Curtains

After we rearranged the bedrooms to accommodate the new occupant, it seemed a shame to paint the bedrooms beautifully and let the window coverings continue to be pieces of fabric pinned up over the curtain rods.

I had many yards of bleached muslin around in my stash--almost exactly enough for all of the panels. I got the green linen fabric for crib furnishings before Elanor was born. I had originally intended to use green ribbon as tie backs but this leftover garden themed wire ribbon was just what they needed.

Our bedroom has the same basic design but, of course, with different colors. The fabric on the bottom of the muslin panel matches our sheets, coordinates with the wall color and came from the bargain bin at the fabric store. I have had the trim piece for several years now--a gift from a colleague who was unhappy with this portion of her online auction purchase. I liked it, but what do you do with 30 yds of trim? Some of it edged a skirt and the rest was just enough for the curtain edging and tie backs for all of the sections.


It is amazing how much more finished curtains make a room look.

Carriers

As much as I love our wrap carrier, it hurts Jonathan's back so when I found this one at a garage sale, that seemed like a great way to try out another type of carrier.
It works better for Jonathan but bothers my shoulders. Go figure.

Sink

Elanor is starting to outgrow her baby bathtub so I am experimenting with other ways to wash her. She liked playing in the kitchen sink but also wanted to lie down backwards in the water--not so good for washing ease.

I'm not excited about washing her in the bathtub because of the miniscule kneeling space between the cabinet and the toilet but we'll figure something out.

Prodigy

Now that Elanor can sit up, all sorts of activities are open to her. Including playing the piano with daddy.

Practicing

Trying to get the spoon in her mouth:

Success and blissful gnawing:

Drinking water from the spoon for the first time to try out another form of getting nourishment besides nursing:

Most of the water was dribbled down her front. I think that she's a little dubious of the value of this form of intake.

I'm Saving Them for Later.

Every so often, I get ideas.

Big ideas. Dangerous ideas.

This one involved 100lbs of peaches the week before my brother's wedding. Last year, I had the help of my sisters and my mom (and early pregnancy sickness--which I wouldn't call exactly helpful). This year, I doubled the amount of peaches and did it alone since they were heavily involved in work and preparing for the festivities. Elanor kept me company but I didn't think that she was up for peeling peaches yet. She contributed by only getting up once a night for three days in a row, giving me the rest that I needed to tackle such a huge project and playing mostly happily on the floor in the kitchen.

I dried a batch every day. Pretty and delicious:


The house doubled nicely as a sauna due to the constant boiling of all of the pots on the stove. There are now 41 pints of peach slices in the pantry. Next year, I'm getting quart jars. The rest was turned into spiced peach butter.

Actually, most of these jars are pear butter. Did I mention the 30 lbs of pears? The rest of the pear puree is unspiced and frozen in cubes for when we start solids with Elanor.

Points to those who recognize the reference in the post title.

Big Girl

No, she's not really standing on her own. But she likes being propped up to look at faces or out the window. She's just starting to look around to figure out where I am.

Smiley girl:

Unicorn baby:

Bigger than the Bathtub

Elanor's first swim:



She loved kicking in the water. We will be doing this again!

Beads! Pretty Beads!

Elanor thinks that Grandma's bracelets are fascinating. So many different, tiny parts to look at!

Toes!

Hope Completed

I shared the beginning of this project here.

This piece had its origins in a conversation with some dear friends about where we all were in our lives at that point.
We were in places where what we could see was the dry, dying hardness of the current season of our lives. We had to trust and hope that the spring was coming. The image of a tree in the midst of changing seasons came to represent this place.
There is all sorts of symbolism about trees in Scripture. Ps 1:3 has special significance to us because of the meaning of our name, there are multiple references to a tree of life, culminating in Revelation, the crucifixion on a "tree," etc. I also wanted to show the link between what we see (the withering) and what is true, spiritual reality as well.

People say, with some justification, that the measure of modern art is really how impressive a blurb the artist can write about it. At the risk of receiving that criticism myself, these were my intentions in this design.

The tree is cup shaped, alluding to the cup of communion with Christ and his body. The red threads underlining the tree branches remind of the blood of Christ's sacrifice for us (on the tree) and the reason for hope. The flame-colored threads reference the work of the Holy Spirit in revealing the hope that we have in God and the way that he is working despite the apparent death.
I worked the withered and falling leaves first and then added the different shades of green. I had originally intended to make only a few green leaves and those not actually touching the branches in the way that the dead ones did to show that hope was far off and only hinted at. However, as I worked on it over the course of the last year, the emphasis shifted to call for more of the green as our personal seasons changed. God has brought us better marriages, children, friends and work in ways that we were not able to see at the time of our original conversation. It no longer seemed possible to put so much emphasis on the hard season in the way that the design started.
However, though we are experiencing a spring just now, there will be another winter when we will need to be reminded of hope.

For now, I hope that this piece will be a blessing as it goes on its way with its recipients to their new home.

