Winter diorama ornaments

I am totally geeked about these. They are SO COOL. I first got the idea from this pin, and got the confidence to actually try making them from this pin. If I wasn’t able to make a round version work, I could always revert to pasteboard and plastic cups.

In the end, though, the round ornaments worked, and I am SO glad! These will be my favorite ornaments this year. Here’s a materials list:

Clamshell-style clear plastic baubles (near the plastic bubble bath bottles in my craft store, not with the other Christmas stuff)
White pasteboard for base of wonderland
White glitter for wonderland snow
White and red acrylic paint for mushrooms, wonderland interior
Wooden pegs to paint as mushrooms
Bottle-brush trees
Model reindeer
Hot glue gun
Mod podge or other paintable adhesive

And here’s what I did:

First, I painted the wooden pegs to look like mushrooms. When they were dry, I sawed them off to the desired lengths. I also painted white snow on the inside of my baubles. Lastly, while I had my paintbrushes out, I cut out circles for the bases of the wonderlands, brushed them with Mod Podge, and glittered them.

Then I let all that dry for a couple of days. When I came back to my craft room, I warmed up the hot glue gun and glued the mushrooms, trees and deer to the wonderland bases. Then I used hot glue to create a “shelf” on the inside of the baubles for the wonderland base to sit in. I positioned a base in one half of a bauble, added a couple more dots of hot glue to secure it, then closed the bauble with a little more hot glue in the seam to keep it shut. End of story!

Martha Stewart should be jealous. I don’t think there was anything this cool in her December issue this year.

I’m very proud of myself on this one. You should make some!

Photo block ornaments

Like just about everyone in the Pinterverse (or so it seems), I was inspired by this pin about making photo block ornaments. And so I did!

By happy coincidence, we had already bought our family Christmas gift: a networkable color laser printer. That made it easy to resize and crop a bunch of images and print them out for the ornaments.

Then, like the Pin tells you, I bought a bunch of 1.5″ wooden cubes at the craft store, had Sparks drill holes down the center of them, painted them, mod-podged the pictures on, and threaded ribbon through. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

What a neat project, and I’m pleased as punch with the results. These will be sweet and attractive on the tree, hooray.

Yes, I do still have that nine foot tree on my mind…

Thanksgiving recap

Well, Thanksgiving is over for another year. In Sparks’ family it is the major holiday, and (as I’ve said before) everyone converges on the tiny no-longer-a-town that his mother grew up in, and spends three or four days eating, socializing, and making shopping expeditions. This year was Mimi’s first and she LOVED it. The people! The new toys! The new house to crawl around! I think she enjoyed Thanksgiving as much as she’ll enjoy Christmas.

And now we are home. The early Thanksgiving has left a week before December starts, and I think I won’t do very much Christmas preparation at all in that week. I’ll call it a breather. I will plan. I will plot. But no decorations yet, and no baking. I changed our centerpiece to its winter incarnation, with silver-glittered false pinecones and acorns, and these wonderful silver berries. I think it’s very pretty.

I made a batch of Martha Stewart’s macaroni and cheese to take to Thanksgiving, and it was completely gobbled up just during Thanksgiving dinner. That recipe makes the best macaroni and cheese ever. I use two blocks of Cracker Barrel Vermont Sharp White Cheddar and a whole 16-oz shaker of grated parmesan & romano, half in the sauce and half sprinkled on top. I also made four pies this year, apple cherry peach and blueberry, and they were well-received. Thanksgiving dinner was BONKERS, with 37 attendees and about a dozen pies.

When I was little and my mother baked pies, she would always bake bits of leftover crust with cinnamon and sugar on top. She called them “tarts”.

My aunt, I gather from her Facebook posts, has bought a nine foot tree. Wow, that’s really a lot of tree! I’m inspired to, maybe, possibly, just thinking about it, try to get a similarly big tree at the after-Christmas clearance sales. Our great room has a tall ceiling, and I would get rid of our two six foot trees if I had that. With a little one in the house, this year I’m feeling inspired to start a collection of ornaments that have sentimental value. I am making a few and I’ll share those with you eventually. We have six boxes of those vintage blown glass ornaments from Sparks’ mother, too. Imagine how magical to have a NINE FOOT!!! tree.

