I've been doing that thing where I open up Semagic and stare at it a while, or possibly start typing something that I don't end up rolling with.I am determined to post something tonight. Of course, if I don't, all this determination will be lost and no one but me will ever know how I don't follow through. Well, me, and M. He's pretty familiar with my lack of ability to finish anythi

So anyway, last year, we had a rainbow birthday party for Evie. She loved it so much that she said she wanted her next party to have the same theme. As the birthday drew nearer, though, she's been talking for months about how she wants a FIDDLE birthday party. The child was giving detailed instructions on what kind of fiddle cake she wanted. (It might be too hard for Mommy to make a cake shaped like a fiddle, so that's okay! She can just make a regular cake and DRAW a fiddle on top!" Yes. Because I can totally pipe a realistic violin onto a sheet cake with pink frosting. Totally. I had a thought of trying to cut out a fiddle shape in sheet cake and then maybe construct a neck out of rice kristpie treats or something, covered in chocolate, and... people, this would in no way have worked. I do not possess the talents to construct a cake in the shape of a fiddle, and I can't even draw a fiddle with a pencil, much less with icing.) I was putting that particular question off while trying to come up with other fiddle-themed party ideas. Decorations? Well.. maybe I could find a fiddle shape to cut with my Silhouette (digital cutting machine). And I could... uh.. make a ... ummm.. I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE. It doesn't really matter because birthday parties are not the big deal here that they are for some of you, and for E especially--her guests will be family, and none of the kids have themed parties. Heck, one of them was asking me why there were rainbows all over the place at the last one. Not a big deal, you know?

Imagine my relief when day before yesterday, E confessed that she would actually like another rainbow party instead. I didn't say much in response, but waited until today to bring it up again and she says she is absolutely sure that she wants a rainbow party again. So--yay! No fiddle theme! And I have experience with this particular party and the parts of it that she liked the most. This should make my next few weeks easier.

Also, I am ticked off at Evie's gymnastics class because after I finally got her moved up to the next level (she's been spending too much time being bored and waiting for her turn for my tastes) I found out that it's a mixed class, with levels one and two in the same class. It's a complete waste of time--the only thing it accomplished was making her switch teachers (to ones that so far aren't as good) and making me go at a less convenient time. The head of the division is supposed to be there tomorrow teaching because the new teacher is going to be out of town, so I'm trying to figure out how to discuss my problems with her. I hate confrontation but they're making me really want to give it up entirely. The YMCA is the only place in town that does gymnastics so I'm stuck with them unless we quit, or drive out of town. I wouldn't mind quitting myself but Evie is really into it right now, and I think it would be a disservice to her to stop at this stage of her interest if I don't have to. It's irritating though.

Today, we were sitting around and I decided it was time to get some housework done, so I told Evie it was time to help me. I WANT to be one of those parents who make their children do their chores. In reality, she gets by with doing less than I would prefer, so I've been working on this for the last couple of weeks by coming up with projects for her to do. (It's just so much easier to do it myself!) As long as I keep a steady stream of manageable tasks ready for her, she does pretty well. I must have been feeling lucky, because I then went and asked M if he would like to come help me pick up the house. Although admitting that it was not really his preference, he agreed nicely and even said himself that it would be good for Evelyn to see that everyone in the family helps out. Yay boyo! I was just thinking of picking up some clutter and putting it all where it goes, but somehow we got really into it and really cleaned. It was fantastic! This would have taken me two days to do on my own. I am a better person when my house is not full of clutter.

Spring! It is such a lovely time of year! Our dogwoods are blooming and the Easter lillies have come and gone and the tulips are going now. Tulips are my favorite flower (as my child likes to remind me) and so I particularly enjoy seeing them pop up. The weather has been amazing lately. And, I would tell you all about how I have been too busy to post because I've been outside soaking up all the sunshiney goodness but you have known me too long to believe me. We've been out and about some, though it seems like it's always raining on the days we are going places. I'm not sure how we manage that.

So the mud* is back up and I am kind of remembering why I haven't spent the last six or eight years hanging out there. It is so fun and nostalgic and I'm enjoying the old routine of doing texty communications, but the players, alas, they are gone. I mean, now all of them, but most of them and those who are left are idle most of the day. There is a Facebook group devoted to old players and as everyone started reminiscing, at least two muds have come back online or are planning to do so, including "mine". I just wish my people were all back online too, though. You can't go home again, etc etc. I suppose I am just too sentimental for my own good. :)

*I've explained this before but for the benefit of those who weren't around then or who don't remember: Mud = a text-based game. It is the equivalent of World of Warcraft without fancy graphics, developed long before it was possible to do those fancy graphics and the direct ancestor of those games. It is also more fun than WoW, or it was in its day anyway. There are still active muds out there, but the kind that we played (aber) are relatively slow these days. M and I met there, almost fourteen years ago.

Navel-gazing treatise on Evie's extracurricular activities:

First of all, can you call it an extracurricular activity when she doesn't yet have curricular activities? I mean...really.

