Whose Favorite?

We thought Noah's new GeoTrax would be Daddy's favorite Christmas present, but it turns out that Mommy is the one addicted to making new track configurations. Noah likes it too, until the trains crash, and then he cries. And if WalMart doesn't stop clearancing the track packs, it's going to take over our living room!

Hellooooooo, anybody there?

Yes, it's been ages since I've posted, and even longer since I've posted regularly. It hasn't been just the normal back-to-school stuff that's been keeping me busier than usual, it's incubating this cute little booger:



Noah's going to be a big brother! We found out the gender today, but before we announce it to the whole wide world, we're going to make you go take a guess in our baby pool. Is the suspense killing you?



Hope your Christmas was wonderful. Ours was, and I promise to post (more) photos soon!

Merry Christmas!

Yes, I tweaked the date on this post... it's almost New Year's by now, but it's never too late to wish you a Merry Christmas!

Happy Halloween!

When the streets started to bustle, we took our little Batman out in the front yard to check out the action.



Noah had a blast running around and watching the other kids, but I don't think he ever realized his little cape was flapping around behind him.



He also enjoyed sorting our Halloween candy. Good thing his little fingers can't get the packages open yet!



By the end of the evening, Noah was running to the door for every trick-or-treater, helping them choose their Hot Wheels and candy, and shutting the door behind them. He had a blast. Oh, and he tried to steal someone's sword.

I think after yesterday he answers to "Batman" better than "Noah." Go figure.

You've been so patient.

The least I can do is share some photos.

Go Longhorns!


Miso Cute


Make yourself at home, Noah.


It's a jungle out there


PlayDoh!

We're still here!

(just finding more things to do with my computer time, now that school is back in session.)

Here's a thought I'll share. Sorry I don't have the photos to back it up. I've got to go dig that camera thing out of it's drawer!

Noah amazes me with his sense of humor. The strangest things make him burst out laughing. Sunday night I was singing him to sleep, and I started the song like you would if you were waiting to come in on a round, singing:
Row, Row, Row your boat,
Row, Row, Row your boat,
Row, Row, Row your boat, gently down the stream.
By the time I got to the third Row, Row, Noah was giggling uncontrollably. He knew that I had "messed up" the song and he thought it was hilarious. Needless to say, that didn't make a very good lullaby. Then yesterday in the backyard, Dave and I started throwing a frisbee back and forth, and Noah thought it was the funniest thing of all time. Especially when it went over the fence! He also giggles like mad if he's about to get what he wants, like cottage cheese from the fridge. Yesterday I got to hear that precious giggle when I picked him up from daycare (unusual because Dave usually does it). He heard my voice as I was climbing the stairs, and started laughing before he could even see me. It's such a joyful sound that it overwhelms me with happiness every time!

Training for the Circus

We start 'em young around here!

Caught on Film!

Oh man, this cracks me up. Especially the last 10 seconds or so. It's short and sweet, and no sound required:



Dave took those sprinkler photos that I posted yesterday, so I didn't get to see this in action till later. In the first part of the video, he's trying to fill the little green eggshell toy with water. Fairly successfully, I might add.

What is he DOING?

Crazy little Noah, drinking from the sprinkler!

He seems to be growing up so fast these days. I'm still in the habit of using the word "baby" around him, but these days every time that word comes out of my mouth, it hits me that he's not much of a baby anymore at all. It's amazing how clearly he thinks and how well he understands... I just still can't understand 99.9% of what he's talking about. Today he brought my shoes to me. I didn't think too much of it because he likes to play with our shoes. But then he went and stood by the back door. Nobody had mentioned going outside, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew mommy needed shoes for that!

He also seems to be growing up fast in more measurable ways. Between two recent doctor's appointments not even a month apart, he grew nearly two full inches. I know teenagers can sprout like that over a summer, but for my little guy... wow! And my arms are swearing up and down that he has put on several pounds in the last couple of days. Tomorrow I should try to weigh and measure him to find out why his clothes keep shrinking and why my elbows are whimpering. I think it might be time to start measuring HEIGHT instead of length, with marks on the wall and everything. How exciting!!!

Hamilton's Pool

We went to Hamilton's Pool this weekend with my sister's family. It's a natural spring-fed pool where an underground river caved in. The trail down from the parking lot is rocky and steep (especially carrying an extra 22 lb tub-o-giggles), but the hike was worth it. We all had a lot of fun and ended up staying longer than we thought Noah would let us. Noah's favorite part was throwing rocks into the water. Here are a couple of photos:

He looks like he's falling in, but he's really throwing rocks:


Those tiny dots on the boulder are Noah's cousins, who swam to the other side of the pool:


We hiked around the grotto (on the left of the photo above). This might have been a good family photo, except for the expression on Noah's face!