In the “what if” part of my mind, I’ve been mulling over what it would be like to celebrate Christmas the old fashioned way, in twelve days, from December 25 through January 6. Decorations wouldn’t go up until Christmas Eve, and would come down as soon as Christmas was over. You’d have twelve days to leisurely visit with your family and friends. New Year’s would be included in there. Most school’s winter breaks don’t start until very soon before Christmas, anyway. Yes, I think it’s a tempting proposition, but with most of the country putting their decorations up in November I think Mimi would feel a little left out that way. Oh, well. Chalk it up with dreams about “simple” living and “slow food” and all those other nice ideas that just… don’t… work.

Have you been having any interesting thoughts about Christmas this year?

Giving thanks

Last night, Alicia of Posie Gets Cozy posted the post that we’d all been waiting for, and it was devastating. The baby girl they had hoped to adopt was, at the last minute, claimed by her biological father and after caring for the little girl for six days, Alicia and Andy have gone home empty-handed.

I’m heartbroken, and I’m just a stupid blog reader. I don’t know how they can bear it, and I don’t know how to handle it myself. Alicia writes about the experience so beautifully, and then the pictures of that beautiful baby girl… it’s too much. Caring for a little baby is such a precious and unique experience that everyone who wants it should be able to have it, especially such good people as Alicia and Andy. And that little girl’s childhood would have been a fairy tale. But it wasn’t to be.

This Thanksgiving week, I am hugging and kissing and loving on my own little treasure all the more. I am so blessed to have her, and so blessed to have Sparks, and so blessed to live a life in which so many fairy tales have come true. I’m grateful that Alicia and Andy have each other. I’m grateful that, for six days, they had that precious thing. And I’m grateful that Alicia lets us into her world, and into her heart. We love you, honey. We’re wishing and praying and hoping.

Affordable art

We never have done much to decorate Low House. The flurry and exhaustion of renovating and moving quickly morphed into the exhaustion of pregnancy and the new flurry of a new baby. Some walls are painted interesting colors and there are window treatments, but there is precious little on the walls.

About a month ago on a Saturday morning, Sparks and Mimi hung out together at home while I did some stroller-free shopping (this happens on most Saturdays). I decided to go into Pier 1. I hadn’t been in that store in years. I guess that having gone from being 25 to being 31 has moved me smack into the middle of their target market, because OMG! That store is SO MUCH FUN!

It turns out that I need to restrict my access to Pier 1, in fact. There’s way too much good stuff. Right now, because there’s so little art in the house, it’s easy to find a “because”. First I bought the dichroic glass platter above to go on the mantel that Sparks built and installed for me. Then I bought the Joy Panel, pictured at the very top of this post. Isn’t it stunning? Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with mass-market art if you select it carefully. This panel makes me think of Chihuly sculptures, with its organic seaforms and wild colors. The green and blue pick up the colors of our kitchen floor and dining carpet, and the shapes themselves are reminiscent of the Calypso light fixtures throughout the house. I LOVE my Joy Panel.

At TJ Maxx I found these two large, aqua-tinted pieces of mercury glass. They’re for the mantel too. I love mercury glass. I love aqua. I love that they were $10 apiece, hooray!

Three cheers for decorating and for affordable art. And Sparks hon, I will blog the mantel itself as soon as I can get a good picture of it. I’m having trouble finding the right light to photograph it. Love you!

Eight months

Lil’ Tootse is eight months old today. Eight months! That’s really old. She’s a regular little girl now, not a baby at all (as I’m sure she’d tell you).

Mimi isn’t strictly “crawling” because she still drags her belly on the floor, but she does move and she moves pretty fast using both her elbows and knees. When let “free range” she’ll scattle across the great room in no time, going straight for books, LPs, and electrical cords. In general it seems she may be a future engineer, she’s so interested in cords and outlets and machines. Yesterday I took her to baby story time at the library and allowed her to crawl into the melee–she went straight for a covered outlet in the middle of the floor and intently picked at it. Not books nor bubbles nor puppets could budge her attention.

She is mostly feeding herself at this point. I never intended to do Baby-Led Weaning, but then, precious little has gone as I intended. She’ll happily eat the little baby sandwiches I make for her but really loves almost anything off of our plates. Last night she ate a substantial quantity of my red beans and rice at dinner.

She’s my vibrant, energetic, funny, enthusiastic, patient, oh-so-beautiful little tootsy. I wouldn’t trade her for a single thing in the world.

