Author: Sarah

Very Productive And Busy Weekend

Sarah General

(A.K.A. The Longest Blog Post Ever!)

I can’t believe it’s Monday night already. The past few days have been packed with so much craziness I’ve barely had time to think, let alone blog!

So, to sum up…

The new toy:
I bought myself a refurbished Kodak V550 camera to upgrade my Canon SD400. This is my carry-it-everywhere camera. It will definitely not replace my digital SLR, but I think after a weekend of playing with it I’m comfortable with it being at least a few steps up from the other camera. The video is incredibly better, the outdoor shots are also better. The inside shots…not so much. They’re probably better, but not so much of an improvement that it would be worth the upgrade. However, the shot-to-shot time and the initial shot time are incredible in comparison. It would literally take my other camera 30 seconds to start up, and then 10 seconds to recycle the flash in between shots – I timed it. Not to mention shutter lag. The new camera – if I didn’t have the D-SLR to compare it to I’d say there was no shutter lag, and the flash recycle time is just a couple of seconds.

Here’s a picture of Carrie I took with it indoors, using the camera’s built-in red-eye removal. There would have been major red-eye in this picture with the old camera, but if I zoom in a bit (to the original, this one’s been resized for the web) I can see a lot of noise in the background. For a snapshot camera, though, this will work just fine!

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The back-breaking labor:
We started staining the deck this weekend. We’re completely changing the color, from weathered gray to cedar. You can see a corner of the weathered gray in this picture. All we have to show, after approximately 18 person-hours of work (12 of which were all Denis), is the railing going around the deck – inside and out.

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The crafts:


I finished the woven tumbling blocks table runner! I love the colors, and the construction was interesting. It wasn’t very complicated, but the instruction packet I got from the class is…well, terrible. I don’t think I’d be able to make another based on those instructions, which is too bad. Since there’s no actual quilting it could be a fairly quick gift to make. I also started another pair of socks. They’re out of Koigu, which is always super yummy to work with. I started them Wednesday night and finished the first one this afternoon, so the pattern’s pretty quick too.

Nineteen Months Old!

Sarah Monthly Updates

Dear Carolyn,

What a month! We’ve officially entered the “no” phase. I ask you a question, and your automatic response is “no!” The thing is, you say it in this really cute, matter-of-fact, tiny little voice, and it’s so hard not to laugh.

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OK, fine, I’ll admit it. I generally do laugh. It’s a better option than getting angry, and when you’ve said “no!” to every single thing we have to do to get ready to go somewhere in the morning and we’re running an hour late because of it, laughter is really the only option.

20060503_ponytail.jpgYou’ve actually made quite a huge improvement in your language skills over this past month, not even counting your very clear “no”. You’ve picked up so many animal signs from the new set of Signing Time DVDs we got you last month I can’t even keep track of them. You know more of them than I do! You sing your ABCs – and can recognize most of the written capital letters – and count to 10. You love the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and will start singing it randomly when you want to hear it. You’ve also started doing what I call litanies. You might be nursing before bed, and you’ll say “mama milk, daddy milk, molly milk, mercy (murphy) milk…” and keep on going with all the names you can think of at the moment. (It’s really funny when you throw Uncle Michael into one of those litanies, because most of the time you call him “mucka-my”.) You do this with all sorts of phrases, like “mama sleep” or “molly eat” too, not just milk. I suppose those count as two word sentences.

Sometime in the past month you also started full-out running. You run with sound effects – I can’t describe the sound you make while you run, but you do it every time. Someday I need to catch it on video. If you could spend every waking minute outdoors on swings and slides, and running around, you would. Your biggest tantrums are the result of me having to drag you indoors because it’s started pouring or we need to go run errands.

20060523_doll_stroller.jpgSomehow, despite your love of the outdoors, you’ve also become quite the TV addict. Your favorite shows are Blue’s Clues, Signing Time, and Go Baby. I suppose they’re all pretty harmless, and I try to limit you to a half-hour of TV a day, though there are days when you get your way and get to watch twice that much TV. You also love to watch baseball, and will bring Daddy the remote after dinner and ask “bay-bah? bay-bah?” The other day you pointed to one of the players on the screen and said “Daddy hat?” because he was wearing the same baseball cap that Daddy always wears. You’re a pretty smart kid.