The trail around the back side of the pool gets really narrow. The rock right behind Dave is so close to the wall that you have to lean over and walk sideways to get past. That was challenging to get Noah through!


We also hiked down to the nearby river. Here's Noah and Dave watching the little fish swim by:

A Very Important Job

Ever since he's been toddling about with confidence and purpose, Noah has been throwing away his own dirty diapers. (Yes, I wrap them up tight so there's no "dirty" peeking out!) He treats it like the most important job in the world, and he's quite proud of his new responsibility. The funny part is, the whole thing was his idea. I vaguely remember one day when he stood up from a diaper change, picked up the diaper and walked away with it, so I showed him where the trashcan in the laundry room was. Then I remember one time when one of his grandmas thought he was playing with a "nasty old diaper" and wanted to take it away, and I slowly realized that he wanted to throw it away. So she tried to lead him to the kitchen trash, but NO, he wanted to go to the laundry room! These days it's every diaper every time. Wednesday I changed him right before we both laid down for a nap together, so I tossed the wrapped-up diaper to the floor at the foot of the bed. First thing Noah did when he woke up? Spotted that diaper and carried it across the house. Yesterday I caught him patiently waiting at the laundry room door, which I had closed earlier, diaper in hand. This morning he had a diaper so heavy (thank you, Huggies Overnites!) that it literally took both hands -- he kept dropping it because he didn't believe it was that heavy. Funny stuff.

Of course, along with the convenience of having my very own diaper-trasher, I now have the extra mom duty of checking that trashcan for stray socks and other dirty laundry. It seems he's training for his second job as laundry sorter, and unfortunately, the dirty laundry hamper is right next to the trash can.

Given that he's also been acting as a human vacuum cleaner since he could crawl (Oh, Noah, you found a treasure! Now hand it to mommy before you put it in your mouth), I think we've got a pretty talented little helper over here. Now why doesn't my house look cleaner than it does?

The Big Read

I used to devour books like a starving bookworm. Other than Harry Potter, it's been an embarrassingly long while since I made time for a good book. But a friend of mine posted this, and I had fun remembering all the great books I used to read (and some that I was forced, err... encouraged, to read in school). There were quite a few that I feel like I probably read, but I don't remember for sure. That just goes to show how much I used to read, that I couldn't keep track of what I'd read and what I hadn't. Or maybe it goes to show what a spotty swiss-cheese memory I have. But I digress...

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. How many have you read? Look at the list: Bold those you have read. Italicize those you intend to read. Underline the books you LOVE. (and Carol, don't mark the ones you don't remember whether you might have read them once upon a time).

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. 1984 - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My Little Hero

Guitar Hero, that is!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for...

... popsicles?



Noah hasn't been feeling well for the last several days, and he's been eating poorly. So I had the bright idea to make him some smoothie popsicles with yogurt and bananas and blueberries. He thought it was pretty cool, but he had a hard time holding it himself. So either I held it for him, or he gripped it by the cold part. In the end, I think more melted onto his hands than into his mouth before he got bored with it. But it got me thinking, is there a better* popsicle mold for toddlers out there? Leave me a comment if you have suggestions -- I'm all ears. This mold is just the standard issue from Target that I picked up yesterday when inspiration hit.

For the record, he guzzled down quite a bit of non-frozen smoothie after he gave up on the frozen one, and that was enough to whet his appetite for some real food. Success!

*For Noah right now, this mold is too big, the pop is too top-heavy, and the stick is too small.

Simply Irresistable

Noah got to work him charm last night in a big way. Thank goodness for cute sleeping angel babies!

Four of us set out in the Prius yesterday to go to dinner and Home Depot, us plus Noah and Dave's mom. When we stopped to pick up the dry cleaning, the car's "OH NO!" lights came on, the same ones we saw when we nearly ran out of gas, the ones that let you know that if you turn the power off, you can't turn the car back on again until the dealer resets it, the ones that the only information in the owner's manual says to turn off the car and call the dealership immediately. It's a hybrid thing. Since we were halfway between home and the dealership, and we knew we were about to be stranded, we decided to drive to Toyota. There we found out that the hybrid guy was gone for the evening, the rental car company was closed for the evening, the courtesy van was not available, no they don't have loaner cars, and that we should "call a friend to come pick us up." Why is it at these kind of moments that you realize you don't have as many friends as you think you do?

Did I mention that Noah was asleep in his carseat?

