She’s getting into everything. No shoe is safe.

Staring down the barrel of my first postpartum vacation, I decided it was time to start exercising again. I ran out of steam for walking when the weather got hot over the summer, and never really got back into it when things cooled off. Now that Mimi is crawling and climbing and pulling up (oh yes–she’s pulling up now, though mostly just to her knees rather than her feet), my workout also needs to be fast. So I dug out my 30 Day Shred DVD, which only takes twenty minutes, and have been doing it most mornings. Sometimes Mimi does crunches with me, even.

Since I hadn’t gotten any sun, really, since our trip to Saint Thomas pre-Mimi, I thought I’d better do something about that too. I hadn’t ever gone to a tanning salon in my life, or ever thought I would, but somehow there I was signing up for unlimited tanning in January for $20.12. The first session was terrifying but I’m getting used to it now.

Let me tell you, these two things have had a profound impact on my mood and my energy. I shouldn’t forget that I also started a higher dose of Synthroid at the time I began this, because I’m sure that has something to do with it too, but boy oh boy does the tanning give you a boost in the middle of January. And the exercise, besides helping my cardiovascular fitness (my appearing in a swimsuit, not so much… yet), has sent me back into the deep, sound sleep that I had been missing for over a year. I can go back to sleep after Mimi’s night wakings now. I can sleep through them, sometimes, on nights when Sparks has the monitor. That fuzzy, dizzy, about-to-pass-out feeling I’d had every afternoon is gone. And all I can say that is HALLELUJAH!

Last Saturday Sparks asked me what my plans were for the day. I had scrubbed my tub the day before, so suddenly I thought, a bath! “I want to take a bubble bath after I exercise.” I hadn’t had one since the night before Mimi was born. Over ten months. So Sparks took Mimi to his workshop, and after I was done exercising I drew a deep bath, and I (feeling guilty for neglecting the family) got into it.

O bliss.

O delight.

Best spa treatment I’ve ever had.

Can’t tell you how good it was. It was THAT GOOD.

I’ll be doing that again.

We’re mostly thinking of this. Especially since she’s learned to crawl up and down steps. Eeeek!

Sparks and I have a new vegetable garden strategy. We’re going to grow smaller amounts of more things, and not burden ourselves with intentions to preserve any of it (except, maybe, some more of Alton Brown’s fabulous salsa recipe, because it’s the best base to make chili). When it’s ripe and we want it, we’ll pick it and eat it… otherwise it’ll just go back to the garden. That sounds very zen, right?

Amidst the enormous effort both of us put in to get our order of garden seeds placed this month, I realized that I haven’t thought about my flower gardens at all. Happily, I think that is a good thing this year. Last summer, before Mimi was mobile or much interested in doing anything except waving her arms while looking at the trees, I did a lot of garden re-arranging and dividing. And then, oh then! let us not forget the autumn’s last great hurrah, those hundreds of bulbs and dozen-or-more chrysanthemums I planted at the last minute. Those will, I hope, provide big yields in the spring and fall to come. I’ve been nostalgically paging through photographs of Mimi’s first few months, and I’m happy to see that there will be flowers in April. That sounds lovely… and not too far in the future. I’m so looking forward to my daffodils and crocus and grape hyacinth and Dutch iris. And oh! Oh oh oh! I have those seven new iris rhizomes too, which just might bloom this summer. What excitement!

I need to divide my pulmonaria. That’s the only undone job I can remember. Isn’t that nice?

These are my new ones. Those gorgeous ones I bought last September? All wool. Full of holes already. Pfffft. These have nylon though, and are heavier weight, and are by Smartwool. I think these will last better. And ooooh do I ever have a thing for Scandinavian knits right now. These socks and My Mug at the same time? YES PLEASE.

This has been echoing in my head lately, because I have so precious little time to make things beautiful. I used to cook lovely meals, to make lovely things, and keep my home relatively clutter-free and lovely. With a crawler in the house, all of these things become a stretch. So do beautiful experiences like bubble baths, having friends over for dinner, and long knitting sessions with a hot cup of tea.

My daughter is beautiful, though. She’s a pretty baby, fun and fun-loving, always seeking out a loving connection with us, and always surprising us with the things she can do. Raising her is one big beautiful work that is crowding out all of those little ones. And she’ll grow up fast; she already is growing up fast.

