Kids do stuff

Posted on by
Reply

It seems I haven't updated anything about how the kids are doing in a while.

Eli is speaking in full sentences. We are doing pretty well coping with a two year old's whims. The morning routine is going better. We have him get dressed before breakfast and he can do 80% of it by himself. His clothes often are on backwards, but he is pleased because he did it himself. Sometimes he will complain about his butt because his underpants are on backwards, and he is getting a wedgie. Speaking of underpants, he is in them full time. For a while he was still wearing a diaper at night, but now he gets up in the middle of the night (not very happily) and goes to the bathroom. This morning he got water all over his shirt while washing his hands, so I had to get up to change his shirt at 2:45am.

Amelia has a couple teeth now. She also sleeps from 10pm-5am most of the time, occasionally even longer. She is eating non-milk food (I hate to call rice cereal or mushed sweet potatoes real food). She is getting big. She enjoys the johnny-jump-up, which also induces pooping. She is much lower maintenance then her big brother was, so I am glad we had them in this order. She is almost ready to sit up on her own.

Paddle tags

Posted on by
Reply

Kevin Callan has a cool link on his blog. Cottage Life mag. has paddle themed Christmas gift tags on their site. They are free to download in PDF format and can be printed on label sheets and stuck on gifts, or printed on paper/card stock and taped/tied on.

I'm not sure how well this fits into the whole “green” thing, but you could reuse them every year, or at least print them on recycled paper.

Diet

Posted on by
Reply

It's time to start thinking about New Year's resolutions. I saw this article on the This Old House blog about going green. It had some good resolutions.

Some of mine are:

  • Killing Vampires. We used to have the tv on a power strip that got turned off, but when we got a repalyTV we had to leave it on. I need to get it off the same strip as the TV and DVD players. The computer area probabbly a big draw. I can put the printer and scanner on a strip that goes into the UPS but gets turned off 99% of the time (or just unplug them since we use them so little). We recently set the computer to shut down at 11pm and we usually don't use it in the morning, so it will only be on a few hours a day. We also need to get better about switching off the strip with the cell phone chargers.

  • Stopping some gaps. The seal on the bottom of the side door is breaking off and I can see light through it. I also need to gasket or foam the outlets in the house.
  • Think about the upstairs. Our second story has original insulation over most of it. The problem is that all the easy places already have been bulked up. The whole cape cod shape makes it a real pain to add to the woefully inadequate insulation we have there. It pretty much requires a gutting.

Thanksgiving

Posted on by
Reply

This is the one holiday that it is about a meal, but somehow the entire long weekend became an endless meal only interrupted by sleep. We started on Thanksgiving with a waffle brunch, and then a lackluster turkey dinner at Leon's. Friday evening we had a nice traditional dinner. My mother did the usual fare, but some things were new. Bridgit made a pecan pie with apples and cut the sugar in half. The apples gave it sweetness without the gooey sugar layer that pecan pie usually has. My mother also did a sweet potato mash covered with sugar and nuts.

We had people over for breakfast on Saturday and we had some amazing food. We pretty much made it our Thanksgiving meal. Bridgit made a Cranberry Spice Bundt which was amazing. The most amazing thing to me was that she actually almost followed the recipe. The only thing she changed was some whole wheat flour in place half the regular flour. She also made a pumpkin fondue thing that was spectacular. The only problem was that one of the pumpkins tipped over in the oven and poured goo out and made a bunch of smoke. Holly made quiche florentine which had more stuff and less eggs then most quiche.

Then to wrap it all up we used the turkey carcass to make a turkey soup and had it for dinner tonight.

Now I need another long weekend to sleep off all the food.

Oh, and Amelia is now eating real food. Real food means rice cereal and sweet potatoes.

From Amelia Rose

Tis the season to use less trees & chemicals

Posted on by
Reply

I remember mountains of wrapping paper strewn about the house Christmas morning, but hopefully my kids won't. Christmas generates enough packaging anyway that we don't need to put one more disposable layer on it. Bridgit's family has used fabric bags for some time, but for the past few years we have been using straight-up fabric. It is fun and we have developed a good stockpile of fabric and ribbon to use.
It started a while back when I discovered the art of Furoshiki which is kinda like origami, but for wrapping things. The Japanese Government has a handy PDF to show you how to wrap what shapes.
While we sometimes use those techniques, I usually do the standard paper techniques, but with fabric.
There are some tricks to making it look good:

  • Don't use a blanket to wrap a book. The fabric pieces should be close to the size you need, anything more then twice the size you need can be difficult.
  • Fold the fabric to the size you need it before you start wrapping. It doesn't need to be complete in-half folds; folding over a few inches to get the right size works well.
  • Feel free to use pins or tape to keep the fabric taught.
  • Disposable ribbon works well with cloth, too.
  • Scrounge fabric from people who sew: my mother has an entire closet filled with fabric. Or check out the “remnants” at your local cloth 'n craft joint.

Bonus: cleanup is super easy.

UPDATE:Here are some photos of presents last year.

Wigglin'

Posted on by
Reply

It's safe to say Amelia is moving. Tom put her in the middle of the quilt, and here she is… photolink
(Awesome quilt made by Erich Harbowy's mother. Thanks!!!) There's also phtos of Eli in soccer socks that he put on himself, and a few photos after going to the park on a cold day: Eli has some pretty sweet clothes on.
She's also gigglin', especially when Eli does anything goofy, which is most of the time, so we have a pretty spirited home theses days.

Thinking back

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking today about our new President and all the usual jazz about the historic-ocity of the moment. This morning I told Amelia (who is 4 months old today) that she would get to grow up under an Obama presidency and she smiled and giggled at me. This evening I was thinking back to the first time I heard of this guy with a funny name. It was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. I still remember the feeling I got from listening to him; it was awe inspiring. The first thing that came to mind was JFK. I'm not sure if it was the youth and energy, or the inspiring language. In his speech he introduced the US and the world to Barack Obama. I recall talking with friends about how amazing this person is and that he should be President. Now he is.

Part 1

Part2