When you’re not outdoors or in front of the TV (which is thankfully in a different room than all your toys) you occupy yourself with blocks, dolls and puzzles. And books! We’re even starting to read some longer picture books lately, although you do love your lift-the-flap and touchy-feely books still.

I have to admit, between the “no, no, no”s and the fact that I spend so much time chasing you down to try to get anywhere or do anything with you, this month has been pretty challenging. But at the same time it’s been a blast since you’re starting to communicate so much better and we can actually have little conversations that aren’t totally one-sided anymore. I suspect that the challenging part of things is going to get worse before it gets better, but that everything you’re learning how to do is going to far outweigh that. I’m already seeing glimpses of the little girl you’re becoming, and although I know you’ve still got a long time as a toddler I also know how fast time has gone so far, and I’m not going to wish away one second – even the challenging ones.

Love, Mommy

Yummiest. Socks. Ever.

Sarah Crafts

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I finished my candy corn socks today! This makes 6 pair I’ve made for myself. We won’t talk about the three (or four?) pair sitting on spare needles/stitch holders in various baskets around my craft room! There should be enough stripey yarn left to make a hat to match Carrie’s sweater and socks, I just need to find a pattern I like. Carrie seemed to be pretty amused that we had the same socks on this afternoon. After I took this first picture she came and sat in between my legs so she could stick her feet out straight next to mine. Then she “helped” me take some pictures of our feet. A couple came out pretty well considering I was holding onto the camera for dear life!

To celebrate finishing a project, I picked up another project that’s been in the “current” list for almost two years: the woven tumbling blocks table runner. I sewed the borders on tonight, tomorrow night I’ll start sewing the binding on. It’s almost embarrassing how little work was left on this when I abandoned it…

I also finished upgrading the crafts section of the site. I think all the links will work and/or redirect automagically. If you notice something broken, leave me a comment and I’ll fix it. It’s definitely a lot slicker, and updating things will be so much easier now!

I Suck At Puzzles

Sarah General

Over the past few weeks I played the Da Vinci Code quest game on google, and I ended up being one of the 10,000 finalists who moved on to the final puzzle challenge. There’s a 48 hour window to play the final puzzles which started this afternoon. So after I was sure Carrie was asleep for the night, and after restarting Safari and making sure nothing would distract me, I loaded it up. It’s 5 consecutive puzzles, and the person who takes the shortest amount of time to complete them all wins the grand prize.

Wow. I thought I was pretty good at puzzles, but this was…well, I know for sure I didn’t win the grand prize. I think it took me somewhere close to an hour to complete it – I forgot to look at the time when I started. Four of the five puzzles were things I’m generally pretty good at, but they were sadistically difficult. The fifth…well, if being able to play this particular game is a requirement to enter Heaven I am totally destined for Hell.

But based on all the snippets of movie previews and such we had to watch during the first phase to get clues to answer those puzzles, I really want to see the movie! (I also want to see X-Men 3. I don’t imagine that we’ll actually get to the movies twice in one month, so now I have to decide which one I want to see more…)

Geeking Out

Sarah General

In my former life, when I was a software engineer, I had grand plans for my site. And for various reasons, most of which I don’t even remember anymore, I had decided to convert the whole craft section of my site to be database (MySQL) and PHP based. Mainly I think I was planning to make it easier to keep updated. I started the process two years ago, lost interest, had a baby, stopped working, lost touch with any and all web and programming knowledge I might have ever had, and, well, now it’s two years later. I have no idea what made me decide to start working on this again two nights ago, but now it’s become an obsession. (As in a “stay-up-late, who-needs-sleep, just-one-more-line-of-code” kind of obsession.)

So far I have a few test pages working, including a page to update the vital information about each project. The lines of code are slowly appearing out of the teeny-tiny little corner of my brain that survived the sleep deprivation and the invasion of nursery rhymes and lullabies. Actually, that’s somewhat impressive considering I’d never actually worked with PHP except for the few days I started trying to do this two years ago. I thought then – and apparently I still think this way – that if I just wanted it badly enough I could write PHP code. It seems to be working so far.

If I don’t get sidetracked by something else (no guarantees on that obviously) I might even have this running by the end of the weekend. Of course, the goal is for it to look exactly the same as it did before – just the way the information is stored and updated would be different – so nobody will ever notice if I don’t finish it!