Anyway, I wrote about how ballet was a drag now. Promptly thereafter, she started liking it again and we had a nice heart-to-heart discussion in the car one day where I realized..she never did hate it. What she hates is that they're not doing enough BALLET at ballet. It's a class for little kids, you know, so they do stuff to make it more fun and less work. She expected to learn how to dance like Angelina Ballerina but they just do a few minutes of practice at a time and then move on to fun dances or tumbling time or whatever. Another mom told me before i signed her up that her daughter was frustrated at this very thing because she expected to be able to dance right away and didn't really see the way that all the little exercises and dance moves came together to be a full dance at the recital. Having said that, I guess anything is possible but I still don't want to do ballet next year. It's a matter of money, if nothing else. I think she is getting more benefit and enjoyment out of gymnastics and the cost of all these things is becoming prohibitive, especially since she will be starting violin lessons this year. We hope, assuming that we can find a good teacher. We have a really good lead on one, but we haven't contacted him yet. When Evie was about two, we went into a museum downtown because they had a luthier exhibit and..well, M is a luthier. It had to be done. They had an area set up with a guy there letting kids handle the instruments. She didn't care much for the guitar or the mandolin or the cello or the dulcimer but she picked up a bow and made one stroke across the fiddle and it made this perfect clear note and she has been set ever since. SHE WILL PLAY THE FIDDLE. M told her that she couldn't start lessons until she was at least five. Turns out that she will be five in a month and a half. Oi.

Anyway, fiddle and gymnastics and ballet and maybe swimming this summer and that is just TOO MUCH, both in time and money. I especially will not enjoy it after she starts kindergarten, I am sure. She is moving to the next class at gymnastics now. I think she should have done this a long time ago, but in the fall, she was the only kid in the class so it didn't matter much. In January, they restructured and eliminated certain class times and so the class is full again, but they're all littler kids and it's moving much too slowly for where she is. Not their fault, not the instructors fault, but not a good situation for her, either. Unfortunately, they don't offer the preschool II class on Thursday mornings, so I'm going to lose my weekly Thursday gymnastics routine. The class will be on Monday evenings instead, which I do not enjoy nearly as much. I do understand, of course, that kids in school can't do school hour classes so it makes sense but it's personally not convenient to me. AND, she won't have the same teachers because they're no longer there on Mondays. I took her to a make-up session yesterday afternoon and met the other teachers and... I don't want to judge them yet because she was again not really in the correct class for her skill level and they didn't know her yet either, but I am pretty sure I do not like them nearly as much. Evie is okay with it, which is both surprising and relieving. She honestly still loves gymnastics. She tends to want to give up when things do not come easily to her but she really throws herself into practicing her cartwheels and stuff. She's had a terrible time learning to do a cartwheel but she is finally GETTING it. She's just working on form now.

I am back on a healthy eating kick, and I tried stating back on the wii fit exercise last week and it made my ankle start hurting again. :( I guess it's not quite ready for that. Next time I'll have to be more careful of exercises that stretch the ankle. I think I know which one caused it. I'm thinking of trying to get into sparkpeople.. I know it's helped some people. I've signed up for it in the past but have never managed to do anything with it. I am sure I should be logging my food intake and all that for accountability but I really hate doing that. I wouldn't mind it if not for trying to figure out how many calories something has. Boooring. I have been considering going to the gym again but... eh. Maybe later on.

I guess it's time to go set today's craft project out. I took an empty bleach bottle and cut a door and windows out with an x-acto knife and now Evie needs to decorate it--it'll be a house for the polly pocket turned fairies that we made last week. (she colored three sets, front and back, of butterfly wings and then I laminated them and used elastic string to make arm holes to turn her dolls into fairies. They turned out really really well. No, I didn't come up with this myself and yes, it was from pinterest...sorta. I did see it on pinterest but it's from a blogger that I follow for her kids ideas. She has really really great ideas. link. Evie loved the wings last week so much that she insisted on bringing one to the library with her and she's not one of those kids that has to have random toys with her all the time. It was cute. :)

The weather this winter has been so strangely warm. Not complaining! But Evie has been looking forward to a good snow so she could play in it, of course, and the weather has not been cooperating. Until today. Perfectly gorgeous snowfall last night and we have a few inches of unusually pretty, well-behaved snow. By well-behaved, I am not referring to its ability to stick together, because it's sort of a dry powdery type of snow. It was melted from the roads only by the time M went to work this morning, though. Pretty snow but not unsafe driving conditions--excellent! Except... poor Miss E was not allowed to go out and play in it.