So while Dave was busy extricating the carseat from the car and calling his best work buddies, I took my sleeping angel around to the sales floor. I was on a mission to find someone who (a) looked like they had some authority, (b) looked to be in a good mood, and (c) looked like a dad. I didn't have to look too far. He even had baby photos framed on his desk. With all 22 pounds of Noah sacked out on my shoulder, and my voice a little shaky with the adrenaline that comes with being a mommy stranded with her baby, I carefully approached him. "Excuse me, do you have a sec? I've got an interesting situation. Ya see, my husband and I are actually in the market for a Rav4 (100% true), and have been talking about test driving them when we get a chance. And coincidentally, our Prius just stranded us here in the service department this evening, we've got a sleeping baby, and we can't find a ride home. Is there any chance you could set us up with an extended test drive overnight so we can get home?"

And the first words out of the good man's mouth were, "I think we can take care of you." The next were "how old is your little boy?" Very shortly after that he was asking, "exactly what model were you guys interested in?"

That's the story of how we traded our Prius in for a Rav4. Don't get me wrong, I still love my Prius, but this one is NEW, and SHINY, and FREE!!!! They "fixed" our car today, but they still don't know what went wrong*, so they want to keep it for observation. I think we have to give the Rav back at some point. Darn.

*Yes, we had a full tank of gas this time! Maybe the best explanation is the car's shock that WE were at a dry cleaners!

Flashback

Happy 4th of July!

You know you're a mom when ... you spend more time looking at your son's expressions than watching the sky during his first fireworks show.

We hadn't really planned on taking him to see the fireworks, but then since he wasn't sleeping anyway, we took him outside to see what we could see. Noah enjoyed the bright colors, and we were far enough away that they weren't too booming. He stared in awe, and kept pointing when they were over. I think he liked them!

Here's a photo from one year ago, and today, in the very same shirt. What a difference a year makes!

The tortoise and the hare.

Noah just turned on his warp speed mode today.

Ok, not really that fast, but we saw a friend this weekend whose baby is three weeks younger and she walked about three times faster than Noah. Literally. Noah is very deliberate, for lack of a better word. Until today. Today it's off to the races (though she would still definitely win).

Here's a photo of Noah and his speedy friend Miranda. It was hard to catch them both in the same frame.

Loot!

I've been meaning to post photos of Noah enjoying some of his birthday presents. Of course the real delay is in Mommy posting photos, not in Noah playing with them! And of course of course, I just tried pick some of the best photos, not the best gifts. No fair getting offended, anyone!

The Splash Pool is lots of fun, and our lawn is appreciating the runoff!


Noah likes to press the button over and over on the Little People Tractor until it gets to the longer song, and then he stops and listens and gets the biggest grin on his face. Sometimes he'll dance along.


Aunt Elaine had all kinds of suggestions on how to make the tunnel less scary to teach Noah to go through it, but he was pretty fearless! We just tossed one of his new toys into the middle, and he scurried right after it.


Noah really likes this Shape Sorter. Never heard of the brand (Battat), but I like it a lot. The pieces are easy to get back out, the sides are color-coded with the pieces to add another dimension to the matching (or simplify it, if babies can think that way), and one side has some bead sliders for before they're ready for matching. Plus, some of the shapes are letters and numbers. I'm so impressed. Noah figured out the circle very quickly.


Our neighbors are big baseball fans, and they're trying to get Noah started young with this baby teeball set. It's working. Noah likes to hit the ball off the tee with the bat, and push the buttons to make the little people say "You're SAFE!"


Mommy and Daddy got Noah this Radio Flyer Retro Rocket, and it was almost as big a hit with the older cousins at the party.


The Wii Fit was never intended to be a Noah present, but somebody forgot to tell him that. He loves doing his own version of step aerobics, and "helping" mom with her balance games.

Spoon, anyone?

For the last couple of mornings, Noah's been enjoying yogurt and cheerios for breakfast. In a bowl. With a spoon. It's quite messy!

It's been a while...

My lack of posting should be considered a sign that we've been very busy and happy. We've had a travel weekend, with a family reunion:



a 70th birthday:


two fun nights at the creekhouse:


and several new dogs to meet:


We had another fun weekend playing hostess for our friend Connie, who came to visit all the way from Connecticut. (I only dare post this pic because I warned her she was making a goofy face in order to get a smile out of Noah. When she complains, I might have to take it down.)


In between, there have been lots of swim lessons, lots of walking, and lots of jabbering in Noah-ese. In fact, we've been having so much fun, sometimes we even forget to break out the camera!

For the record,

For the record, peanut butter hair may look nastier than cottage cheese hair, but it smells better three hours later. For the record, I may be obligated to feed Noah at least three times a day, but I refuse to bathe him more than once a day on a regular basis, regardless of how his hair smells! Besides, that's what all this swimming is for, right?