Goodbye Missy

We said goodbye to Missy last week. She was a faithfully loving cat for 16 years. I don't think that I've ever seen a cat adore a person the way that she did Jonathan.

Look What I Did!

Sitting

Elanor is very close to sitting up on her own. She just needs a little bit of support--more to give her confidence than anything else.

She got very excited about being able to reach her toy in a new position.

Maybe a little too excited. Oops!

Hmm...

I put Elanor down for her nap, peacefully gnawing the pacifier. I came back to check on her 10 minutes later to find this.

Her hands are completely swaddled. I cannot figure out how she did this.

Finished Book

I gave this embroidered book cover to Camille for her college graduation. Then it sat, waiting to be stitched to the purchased book insert.

At long last, I got around to making it up.

I just realized that this picture is upside down...

The stitching is on a remnant piece of dupioni silk. It is backed with fusible interfacing, layered with charcoal gray felt underneath and stitched onto the book with a piece of black satin ribbon for a bookmark. It is a little tight, as shown in the slight wonkiness in the first picture, but should stretch just enough with a bit of use to lay flat. I'm particularly proud of the darning job that needed to be done along one edge where the silk was fraying. It had started to ravel when I started the stitching, but it couldn't be trimmed off without making that side of the end pocket too small. Next time, I'll be more careful to match the positioning of the stitching to what I intend the finished project to be.

Justice's Fiddlehead

After making a sweater in this pattern for Elanor, I decided that her new cousin should have one as well. I picked out the yarn before we knew if the baby was a boy or girl, figuring that this lovely color--like chocolate cherry---would work just fine for either. It is 100% superwash wool fingering and worked up beautifully.


I just missed finishing it in time for their visit this summer but it is on its way.

Note to self, however. Do not use old mailing labels that have lost any of their stickiness. The package ended up back in my mailbox without the recipient's address on it. Thank goodness I had put my return address on the envelope itself!

Shift

Elanor next to the cats then:

and now:


She has begun to show quite a bit more interest in them. As her ability to reach and grasp has improved, she has made quite a few lunges in their direction. We're working on the idea of "pet the kitty nicely!"


The boys had been getting used to her as the squeaky new inhabitant with interesting toys. Now they are a bit more dubious of the benefits of her presence

Snoozy Friends

Sweetly napping, swaddled babies with matching (spit out) pacifiers.

Picnicking

We have been enjoying our summer by picnicking at various parks. Elanor sometimes sleeps and sometime squawks. It's a little difficult to figure out what apparatus we need and what can be dispensed with. The play mat works pretty well as a sun shade and Ellie snoozes in the cozy moby swaddle. It is wonderfully relaxing way for Jonathan and me talk over the week.

Five

Last year, we spent the weekend on Orcas Island after discovering that the next year was going to be full of changes.

This year, our celebration definitely showed the effects of those changes, but it still had the unmistakable signs of the new happy.

Jonathan decided to work a half day and then come home to rest. We picked up Indian food to eat in and then went to see Toy Story 3 while Elanor did this with my mom:


It was a little nerve-wracking to leave her for that long but, of course, she was just fine and we got to enjoy our movie.

On Saturday, the three of us took a day trip to Whidbey Island by way of Deception Pass. The last time that we were here, we watched a boat towing bunch of logs through. There wasn't anything quite as interesting in the water this time although we attracted plenty of attention ourselves. At least Elanor was in the wrap most of the time so people were less likely to come up and try to pat her on the head. It also reduced the urgency of my entirely irrational vision of her slipping out of my arms and falling off of the bridge. We did have her hat with us, but after it blew off and landed in the roadway, I tucked it away until we were out of the wind a bit.

It was a gorgeous day.

We walked down to the beach at Deception pass, something that neither of us had ever done before.

There's nothing like the bald back of a baby's head to make a romantic picture, is there?

Elanor loves the Flying Baby move. She was laughing until I got the camera out to take a picture.

We introduced her to the little bit of sand on the beach by trickling it over her feet. Fortunately, she isn't into grabbing fistfuls of dirt and stuffing them into her mouth yet.


We stopped at a few places that we have never been before to see the view and give Elanor some time out of her car seat.

Then back into the car, a quick dinner at DQ (the only place that we came across at the right time--Jonathan was anxious to get to the ferry line) and a long wait for the ferry back to Seattle. A good day and a fun way to celebrate our fifth anniversary.

Two

Two year-olds are all the same-fascinated with scissors.

What? I'm not supposed to play with these?

Blueberries

We went blueberry picking as usual this year. It was pleasantly overcast in the morning.

Elanor did her part by playing on the picnic blanket among the bushes.

And by taking quite a good nap.

We saw this fellow curled up at the base of a bush. He was a little shy but just enough interested to look back at us instead of slithering off.

Proverbs 4:4-5

"When I was a son with my father, tender, the only one in the sight of my mother,
he taught me and said to me, 'Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments and live."