Remember last week, how I was all whiny about taking my kid to the doctor and she did nothing? I swear, I really am that person who is against the overuse of antibiotics but I *KNEW* she needed something this time. Friday afternoon, in the midst of our tornado warning* panic, E starts talking about her ears hurting. I called the nurse, who said the doctors wouldn't call in an antibiotic without her being seen by the doctor. (You can imagine how pleased I was, since I had taken her in once already for it.) By nine, she is crying non-stop, saying "My ear! It really really hurts! OWWWWWW!" and variations on that theme. The Tylenol finally kicked in and she fell asleep after a couple of hours of crying. At midnight, she woke up again screaming for two more hours, and then at 5:30. She only wanted Daddy, which was sort of nice for me in that I didn't have to lay there with someone screaming in my ear but that is not really how mommies work, you know? I wanted to be able to DO something for her and none of the usual remedies were working for her. The last time, she came to our bed and wanted to stay there with Daddy, so I went to the couch and set the alarm on my phone for eight so I could get up and call the pediatrician. Turns out that it's hard to fall asleep if there is a small person screaming in your house even if it is not sitting right next to you. Anyway, in the morning, off to the doctor we went, and blessedly, all ear pain was gone. !! Prescriptions picked up (with a modicum of trouble related to dosage that almost meant we wouldn't have been able to pick it up until Monday...) and dispensed and we were ready to move on with the weekend when.... on Sunday, child wakes up with a ruptured ear drum. I had personally never experienced this and I hope you don't have to, either, because the stuff that drains out of an ear? It's gross. And freaky because you know, nothing is supposed to come out of an ear. Google assured me that this is usually okay, though, so I waited until today, when the office was open, to call and ask the nurse about it. She said she would need to be seen, so we headed out in the snow to the doctor this morning. He added some drops to her meds and, when asked, said absolutely no way to the question of her being allowed to play in the snow. That was my feeling, too, but my arctic love thought she'd be fine. L)

(Except I am worrying now because the ear drops contain a fluoroquinolone antibiotic and I am allergic to those. I wonder if it's hereditary? I am pretty sure allergies of that type are, to some extent, but what chance then that she will have a reaction to it? That's what prompted my major rash a few years back, in 2005, if you remember it. I'd link to it but am too lazy to go searching. Full-body rash that caused the allergist to take pictures and invite all his colleagues in because it was so unusual. In way of a small update on this issue? I have since learned that that antibiotic is not prescribed on an outpatient basis anymore, and I got the impression that it probably shouldn't have been prescribed to me in the first place. No one actually told me that straight-out, though. It worked well, though--it did cure me. Of course, then it nearly killed me but whatever. DRAMA, YES. I am so allowed drama on this one, as I think anyone who actually saw me would attest. Also, I will never in my entire life think of the word "fluoroquinolone" without thinking of the anesthesiologist when E was born. He was pissed that the nurses had given me IV drugs that turned me loopy and unable to consent to his epidural spiel, but when he asked if I had any allergies (after I apologized to him for being stoned) I told him I was allergic to fluoroquinolone antibiotics. He was impressed that I managed to remember such a word while stoned out of my mind. Then everyone turned into giant foam fingers, like at ball games, and I don't remember much after that for a while.)

On the bright side, she is clearly not feeling too bad currently, and hopefully we're on the mend now. And, I think I earned bonus mom points because I brought in a tub full of snow so she could still play in the snow while inside. She made miniature snowmen with julienned baby carrots and raisins, and then she made an igloo, and her Polly Pockets made snow angels. After about half an hour, I carried the tub to the sink and gave her a spray bottle full of water with food coloring and let her spray it all over the snow, which she enjoyed greatly, and when she was done with that, I gave her the sprayer from the sink, turned it to hot water and let her melt all the snow. I think she enjoyed that more than anything else. :)

*Tornado. I'm sure you heard about the big storm thing last week? It sort of took over the entire day. School was dismissed early in most places and businesses were encouraged to send their people home early. It was actually bad enough that even M got to come home early, and he never does. Luckily, it passed us by but a town next door to my hometown was destroyed. Since it's so close to home, I'm seeing nothing but pictures of the devastation on Facebook this week. It's pretty awful. It's wonderful how much warning there was, though--I'm sure otherwise the fatalities would have been much worse. I'm so relieved that none of my family/friends was greatly affected by it. And then, to add insult to injury, three days later, six inches of snow falls on them. At least it's melting fast.

My week has been hectic so far! Not bad, mostly, but we've been on the go quite a lot more than usual. I had to go pick up my girl on Tuesday. Instead of going all the way to my mom's house to get her, we met halfway. Well, if halfway is what you would call one hour for me, half an hour for her. ;) We had lunch and talked and then did a tiny bit of shopping before Evie and I headed home. We were only here an hour before we had to leave for ballet, though. As we were driving there, my car started making strange scraping noises upon application of the brakes, which struck me as a problem. Brake pads, I was informed when I got home.

Normally if a car breaks down, we take it to the shop after M gets home from work and then pick it up after work the next day (or when it's ready, anyway.) For a number of logistical reasons, that wasn't the optimal solution this time--I wanted to take Evelyn to the doctor, for one thing, and then gymnastics this morning. So... I got to take it to a different shop by myself and wait for it to be done. With a four-year-old. FUN! But actually, that wasn't too bad in the end. I called one of my friends from my old job, and she spread the word a bit, and a group of girls met me for lunch at a Mexican restaurant (almost) next door. The fly in the ointment was the severe thunderstorm and tornado watch going on at the time, but I actually managed to time it really well, and it wasn't raining while we were talking over there or back. Plus, by the time I got back from having a fun lunch, the car was just about done. I had just enough time to call the pediatrician and make an appointment for later in the afternoon and then they came back with my keys. It really couldn't have worked out much better, except that when I got home, I had a text message from M telling me that I should only let them do half of what they were doing--I hadn't had a chance to see it before it was all done with. Oops. Apparently the back brakes did not need replacement as urgently as they said. How was I supposed to know? He sent me to get them fixed and I did. I mean, ya gotta have brakes, right? ;) Oh, well.

