Isn’t she lovely? Beautiful? I’m not sure what aunt is all the way to the left, but I think that’s my Uncle Bill in dresses.

I’m scanning and resizing pictures for a project I’m doing downstairs in our dining room. A wall that will hold slices of our family history. Hanging already are pictures of the model A that belonged to Eric’s Great Grandfather. Soon, our grandparents and great grandparents and infant parents will join it. A little bit of who we are right there for us to see every day. Like a treasure.

A while back I found this picture. I love that my great grandparents were in love like this.

They were married for many happy years until my great grandfather passed. I wear the ring he bought her on their fortieth anniversary. I love that. I pray that Eric and I have that happiness. I really do.

I have lamented Emily’s growing often. I have a love/hate relationship with her aging. I celebrate her steps forward and her progress. The fact that she can spell and read,b ut I miss things about her smallness. Her babyhood is a distant memory, replaced by Emilyisms and drawings and trips to the park. I remember her smallness in snatches, mostly with pictures and videos as time passed quickly and I willed it to pass even faster, terrifed that she was developing too slow.

Last week, I ordered a bunch of American Girl books on sale. Easy readers. I ordered a companion craft book to go with them and yesterday we made out of a felt a tooth pillow purseish thing to go with the book we had recently read. It took a while, punching holes in felt and the green ribbon that we tied in refuses to stay tied.

This morning, Emily brought the tooth pillow to me, one end of the ribbon hanging out, pulled from it’s hole. I said I couldn’t fix, needing my tapestry needle to make the thing work. Moments ago, while sitting at the desk, Emily brought the pillow and ribbong to me, laid them down, touched each and said “Please?” in the sweetest voice. My heart ached. I miss this part of her already. Now she sits quietly coloring on my printers paper, tracing the flower pattern from the pillow, wearing her new sundress and seeming just a little bit like an angel.

Motherhood is a crazy mix of emotions. I tell you honestly that this morning, I considered marketing myself as a bearded lady (minus the beard) and joining the circus to escape Emily using curtain rods as ski polls and the dog barking at scattering leaves out of the front door and now, I wish I could press pause on this very moment, freezing us here forever. I wish I could slow down and suck in the sweetness that is always here, but that I’m too busy or too hurried or too stressed to take in.

and I’m running out of luck. I want to go outside and get run ovver by a truck. Emily just covered me with a pile of junk mail when I said I didn’t want it, she started to wail. The dog’s a boiling blister, the house is a pit, I haven’t gone crazy at least not yet.

It’s the third day of spring break, and Emily is here. We play games and watch movies, I wish I could have a beer. The only time she’s quiet is never I fear. The third day of spring break is the craziest time of year (year).

(sing to the tune of “The Second Week of Deer Camp by the Yoopers)

We’re surviving, but Emily has no interest in being at home entertained by only me all day anymore. We’re doing crafts, reading books, watching movies, running errands, but she’s not impressed. The dog is whiney and it looks like rain (which pretty much exhausts mmy idea of sending her outside to burn some of the enrgy off).

I went to work on Em’s curtains yesterday and got one nearly finished. I need to sew on the tabs and hem the firstt. I’m hoping the second goes quicker, having cut everything yesterday. I’ll need some help from Eric tonight to finish up and hopefully with some work will be able to hang them tomorrow. Then, we’ll work on fixing the paint an rearranging the room and then Emily and I will do some art and craft projects to finish her room out and then we can move on to other things.

the first knitting in some time. Ages. I don’t even know the last thing I knit. It’s been a while, is all I can say.

I’m making This Hat, but with a few changes. First, the pattern says gauge doesn’t matter, but I mean, doesn’t it always? Well, in the case of felted projects like The booga bag it probably doesn’t, but for a hat, it does.

Using sport weight yarn and size 6 dpn, I got 7 stiches per inch instead of six, but the cap was still far too big for a small baby, so I reduced to 55 stitchs (at 7 per inch) and knit the body of the cap for four inches instead of six. The decreases were odd as well, not accounting well for the multiple of five stiches the hat detailed one should have. For instnace, the first decrese was down over 16 stitchs instead of 15 and so on.

I also decided to knit it in the round, so no chances of bumpy seams on baby’s little head and will duplicate stitch in the spots. I’ll have to make adjustments for the ears as well. I knitted the hat last night and finished the decreases this morning. I’ll work on the duplicate stitch and finish up with the ears.

