So Cute! [Faint Dead Away]

I love the smell of newborns in the morning:

Meet Hazel--Tillie's newest baby friend. I cannot wait for her to grow up and come over and play with all of Tillie's toys and go on walks and tell us stuff and have a slumber party and join our soccer team and show us her latest tai kwan do routine and explain to us what her favorite kind of animal is and why...

...until then I'm just going to gaze at her in awe and smell her head. It still strikes me dumb that people come out of people.

Ravioli Factory

Once again, Scott got me the best present for Christmas--a ravioli maker attachment for my mixer. It makes the cutest little plumpkins. My brother and I had to give it a whirl:

Cousin Madz Comes to Visit

Elf Troubles

Trying on the hat:

It's too itchy:

The sock is more comfy:

Little Drummer Girl

Helping daddy with his drumming:

Helping mommy with the laundry (yes that is my underwear around her neck):

Tillie vs. the Sock Puppet

Shredder with a Small Footprint

Tillie can shred paper, but she does it on her own time. With reams of paper in need of anti-ID-theftifying, I decided to speed up the process and get an electronic shredder. These are such satisfying machines! It is right up there with my linguine cutter, both achieving a tactile/kinesthetic satisfaction-o-meter rating of 9.5. (10 is reserved for peeling those protective films off of LCD displays.) Here is the result of 5 years worth of old filings that needed to go out for recycling.

Pure Comfort

Warm milk on Grandma's lap:

Pocket Organizer

I've been meaning to organize my cabinets this holiday break. Someone beat me to it while I had my back turned. Another thing on my to do list is baby-proofing...

Elephant or Elaphant Man?

I had a vision of making cute little elephant dolls for all my baby friends this christmas. I tried to make a test pattern inspired by this photo:

[Image from: http://www.craftconn.com/]

...but sadly it turned out like this photo:

Uhm...it is a good thing I live with an actual toy designer, because Scott was able to come up with a better design. Hence, there are many babies who will not be scared of the christmas presents that I am giving them this year. Of course, you will just have to check back in a week or so to find out what the improved versions look like. (I don't want to ruin the surprise!)

Mamarazzi

You have to sneak up on the baby...

Or the photo looks like this:

Handy

I had a bit of free time last week and thought I'd use it to fix up some unfinished projects around the house. One of the previous owners must have fancied him/herself a handyman, and let me tell you, he/she was greatly mistaken. Not a single room in the house is free of this numbskull's jury rigging. After an afternoon of fixing all the easy things, I felt pretty darn skilled, but I think I might have met my match: the refrigerator. It's been tiled into its nook such that you need to lift it half an inch to get it out of it's "hole." The problem is that there is not a half an inch of head room above it, so what do you do? We've already cracked a tile trying to get the thing out for maintenance. Probably once or twice a month, the motor breaks down, the freezer melts, and the food all spoils. Then it feels better and gets back to freezing again for another couple of weeks. I imagine that there is about 3 puppies worth of animal hair back there gumming things up! The only thing more stressful than a car that keeps breaking down (also a problem this week) is a fridge that periodically stops working. If Tillie were a little smaller, we could just send her back there with a tiny vacuum cleaner...

She Walks!

These pudgy feet were made for walking.
(Sorry, sideways cam again, duh!)


More walking and some other antics:

Burp!

Tillie feeds herself whipped cream.

The rest of us subsist on more savory victuals.

The Thanksgiving Day Spread:

From the P.O.V. of a Brussels Sprout:

Feasting Matriarchs:

Sweepies

You know what is better than chocolate? Holding a sleeping baby in your arms--I swear!

Tilberforce: The Striped Adventurer

Twapped:

Slide Fun:

New Shoes:

Baby Pigs:

Sewer Safari:

Marrow

My friend is very likely going to need a bone marrow transplant. I hate it. I hate knowing it. I hate thinking about it. But, I also hate not thinking or talking about it. A bone marrow transplant sounds painful. It sounds dangerous. It sounds like something that an athletic, healthy eating, smart, and careful person should have been able to bet on never having to do.

Whenever I find myself feeling depressed about my ridiculously mundane problems, I am quickly sobered by the realization that there is a much greater problem--I cannot help someone that I love avoid a horrible and scary thing. I wish I could take a scalpel and cut out her cancer and then cut out my own cancer-free tissues and gently place them into her bones and kidneys and chest and, you know what, I keep forgetting all the places that she has cancer it's so many. I want them all to be gone. I want to kill them. This would be full-on pre-meditated murder of those disgusting, evil cancer cells.

Yet, I am completely helpless to help her. There are just so many flowers and cupcakes and "helpful" errands you can run for someone who really just needs new bone marrow. Today I did the far-second best thing that I could do, which is sign up for the national bone marrow registry. It is not as satisfying as I want it to be. It will not help anyone I know AT ALL. About all it does is let me fantasize that some day I'll be the person that a friend of someone who is very sick will be thankful for because I can do for her friend what she is not genetically capable of doing but wants badly to do, which is maybe cure her cancer.

Blast from the Past: Tills and her Auntie Camile this last 4th of July--oh my goodness I miss her fatness (Tillie's, not Camile's of course!)

Anipals

Noodling

Mommiocrity

When I was thinking about having children, I remember fearing that I would become boring. I couldn't figure out the mechanism, so I concluded that it must be a myth the idea that parents are not interesting people. Well, I finally figured it out. I'm a parent now and I just don't have time to do interesting things anymore. Tillie needs to be fed, bathed, cleaned up after, entertained, exercised, and kept out of danger. These chores can be quite fun and sweet, but they take up 3 to 8 hours each day, depending on if I have a babysitter to help out. I have only two hour blocks of time to get anything else done when she naps, and that is not enough time to accomplish anything of substance. With a child, I can't afford to make less money and spend time on nonpaying or low-paying work projects, which tend to be more exciting. I can't afford the time or cost of extravagant travel or hobbies. I'm so worn out mentally that I can barely get away from the television after the kid goes to bed. I have read exactly one book that was not about child-rearing or pregnancy in the last 2 years. The idea of having a second child really frightens me. Is it really true that the most creative thing that I've accomplished in the last couple of months is watching a whole season of Project Runway? Would I have done even that if I had a second set of wiggling fingernails to trim?

Juice Time

Such a crazy-wonderful week that I must catalog its highlights: I turned 33 and threw a dinner part for 10--pumpkin ravioli with zucchini-leak soup. I'm still eating the wonderful leftovers. Then I pulled an all-nighter, which was horrible, but afterward my client seemed appropriately guilty for having forced me to. Today while I was jogging with Tillie, some random lady shouted out "You go girl!" Apparently, I looked awesome (or perhaps like I needed some encouragement, but I like to think the former). And the cherry on top is that I am in love with our dreamboat elect. I spent the entire morning reading about him and his family on wikipedia. I have more brothers and sisters than he has, which so far seems to be his only shortcoming.

Bizzy Weekend