Evie is not exactly sick right now, but she's not really NOT sick, either. Back in January, she started acting all weird and then she got sick and then she got better and then she got sick and then she got better and then she got sick and.. etc. Through it all, she's kept a runny nose and a really nasty cough and a fussy attitude and she's tired all the time. Finally, I decided that I had had enough when it occurred to me that another symptom was probably related--she can't HEAR stuff anymore. I will be talking to her and she will keep asking me, "What did you say?" or just not responding. My mom was really concerned about her hearing and I started noticing it more. So, I made the appointment yesterday, which was a total waste of time and effort and money. I am really, really not one of those people who require antibiotics for things they won't help, but the child has been sick for six weeks. She has something that is not going away on its own. However, I think the woman saw a mostly healthy child (after waiting 45 minutes, E's patience was wearing thin so I had her standing on one foot, etc, when the doctor walked in.) Her opinion is that Evie has allergies. My opinion is that we won't be seeing this doctor (think she's not an actual doctor, actually) again if I can help it. Her hearing test was fine, when they inserted the thingie in her ear and played beeps at her, so she completely dismissed the hearing thing. She does have fluid in one ear, though, and that can cause temporary hearing loss--not that SHE said that, but Google did. I don't know. I really could have been okay with a "this is not an antibiotic issue" if presented in the right way, but the kiddo really doesn't seem like she has allergies. She seems like she's been sick since January. She seems, in fact, like she's had a raging sinus infection since January, based on my extensive experience with raging sinus infections. But..whatever. Bring on the Zyrtec, I suppose, once we actually make it to the store to acquire said Zyrtec (her official recommendation.) I had asked M to buy some last week, but he couldn't find the kids versions. I've had some success with keeping sinus infections at bay with allergy meds in the past so I had been planning on trying it already.

Have I mentioned that I am very disenchanted with ballet by now? It's not exactly that the child for whom I am dragging myself out into the cold for every week doesn't even enjoy it, but it's... sort of like the child for whom I am dragging myself out into the cold for every week doesn't even enjoy it. She doesn't particularly want to leave the house. Ever. Even when it's one of her fun activity things. She drags her feet and there's a fight to get her ready to leave. (Yeah. Kindergarten. I KNOW.) She seems to have fun after she's there. After we're in the CAR she seems to be cool. But, she's very meh about it mostly. It's not fun and exciting and the culmination of her life's dream anymore. It's more like "oh. Ballet again. Whatevs." This is not worth sixty bucks a month to me. I'm glad she got to do it, but I will be so relieved when it's over, and I think she will too. I think it's occurred to her that it's WORK, and they want her to dance the way THEY say, not the way she wants. She actually has a pretty good sense of rhythm for a little kid, when it comes to dancing. She dances better than I do (although, this is not saying much.) They do ballet in sort of a school-year arrangement, September through May, with a recital at the beginning of June. We are going to make her see the year through in a honoring-your-commitments sort of way, but she won't be doing dance again in the fall unless something major happens to change my mind, and I really can't imagine what that would be at this point. Gymnastics, however, is still something she enjoys. She told me recently that she wants to be a gymnastics teacher when she grows up. Unlikely to be what she settles on, but cute nonetheless. :) I can sort of see her being a teacher, actually. She's bossy enough for it, certainly. Of course, she kind of doesn't like other kids but maybe they'll grow on her.

I just found out that Evie's soon-to-be elementary school starts at 7:25ish. I noticed this because I have a few different pre-k tasks to do today involving scheduling an appointment for her physical, etc. I was looking at the school's website and noticed that the bus route by our house picks up students at 6:32. And I was thinking, geez, I am not putting my child on a bus an hour and a half before school starts, guess I'll be driving her. (Which.. I most likely would be anyway.) I don't know why I assumed that schools always start at eight but mine pretty much always did. It was pretty cool because as I was looking at this chart, I noticed that the bus should go past here at 2:56 in the afternoons and it was 2:55, by coincidence. So I turned my head toward the front windows and waited. Sure enough, the bus drove by a minute later. I am dork but I thought that was pretty cool timing.