My husband is beautiful too. He’s a handsome man, and kind, and affectionate, and giving. It’s true that having a baby turns your marriage from two people looking at each other, to two people looking at the baby. But again, she will grow up. Sparks and I will be able to concentrate on each other again soon. And until then, we are doing out best to be available to each other for every opportunity to go out to dinner, every good-morning kiss and hug, every snuggle on a cold winter night.

When I was single, before Amelia and Sparks and Pudding, I had a lot of time to make things beautiful and no one to see that they were beautiful. That’s why I started this blog in 2007. I wanted someone to see.

And now I have people who do see. And people who live, for real, the beauty I have the time to make. And I get to enjoy their beauty in return. It’s all about give and take, you see.

I’m a little embarrassed, looking over my past several blog entries. I hadn’t realized I was complaining about the same things over and over again: teeth! chicken pox! head cold! teeth! So I won’t talk about those any more. Instead, this month:

Little Tootse grew two teeth and we are so proud. She’s definitely not a baby any more; she’s definitely a little girl now.
Little Tootse’s hair grew over her ears. It is getting pretty thick and long; just towel-drying doesn’t get it completely dry after we wash it, anymore.
Little Tootse became a seriously fast crawler. She needs more and more freedom, so I often let her play on the floor wherever I’m doing things (and the decision to let her free-range has made it possible to do things again). More than once I’ve gotten absorbed in my task for a minute, only to discover she’s gone.
Little Tootse has become fascinated with swinging doors back and forth. When she disappears, I almost always find her swinging our bedroom door. If not that, our bathroom door.
Little Tootse had her first Christmas! She was too dainty to tear wrapping paper, but she loves her new toys. I am especially impressed by the way she can put the little topsy-turvy-beany things into the top of their funhouse. Do you know what toy I’m talking about? That one, yeah. From Uncle Davy, thank you Davy!
Little Tootse began to crawl over obstacles. This turned her Exersaucer into a toy she crawls into and uses as a fort, rather than a toy she stands up in. She has her favorite toys squirreled away in the bottom of it. It’s adorable.
Little Tootse developed a strong interest in books. She has figured out how to turn pages, especially of board books, and those are her absolute favorite toys.

Okay, enough about my little tootsie–my favorite tootsie–my best and only tootsie. We love you so much, little monkey.

January has been a hard month. Mimi cut her first tooth the week before Christmas, then got what we thought could be chicken pox on Christmas eve, then got the nasty headcold Sparks and I were recovering from and spent two nights sleeping in her bouncy chair so her head could drain, and one strange day passively cuddling on my lap with a fever. Then she cut another tooth. Right now I think all of that mess is cleared up; she is drooling and has a rash on her chin, which is a teething prodrome, but if the first two are any indication we won’t be in real trouble until she gets a diaper rash and I can feel the tooth under the gum. So, phew.

Mimi got a lot of toys for Christmas. We don’t have an especially large house, so the onslaught scared me a little, but I’ve made peace with it now. My parents gave her this Fisher Price Noah’s ark (at my suggestion). A Noah’s Ark with animals is such a classic toy. Felicity from American Girl has a Noah’s Ark. Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie had one. And now Mimi has one too. I love to line the animals up and sing “the ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah!”. I spend a lot of my time making sure the set stays intact. There are twenty little animals plus Noah and his wife to corral.

Right before Christmas I made a rare trip to Aldi and discovered Moser Roth 85% chocolate, which is my favorite dark chocolate ever. It has a nice snap and a gorgeous buttery finish that have won me over completely. For $1.89 a package, I’m happy to be won.

Mimi is getting to be a master of the army crawl. She can scattle so quickly that I lose track of her, and have to walk around the house looking for her. Usually when I find her she is eating lint, dead bugs, and cat food. This from the baby who won’t eat most of the food I put on her tray at meal times… sigh. I think she learned it from Pudding. Anyway, we are babyproofing the house as she develops interest in new rooms. Right now she is a huge fan of our bedroom, which with its piles of clothes being sorted into special washing/to be donated/to be chucked is admittedly, right now, a very interesting place.

Mimi has always had a smallish head, and the baby sunglasses I bought around the time she was born were too big for her all summer. I recently bought this pair, triumphantly thinking I’d finally found a pair to fit her. They are too small. The original pair fit just right now. Sigh. Don’t you like the pink sneakers? I put shoes on her for Baby Story Time at the library, where the girl-moms competitively dress their babies (or so I’d like to think). The shoes stay on for about thirty seconds.

