The long version:
The day started out hopeful with a clean kitchen and a morning walk around the block in the mist while our porridge cooled (so very three-bears of us). Then it involved taking three children to the dentist for two children to have exams. Then it involved coming home briefly before adventuring with three kids at the library to get enough books to keep them busy as we returned to the dentist for mama to have a LONG dental exam (all looks good, I'll have to go back for two, small, early cavities). Then it involved returning home and mustering the energy to pick up the toys that somehow still managed to be spread all over the house even though we were never in it for more than an hour followed by managing to make a three-course dinner with all the veggies we had in our CSA box. Lastly, I folded some laundry, snuggled some Penny, kissed my husband, and fell asleep before 10.
The short version:
Mainly, I spent the day fantasizing about what life would be like with a live-in nanny.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Baby Head Band Tutorial
I am not very crafty, however, I always imagine that someday I might be. This makes my husband chuckle as I save broken dishes dreaming of mosaics or little bits of paper and ribbons I think I might find a use for on that mystical "someday" in the future.
I even saved the elastic from the sheet I bought to make my binding cloth. Then I had a baby girl. A bald baby girl, because Scrivners are born bald (and so was I...fully-bald genes here). Someone told me about their mother superglueing little ribbons on their bald head when they were a babe, and it got me thinking that all those ribbon scraps and the elastic might be put to good use:
I even saved the elastic from the sheet I bought to make my binding cloth. Then I had a baby girl. A bald baby girl, because Scrivners are born bald (and so was I...fully-bald genes here). Someone told me about their mother superglueing little ribbons on their bald head when they were a babe, and it got me thinking that all those ribbon scraps and the elastic might be put to good use:
The scrunchy baby head band
(which looks remarkably like a garter)
(which looks remarkably like a garter)
Aha, here is a crafty project that fits my budget, available time, and sewing skill level. If you have similar craft boxes filled with things like elastic and ribbons, this is a quick and easy project to give you some shower/Christmas gifts for baby girls.
Measure out 15" of non-stretched elastic
(and inch or two less for a small newborn, another inch for a toddler).
Then stretch it out and measure out that amount of ribbon.
(see photo for perspective on the proportion of ribbon to elastic).
(and inch or two less for a small newborn, another inch for a toddler).
Then stretch it out and measure out that amount of ribbon.
(see photo for perspective on the proportion of ribbon to elastic).
Pin the pieces together at the top.
If you are layering ribbons, pin the other ribbon together for the full length of the ribbons.
If you are layering ribbons, pin the other ribbon together for the full length of the ribbons.
Stretch the elastic out along the ribbon as you sew.
You will likely have to do this in increments.
You will also not have a free hand to take pictures while doing so.
You will likely have to do this in increments.
You will also not have a free hand to take pictures while doing so.
Take the ends together, and then sew them together horizontally.
Fold back the ends onto the head band and sew them flat.
From here you can make a bow (or flower or doo-dad)
to sew onto the head band for a little decoration.
to sew onto the head band for a little decoration.
Then you are done!
Monday, September 14, 2009
Missed Entry
Before Penelope arrived I had the grand idea that I would submit an essay for the 2nd Annual Real Simple Life Lessons essay competition. I had several free-writes and thought the September 7th deadline would be perfect as it would be right before the baby would come. As we all know, little miss Penelope surprised her mama by coming much earlier than anticipated. In fact, she came so much earlier than I had originally expected (thinking myself a 42-43 week carrier) that I began to think I would still be able to pull off finishing the essay (ha!). All was going well and I even tidied it up enough to send it to one wise reader to begin my editing process. But then I was struck by a busy weekend and an awful case of mastitis right before the entry deadline. My essay aspirations were over.
However, I have decided, since this blog is in bad need of some regular posting, to share it with you. Now, I do so reluctantly. I am reluctant because 1) I found the topic a little bit silly (the essay topic is "when did you first realize you had become a grown-up"), and it is not something I would ordinarily write about here 2) the essay is not written for you, my readers, but for a commercial magazine reading audience (though perhaps missing both audiences as I have no idea how to write moral pieces for a commercial audience) 3) There is a word limit (1500 words or less) Thus certain tidbits of information are more generic than I would ordinarily be 4) the serious editing process stopped when the deadline passed. My husband, and excellent grammatical editor, has not read this and I have largely directed my attention elsewhere.