Miss E is with my parents today. She hasn't been as wild about staying with them lately, but she pitched a royal fit last night to stay for some reason. Actually, I found out today that we had some misunderstandings about this decision to let her stay. What *I* heard was heartbroken sobbing to M about not wanting to leave, and therefore, when she came into the kitchen and my mom asked her if she wanted to spend the night, I let her stay. What I didn't hear was apparently a royal-brat meltdown before the tears began about how she was NOT going home, which is exactly the sort of thing that always makes us deny her request. So, kind of a parenting mistake there because that is one rule that we are pretty firm on, that she can't just start crying and demanding to get her way, as she is a drama queen girl child and I fear the results of bending on that. However, having said that... I am pretty darn happy with how that worked out because I have been in dire need of a day to myself to get things done in peace. I have a backlog of things to do, plus a need for a little quiet time. We've had a rought time the last few weeks and it's good to have a little time at home without someone prone to break out in a fit of moodiness. :)

So, today I have done our taxes and scheduled a physical and eye exam for Evie, and vacuumed the house and put away a ton of toys and other things out of place, and ebay auctions and laundry and sheets and dishwasher, and I had a healthy chocolate breakfast. (Two Hershey's kisses. See, it was even low-cal.) It feels so great to get things crossed off the list, and to know that the rest of the week will not be spent catching up on things like this. I even put lotion on my feet. It's a banner sort of day. ;)

M has just spent the last ten minutes doing a monologue about how (in summary) it is okay that my eyesight is horrendous because neither time travel nor banjos are something I will need to worry about. I'm reading Outlander currently, or rather, the seventh in that series. helloheather mentioned it favorably at some point and I finally got around to reading them. I am really liking them except I am pretty sure that she creates plot lines and characters solely because she wants to do weird accents in her dialogue. Also, I have been using the word "wee" a lot. ;) I was trying to say that I would be totally screwed if I accidentally went back in time because I am blind as a bat without my glasses. That explains the time travel part but the banjos...ahh, well. That's a manolin guy for ya, always ready with a slur on banjos. Anyone else read them?

I think that the mommy spidey sense is an amazing thing. You know how you diagnose your kid as being sick long before they actually display tangible symptoms? I have been waiting for it for days and there it is. I am beginning to think she's been sick for weeks with one thing, actually. It's not that she seems sicker currently than your average cold or similar (except her cough is beginning to worry me) but I think she will find herself in the doctor's office on Monday unless there's marked improvement tomorrow. She never got completely well from the last thing before she got it again.

I have sort of given the couponing up, most of the way. It's not that it's not still a valid and fun hobby, it's that that stupid freaking show has turned it into a three-ring circus. It's one thing to spend ten hours a week on your hobby/part-time job (since I do the sales, I have in the past considered it such.) It's another to spend five hours making a shopping list, printing coupons, organizing inserts and clipping things and then spend three or four hours doing the shopping and coming home with a lot of fun loot and another thing entirely to spend that same amount of time doing something only to go out shopping and find nearly nothing in stock because of all the newbies. Part of it is that I had shifted my shopping times--I used to go out on Sunday mornings, but we go to church now. Still, even going on Sunday afternoon finds things out of stock for the week and it's just too much of a hassle. I let it go sometime before Christmas--which is also my traditional time of year to tone it down anyway because I do a lot of other shopping things then. I just haven't picked it back up much yet. I am still DOING it, but in a more normal-person sort of way. I just have a lot of other things going on these days and it's a lot of work.

In any case, I ran out of shampoo finally, a couple of weeks ago, and I went out to my storage room and found... nothing. Eek! I hadn't bought shampoo in ages and it's been literally years since I bought shampoo without it being close to free. I kept thinking I'd make a list and see if I could find any deals or freebies and do a little shopping this week, but I never got around to it. I've been using Evie's shampoo a little, but mostly those samples and trial sized bottles that I normally never actually use. (Am I the only one with a big pile of those things that I never think about using?) It's been driving me crazy but at the same time, I thought it was a great opportunity to get rid of those things so I was trying to force myself to go with it. Anyway, I went out running errands today, one of which was the grocery shopping, and while I was there... I decided to bite the bullet and just BUY SOME SHAMPOO, just like a normal person, coupon or no. I know that this story of hair care purchasing is not particularly compelling, except... I realized that just before I put it into my cart, I actually darted glances up and down the aisle in shame, checking to see if anyone had noticed what I was purchasing. It was exactly the same as those self-conscious kids you see standing around in Walmart, trying to work up the nerve to go peruse the condoms. I bought hair care products at retail price! The SHAME.

(You know what the absolute worst part was? In my furtive shampoo selection process, I grabbed the wrong bottle and came home with conditioner. I STILL have no shampoo. Duh.)

I am beginning to think that I am not entirely comfortable with a truly clean house. I had a really clean house, last weekend. It looked great. It made me feel somewhat antsy, though, like I'm afraid to do anything for fear of messing it up, or like it's someone else's house. It just feels strange to me. It stayed pretty clean through the first half of the week, but has been slowly degrading day by day since. I'm sure that says something about my psyche.

I am not sure where time goes. I remember being young, and thinking that the days went by so slowly, but now, it's just... wasn't it only last week that we were doing the Christmas thing? Mid-February. Crazy. And speaking of time, next week will mark a decade of LJ for me, which is also crazy.