Nursery food

About a month ago I began to put those little baby “puffs” on Mimi’s high chair tray to see if she would feed herself, because at that point she was picking up food in her fist and depositing it somewhere in the region of her mouth, though almost never in her mouth. I wanted her to have some practice that wouldn’t stain or soggify anything. Puffs are perfect.

About two weeks ago she got really good at eating puffs. Since then there’s been a nearly full-on refusal to be spoon fed. I can get some cereal in her in the mornings when she’s very hungry, and in the afternoons she’s again very hungry in the long stretch between lunch and dinner, and if I give her something really tempting–like flavored baby yogurt–she’ll take a little of that. But the bulk of her meals, including all of lunch and dinner? She MUST feed herself.

This is a challenge for me, because I find myself putting the same things on her tray over and over. Pasta with butter. Canned green beans (which are her favorite food, which she eats before anything else). Steamed carrots. Steamed apple chunks. Doesn’t it sound monotonous?

We will give her whatever parts of our dinner she’s likely to gum up by herself, and she enjoys them. But she needs more things tailored to her needs. I tried making “baby casseroles” of vegetables and pasta held together with a slurry of baby food meat and milk. The result was, predictably, disgusting and she rejected it. I haven’t tried making macaroni and cheese for her yet, but I think it would go down “okay”, about as well as pasta with butter does.

Sandwiches, though, she loves. If I spread a piece of toast with something tasty and cut it into little fingers, she’ll eat almost the whole thing. So the new challenge is, what tasty, nutritious and calorically dense stuff can I put on toast? Grilled cheese sandwiches are obvious. Remembering Dr. Spock’s advice from previous editions to give babies egg yolk, I mashed some hard-boiled yolks with butter and have used that as a spread, even adding a pinch of shredded cheese. Today I had a big victory when I invented “baby chicken salad”, a combination of homemade pureed chicken with enough sour cream to make it stick. This is the first time Mimi has been happy about eating meat in her whole life.

All of this makes me think about Victorian nursery food. The Victorians had a lot of ideas about what food children should eat. Nursery food was plain and simple; there was a lot of oatmeal and a lot of toast, a lot of meat and a lot of thoroughly cooked and sieved fruit and vegetables. And, voila, here we are. Mimi’s daily diet.

While I think I should continue being adventurous about what vegetables and fruit I put on her tray, it probably won’t pay to drive myself crazy about what to do with her pasta and her sandwiches. Just because it seems monotonous to me doesn’t mean it seems monotonous to her, as most children aren’t culinarily adventurous. I just need to let her be. That’s a large part of parenting, isn’t it? Just letting the kid be.

Toys

I love Amelia’s toys. I had thought that “noisy plastic crap” would bother me, and that we’d get her only classic, quiet, quality, all-wooden hand-crafted works of art to play with. Ha! The fact is, I love the colors and (for the most part) I love the cheerful sounds and music her toys make. And with Christmas coming up… oh boy oh boy!

Sometimes I find myself sitting on the floor with her, playing with her toys the way I want to play with them: putting blocks neatly in their box, putting stacker rings neatly in order, lining up toy cars, making plushies sit at attention. And then Amelia knocks it all over and chews on it and tries to put things together that don’t go. Then I have to remind myself that these are, after all, her toys. She gets to do whatever she wants with them.

Have I said that I cannot WAIT until she’s old enough for Barbie? I hardly can. We mosey down that aisle every time we go to a store that has one. My life has been Barbie-free for way too long. By the way… did you know that there’s a tattoo Barbie now? I’m trying to get over that one.

November!

Well Halloween is over. In honor of All Saint’s Day, Mimi is wearing her “Little Angel” onesie and silver tutu today. We have a big bowl full of Halloween candy that no one claimed. And me, I’m jazzed. I apologize to the Halloween lovers, but it felt like a big hump separating me from the “real” holiday season. REAL HOLIDAYS ARE HERE NOW! YAAAYYY!!!

“Real” holidays mean we get to see a lot of family, I get to make a lot of food, we get to put up lots of decorations, and I get to buy and wrap lots of presents. I love it. I have learned that getting extra chores done when one stays home full-time with a small child is slightly harder than getting extra chores done when you are childless and work full time (which confuses me, but it’s true). But I think I can get it all done. Trees, cookies, present wrapping and shipping. Those are the hurdles and I am reeeeaaadyyyyyy to rummmmmmble!

First stop: a huge dish of macaroni and cheese and at least two pies to take to Thanksgiving. Wait. That’s three and a half weeks away? Phooey.