How am I teaching my daughter now while she is the only one in my care?

Bailing

We are coming to the end of our dual income time and as we look for ways to keep our financial ship from sinking, we've introduced a new concept that we're calling bailing. This not only involves cutting non-essentials but also looking for ways to spend less on the essentials.

Now I may be crazy to try this in the PNW but as part of our bailing attempts, I am doing this:


After all, how many loads of diapers do I do in a week? Several, that's all I can say. Maybe this will help counteract the fact that we are keeping our house a little warmer these days.

The New Happy

Keren wrote about realizing how happy she has become to be Charlie's mom after their difficult start. This reminded me of something that helped me get through the first weeks of adjusting to a new family member.

We had planned and hoped for a baby for a while before Elanor came along. The first two thirds of the pregnancy was pretty rough. I know there were moments (bent over the toilet or breathing deeply attempting to not be in that position) where I questioned how worthwhile this process was. But when I started to feel her move around inside me, it became more fun to think about how she was growing and get a sense of the small person who was being nourished and sheltered there. I'm grateful to have had a fairly easy end of pregnancy and, while labor was long, I always knew that it was going to be a finite and relatively short period. I hope that I never forget the incredible high of giving birth with Jonathan and seeing Elanor for the first time.

Then we brought her home.

Now Elanor was not a hard baby. She ate appropriately (after the initial adjustment period), cried when she was uncomfortable or tired, seemed happy to be held and slept a normal amount for a baby of her age.

But as some friends of ours very kindly put it, even a normal newborn is hard.

To make matters a little more interesting, one of our cats had gotten himself into some serious trouble while we were gone having the baby and needed several weeks of close observation, vet visits (culminating in surgery) and special care. Jonathan took over this responsibility while I was in charge of Ellie-care. All of my imagining of special cuddle time with the three of us or chats with Jonathan while Ellie slept in my arms were blown away by sheer exhaustion and the separation of having to each care for different, needy creatures.

All of this, in addition to that lovely postpartum hormonal crash, created this sense of horror about our new life. We had been happy with just the two of us, hadn't we? What had we been thinking to change things and bring this new complication into our lives? Had we ruined everything?

The breakthrough came with a realization that birth is a longer and more complicated process than I had realized. Our old happiness had left and was irrecoverable in its previous form. I had hoped for a new kind of happiness--that of expanding our family--but I realized that I didn't really know what that was going to look like and even the glimmers of it that I was able to imagine hadn't arrived yet.

That time between the death of the old happiness and the birth of the new was much longer and harder than labor.

However, as my hormones started to settle down and Maxwell got better, Jonathan was able to spend some time with Elanor and me and we were able to have a few moments that looked just a little bit like the picture of our new family that I had imagined.

There is something wonderful about seeing your husband croon over his tiny daughter. It turns out that a walk through the grocery store with the baby asleep in the wrap can be romantic. Sharing your baby's first smiles is just as thrilling as watching a glorious sunset at the end of a ferry ride.

As Elanor and our family embark on the fourth month of this new adventure, caring for her has gotten a little more complicated as her needs and pace of development increase. But this is usually balanced by more of these moments of the new happy.

Getting up with her at night sometimes can be a special cozy time for us now that she smiles when she sees me and snuggles a little before I put her back to bed. It also helps that we're down to twice a night too.

Changing her diaper is a time for singing and finger games.

It only takes me half an hour to walk to the library and Elanor does tummy time even better outside on the grass in the backyard while I hang laundry or weed the flower beds.

Sharing her coos and giggles with Jonathan is as delightful as sharing a movie.

A casual date for ice cream or coffee is just as satisfying right now as a date for dinner and a concert.

And, of course, sleep makes EVERYTHING better.

Baby projects

I've been on a knitting kick for a while so I haven't made any embroidered clothes for Elanor yet. I have enjoyed using up some odds and ends of yarn from other projects for baby socks, though.
This yarn was the leftovers from the Evenstar mitts:

I got a bunch of a friend's leftovers as well:

Matching mitts--which were for a much smaller baby than the socks were and are now too small:

This was a great free pattern called Fiddlehead that I found through PurlBee. I made a lightweight cotton version in a sport weight rather than the fingering weight that the pattern called for. It involved a couple of the dreaded gauge swatches and several calculations but it came out beautifully in the end. Another modification--knitting the body in the round rather than in two flat pieces. I don't care for seaming at all and there is something very soothingly rhythmical about knitting row after row to produce perfect stockinette. It was perfect for bus riding and other odd moments. I was also trying to get in as many continuing education lectures as possible so as to be able to comfortably renew my cytogenetics certification before taking my leave from the lab and working on the sweater during the lectures helped me stay awake and focused. It's working pretty well for sermons now too as I work on the one for Elanor's new cousin, Justice.

Of course, calculating the yarn needed was a little tricky and I ended up with some extra. Every cute baby sweater needs a matching hat doesn't it?