A letter

Dear Max,

At 6 months, 1 week old if I could choose one word to describe you it would be "driven".  You are the most determined, strong-willed baby I have ever met.  Yet you are also the happiest, laid back baby too.  Contradicting?  Probably.  Let me explain.  You are quick to smile and giggle and rarely fuss.  (Lucky me!)  Yet when you set your sights on something, nothing gets in your way.  A few days before your 6 month birthday you figured out how to crawl.  It's not a traditional crawl, more like an army drag, but you can get from point a to point b in a few seconds.  Its simultaneously awesome and terrifying.  You have been this way since birth.  You rolled over a just 2 and a half weeks old.  Don't believe me?

 

 

 

 

See?  Determined.  Driven.  That's you. 

You already have a wonderful friendship with your brother.  You save your biggest smiles and giggles for him.  You love to watch him play and get sad when he leaves the room and you can't follow him. 

Now you army crawl across the room to get whatever toy catches your eye, usually one of Barrett's toys with small pieces and sharp parts....those are way more interesting than the brightly colored baby toys I try to litter around you to keep you from getting Big Brother's toys. 

You are growing bigger and bigger every day, bug.  I can hardly believe you are the same little peanut that I brought home from the hospital just a few short months ago.  I look forward to the next six months until we get to celebrate your whole first year in our lives.

Love you bug,
Mommy

Oh hai.

So I'm now officially on maternity leave.  Which might mean you'll see more frequent blog posts.....or it could mean that they are just as sporadic and infrequent as they are now!  No baby yet....although if he doesn't come by Wednesday, April 4th he will be born that day for sure!

Not a lot of crafting has been going on here.  I've been spending any free time I have getting things out of the attic and washed and ready for baby!  But now I've gotten that task mostly complete, and no more work so maybe I'll crank out some craftiness before he gets here. 

This little guy, or should I say big guy??, will be three in a matter of weeks.  It's hard to believe that just a short time ago I was rocking him back to sleep in the wee hours of the morning and tucking him into that tiny bassinet I just got out of the attic. 

I think it's finally safe to announce publicly that he is potty-trained.  He hasn't worn a diaper in several weeks and we've had very very few accidents lately.  He has no problem telling me when he has to go even if it's interrupting playtime.  He is still wearing and overnight diaper to bed, and probably will for a while.  I'm super excited that he is out of diapers just in time for me to not have two kids in diapers at the same time.  One thing no one told me about potty-training boys....(and maybe this isn't exclusive to boys)....every outing turns into a potty adventure.  He wants to explore the bathroom of every establishment.  And every bathroom outing turns into a marathon experience.  Our errands have started taking twice as long as we have to go to every single bathroom and spend at least 10 minutes in there.  

A few weeks ago a friend of mine came and took some maternity shots for me.  This was my absolute favorite as it shows Barrett's personality perfectly.  I was trying to get him to give me a kiss and everytime he would lean close enough he would open his mouth to lick me as soon as I got close enough.  That kid is such a hoot.  I can't wait to see him as a big brother and all the fun things he will get into with Max when he's old enough.

Hopefully the next time I post I will be showing off some new baby photos! 

Ruffles

Hey there, been a while.  I think it will take me a while to get into the groove of blogging again.  Somehow taking a picture, putting it on the computer, and then forming sentances about the picture seems like a daunting task.  I have plenty of things to blog about, and lots of pictures, it's just the whole thing together that seems like such a huge task.  Any other bloggers feel that way?

Anyway, I made something!  Actually I've made a couple of things since the last time I posted, but I'm really proud of this one!

I made a ruffle apron!

I used this tutorial, although I tweaked it a little bit to accomodate the fabric I had on hand.  My ruffles are shorter and more ruffly (is that a word?) than the ones in the tutorial.  It makes it almost tu-tu like!

 This would be really easy to do a mommy-and-me apron set, just downsize all the measurements.  This one is a birthday gift for my mother-in-law, but now I want to make myself one too in different fabrics.

And since I was taking my own mirror-pictures, you also get a belly shot.  Seven weeks left!  I am starting to not fit into some of my maternity clothes from my first pregnancy.  I'm going to chalk that up to frequent washing and shrinking ;)

Sadly, this is one of the few belly shots I have of this pregnancy. I just seem to not have taking pictures on my radar.  If I get the camera out, it's to take pictures of cute things that B is doing or of my crafts!  I will try to take a weekly belly shot from here on out....let's see how much bigger I get!

