Happy Easter!

What a nice day we had – if you don’t count the fact that it was cold and snowy enough to be Christmas instead of Easter!

Carrie was thrilled to find a half-eaten carrot next to her Easter basket when she came downstairs for breakfast. I didn’t leave it there, so the Easter bunny must have raided the fridge while we were sleeping. But he left behind a Little People Easter train for Carrie, along with a couple of books and a small stuffed bunny.

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We went to church, where I very nervously played piano and sang – I can’t believe I used to do this every week (sometimes twice!) and it was so normal, and now I get nervous and shaky and choke up when it’s time to sing the descants – and Carrie did a fabulous job of being quiet and attentive and good sitting out in the congregation instead of the “cry room”.

We talked Carrie into taking an early nap, and then headed to my Grandma’s for dinner. Carrie was hungry and as we were setting the table she kept saying “We eat now? Time to eat?” and I’d tell her we were almost ready. Finally she got fed up with waiting and said “OK, we eat now. We eat cake!” But she was happy enough with the ham instead – actually I think she ate more ham than I did – and wasn’t too disappointed that dessert was fruit and the cookies we baked yesterday instead of cake.

The only thing we didn’t do was any sort of egg hunt, but it was too cold outside really. There’s always next year!

Easter Preparations

Today Carrie colored eggs for the first time. I didn’t even bother for the last couple of years, but I thought she might enjoy it. Well, that’s an understatement! She’d drop the eggs into the dye (we had a couple of casualties with her method) and say “Bye, bye egg! See you later!”

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a “normal” egg coloring kit. You know, the Paas tablets that you dissolve with hot water and vinegar? No, there were several varieties of another brand: glitter eggs, tie-dye eggs, painted eggs… So I bought the kit with the paints. Carrie was delighted. Me? Not so much. Check out the kid’s hands:

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Plus, the dye colors just didn’t look the way they should. The purple was magenta and the green looked exactly like the blue. I wound up putting the “purple” eggs into the blue and the “green” eggs into the yellow to make them actually look right. Yes, I’m picky about my colored eggs. Next year I’m buying a Paas kit if I have to go to ten different stores to find one!
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Besides the eggs, we also made some cut out cookies of bunnies, chicks (or ducks), eggs and flowers. Carrie still only dabs a tiny bit of frosting on her cookies, but now she likes to pile up as many sprinkles as she can on that wee little dollop of frosting.

Now I just have to try to make her very colorful hands a bit less colorful before church tomorrow…

Look! Knitting!!

(I’m hoping that the exclamation points and the word ‘knitting’ will divert everyone’s attention from the lack of posting for the past several days…)

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So, the finished Pomatomus socks. These were actually finished…um…a week and a half ago…but between the toddler, the musicals, the never-ending battle I wage against laundry, dishes, dog fur and clutter, and just a general lack of free time, I haven’t had a chance to post about them. Having said that, I really liked this pattern. It was interesting and complex, but I found it to be a fairly quick knit. I even managed to work on them during bits and snatches of rehearsals where I knew I wouldn’t be playing for a while. They also fit really nicely, no sagging or bunching. I think if I did this pattern again I’d start the chart halfway through the first repeat, because the leg is just a bit longer than I like. But really, overall, a wonderful pattern to knit!
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And, since it’s becoming quite a habit to have a pair of socks on the needles at any given time, here are my new “girly” socks. They fit in fairly well with the Project Spectrum colors for April and May – well, at least there’s a whole lot of pink in them!
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In other Project Spectrum news, here’s a yellow bunny to go with the hat I made for a friend’s new granddaughter. (I cheated and started it last month, but who cares?) It doesn’t have a face yet, because the black yarn I need is trapped in my craft room behind half of our bedroom furniture. (Don’t ask.)

The final Spectrum color for this round is green. I have a much bigger project in mind for the green. It involves paint…

So Far Behind…

I’m so far behind in answering emails it’s not even funny. And obviously I’m behind in blogging, since the past 10 days worth of posts just finally showed up. It’s not that I don’t write them in a timely manner, it’s just the act of getting the pictures off the camera, cropping them, uploading them, and sticking them in the posts that I dread. Once I have iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, and Firefox open all at the same time, my practically new MacBook Pro starts doing the spinning-color-wheel-of-death, “go make yourself a cup of coffee, I’m busy thinking here and it’s going to be a while” thing. So I don’t like to do it unless I really, really have to. I guess I should try to figure out what that’s all about so it’s not such a dreadful task. (My gut feeling is that it’s iPhoto, as it’s a problem that’s gotten worse with time and I’m now up to 8400+ photos in my library. Sigh.) I also think I just generally need to be more efficient with my computer time…

Or maybe just sleep less.

One Down, One To Go

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat finished last night. I really loved playing in it, and as usual I’m a little sad to see it end. I’m not sad to see the double rehearsals go – I ate so many dinners in my car the past few weeks that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat dinner with my family, at a table.

Now I just have West Side Story to do. So, you’ll excuse me while I go practice the Mambo now…oh, and I have to work on Cool, Tonight, Office Krupke…actually, I should really just go practice the whole show. Several times. With a metronome…

Twenty-Nine Months Old!

Dear Carolyn,

Next month we can officially call you 2-and-a-half. Your Daddy and I were just discussing how different you are now from when you turned 2, how you change so much faster than we do, we can barely keep up.