With my disclaimers posted and without further apologizing, here is what would have been my entry:
I remember my mother telling someone once that I was "eleven going on thirty". Perhaps this was because, at ten, I already had a job, unofficially, as support staff at the day care my younger sisters and I attended. The management actually asked my mom to stop paying for me as I was far too much of a help. The kids often came to me first with problems on the play ground. Only if I could not help them resolve the conflicts would I direct them to the appropriate staff person. I helped with cleaning and volunteered my time to prepare snacks and help in the nursery. I sat in on meetings and contributed to brainstorming and problem solving. Eventually I even answered phones.
Perhaps my "mature" status was from being the eldest child of a single mother. Perhaps it was because my siblings were young enough that I was more like a mini-parent than a sister. Whatever my precocious reasons, for most of my teens and twenties I conceived of myself as “mostly grown up”. Sure there were things left to do, like marry, buy a house, and have kids but there were plenty of adults who had not done those things, which lead me to believe those milestones were not the ultimate indicators of maturity. “Old soul,” “Wise,” “Grounded,” or whatever I may have been called, I was still a youth and as much as I wanted to be “grown up” I knew I was not precisely because it was so much my desire.
I cannot pin-point the exact place and time when the shift came as I could if the milestone were as simple as my wedding anniversary, or the day we signed papers for our first house, or the day of my first child's birth. My wedding seemed a strange marker of maturity. Either I had matured before deciding to get married, or I would mature a lot more through being married - or perhaps both - but the wedding itself was simply a five-hour blur that we remembered more painstakingly by our credit card bill than by actual recollection. Did marrying a man twelve years my senior indicate that I was mature or he youthful? What did he see in so young a woman that made him willing to risk my youth? He might say compassion. Compassion that indicated an understanding of my own humanity that gave him confidence I would not "discover myself" several years into our marriage and leave him. I felt secure in my decision to marry him, but deciding on a spouse did not make me feel definitively grown-up. The house we eventually signed papers for was a project and a business venture that did not feel like any adult accomplishment of saving and stability as I imagined first homes typically signified. The birth of my first child only made me more acutely aware of all that I had not experienced and did not know. This, perhaps, was a sign of adult maturity but one that was lost on me at the time.
Somewhere during the passing of all those milestones a change came over me. It was not connected to a circumstantial change, though many circumstances did change. My husband changed careers three times, wildly adjusting our income levels. We averaged a move every nine months, bouncing around three different cities in two different states. At somepoint, during all the packing and un-packing and purging and settling and renting moving vans, there was a change in my own self-conception.
In my youth I would have admitted to making mistakes. I had made the mistake of living slightly beyond my means with the help of credit cards, and the mistake of not doing what I said I would do and letting another down, and I had even made mistakes that resulted in injury to someone else. However, nearly all of the mistakes and the difficult situations in which I found myself I could rationalize away as being primarily not my own fault.
When money was so tight that I was paying credit card minimums but bouncing checks for groceries, I could tell myself, or my mother or my husband, any number of reasons that our financial state was due to some injustice. Truly, there were often others to blame. Whether it was the time my husband and I bought our first house with an owner-carried contract (a major fixer-upper for my contractor husband to renovate) only to discover, when we attempted to switch the papers exclusively into our names, that the woman selling the property did not actually own it and had no right to sell it. Or when my husband, overly trusting as he may be, completed over five thousand dollars worth of additional work that a homeowner requested on top of her original contract without amending the contract. He said we could trust the owner, only to have her claim afterward that she did not request any additional work and she therefore refused to pay for it. However seemingly out of our control these injustices were, all of my rationalizations that they were the cause of our difficulties did nothing to confront my own lack of wisdom in managing what money we did have.
There were many arguments, early in marriage, that resulted after I bashfully told my husband we had less money than he thought because of bank fees from bounced checks. This happened over and over and the wise-eyed child in me was mystified at why I could not seem to restrain myself to make a budget and keep it. I came up with a million excuses for why it happened again and how it was ultimately not my fault. My husband simply could not understand how we could continue having the same problem month after month, and he could not help but tally in his head the amount of money we were giving the bank for our "free" checking account as I continued writing grocery checks hoping they would not draw on our account before we had more money to deposit. Eventually, I had a paradigm shift that allowed me to believe that buying groceries was more important than maintaining my credit score and our monthly money fights disappeared.
