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just wanted to let you know i finished compiling the heartswellers cd and you are not too late to get in on the game! nothing fancy to make you feel guilty about giving back ;) just a nice cd of things i love for one reason or another. comment here or email me your mailing address if you want one!
well, first- my parenting. that’s ALWAYS a work in progress. of course yesterday the sun was shining and in our backyard it was HOT! i swear to you it was at least 75 degrees. and i spread out a bunch of blankets and let the girls run around naked and bunny had the best day she has had in a long, long time. i didn’t do anything but spend time with my babies and luxuriate in the sunshine. nothing, not even knit. it was awesome and just what we all needed, i think.
thank you so much for your kind words when i had reached my limit. she is the sweetest girl. a little bit more about what seems to work for us and what doesn’t, another post.
second:
a little embroidery on what will eventually be a lunch bag for my husband. do you think this will get him teased at high school? ;)
and third:
a top-down raglan for bunny out of the local yarn. i’m making it up as i go along, as usual. i’ve started in moss stitch, which i love, and i think maybe the rest will be stockinette? i don’t really know. i’ll figure it out as i get there.
i was always a little bit smug about the “terrible twos.” screaming, tantrums, willfulness- those were all for other people, not for us. i was sure that we had already surpassed that time in our lives. bunny is so articulate, so intelligent, so communicative. so kind and gentle and funny and loving.
in the past week she has deliberately hurt her sister, shredded the pages of several favorite books, written with ballpoint pen on many things, smeared mud on the (white) couch, kicked, bitten, tantrumed. she has screamed until she made herself throw up, more than once. snatched things away from her sister. hit. scratched. i feel like i’ve been punched in the stomach. all the things i thought i knew about parenting my child seem irrelevant, useless. i’ve been doing a fair amount of crying and screaming myself, wishing that my sweet baby would come back to me.
i don’t know how to support her. i’m all at odds with myself and with her.
i know that this, too, shall pass. i know that it’s just a phase and it is as difficult for her as it is for me- probably more so. it has to be terrifying to her to be so suddenly out of control of her own feelings.
on the one hand- i don’t want to dwell on it and make it bigger than it is. but on the other hand, i need to find a little support, myself. need to try and figure out something that will work for my little family until this passes.
it seems like just yesterday she was this.
that night when birdie was having such a hard time getting to sleep, and bunny- you held her tiny little hand in yours and sang her made-up lullabies until she finally drifted off, still holding your hand, both of your bodies draped across me, with one of you on each side.
the first time that birdie said your name, crying out for you because you had been gone all day with your nana- my-na! my-na! my-na!
the way you giggle together, sitting in the backseat, in your carseats that are never close enough for your liking, over nothing.
i love you both so much.
we went to the farmer’s market this morning, as we do every saturday that there’s a farmer’s market, and there wasn’t much to be had that wasn’t already lingering in our pantry- squash, onions, potatoes. all delicious, to be sure, but you can only eat so many onions a week.
in many ways, though, this was a good thing. we were able to get some fantastic apple cider. i lingered at stalls i had always just passed by before, on my way to the rainbows of fruits and vegetables heaped up on other tables. a lady was selling beautiful ukranian eggs- how had i never seen this before?- at $20 a pop. there were baskets made from pine needles, with their lovely astringent smell.
and there was yarn.
oh, man. yarn! gorgeous, fresh from the sheep, local yarn. what i got was processed and spun at a local spinnery, but there was another stall of really lovely handspun, handdyed yarn, too. and another stall had local, handspun alpaca. !!!
wouldn’t this wool make the perfect cabled cardigan for bunny? ack. i am so in love. it is a fabulous feast for the senses. they sell undyed wool roving and some really beautiful chocolate colored yarn from “black” sheep. which you know aren’t really black at all, but a heavenly earthy color.
i’m so excited to make something with this. by far my most exciting yarn purchase in a long, long time. is this amazing, or what?
so often i feel distracted. there is always something to be done. dishes to be washed, floors to be swept, little faces scrubbed, stray books and crayons to be put away. the laundry looms. i rush through the day trying to make the most of every moment, which all too often means doing several things at once. i read once that when you multitask, you actually accomplish less, of a lesser quality, than if you had just done each thing separately in its own time, but in the day to day living that i do, i can’t seem to make it work. how else would the girls get fed and the house stay in any semblance of order? how else would we have clean dishes to eat off of or clean clothes to wear?
