A long post about lots of different things

I ordered a car seat! I started writing about the final decision-making process and last-minute pandemonium with actually ordering the car seat, then about three paragraphs along I realized it makes for a whole post all by itself, so I will finish and post it later. Suffice it to say that we ordered a seat, it will arrive Wednesday evening, and that we are excited and relieved! (Oh, and spoiler alert: We got the Britax Boulevard in Aztec, no click safe.)

Aside from writing about the car seat, I also want to be really whiney about the fact that I am sick. I started to feel stuffy on Wednesday night, then woke up Thursday morning, WHAM, full-blown sick. It has been a miserable few days. Turns out it is really hard to be a good mom and take care of my baby while being sick. I could honestly grouse about it for several paragraphs, but I am not going to give in to the negative. I am already starting to feel better, and after a couple more days of rest I should be mostly mended. (The runny nose will likely persist for at least a week because, for some reason, that's how my body works, but I'm sure I will otherwise feel fine in just a day or two).

So here's some of the best parts of the week:

Last Monday (Memorial Day, a day off work) we went to visit some friends who live about an hour south, in the town where Nate and I went to college. The husband is an old friend of mine from high school; we were in band together. I became friends with his wife about six years ago, after they got married, because she (Kimmy) use to host an open-to-everyone waffle breakfast every Saturday morning. Kimmy is absolutely one of my most favorite people in the world. I think of her as a kindred spirit. I don't know that she thinks of me quite as affectionately, but that's okay -- I don't keep a lot of company so I tend to be a bit overly affectionate about the handful of friends in my circle. I try to keep the lovey dovey stuff pretty well contained but sometimes I just can't help it...

Like when our friends let us stop by and suck up half their day, and let us use their baby wipes for the six diaper changes we go through in a four-hour period (how did I forget baby wipes?! Blarg, I felt and still feel pretty dumb) without even batting an eye. They are very generous souls. Nearly every day I find myself wishing that we lived closer to them.

Anyway, we headed south for the bulk of the day to visit with our friends and go walk around on the ol' college campus. It looks about the same as it did when we left five years ago, although there were several new buildings and developments on the East side. It was fun to see the changes, but unfortunately since it was a holiday everything was shut down.

So we had lunch, took our walk, went back to their house for a little more chatting and hanging out, then hit the road.

Back home, Nate went to town on a project we started in the entryway. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" picture, so those of you who have been to our house will just have to call upon your memory, and for those of you who have never been over: when you walk into our house, immediately in front of you there is (was!) a narrow, half-height bookshelf built into the wall. We use to keep toys and trinkets on the shelves. At some point several months ago, Nate suggested that we take out the bookshelf and put in a shoe storage locker for ourselves and our guests. I liked the idea so much that I started ripping out the shelving.

As if we needed another project, right?

We have one of the shoe lockers in our office and we love it -- it's very handy and very tastefully subtle. There's not a lot to be done with the entry way because it's a narrow space with nothing but exits into other rooms, so this is a much more practical/functional yet still simple use of the space.

Anyway, on Monday afternoon, Nate and I knocked out all the rest of the shelving and the studs, then framed the space for the new shoe locker and put the shoe locker frame in place. In other words:

We forgot that the shoe locker doesn't have a backside (it's left open because it's suppose to be mounted to a wall) so we need to get more plywood for the back before we can actually finishing putting together the locker. We also need to figure out how we want to frame the locker and the space. More pictures to come whenever we continue working on it.

(Here's the fully assembled shoe locker:

)

This week I did some sewing. But before I talk about it, let me share story that will help put things into perspective: About a month before my daughter was born, I had a baby shower, and my grandmother gave me a crib bumper. It's cute, it has animals on it. (This generic picture doesn't really do it justice...)

But even though the bumper came from Ikea and the crib came from Ikea, for some crazy reason the ties on the bumper did not line up correctly with the crib bars, and so it wouldn't stay up properly in the crib.

All I needed to do to fix the problem was put the bumper in the crib, mark where the ties needed to go, and add some ties. (Or move the current ties.) Simple, right?

For some reason, it took me almost a year to get it done. Baby Girl was probably about 8 months old before I finally marked the bumper, and then about 10 months old when I finally sewed on the extra ties and installed it in her crib. Sad, right? I know.