Being a serial hobbyist, I am back into sewing at the moment and specifically, quilting. I made a table runner for M's parents for Christmas, and then M fell in love with it so that he wanted a wall hanging for the end of the hallway. I didn't get started on it before Christmas, like I had planned, but I had it done for Valentine's Day. I've also started a quilt for Evie, which is.. hmm. The top is somewhere shy of half done, but not dreadfully so. I have been dreading the actual quilting of a twin-sized quilt, though, and Evie and I discussed the possibility of just making it as a snuggle-sized quilt. She thought that was a better idea than for her bed, without me even directing her into it. I don't know. I would prefer it to bed bed-sized but I would also prefer it to be done sooner and require less work.

Here's the first one, the table runner for M's parents for Christmas.



Then there's M's Valentine's Day thing, which he picked out most of the fabrics for. I added the yellow, which I am pretty happy about. I even remembered to add little folded triangles to two of the back corners for a dowel rod to slide into and hang it with. I have now ended three sentences in one paragraph with a preposition, which is bad even for me. Anyway, it's hanging up at the end of the hallway just as planned and, if I do say so myself, it looks great there. I have tried to hang nearly every piece of artwork in this house down there and M has always been against it for one reason or another. Now I'm glad that spot was open because it looks like it was made for it...which....actually....well... it was. ;)

Here it is, hanging at the end of the hallway. This may surprise you but there is zero natural light down there, so this wasn't the best photo session we've ever had. Sending Evie to do it may not have contributed, though.

M was helping her, though, and he turned it over to get the back in a picture, too, hence the wonky hanging thing at the top. I wish the lint had gotten brushed off, though! There's a bookcase (made for my by my grandfather <3) below it that used to be my "books to read next" bookcase. Now it is my "books I will probably never read" bookcase, since I fell in love with my book reader, and most of what's left there are rejects from various used book sales that never looked appealing enough to choose next. I think I shall make it one of my next organizational projects. ANYWAY. On top of the bookcase, there's a large picture of Zinkensdamm in Stockholm, and a picture of us taken there (it's where he proposed) just after we got engaged. :)

And speaking of quilting, I don't have a picture of it, but I have about thirty blocks done on the quilt-as-you-go quilt that I started. Of course, I had twenty when I posted that in April of last year so that is actually some truly terrible progress. Oh, well. The problem is that every time I lay them out and start working on them, I decide to make it bigger. ;) The truly horrible thing is that I still haven't tested the process of joining them together, though I do have the fabric for it, at least. I also think that my new sewing machine seems to have a harder time with a bunch of layers than my old cheapo did. We'll have to see how it goes, but I am just hoping that if my new machine won't sew it, my old one will, at least. It is actually not an abandoned project, though. I cut out strips for it just this week and intend to start making blocks again. I was planning on making it 5x7, which would mean I was almost done, but I think I decided on 6x7. Still, that wouldn't take too long if I would just focus. I seem to have gotten derailed on a great many things last year. Not sure why. It truly feels like that post from April was no more than three or four months ago.

I don't have the pictures transferred from Evie's quilt yet, and this post is long enough anyway so we'll have to save that for later. :) I have to field the "I want candy" complaints department for a while, and maybe make a little dinner. :)

I just looked up the tentative first day of school for 2012-2013, in which my BABY will be starting kindergarten. August 8, with registration in April. That is six months from now. Let the freaking out begin. ;) Oh, I don't know. Part of me is worried but part of me knows that she'll be fine. I have been assuming that she will be going to a particular elementary school in town, but it occurred to me today that I need to double-check that before we show up at their registration event. I couldn't see a zoning map or anything sensible like that on the website--maybe I'm just weird to expect things like that, I don't know--but I did see a bus schedule, with what bus number goes to what streets. Now I am still confused, but about something different. How do I know if I am on the "short end" of my street? I am thinking that your average residential street pretty much has two ends of equal size. ;) One end goes to the school I was expecting it to and the other end goes to a different school. I am still pretty sure which end we fall on, but short end? Really? That's as descriptive as you can get? I'll call and ask to be positive, but I'm pretty sure. All of my neighbors are retired, by the way, of the ones close enough for me to know.. no young kids.

I have always resisted playing Facebook games because I have played real computer games in the past. The Facebook games are gateway games, appealing to a different person--the ones who have never been into gaming, you know? And I have heckled many a Farmville player. Alas, how the high and mighty fall--I have fallen into addiction with CastleVille. I only clicked on it the first time for promotional reasons (Swagbucks told me to.) Now I have a complex series of fake Facebook accounts for gifting purposes, and I have a dozen FB friends now that I don't even know, and I have always STRONGLY been against that. It's a really fun game.. but I still feel like a dork for being so into it after all of these years of resisting the FB game thing.

Kiddo was feeling better today--still not totally back on her feet, but much improved and still pretty sweet. If loud. Anyone ever find the volume button on these younguns?

I highly recommend Walmart's generic Equate brand kids chewable Tylenol/acetemeniphen, bubble gum flavor. Evie hates liquid medicines but thinks these are delicious, and they're pretty cheap. She sort of thinks it's a special treat when she's sick and she gets to take the pink medicines. Is it evil that I let her believe they're for her stuffy nose, too? Also, is it possible for someone to take two or three weeks to get sick? Remember how I was complaining about how bored and out of sorts and fussy she was? She's a completely different child again now that she's officially sick and getting regular doses of Tylenol. Or maybe she just doesn't have enough energy to be grumpy right now, who knows?