The centerpiece is the closest thing to a crafty endeavor that I have to show you, though you’ve seen it before and several months ago. Having a sick/teething baby in the house, and the sleep disruption that follows, has made crafting absolutely out of the question. I got through Christmas and its assorted chores only because I’d gotten started early, before things got rough. For what seems like forever now there has been precious little house cleaning or even cooking of dinners. Things are getting better now though… things always get better.

Happy anniversary, dearest Pudding. You are a soft, adorable, purring, chirruping, patient, gentle, loving, and perpetually neglected pussycat. We love you lots. Extra treats for New Year’s tonight.

The shopping is done. The decorating is done. The cookies are done. The gift wrapping is done. The house cleaning is done, only tidying is left. Mimi is cutting her first tooth (!!!) and Sparks and I both have head colds… alas, it’s the third Christmas in a row that I’m under the weather… but Pudding seems perfectly healthy. So heeeeere we go, come at us, Christmas!

The variegated socks you see were knit from a Zauberball Crazy, which is my new favorite sock yarn. Regular Zauberballs are one ply and that drives me crazy, but Crazys are two ply so they are just right.

The snowflake sock I started last winter. It’s knit of Shelridge Farms Soft Touch Ultra, with snowflakes in Jawoll. I am knitting its twin right now. This is a nice yarn because it’s a thick sock yarn… Only 56 stitches around my foot instead of the usual 64. It comes in lots of scrummy heathered colors too.

Mimi’s Weasley sweater is on hold. I got about four inches into it and could no longer deny that, in spite of calculations and having swatched, it was sized more for a toddler than a baby. So it has been put away and will be finished, or not, in a winter to come. Such is knitting.

One more trip to the grocery. One regular round of laundry plus guest laundry plus washing the guest room quilt, which badly needs it plus it’s time to wash all the mattress covers and blankets and switch to our winter quilt. One large house cleanup. One scrubbing of the guest bathroom.

That might be all.

This month, she slept through the night fairly reliably. Sparks, who gets up to give her her morning bottle between 5 and 6am, might argue that point. But it sure seems to me that she’s sleeping well (har har).

This month, she’s been staging revolts against spoon feeding. Right now, I can feed her if I let her have a second spoon to hold while I do it. Right now, she likes to sit on the sofa by her dad and share a bag of popcorn.

This month, she will drink from a sippy cup… then spit it out all over herself.

This month, she is all-the-sudden older, wiser, funnier, and more loving and lovable than ever. Sometimes I can get her to give me a sloppy-wet baby kiss. Sometimes I can get her to hold eye contact with me and grin and squeal and make me the happiest mama on the planet. Mostly though, this month, she just has to go-go-go-go-go. Chairs, playards, saucers, even the cordoned-off fireplace nook are NOT ENOUGH. She needs to GO PLACES, and she needs to do it NOW. I am trying to keep up, to babyproof the house ahead of her, and to lower my standards of decorous mothering and baby-behavior. This week’s most memorable moment was the ten minutes I spent moving all the kitchen chemicals onto high shelves… while she put handfuls of cat food into the cat’s water bowl and tried to scoop them out with her lunchtime spoon, which she still had in her pudgy little fist and would not surrender all that afternoon. Eventually the water bowl got tipped, Mimi got soaked, and everyone ended up in pajamas for the rest of the day.

Do you know how everyone acts like their rugrags are the cutest, most fascinating, most important beings on the whole planet? Well, mine actually is.

Shall I name names? This is a sock knit out of Claudia Hand Painted. I have also, in the last year, had to throw away socks knit out of Blue Moon Fiber Arts lightweight and Knitpicks Sock Garden. These are all lovely yarns with exceptional dye jobs. I own many skeins of all of them. I may buy more in the future. But I will never, never, never knit another pair of socks from them.

I have never worn a hole in a sock with nylon content, and some of those I’ve been wearing for five winters now.

Choose your yarns wisely, everybody. I’d also advise against any alpaca content in any garment that will receive any wear friction or need to be washed, ever.

I didn’t finish using those four rolls of paper until I was done with grad school almost ten years later. There were a lot of things in my life then, but people to give Christmas presents to wasn’t really one of them. One thing for mom. One thing for dad. In my freshman year of college I made polar fleece hats and mittens for my new friends, mostly so I could use some of that wrapping paper.

I would use one sacred afternoon to wrap a half-dozen boxes and address a dozen cards.