Though we grew wiser in managing the money we did have, our budget was still small and hardship kept coming. However something had changed in me. For when our vehicles were taken from us after an act of God caused a business venture to fail, rather than allow myself to feel like life had dealt us an unfair hand, I knew that we had decided to subject ourselves to such risks as landed us precisely where we were. If I decided to support my husband in taking those risks, then I ought to have been willing to embrace, rather than bemoan, the consequences. At times, though some of our friends would look at our circumstances and think that we were suffering undue hardship, I saw the hardship as the result of our own decisions. This made the consequences much easier to bear and has made me wiser still because of the ability to see my own role clearly in my failings and my lack of wisdom in our various endeavors.
It was not a huge shift, and it did not come with any trumpet sounds or aha moments, but at some point my perspective changed. I began to look at my every decision – even if it was one to trust someone I should not have – as my own and thus I began to live as the creator of the life I had made for myself. Seeing with this clarity has allowed me to learn a great deal about myself, about how to make do with less, and about how to make wiser decisions. While learning and accepting responsibility does not immediately rectify any consequences or mistakes, it does allow me to live my own life with confidence that I am a grown woman. Whatever contribution another person, or an act of God, might have made to my difficult circumstances, the circumstances are ultimately my own. I freely choose the decisions that lead me to where I am. Many of those choices I still cannot imagine making differently given the information, or lack there of, I had at the time. If they were all my own decisions, how can I not live confidently in the life I have made for myself? The mistakes and the hard consequences have also taught me abundantly more than I learned while "getting everything right" or being "so mature for my age" as a child. Further, the mistakes as well as successes have made my life, which I love, what it is. Thus accepting full responsibility for my own life is what has truly made me realize I am finally a grown up.
Okay, my reader, now I actually want to hear from you. The essay competition would not have given me feedback for my entry, so one perk of sharing it here is that YOU can. Can you imagine reading something like this in a magazine? If not, tell me why (gently!).
However, I have decided, since this blog is in bad need of some regular posting, to share it with you. Now, I do so reluctantly. I am reluctant because 1) I found the topic a little bit silly (the essay topic is "when did you first realize you had become a grown-up"), and it is not something I would ordinarily write about here 2) the essay is not written for you, my readers, but for a commercial magazine reading audience (though perhaps missing both audiences as I have no idea how to write moral pieces for a commercial audience) 3) There is a word limit (1500 words or less) Thus certain tidbits of information are more generic than I would ordinarily be 4) the serious editing process stopped when the deadline passed. My husband, and excellent grammatical editor, has not read this and I have largely directed my attention elsewhere.
With my disclaimers posted and without further apologizing, here is what would have been my entry:
I remember my mother telling someone once that I was "eleven going on thirty". Perhaps this was because, at ten, I already had a job, unofficially, as support staff at the day care my younger sisters and I attended. The management actually asked my mom to stop paying for me as I was far too much of a help. The kids often came to me first with problems on the play ground. Only if I could not help them resolve the conflicts would I direct them to the appropriate staff person. I helped with cleaning and volunteered my time to prepare snacks and help in the nursery. I sat in on meetings and contributed to brainstorming and problem solving. Eventually I even answered phones.
Perhaps my "mature" status was from being the eldest child of a single mother. Perhaps it was because my siblings were young enough that I was more like a mini-parent than a sister. Whatever my precocious reasons, for most of my teens and twenties I conceived of myself as “mostly grown up”. Sure there were things left to do, like marry, buy a house, and have kids but there were plenty of adults who had not done those things, which lead me to believe those milestones were not the ultimate indicators of maturity. “Old soul,” “Wise,” “Grounded,” or whatever I may have been called, I was still a youth and as much as I wanted to be “grown up” I knew I was not precisely because it was so much my desire.
I cannot pin-point the exact place and time when the shift came as I could if the milestone were as simple as my wedding anniversary, or the day we signed papers for our first house, or the day of my first child's birth. My wedding seemed a strange marker of maturity. Either I had matured before deciding to get married, or I would mature a lot more through being married - or perhaps both - but the wedding itself was simply a five-hour blur that we remembered more painstakingly by our credit card bill than by actual recollection. Did marrying a man twelve years my senior indicate that I was mature or he youthful? What did he see in so young a woman that made him willing to risk my youth? He might say compassion. Compassion that indicated an understanding of my own humanity that gave him confidence I would not "discover myself" several years into our marriage and leave him. I felt secure in my decision to marry him, but deciding on a spouse did not make me feel definitively grown-up. The house we eventually signed papers for was a project and a business venture that did not feel like any adult accomplishment of saving and stability as I imagined first homes typically signified. The birth of my first child only made me more acutely aware of all that I had not experienced and did not know. This, perhaps, was a sign of adult maturity but one that was lost on me at the time.