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I’d like to tell you what your favorite things to do this month are, but the word “everything” doesn’t come close to summing it up. Color with crayons and markers? Great! Ride your tricycle? Sure! Read library books over and over? Wonderful idea! Play with dolls and blocks and puzzles and cars and play-doh? All at the same time? Bring it on! About the only things you don’t like to do are getting ready for bed, getting ready to eat, getting ready to leave the house…do you see the trend here?

You are a very helpful child. You love to help me load and unload the dishwasher (it definitely goes faster when you help, since I have to put away all the breakables as fast as I can!), vacuum (the floor gets extra clean since I have to go really slowly so I don’t run over your toes), fold laundry (or unfold, as the case may be) and dust (actually, that is really helpful – though not very thorough). You’re also very, very polite when we’re out, saying pleases and thank yous unprompted. The other night we were at Grandma’s house for dinner, and you had eaten a late lunch. When she encouraged you to eat more dinner, you said “No thanks, I’ll finish it later. Can I have some apples please?”

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You’re back to sleeping in your bed, although you take forever to fall asleep at night. And sometimes you have nightmares. The other night you woke up crying, and when I went in to ask you what was wrong you tearfully replied, “my play-doh!” When I asked what happened to your play-doh you sniffled and said in a really small voice, “it fell off the little green table.” And as funny as that sounds now, I wanted to cry with you that night hearing how sad you were. I’m honored to be the person who can make it all better when you have a nightmare.

Love, Mommy

Bowling

I signed Carrie up for bumper bowling for the spring, for a change of pace from story times and music “classes”. She loved it – from the fancy shoes:

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…to the fun metal ramp that actually lets the ball get all the way to the end of the lane:
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And she bowled a 78 for her very first game of bowling ever. That’s pretty good…I bet I could barely break 100 since it’s been so long since I went bowling last!

Sixteen Teeth, Going On Seventeen

Carrie came to my dentist appointment today. She got to take a ride in the “big chair”, while the dental hygienist counted her teeth. (Apparently two of her two-year molars are finally on their way in – which could explain a bit about the last couple weeks of sleep issues.) The chair was such a big hit that Carrie kept begging for another turn while I was getting my teeth cleaned.

Next fall she’ll have her first “real” appointment. In the meantime, all of her teeth look good, and she seems to have a normal bite…despite the sleep-time binky habit we haven’t kicked yet…

Oh, and the hygienist was impressed with our toothbrushing song. We sing the ABC song while Carrie brushes her teeth, but then after when Denis or I brush her teeth we sing the “Toothbrush Hokey Pokey”. I’m sure it’s not really original, but the hygienist had never heard of such a thing, so in case anyone needs a new toddler toothbrushing strategy, I give you:

The Toothbrush Hokey Pokey
You put the toothbrush in. Stick the toothbrush in.
You take the toothbrush out. Take the toothbrush out.
You put the toothbrush in, I trust you can figure this out…
And then you shake it all about! Brush as many teeth as you can!
You do the hokey toothbrush and you turn yourself around, You can turn around, or have your child turn around, or just turn the toothbrush around here.
That’s what it’s all about! Jazz hands. Seriously.

(Repeat until all the teeth are brushed.)

Books We Love

We have an unbelievable number of books in our house. Paperback books that I’ve collected since high school, textbooks from college, fiction, science fiction, non-fiction…

I started buying books for Carrie before she was even born. I’d see a picture book that I had to have to read to her someday and I’d buy it. We have an obscene number of board books, and a growing library of “paper page” books for her. We also frequent the library, and when we bring home a new batch of books we have to read them over and over again until they’re practically memorized.

There are a lot of amazing children’s books out there. But there are so many, it’s hard to know where to start. So I thought I’d mention some of the books we really, really love in this house, in case anyone is looking for some ideas. Just as a warning, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re either going to have dogs or sheep in them, or sometimes bunnies.

The first one actually doesn’t have animals as a main theme. We’ve gotten this book out of the library a few times now, and I think we may have to add it to our collection:

The Night is Singing by Jacqueline Davies.
The illustrations in this book are an amazing mix of collage and painting. Every time I read it I see a detail I’d missed before. I really love the main character’s knit bunny! It’s also a very readable book, with lyrical rhyming text (“Pip-pip popping/acorns dropping/on the roof above your head”). The book is about a little girl getting ready to go to sleep and identifying all the various noises of the night as lullabies. It is one of our very favorite bedtime stories.

St. Patty’s Day Party ’07

Our 6th annual St. Patty’s Day party was today. It was a blast! The power went out an hour before everyone was supposed to come. Luckily, I had already vacuumed. Unluckily, the corned beef and scalloped potatoes were still cooking. Denis went out and fired up the generator so the crock pot (with the potatoes) would keep on cooking, and then he fired up the grill and stuck the giant roasting pan of corned beef in the grill.

Shortly after the first guests arrived the power finally came back on. But all things considered, it wasn’t a huge problem, just a minor inconvenience. A generator is a good thing.

And now for the really crazy part of the day: at one point, there were 10 children five and under in my house. That’s a lot of small humans in one place at one time. But they all got along really well and everyone played really nicely.

I also decided that I haven’t taken enough pictures at these parties throughout the years, so I chased people around with a silly hat ($1 at Target!) and took pictures of (almost) everyone in it. (I think I missed a couple of the kids – they didn’t stay still long enough, and if they weren’t willing I didn’t push the issue.)

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More silly hat pictures are here.

O.K.

Off to go call the power company again, since the power just went out again. Yay for laptops and DSL…the power going out didn’t cause me to lose my post!