Snowy and Cold Days

We had a teeny tiny bit of snow over the weekend.  Barrett is just getting to the age where snow is SUPER exciting (and he doesn't even know the joy of a snow day from school yet!)  We ate breakfast and dressed quickly to get outside and play in it before it melted. 

It was the perfect snowball-making kind of snow.  Dense and wet and juuuuust right.  We had to collect snow off the cars to do it though since it was such a tiny tiny snowfall and all the snow in the yard was pretty muddy.  Barrett got a real kick out of throwing snowballs at mommy.

One thing I hate about winter is being cooped up in the house.  We try to get outside every day, but it's been pretty cold here lately and I've been a wimp about going out in it.  Some days Barrett is good about playing with his toys independently, and those are the days that I have to be attentive to the length of quiet time.  You moms will know what I mean....the moment when you think "he's been quiet in his room for way too long....what's he getting in to?" 

I had a moment like that this morning where I realized I'd been happily facebooking and pinning away without any interruptions for far too long.  I surfaced from lala-internet-land to peek in on him and found this:

He had pulled his easter basket out of his closet and taken all the plastic easter eggs apart and was building towers of them on the floor and then decorating his blinds.  Right after I took this picture he turned and said "Look Mama, I make it pretty!"  He's already crafting on his own!  I love his imagination.

Quilt squares

A year ago I joined a monthly online quilting bee.  There's a bunch of these types of bees out there, you can find a bunch on flickr if you are interested.  Ours is special because it's with a group of mothers I met through Ravelry when we were all pregnant at the same time.  So our babies are growing up together, albeit all over the globe.  It's nice to have a group of women who are hitting all the same milestones at approximately the same times. 

Anyway, the bee ended in August, but I just finally finished the last blocks.  I am so relieved to have them finally done.  While I enjoyed the bee, things got so crazy for me at the end of the year and I felt like it was hanging over my head to get these done.  I still enjoyed making them.  Well, mostly.  The first one is the Flying Circle of Geese block that's been all over quilty blogland lately.  It's a gorgeous block, but I learned while piecing it that contemporary piecing and paper-piecing are not my thing.  I'm much more of a traditional block girl....the "cut two half square triangles X size, then piece to a block Y size" sort of piecing.

If you make four of these blocks you get the circle of geese effect, but after I ripped and re-stitched the block about 4 different times, I couldn't bring myself to do the whole circle.

The other block was for one of the moms who assigned each of us a month and sent us a fabric selection.  The only rule was to incorporate the red fabric (that I used for the stems).  She wanted us to make a block that represented the month to us, in whatever fashion we wanted.

I've always loved fall, so I asked for a fall month and chose to do this leaf pattern.  I found the instructions somewhere online, but the original block wasn't big enough (it was supposed to be a 12x12 block) so I had to do some resizing to make it work.  I hand-appliqued the stems instead of piecing them, which was a first for me.  It was hard to make the stitches seem invisible, but I was pleased with the end result.

I had a lot of fun with the bee, and although I sent some of the blocks embarrasingly late (these were June and July's blocks...sent in January!) I really enjoyed getting to try a number of different styles that I wouldn't have otherwise done.

Welcome

Hello.  So I have started, quit, and restarted blogging about 4 times in the past year.  I can't say for sure whether this time will stick, but I'd like to have a solid outlet for my crafty attempts and parenting wins and failed attempts (now come on, we all have them). 

So....I guess this is the get-to-know you post.  My name is Karen, and I have a wonderful husband and a delightful little boy who entertains me daily.  His name is Barrett and he is 2 and half years old.  He amazes me every day with the things he says, does, and learns. 

We are expecting another wee one (another boy) in April.  I'm both thrilled and overwhelmed by the thought of parenting two children, much less two boys.  Barrett is fearless and adventurous.  He was walking by 10 months, running and climbing by 12 months.  I'm sure they will be great brothers, but I still have daily moments of "what in the heck was I thinking?". 

My other goal from rekindling blogging is driving myself to take more pictures.  I'm a scrapbooker, so you'd think that I would take tons of pictures.  And I used to....before Barrett became so active.  Now when we do anything I always think about how much juggling I can do between keeping up with him and my awesome, but large, camera.  Plus I've never taken the time to really get to know my camera so I experiment a lot with the settings...not so easy to do with a 2 yr old who stays still for about .2 seconds.  Over the last few months, aside from obligatory photo opps like holidays and family get togethers, I only have some blurry cell phone pictures.

I have lots more to share, but I guess that's enough for an introduction post.  I hope to meet some other moms along the way and to swap stories and form some online friendships.  Thanks for stopping by and drop me a comment to let me know you've been here.