Those days are over.

From Pinterest, I have learned that there are four stages of life:

1) You believe in Santa
2) You don’t believe in Santa
3) You are Santa
4) You look like Santa

I’m in stage 3 right now. And boy howdy. Gift wrapping has been a frantic thing, done in every spare moment, every box a victory, every nap time a mountain of boxes to be conquered. I think I will get all of the wrapping done, I’m just not sure I’ll get all the cookies baked in time to pack up Christmas packages and get them mailed. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

You’re right, kiddo. That is one shining pile of gifts under one beautiful Christmas tree. Thank you so much for giggling the first time you saw them. And no, you can’t open even one until December 25.

They turned out about as well as home confectionary can be expected to. It took me about 90 minutes to do four dozen. Working with sugar and candy always leaves me wiped out… Sparks had to cook dinner that day. And they taste just like Twix bars. Hm.

On it went the village I built of cardboard boxes last winter. That was my second attempt, in my second winter, to build myself a cardboard village. There are tutorials and patterns all over the internet for houses like this now, but two winters ago when I started, there weren’t. I found a wonderful series of books called “Build Your Own” and used the house shapes from them–Build Your Own English Village, Build Your Own Irish Village, and Build Your Own Main Street.

The colors of the houses were loosely inspired by Barbara Cooney’s illustrations from my last blog post. I even made two townhouses. I love townhouses. Can’t explain why, but I do. It might have something to do with Howard’s End.

The houses have vellum behind the windows and doors, so when they are put over a light they glow. This looks SO much better than I could have imagined. It’s wonderful! They also have a coat of snow glitter on their roofs and in the bottoms of the windows.

Maybe some year in the future I will have Sparks build a board for me, on to which all the buildings and bottle-brush trees are firmly attached, and through which the lights can be poked. For this year though it’s all just sitting on the batting-snow. Things are a little topsy turvy.

Here is how our fireplace nook looks at night just before I go to bed. There is the big tree, and the pink tinsel tree, and the mantel all lighted up. (Oh, and baby gear.)

It is a story about wishing. That’s all I can say to describe it. The illustrations, though, are so dreamy… let me show you.

Please sir, may I spend a Christmas in this English market town? May I live in one of the little row houses? May I put a small, real tree in my dining room window and decorate it with silver crackers and real candles? May I fill stockings with old fashioned toys, nuts, and tangerines wrapped in silver paper?

This book is so wonderful. You should try it. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to read to myself, so I wouldn’t count on reading it out loud all in one go. But that’s all right. There is a lot of Christmas left.

Because the media room is baby-proofed and Amelia can’t escape over the two steps that go down into it, I decided not to put a tree there this year. So the big green tree has gone in the great room, and it looks wonderful! We can enjoy it from our fireplace nook and Amelia’s playpen is right next to it, which I hope makes her temporary confinements there a little more fun.

This year the base of the ornaments was a box of 36 oversized shatterproof ornaments in greens and golds. They look GREAT on the tree! So great that I think I’m ready to get rid of the old, smaller glass ornaments I had been using.

Next I added a dozen lacy sparkly ornaments in golds and pinks and a handful of sparkly gold icicles. Then a dozen pink vintage glass balls (all too high for baby hands to reach). Finally, the ornaments I made this year and my wedding band teaset.

I think the tree looks SPECTACULAR! I haven’t been so happy with a tree in years.

Most of the decorating was done during Mimi’s long nap. She had seen undecorated trees in stores before, but never a decorated one. When she woke up I went to her room to take her out of her sleep sock and extract the pacifier, then carried her down the long hall, into the great room, and to the tree. She made a little giggle–an overwhelmed giggle–and stared. I pointed out the special ornaments to her and she giggled the same way a few more times. The “Ice Dance” from Edward Scissorhands was playing on the stereo. She laid her head on my shoulder and looked, and looked, and looked.

Best moment in parenting so far. Hands down.

She is still here. She is still a very good kitty. She’s as beautiful and soft as ever. These days she doesn’t get attention unless she asks for it, and that has transformed her into an affectionate, dare I say needy? lap cat. She snoozes, and when I’m down on the floor with Mimi she comes over to investigate. Mimi loves Pudding, loves her more than toys or food or snuggles, almost more than Sesame Street. Sometimes I hold Mimi’s hand so that she can’t grab, and let her gently pet Pudding. I think those two will be good friends.

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!