i fill all the “spare” moments, too. keeping an eye on the girls’ play, if all of the household chores are miraculously done, is totally peripheral, as i knit, or sew, or read. even while i’m reading “we’re going on a bear hunt” aloud, again, i’m thinking of other things that i could be doing, or things that i want to accomplish in the future.
i do believe that children don’t always need to be entertained, that they benefit from seeing adults do real, meaningful work. my girls are happy with projects of their own, even at these young ages. they play remarkably well together and adore each other.
but-it humbles me to think of how few times in the past week i have looked into my children’s eyes. just looked. these beautiful, amazing, funny, clever little people always look back at me with joy, happy to connect with me and be a part of what is going on in my inner world. they are happy to chat and revel in the moment’s singularity.
i need to remember this, the light in their eyes, connecting their souls with mine. it’s like taking a breath of air after being underwater for just a little too long- gasping and relishing life, we can both feel renewed. there is plenty of time, i see that now. plenty of time for doing and not doing, too. not everything needs to be done right now.
except maybe looking my babies in the eyes.
some things just make your heart swell. with joy, with sorrow, sometimes with both.
some photos i take are like that. some songs, too. some moments with the ones i love.
i’m glad to be back, here, with you. makes my heart swell a little bit to think about it.
to- celebrate? commemorate? i want to send you each a letter, and a cd of some of my heart-swellers. okay? look in the sidebar and email me your address.
may your hearts be as full as mine.
hee, hee. can’t wait for warmer weather!
(jumping, as usual) more photos here
in my never-ending quest to make ALL the girls’ clothes (will this ever happen? probably not), i have set a new goal: at least make all their dresses. my favorite outfit, and the one i think works best for the kind of hard play my girls do, is a knit shirt, apron/pinafore-like dress, and knit pants. i also really love the knit shirt/pinafore/matching pants combo, but the combination where both the shirt and pants are just solid colored knit actually works better, because you can mix and match if things get a little, ahem, messy. am i the only one whose kids go through several changes of clothes a day? i think i must let my babes get a lot dirtier than other moms would allow. seriously, they get changed because they are too wet/muddy/food covered/paint covered/etc about five times a day. so anything to cut down on having to change the entire outfit that many times is good for my washing machine, if ya know what i mean.
um. so that was a tangent.
anyway, the pattern for the dress is mccall’s 4814 and i love it. the top part is self-lined. nice. i finished the skirt with flat felled seams on both sides, which i love for all kids’ stuff, like pants. very sturdy and totally finished. no itchiness. i hacked away at the pattern quite a bit. shortened it by about ten inches or so, for one thing. and i am really really really bad at reading pattern instructions, so i pretty much reinvent the wheel every time i sew something. but actually i was able to put this together in one day, today, even though both of the girls were pretty needy and cranky, so that’s saying something about the ease of the pattern.
well, i almost put it together in one day. i still have to slipstitch the lining. but that’s pretty darn good, i think.
i forget where i got the print originally but i used it to make a pair of pants for the bunny, and i’ve been hoarding the rest ever since. the rest of the dress is made of a midweight linen i got on sale at joann’s. but even the sale price doesn’t beat greyline linen, so i think i’m going to go that way next time. this would be the perfect way to use japanese prints- you wouldn’t even need a fat quarter. it’s this tiny, tiny piece of fabric that is the print, and the rest is linen. oh yeah, i still have to do pockets, too. bunny requested pockets. girls gotta have pockets! i don’t blame her. so the pockets will be in the print, but still, barely any fabric.
can’t wait to make more of these. as the weather gets warmer she can start shedding the layers underneath, and as fall comes, she can still wear them as tops! yeah, i’m patting myself on the back over this one.
hopefully i will get my act together to do the same sort of thing for birdie. i bought butterick 3846 with this in mind.
how did this post get so long?
oh, one last thing- neither one of these patterns have any closures (buttons/zippers/etc) to put in, which makes them that much more simple to put together. easy-peasy.
also- when i was sewing this today i totally thought of abby. uniforms ROCK. maybe i should start wearing the same thing as bunny. or maybe not. mother-daughter matchy is not so cute.
valentine’s day is over- time to start thinking about easter!
here is what’s on my mind:
making a sort of living spring woodland centerpiece with wood violets, mossy hills, and sprouting wheatgrass
real nests (where would i get real nests?) with blown quails’ eggs
bunnies made out of wool felt- or knitted?
tin pails instead of baskets
a molded carrot cake
egg cozies
clearly i am not going to do all of this, but maybe some of it. i’ll keep you updated. any other good easter ideas floating around out there?