I got an e-mail last week to lead a teen knitters group at the library, but I’m not sure I’m up to instruction. My patience is wee and trying to come up with easy beginer projects to entice teens to knit (when they’re all going to want to knit frou frou scarves which no new knitter should ever knit becuaes the stitches split and it’s freaking hard). So, no for now.

I also must sew curtains…

You Are 50% Weird

Normal enough to know that you’re weird… But too damn weird to do anything about it!

This week we must go to te grocery store. We’ve been out of milk an bread for days. DAYS I tell you. Dnner has been lacking and has been mostly out. I can admit that it’s my fault. I don’t feel good in the mornings and contimplating dinner isn’t working. I need to focus on some easy to make, non-frozen stuff that we can throw together last minute so I don’t have to plan ahead and that Eric can toss together. I’m thinking pasta, sausages, etc. Macaroni, things we’ll eat that we don’t have to thaw.

Eric did a ton of housework yesterday that Emly and I will try and finish today. We’re having a serious laundry crisis right now that needs attending to and a ffew places in the house that you can’t really walk through. I also want to try and get Emily’s bedroom finished up this week. Touching up paint (hopefully), moving some furniture (whih probably inclues the dresser back into the closet, sorry Eric).

Before Emily was born, we asked Eric’s dad to make her dresser. He’s a great wood worker and makes beautiful furniture. It took a little while, but the dresser was finished, wth beautiful oak veneers and a beautiful finish. It is quite literally the nicest furniture we own. A year later, Eric’s uncle finished off the hutch top for us and it’s also beautiful. A big mirror, lots of shelves. Heriloom quality, folks.

But it’s huge. And heavy. And Emily’s room is small and she has a lot of shit. When we lived here before we moved the dresser into the closet (because she doesn’t use the closet at all) to give her more room and floor space. We have a canopy thingie to hang over the bed and I want to start looking for accessories too to finish things off. her room needs to be finshed before we start the nursery.

Me.

I hate that the weekends fly by so quickly. I look forward to them as soon as I get up on Monday morning and they seem to move so much more quickly than the rest of the week.

We met the new step-nephew (is that right? Is there such thing? Eric’s sister’s step-daughters son.) He was very cute. Emily wanted ZERO to do with him and even canceled her goodbye after I told her she didn’t HAVE to do it. She didn’t want to hold him, though she did spend about 45 seconds saying hi with her face close to him so he could see her.

She feels a lot of pressure about being a big cousin, so we’re not pushing. We don’t want her to be babied out by the time ours shows up.

I also picke dup some maternity clothes today, about five weeks earlier than I did with Emily. I’m not showing, but just feeling umcomfortable about where my jeans are riding even though they’re plenty big. I decided it was time and got a pair of jeans and khakis today. They’ll do for now, though I had to buy jeans with panels, which I abhor. Thankfully I have a lot of long shirts. The khakis are much better and I may live in them, though they’re big enough now that with any effort they could fall down.

In other news, I’m heading to an LYS tomorrow and pick up yarn for a very special baby gift I have to have done by this weekend. We did stop at Joann’s to pick up some patterns and material for summer sewing, but nothing there was what I needed. Plus, I think a need a pair of size 6 dpn. THe pattern calls for it to be knit flat and seamed, but I’m totally doing it in the round. I hate seaming.

I fucking hate you. P.S. You html code like shit.

Bah!

I’m an F bomb dropper. It’s my favorite word in the whole english language. It’s like pepper or salsa or worchestershire(sp) sauce. It’s flavorful.

You could say “I have a headache.”

Now that may be true, but doesn’t sound, I don’t know, bigger if you say, “I have a Fucking headache.”

Well, it does to me. My car’s license place says Fr. I call it the effer. I love it. I hate that when I change it to IL plates i can’t have the same plate.

Emily is on spring break next week. I kept her home yesterday thinking she was starting to get sick and harboring a slight fever. She drove me nuts. She felt fine and was totally pissed that I had made her stay home and miss show and tell!!! Needless to say, I’ll be searching the net for things to do to keep Miss Thing busy.

It’s another.

While I was dealing with my panic/depression issue (well, I don’t know if I was DEALING, per se) updating here was so difficult. I felt like i had not one positive thing to say and reading someone’s constant whining is a downer and boring (at least to me) and it just took too much effort to really put down how life was going and how I was feeling, so I just skipped it.

