 and she was up for the next two hours.  Finally I just turned over and told her she could do what she wanted, but to leave me alone so I could sleep.  Next thing I knew, it was 8:30.  She has had one crappy nap of 45 minutes today and THAT’S IT.  I always want to sleep when I don’t feel good, what is wrong with my kids?  Most of the time I want to rip my hair out.

I swear I am never going to miss these days.  This is just too much.

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