Am I the only one that writes paragraphs that then get deleted? I have done that three times now so I think that means I'm done rambling.

Not all of my bargain shopping works out. I pulled three shirts out of the closet that M has worn either once or not at all. The problem with them? They were so unflattering in design and color and fit that when he came home from work wearing one, I nearly burst into tears at the thought that we have SO FEW GOOD YEARS LEFT. So, I think I'll be getting rid of those. They were cheap at less than two bucks each, but one should not wear clothes that make them look that much older than reality no matter how cheap they were.

And speaking of sales, I am just so excited today because eBay is allowing its sellers to list UP TO 50,000 auctions with no listing fees today! And with twelve hours left in the day, I'll need to get cracking in order to put up 4166 auctions per hour. That works out to 69 per minute. I mean, I think they were really going for "as many as you want" with a ridiculously high cap, but still. I am amused by silly things.

My child is bored. I'm not entirely sure what to do with her. See, a few months ago, she Discovered computer games in a big way. I mean, she would sit at her computer all day if I would let her. We didn't let her play all the time, of course, but we did let her play more than she probably should have been allowed. She almost completely replaced television with it--she'd only watch TV for a few minutes at a time when she was doing something else. This allowed me to say that she didn't watch much TV, which feels good in a parenting sort of way, but the truth was that she was only watching so little TV because she had moved on to another sort of screen. And, on one hand, I was sort of okay with it as long as she did get some non-computer time in during the day, because she was sincerely interested, she was learning stuff like crazy (including how to work with computers) and because I've been there. She comes from a family of computer people. Also, I could get a lot of stuff done, I'm not too ashamed to admit it.

Two or three weeks ago, though, she started complaining about her games. She wanted a different one all the time, and yet wouldn't play the new ones we'd find for very long. There are not a limitless supply of new games suitable for children of that age, you know, and I had pretty much exhausted my supply. She didn't realize it, but I could tell she was getting a little bored with computer games as a concept. Which.. is fine! Great! Because I knew she was playing too many of them, but I also felt like it was a phase and not something I wanted to do battle over on a daily basis. She's just like we are. We both get really into something, and we are really into it until we are... well, not. But, she is now done with that phase. There have been several days now that she hasn't even turned it on. The problem is that she is now bored all the time. To my great sadness, she is not hugely interested in crafting with me lately--or rather, she is excited about crafting, but it ends badly enough of the time that I am not interested in doing it too often. I can't stand getting everything out for her, only for her to.. I don't know. Put six foam stickers on another piece of foam and then wander off. Half an hour of prep and clean-up for three minutes of not-much-fun? No thanks. She rediscovered TV, but I don't want her to replace computers with TV again, plus, she's not interested in spending all day with that even if I was interested in letting her.

We have ballet on Tuesday evenings--and even that, which she previously loved, is met with resistance when I try to get her up and out the door, and last week, her teacher told me that she wasn't listening to her in class and making angry faces about everything she was told to do--VERY unlike her at ballet. We also started back at gymnastics after a couple of months off, on Thursday mornings, and she is still interested in that--she even said she liked it better than ballet (before she got grumpy about going to ballet). However, there is a full class at gymnastics right now, and all of the other kids are much smaller than she is. I think one of them *might* be her age, but I only think that because she has what I assume is a younger sister in the class as well. Remember that Evelyn is really tall for her age anyway, but she is head and shoulders taller than the next biggest kid in the class, and none of them have been to gymnastics before. Well, one of them has been, but he is a little boy who JUST turned three, so he's all over the place at the best of times. So, the last few sessions of gymnastics was just her, or her and the boy, and there are two teachers, so she was getting a lot of special attention. I had been planning on dropping out of gymnastics, actually, but then she suddenly started being much much better than she was, and taking it very seriously, and I want to encourage her to stay with things if she takes it that seriously. Anyway, these kids have changed the dynamics of gymnastics. They've had to go backwards to teach them things that Evelyn has been doing for a long time. That's FINE, as far as the class goes. It's just less fine for E, because I don't want her to get bored with something ELSE that she enjoys. Currently, she's liking it a lot that they're using her as the example of how to do things right, but I'm not sure I really want to pay $30 per month for them to have a role model for the other kids?

That was a complete tangent, except that it's sort of part of my current dilemma. I realized recently that I only have a matter of a few short months left at home with her before she goes off to kindergarten. (Ack.) We desperately need a new routine and I'm not even sure what to put in it. I'm sure she would love it if the new routine was thusly:

9:00-11:00: play with Mommy.
11:00-11:30: eat lunch. watch television.
11:30-5:30: play with Mommy.