For the past, what, two months my morning sickness has been out of control and sitting down anywhere that’s not in my bed to compose a post seems just as difficult as finding something readable to write during the panic/depression phase. The good news is, I see my OB in two weeks. I think 16 weeks is a reasonable amount of time to give this thing to subside on its own. If it hasn’t, I’m going to ask for something to help. I’m just as homebound now as I was during the peak of my depression and that’s not working.

This weekend I missed Game Night with the friends becuase they plan things around the dinner hour which is my worst time of the day.

On the bright side, we had a great time yesterday. We visited the Pompeii exhibit at The Field Museum. Emily was a little bit freaked out by the body castings. I was really only bothered by the dog. We also saw Sue, visited their HUGE animal exhibit (the field has tons of stuffed animals, including some that are now extinct, gathered years ago when apparently it was okay to stuff baby giraffes….). Afterwards, we had lunch/dinner at The Ram and hung out at John and Kim’s for a while, talking and having beer (I skipped the beer).

In crafty news, I finished two canvas projects on Friday to hang downstairs and will do two similar projects for the bedroom. I want to expand on the two I have for down stairs to possibley including a total of four or six canvases in the grouping. I’ll take pictures once the project is finished.

I also ripped out my Potato Chip Scarf this past week. It was too damn short, even though I followed the pattern and used the reccomended yarn and needles. I have a second ball of the reccomended yarn, so I’m going to double the amount of stitches cast on and hopefullya t double the length, it’ll work. With the colors, I’ll probably pass it along to my little sister, as they’re pretty much up her alley and not so much up mine (I’m more subdued than she, but she is the girl who dyed her hair fushia).

it was spring time. On Friday and then all day Saturday. On Saturday we threw open the windows and worked in the yard. We played at the playground and rolled down the car windows.

Today, it’s winter again, or coming close. Snow due tonight.

I’m usually pretty pragmatic about the seasons. I don’t mind any of them and look forward to each in turn. I really don’t mind winter. I really do like snow and cold air and frosty wndows. But I never realize how ready I am for the seasons to change until we get that glimpse of the next season. The first springish day of winter makes me ache for sunshine and warm breeze. I miss sitting outside. Can’t wait to grill and eat al fesco.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that our tenant (becausee it’s the least complicated way to refer to her) put a monster deck on the back of the house. OUr back yard is offically the size of two small postage stamps. All that remains of it is a three or four foot wide swath at the back of the yard. She paved paradise and put up a parking lot (or at least covered the yard in grass killing tarp and put up a big ass deck). I hate the deck. It’s big. It’s ugly. It’s not tasteful. Eric and I wanted to tear it down, but after talking about the time and cost realized it would be easier to just deal with the deck for the few years we’ll be here.

I agreed with his logic, but I still hate the deck.

The tenant put in a small flower garden on the front of the deck. Over the windy winter her pots and resin garden figures (no gnomes. I like them) have been blowing all over the place, not to mention the jumanjiesque vines that grew and died all over the place.

So, Eric and I go out and try to clean up.

It was gross. Oh my god.

OH.

My.

GOD!

Worms. Rotton produce. Ooze. Gooze. A million cigarette butts. YUCK!

So, we ripped out the jumanji vines and picked up the rotton peppers and Emily killed the worm. We moved the silk plants that had been potted in cement AND tied to the deck (WTF) and pondered who was going to crawl under the deck to pull out the hillbilly pile shoved under there and speculated on what was living under the deck, because the dog shows great interest in one corner, which means there is something living under there which I hope is cute and fuzzy and not a skunk or anything rabid.

There’s a lot of work to do. So much to do that I don’t know if we know where to start right tnow.

I think Emily thinks I’m a raving idiot. Last week, she went to the grocery store with two quarters in her hot little hand. She picked a gumball machine, put in one quarter and got double prizes. She put in another quarter and got another round of double prizes. They’re these litlte smilie faces who have arms and legs and you can fold out of their body. She named hers Doris. I named mine Henry.

Today, she was carrying around Doris in a lantern I have sitting around.

“This is my princess. Can you guess her name?”

“Doris.”, I answered on my way to the laundry room.

“How did you KNOW that?”

“You TOLD me.”

“Oh.”

I mean, we’ve been playing with Doris and Henry since last week. A couple of times a day. Elaborate games. How WOULDN’T I know Doris’ name by now?

Because I’m a forgetful old woman that’s why. At least that’s what Emily must think. Or maybe an idiot. Or perhaps just dumber than she (which is a real possiblity). I had no idea that the ideas of superiority of the child over the parent happend so soon. Emily’s just barely six.