So it's no surprise that the crib skirt experienced a similar fate. I had a gift certificate to Pottery Barn that I used to order a very nice, white-with-brown-ribbon-trim skirt for the crib. It arrived in the mail, I put it in the wash, and put it on the crib.... And it was about two inches shorter than the length of the crib. That doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, there was a big gap on either end of the crib skirt and it looked tacky. I got the skirt when my daughter was maybe a month old, and it stayed on the crib for several months. In fact, I think it was my renewed efforts on the crib bumper that finally prompted me to take off the crib skirt. ("Now that I've fixed the bumper, I am going to fix this d----- crib skirt!")

The skirt sat around my craft room for a couple of months before I finally made time to work on it. The skirt has a very nice, full pleat on either side that gave me extra fabric to manipulate. I let out the pleats, cut the lining in half, sewed in a 2-inch length of cloth, narrowed the pleats and sewed them back down.

This picture is a bit fuzzy, but you can see where I put in the new length of fabric:

And here's the "fixed" skirt, installed in the crib (note that it is still a tad short on either end -- I couldn't make it any longer without losing the pleats):

(For the record, I actually ordered two skirts, but I hadn't opened the second one when I discovered the first one was too small, so I sent the second one back.)

Thus, now that my daughter is nearly a year old, her crib is finally all put together. Of course, since she's going to start standing up sometime soon, we will need to lower the crib bed and thus the skirt will be too long. It figures, huh?

Today I made bread. Normal bread, just whole wheat with honey. Actually, I used my Challah recipe but rolled it into normal loaves rather than braiding. It makes for a bit of a fluffy bread -- I think I'm not kneading it quite enough or baking it long enough for it to really thicken/harden -- but Nate and I generally prefer a soft, fluffy bread. Some time soon I'd like to branch out and make a dense, rich rye bread. (I will have to chat with my father in law about this; he's an excellent bread maker and his rye is superb.) If I had more free time, I would love to spend more like baking. For instance, this afternoon I was thinking it would be fun to try and make a cheesecake sometime. I've never made a cheesecake, nor anything like it. I wonder if it's hard?

I often say to Nate that if I could be a stay at home mom, I would like to start making bread for the family. Right now, it's a fun thing to do sometimes on the weekends, but I think it would quickly become overwhelming if it were permanently part of my responsibilities. There's a lot to do, running a home and a family, and Nate and I keep pretty darn busy with the tasks already allocated. But if things were different, well... it sure would be nice to do more baking. (Kimmy, lately I find myself often wishing I were in your shoes! You are so blessed, and I am so happy for you :o)

Now for your favorite part of every post: THE LATEST WITH THE BABY!

Let's start out the baby section with a very cute video:

Baby Girl got two (TWO!) new teeth this week. One of them came through on Monday, the other came through on Friday. She was significantly less fussy and cranky and difficulty during this round of teething. Yes, she woke up earlier, acted a little fussier once in awhile, bit more and nursed a little less, but nothing like the first five teeth. Those additions were hellacious! In comparison, gaining these two teeth was pretty gentle.

Baby Girl has become crazy about animals. She loves, loves, LOVES kitties. Whether it's one of our cats, or a neighborhood cat, or her poppi's pet cat (Miss Kitty), when Darling sees a kitty, she starts squealing and squirming and shaking her arms/hands in delight. If you are holding her, she will fight to be set down. If she's sitting, she will immediately start crawling toward the cat. She is also saying "kitty" although she says it in her baby language, not the actual word. But it's very clearly her version of kitty -- she says something that sounds about like "tee-tee" (although once in awhile she'll say "kit-uh"). I will find it endlessly amusing if her first word is, in fact, kitty. Nate doesn't think it's cute, he's still working hard to get her to say momma or mommy. (She does say "mah-mah" but it's not really her word for me, it's just a sound she makes.)

Our pet cats like to sleep under our bed. Sometimes we take baby girl into our room, lift up our bed skirt, and gently pull one of the cats out from his or her basket under the bed. Baby Girl has learned this routine and will now do this for herself sometimes when she is exploring -- she will crawl into our room, lift up the bed skirt, peer under the bed, and start pulling out the kitty basket. When Jack is in a gracious mood he'll come out and let her snuggle on him. Or he'll just run away, which is even better: Darling loves to chase the kitties around the house.

This video sorta captures what I'm talking about (sorry it's dark at the beginning, and fuzzy throughout, and that I blow my nose somewhat loudly...)

Finally, please remember: If your mommy dresses you up in an outrageously shiny princess dress, please play the part by banging things together and causing a general ruckus. (Because you are, after all, the center of the universe.)