For the record, Noah will still eat plain yogurt off a spoon. He will also eat banana covered in yogurt off a spoon. He will even eat meatball covered in yogurt off a spoon. And corn. This may open a whole new world of possibility.

For the record, how do I implement the three-day allergy wait between new food exposures if I can't get Noah to touch, much less ingest, scrambled eggs or strawberries? What does it take to qualify as exposure? He used to eagerly taste new stuff, at least once.

For the record, one of the best things about turning one is being free to eat/try all those foods that have been off-limits up till now. Maybe my fruit and cheese boy will finally find something else that's gobble-worthy.

And a question: Without getting too graphic (the moms out there know), is there any nutritional value to corn whatsoever if you don't chew the kernels before swallowing?

Cool...

It's 95 degrees outside, and I just got in from running errands with Noah. To take the edge off, I thought I'd share a photo from this weekend:

I Hate Customer Service...

Perhaps I should tag this post "Not about Noah" so that most of you can skip over it. I promise, it really does help me to be able to write stuff like this out, whether anyone reads it or not. That's my disclaimer. No complaining, you were forewarned...

Nothing gets under my skin these days like trying to communicate with customer service reps. I think somewhere in the past few years, they've forgotten what their title means. My latest issue is with Shutterfly, and I almost don't even have the energy to resolve it. But then, the dark pessimistic side of me knows that's what they're banking on, and that irks me to no end.

A few weeks ago, Shutterfly sent me an offer for a free 8x8" photo book with any qualifying purchase. This really appealed to me, since it's a $29.99 value, and something I'd been interested in anyway. This is actually Customer Service Issue #4 related to this order.

Issue #1 was almost a non-issue, but it did require an email to customer service. After spending time and money on a "qualifying order" to get the free photo book, they sent me an email for some other promo, and I had to write and tell them that if they weren't going to give me my photobook, they could refund my "qualifying order" because that was the only reason I'd placed it in the first place. In reality, the photobook promo was still in my account, it was just invisible until you placed a photobook into your shopping cart. Thanks for telling me.

Issue #2: After I spent literally dozens (plural) of hours building the pages of my 20-page book in Photoshop, I couldn't get the covers to upload properly because the Shutterfly program kept cropping them funny. I had to write them to get a link to the bleed-and-crop guideline template thingy. Turns out my image needed an extra inch or so on three sides for wrapping around the cover. This template was easy enough to use, except that in the process I found out I needed to go back and resize all 20 of my regular pages so that their edges didn't get cropped off. No biggie. At least this could be resolved with an email, and better to find out earlier than after it was printed.

Issue #3: A handful of hours of cropping and resizing later, I finally put the finished book in my shopping cart and go to checkout, and I can't get the promo code to work. After an hour of online chat and half an hour on the telephone, they explain that when you choose the "digital scrapbook" theme (as opposed to graduation or new baby or father's day, for example) the book gets a different SKU number and hence is ineligible for the promo. Of course, nowhere in the terms and conditions does it tell you this, and nowhere in the digital scrapbook theme does it mention it's a different category of book. But no matter, some supervisor of a supervisor was willing to manually edit my promo code so that it would work "just this one time."

Issue #4: The book arrives in the mail. The inside is as beautiful as I imagined it could be. The cover and back and spine look sharp except for one thing... the background colors of the three panels don't match. The cover is lighter blue, the spine is darker blue, and the back is grey -- not blue at all. They definitely were EXACTLY the same in my original Photoshop and .jpg images. An email to customer service doesn't help. They respond that the book is a faithful reproduction of the images in my project file, and if I look closely the colors do differ in my uploaded images. So they are half right... the three background blues DO differ in my uploaded images, but don't ask me how or why because the originals definitely don't differ. How can uploading an image file change the background color without changing the photo hues? And how do I stop it from happening so that I can fix my cover? BUT the part about a "faithful reproduction"? How does he know? He's not looking at the book. In fact, the color differences in the uploaded files are opposite of the color differences on the actual book. The uploaded spine image is lightest while the actual front cover is lightest, and the uploaded back image is definitely a dark BLUE, not gray. Their solution is for me to send the book back for refund/credit, fix the project files on my end, and re-order it. Never mind that this book was FREE, so the whole refund/re-order isn't going to work in my favor. Never mind that I can't get the colors to remain consistent during the upload process (I tried again today). And above all, never mind that when you go to preview your finished photobook, Shutterfly thinks that showing facing pages in slightly different shades makes it look more 3D-realistic on the computer screen (as evidenced by all my 20 inside pages that were the same shade in Photoshop and in the actual book, but looked different on the Shutterfly screen). Sigh. I just want to hire someone and say "fix this." Isn't that what CUSTOMER SERVICE is for?