But honestly, I just do not have that much play in me. M is great at playing with her. That's part of the evening routine, playtime with Daddy. He'll come up with weirdo voices and make her Barbies do outlandish, rude things. (This got him into trouble recently, as she started begging to only play Barbies with Mommy..haha.) I can handle a few minutes of Barbies at a time, or a board game, or something but then I go nutso, or I accidentally end up starting some weird organizational project. ("I know! I'll dress all these Barbies, fix their hair and separate all of these accessories in this huge box by size, function and color!" I won't even realize what I'm doing until I'm half done because in my head I am still just playing Barbies. etc. This is a true story except perhaps for the size function and color thing. I do spend unreasonable amounts of time putting clothes in the right box and furniture in the right place and brushes and hats and other accessories into the right place. She totally spends all her time making sure to maintain that system when I'm not there, of course.) I'm better at activities than free play. Sometimes she'll help cook, or we will do housework in a fun way, or crafts or a science project or something like that. But, there are only so many activities that I can think of to do.

And I just realized that today was storytime at the library and I forgot about it. She has missed every single storytime this month, which is unfortunate because it's a FREE activity that gets us out of the house, and also, I'm in book crisis. M has said since I got my book reader that he'd like to borrow it to read a book sometime so he could see if he would enjoy having one himself. I am all for that except if he is using it, that means I can't. He's at work during the day, so sure, I could read it while he's gone, except it doesn't really work out that way very well, as we have now found. He is reading Wheel of Time, having given up on it back in the day at around book 10ish. I only have the last two books in electronic format, so now he is reading a WoT book, ten minutes at a time in the bathroom. So, I SEE the thing all day long, and yet, I can't read it. I was in the middle of reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series when I had to relinquish the book reader. I tried to NOT relinquish it, and just share it? But that inevitably led to the book reader not being where he needed it to be and therefore having nothing to read while he hibernated in the bathroom. (Why do men do this?) So finally, I finished up the book I was reading and then set it down and walked away. I'm rereading Harry Potter now, in PAPER FORM. It's bizarre. Anyway, I have been meaning to pick up the WoT book, or the next Outlander in paper for me, for weeks now and I keep missing storytime and then thinking, "oh, I'll get it next week." Or not. Last week we were out of town, the week before, it was snowing and I felt no desire to trudge down there in the snow, and this week I was just completely spacey.

On top of that--or maybe because of it--she's been tired and kind of fussy and demanding, more than usual. She's sleeping later but not complaining as much about going to bed. I think she's going through a growth spurt but sometimes I'm almost worried about her because she's just not acting like herself all the time. BUT, did I mention that she's reading? She's sounding out words and we're reading Dick and Jane (which--ROFL! that is some comedic gold, right there. Very hard to listen to a child reading, "Come, Dick, Come!" without snickering out loud.) and she's putting a lot of things together in her brain right now, I think, and I know that is big work for little kids, and it's likely to leave them tired and out of sorts. So I think that may be the root of it (or maybe I just read Ask Moxie for too long and buy into the "everything is caused by a developmental stage" thing.) Friends who read parenting books? Something going on with them at 4.5 or 5? I don't know if it's this underlying issue causing the boredom and whining, or if it's just a convergence of a bunch of different things, but I think she's bored with life right now and I would rather see her more happy and engaged. I was happy that she didn't start preschool this year, but now I am thinking maybe that's the sort of structure she is searching for right now.. not that I could or would start that now, anyway.

I guess this post is a really long, typical-me, roundabout way to ask: what the heck do your kids do all the day? Or, what did they do before they started school? And oh, don't forget that she is completely in a scaredy-cat phase (started at the same time) where she does not want to be in a room other than the one that I am in. So, I can't just leave her playing in her room. If she's going to play Barbies on her own, I have to be sitting there, too, and I really like to get things done upon occasion myself. Blah.

Oh, and she has also gotten tired of every single food that she previously loved at the same time. WTF. It's like she's a teenager reinventing herself all of a sudden.

Honestly, I had no idea I had so many words about this subject. I didn't even mean to write about it when I sat down here. It's not like it's a huge deal, but apparently I have been thinking about it more than I thought.

Every year, my family does a New Years dinner in which we serve cabbage rolls. The tradition has been going on since it was picked up by friends of my grandparents (all of the people of which are now gone.) My mom and aunt are the ones who are currently doing the meal. On New Years Eve, they are at my parents house every year, making enough cabbage rolls for an army. This year, I helped because we went up for the weekend yesterday--sometimes I'm there to help but lately, it hasn't worked out, which honestly is fine by me. It's kind of a sucky job.:) Another yearly tradition is to complain about the fine members of the family who believe that New Years is an optional holiday. :)

FYI, New Years is not an optional holiday.

So it was a pretty good day, although quieter than usual in terms of the number of people there. There was plenty of chaos regardless. :) Now it's past midnight and we're still up, trying to force a little more awake time into an already long day. Or maybe it's just a long day for those of us who didn't sleep until 10:30 like SOME people I know. Ahem. Boyo. M has tomorrow off so we still have one day left of our holiday.

Random Evie witticism: She announced to me on Friday, completely out of the blue, that Daddy--who was at work at the time, and therefore totally innocent of any recent wrong-doings--is a "fart genius". This is because he is an expert on farts, since we does them so often. There has perhaps been some commentary made to him by myself and.. oh, all the estimated one hundred forty-two people to whom I have told this story. ;) Good thing he loves me.