Oh, The Guilt

Sarah General

We stopped in Stride Rite today because I wanted to get Carrie a pair of sandals for summer. I didn’t think she’d outgrown her shoes yet, because I just had them checked a few weeks ago and her feet still measured 5 1/2 – and her shoes are size 6.

Apparently, her feet grew quite a bit in those few weeks, and now measure 6 1/2. So we bought her some size 7 pink sneakers. They’re cute, but not the adorable fisherman sandals I wanted, because the store was sold out of her size. I’m very tempted to buy the other pair online and let her have two good pair of shoes for the summer. Especially since she’s now getting into all kinds of dirt and mud – it might be good to have a backup pair when the other pair is desperately in need of cleaning. Plus I’m feeling really guilty about letting her walk around for weeks in shoes that were a half size too small! (Like how I justify these things?)

Pre-Reading

Sarah Carolyn

I could hardly believe it when Carrie started filling words in for me while we read our bedtime stories earlier. I’m sure it’s just that she’s memorized the books we read frequently, not that she’s reading them. But I do think she can recognize the word “Dog”. I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising to me, since about 90% of her books have the word “Dog” in them at least once. In fact, her current favorite book at bedtime is Sleepy Dog: “Turn on the moon. Turn off the light. Sleepy, sleepy, sweet dreams tonight.”

It’s not like I’m pressuring her to do anything with letters or reading. She just starts randomly reciting the alphabet (when she’s not counting her toes) and points to letters and says their names. I’m assuming that someday she’ll acknowledge the existence of “M” and “N”. She recognizes the written letters and will say their names, but when we say the alphabet her version goes something like “J”, “K”, “L”, “O”, “O”, “O”, “P”. I guess it’s similar to the “ella-mennow” thing, maybe she thinks it’s “L and O, O”. And as far as I can tell, she recognizes finger-spelled letters at least as accurately as written letters. Which is much better than I can do!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Sarah General

cameo_pendant.gifI hope everyone had as nice a mother’s day as I did. Denis did most of the toddler chasing for the day, which meant I could sit and chat with my family for a while! He also gave me this lovely pendant – actually, though, he gave it to me two weeks ago so I’d have it for our family portraits.

This year I’m definitely not as reflective about the whole “being a mom thing” as I was last year. Don’t get me wrong, I still love being a mother and wouldn’t trade it for anything…most of the time. But I have to confess, it was all I could do not to crawl under the pew and disavow any relationship with my adorable little toddler when she spoke up in church. There were two baptisms this morning, and the priest had us all renew our baptismal vows. He asked the congregation, “Do you reject Satan, and all his works?” To which Carrie quite loudly and emphatically replied, “NO!”

And that about sums up my mother’s day.

It’s Been A Busy Week

Sarah General

It’s Saturday, right? It’s been such a long week.

Let’s see. I went to spin class on Wednesday. It was my third time in the class, and I’m finally starting to be able to do the parts where you stand up and pedal. Except, I really paid for it – I was in agony going up and down the stairs until today.

Thursday was Jenny’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Jenny!) and I should have also mailed out some Mother’s Day cards, but we decided to wait until we picked up our family pictures and send them out at the same time. Um, I just finally bought the photo mailers today. I guess I should have just sent the cards!

Friday I had to take Carrie to the pediatrician for a terrible rash. Nobody knows what’s causing it and it’s not anything easily identifiable like roseola or fifth disease, but at this point it’s covering her tummy, waist, one thigh, under both her arms, and one little hand. I’m thankful that it doesn’t seem to bother her, but I wish I knew what it was and what caused it.

And today was just a running-around kind of day. We bought a couple of pairs of Gerber training pants for Carrie. I don’t know when we’re actually going to start, but since she’s starting to show a little bit of interest in the potty and the training pants are hard to find I bought them just to have on hand. We were contemplating using them temporarily to see if the diapers were what was causing the rash, but the rash is remarkably everywhere else but under her diaper, so that’s probably not it.

So, it’s been busy. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I owe people cards. I haven’t wrapped up my mom’s gift. I don’t know whether we all have clean dressy-enough-for-church clothes for the morning. I have to make a fruit salad. I’m supposed to go to my grandmother’s house for brunch, except I’m not sure when we’re supposed to be there. But it’s mother’s day, so I’m not going to worry about any of this. So there.