Swimming Pretzel

The second night at swim lessons was even more fun.
Yes, that's a noodle tied around his belly.
Yes, the idea came directly from the swim instructor.
Look at him kick like a frog!

Swim Lessons

Noah had his first swim lesson last night at the YMCA. We had a great time despite a poor first impression of the lessons. The regular instructor was out with a family/hospital emergency, so we had a sub. But the sub missed the first 15 minutes of the 30-minute lesson for her own "emergency in the parking lot." The aide that filled in admitted that she knew nothing about babies, so the first half of the lesson consisted of 2 minutes worth of The Wheels on the Bus, and 13 minutes of "swish the baby around and get them used to the water." Pretty lame, but we had fun nonetheless:




Looking at these photos, I think Noah needs another haircut already! What a scraggly kid! But cute... always cute!

Happy Birthday, Dear Noah!

There's too much I could say, so for now, I won't. We had a wonderful party at home with family and friends, and couldn't ask for anything more. What a wonderful year it has been!

Walking, officially

Noah took 2+4 steps this morning. I say 2+4 because he took two, squatted down like he was going to start crawling like he usually does, and then had a look on his face like, "hey wait, I was doing pretty good at that, let's keep going!" and stood back up to take 4 more steps.

My friend the pediatric physical therapist says that "walking" is SIX steps. 2+4=6, right?

Never mind the semantics, he took 7 steps in a row later in the evening!

Wonderful Whirlwind Weekend

We had a great trip for the holiday weekend. I got to see old college roomies and their families, plus some of Dave's cousins. Noah was ultra-cooperative, and handled the two 4-hr car trips really well. He tolerated us monkeying with his naptimes, bedtimes, and mealtimes, and we even saw a couple more no-cry bedtimes. He got to play with a couple of babies his age, watch in awe of some older kids, climb uncountable flights of stairs, and swim in a pool. Oh, and Dave and I celebrated five years of wedded bliss on Saturday. :)

Changing Mat

Another sewing project, back from my pre-Noah-nesting days: a changing mat. There's not much to this one, except realizing that I could buy fabric-covered rubber sheeting (100% waterproof) and pre-folded quilt binding at a fabric store, and then experimenting with the fancy stitches on my basic sewing machine. Okay, I won't lie -- it's not easy to figure out how to tuck (mitre?) the binding around the corners of the mat, nor how to join up the beginning of the binding to the end. Mine involved a lot of trial-and-error, and I still have lots of room for improvement. But here's a peek at the finished product. We got TONS of use out of these. The photo is from September 2007, when Noah was just 3 months old.

Taggie Blanket

Before Noah was born, I found a really easy pattern to make a "Taggie" Blanket. In fact, I think this pattern and the nesting urge of those last few weeks were the reason I went out and bought a sewing machine! This was so quick and easy and fun that it is still one of my favorite projects, and I've made several more since. Here are the first few:





If you google "taggie blanket tutorial" I'm sure you'll turn up dozens of links far better than anything I could write up here, especially since I didn't take photos of the process. But trust me, it's easy. It was my first sewing project, and I'm no seamstress. But in case you're too lazy to google, here's the gist:

• cut two squares of complementary fabric (cotton, flannel, satin, minky, whatever you like, I made mine anywhere from 15-18" square) and about twenty lengths of ribbon (satin, grosgrain, wide, skinny... again, whatever suits you, mine were 4-6" each).
• pin your squares of fabric, right sides together, and tack the ribbons around the edges, about 5 per side. The ribbons should be folded in half, with the looped end sandwiched between the fabric layers and the cut ends sticking out beyond the fabric just a little.
• sew around the perimeter, leaving a gap on one side between two ribbons so that you can turn the blanket right-side out.
• snip your corners, turn right-side-out, poke the corners out, press the seams flat (especially the gap that is not sewn closed yet), and then sew around the perimeter again, close to the edge but just inside it. (This will close the gap; no hand-stitching required.) If you have decorative stitches on your machine, this may be a fun time to use them.
  

(I'm backdating this because it's old. I actually made the first taggies on 5/19/2007, but I didn't want this to appear as my very first blog entry)

Sprinkler Fun

One of Noah's favorite games is for Daddy to fly him like Superman through the backyard sprinklers. But yesterday it was hot enough to do one better than that.

* this video is also linked in the sidebar to PhotoBucket, if the embedded one doesn't work for ya. Let me know in the comments if there are problems.