Somewhere during the passing of all those milestones a change came over me. It was not connected to a circumstantial change, though many circumstances did change. My husband changed careers three times, wildly adjusting our income levels. We averaged a move every nine months, bouncing around three different cities in two different states. At somepoint, during all the packing and un-packing and purging and settling and renting moving vans, there was a change in my own self-conception.
In my youth I would have admitted to making mistakes. I had made the mistake of living slightly beyond my means with the help of credit cards, and the mistake of not doing what I said I would do and letting another down, and I had even made mistakes that resulted in injury to someone else. However, nearly all of the mistakes and the difficult situations in which I found myself I could rationalize away as being primarily not my own fault.
When money was so tight that I was paying credit card minimums but bouncing checks for groceries, I could tell myself, or my mother or my husband, any number of reasons that our financial state was due to some injustice. Truly, there were often others to blame. Whether it was the time my husband and I bought our first house with an owner-carried contract (a major fixer-upper for my contractor husband to renovate) only to discover, when we attempted to switch the papers exclusively into our names, that the woman selling the property did not actually own it and had no right to sell it. Or when my husband, overly trusting as he may be, completed over five thousand dollars worth of additional work that a homeowner requested on top of her original contract without amending the contract. He said we could trust the owner, only to have her claim afterward that she did not request any additional work and she therefore refused to pay for it. However seemingly out of our control these injustices were, all of my rationalizations that they were the cause of our difficulties did nothing to confront my own lack of wisdom in managing what money we did have.
There were many arguments, early in marriage, that resulted after I bashfully told my husband we had less money than he thought because of bank fees from bounced checks. This happened over and over and the wise-eyed child in me was mystified at why I could not seem to restrain myself to make a budget and keep it. I came up with a million excuses for why it happened again and how it was ultimately not my fault. My husband simply could not understand how we could continue having the same problem month after month, and he could not help but tally in his head the amount of money we were giving the bank for our "free" checking account as I continued writing grocery checks hoping they would not draw on our account before we had more money to deposit. Eventually, I had a paradigm shift that allowed me to believe that buying groceries was more important than maintaining my credit score and our monthly money fights disappeared.
Though we grew wiser in managing the money we did have, our budget was still small and hardship kept coming. However something had changed in me. For when our vehicles were taken from us after an act of God caused a business venture to fail, rather than allow myself to feel like life had dealt us an unfair hand, I knew that we had decided to subject ourselves to such risks as landed us precisely where we were. If I decided to support my husband in taking those risks, then I ought to have been willing to embrace, rather than bemoan, the consequences. At times, though some of our friends would look at our circumstances and think that we were suffering undue hardship, I saw the hardship as the result of our own decisions. This made the consequences much easier to bear and has made me wiser still because of the ability to see my own role clearly in my failings and my lack of wisdom in our various endeavors.
It was not a huge shift, and it did not come with any trumpet sounds or aha moments, but at some point my perspective changed. I began to look at my every decision – even if it was one to trust someone I should not have – as my own and thus I began to live as the creator of the life I had made for myself. Seeing with this clarity has allowed me to learn a great deal about myself, about how to make do with less, and about how to make wiser decisions. While learning and accepting responsibility does not immediately rectify any consequences or mistakes, it does allow me to live my own life with confidence that I am a grown woman. Whatever contribution another person, or an act of God, might have made to my difficult circumstances, the circumstances are ultimately my own. I freely choose the decisions that lead me to where I am. Many of those choices I still cannot imagine making differently given the information, or lack there of, I had at the time. If they were all my own decisions, how can I not live confidently in the life I have made for myself? The mistakes and the hard consequences have also taught me abundantly more than I learned while "getting everything right" or being "so mature for my age" as a child. Further, the mistakes as well as successes have made my life, which I love, what it is. Thus accepting full responsibility for my own life is what has truly made me realize I am finally a grown up.
Okay, my reader, now I actually want to hear from you. The essay competition would not have given me feedback for my entry, so one perk of sharing it here is that YOU can. Can you imagine reading something like this in a magazine? If not, tell me why (gently!).
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