Category: General News

March 25: The kids and I had our first Music Together class at Happy Bambino this morning.  It’s the first class (aside from story hour) that I’ve taken with Andrew since I was on maternity leave with him!  I’m excited to have a class to go to every Wednesday morning.  Attendance is Sylvia’s birthday present from Granny and Grandad…and she LOVED it.  She was grinning and bouncing and squealing the whole time.  (Andrew was curled in the corner with his bottom lip protruding most of the time…it was a little boisterous for him.  But bizarrely, when we left, he lept up and down exclaiming about how fun it was (!!??).)
Tom is playing with Andrew now, and Sylvie is napping, which is giving me a chance to catch up on the happenings of the interwebs.  I haven’t been on the computer in the evenings for a few days.  I started a book and am knitting a baby hat, and both of those activities are addicting.  When I am reading a good story, I have a very hard time doing anything else.  Like feed my children.

The other day, I thought, “I won’t read my book until after the kids are in bed.”
Then I wandered into the room where the book lay innocently on my nightstand.
“I’ll just move the book to the bed so it’s ready for me tonight,” I thought.
There it lay, nestled upon my comforter.
“I’ll just lie down on my bed for a moment.  Feuf!  I’m tired!” I lied.
“Wow, this bed sure is cozy, and Andrew and Sylvie aren’t in imminent danger, so maybe I’ll just cozy up to this large book that also happens to be on my bed.”
“I’ll open the book to the spot where I left off last night.”
…
…
Bad, bad, bad.  Isn’t something considered an addiction when it interferes with your normally functioning life.  Yes.  Reading addiction.
But after that, I’ve gone cold turkey for the last couple days.  Instead I’m working on a sweet little hat.  Almost. Done.  Must stay up one hour more…  Another addiction.  I think I have an addictive personality.

Anyway, enough about me.  Today is my brother Joe’s birthday!  21 years old today.  In Sri Lanka.  He’s done some great posts recently.  You can read them (and comment too…that’ll make him happy) on his blog: Plato’s Footnotes.
Michael’s birthday was last week.  We went to dinner together and had a nice time and ate yummy cake.  I have photos.  They’ll get edited and uploaded soon.

Soon as I finish my book!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!
<runs to bedroom>

March 17: Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!  The weather is promising to be beautiful today.  We’re meeting friends at the zoo for our first group outdoor activity and picnic of the spring!
Andrew’s working on some shamrock crafts to give to his friends, and he’s dressed from head to toe in green.
I have my hair in pigtails with the shamrock bands that Heather gave me years ago.  This morning, Andrew walked up to me with his crafting scissors in hand and snipped at one of my pigtails.  A clump of hair fell to the ground.

Disbelieve was conveyed.  A discussion ensued.  At least I already have layers in my hair, so hopefully this will just add a little more volume.  I hope.

March 16: Sylvia is taking her afternoon nap, and Andrew is humming along to Beethoven’s pastoral symphony as we watch Fantasia.  I’m finding myself very thankful that Andrew likes watching movies.  It gives me a little down-time.  I’m also grateful that his movie selections are limited to Fantasia, Fantasia 2000, the David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, Animals are Beautiful People (a kids wildlife show from the ’70s), and Robin Hood.  Oh, and The Lion King sometimes makes an appearance.  They’re all shows I enjoy listening to, and it means that Andrew hasn’t ever even heard of most of the characters in most modern movies.  So he’s not jonesing for shoes or cereal or pajamas that sport the logo of some Disney product.  I am really not a fan of having my children being walking billboards!

Hmmm…take five on that comment that Sylvia was napping.  She’s apparently not napping.  That girl!  I was hoping she’d take a good nap so we’d all be nice and rested and could pull out my bike and hook up the trailer and go for the first bike ride of the spring!

It’s a stunningly beautiful day today.  The last piles of snow are melting, and the ground is wet, wet, wet!

March 16: One of my mom’s favorite lullaby’s was from Hansel and Gretel, “Sleep my child, and peace attend thee; all through the night.”  I like singing it to my kids.  But up until Saturday, March 14, Sylvia hadn’t partaken in the song’s suggested timeline.  This last weekend, she finally slept “all through the night.”  It was magnificent. She slept from 7:30pm to 7am without waking us once.

A couple nights before, I had slept through the night.  Bryan woke up with her once.  Also on Thursday night, she slept for a total of 14 (!!!) hours.  She went to bed at 7:30, woke up at 3 am to nurse, and then didn’t wake again until 9:30.  Unbelievable.  In general, the switch to daylight savings time has worked really well for our family this year.  We kept putting the kids to bed at their normal bedtime (which felt to them like an hour early), and then they slept until their normal wake-up time…or much later.

Along with her crazy-long nighttime sleeping, last week Sylvia switched to a single-nap.  It seems like she’s back to waking at 7am and napping at 9am and then 2pm.  But last week she was waking at 8:30 or 9am and then napping at 11 or 12 for several (or more) hours.  Overall, it was an amazing week for sleep.  And what a joy my young girl is to be around when she is well-rested.  It makes such a difference!

March 15:  Did you notice the new little flashy application on the side bar?  That’s my new Twitter status.  There are lots of times that I have the computer on and the kids have done something funny or sweet or horrible or enduring and I want to share it, but I know I won’t have time to fire up my website-updating program.  So now I can pop off a quick note via Twitter (I just enter the text into the URL bar of Firefox!) and it will show up here on my webpage.  If you’d like to comment on any Tweets you see, just pick some post and comment.  I’ll see it!  Let me know what you think!

March 15: Every weekend, I spend a little time mapping out our dinners for the week. I try to do this on Saturday. Then on Sunday one or some (in this case, Bryan and Andrew) of us go grocery shopping. It might be more appropriate to say that we brave the Woodman’s crowds in search of our food.
I started meal planning about a year ago. Before then, we had a dozen or so meals that we commonly made, and we bought the staples for those meals weekly. So we didn’t really need a shopping list, and we didn’t really use recipes too often. That was when we were both working and dinner was something that needed to happen at the end of the day when we were both tired and wanted to play with Andrew.

But now things are different. Since I started staying home, I’ve taken on dinner. It used to be Bryan’s terrain, and now it’s mine. And I like to make new things. So every week I look through magazines (Martha Stewart’s Everyday Foods is my favorite) or cook books and find seven meals…almost always ones I haven’t made before…to put on my list for the week. We still have our staples, and I don’t tend to plan our lunches (no need when they are all mac & cheese or pb &j or malt-o-meal muffins).

It’s a pretty good system. The best part is that on any given day I don’t have to think about what I should do for dinner. I just look at my list. I don’t like to have to think or be creative when I just need to start a meal. Especially when Sylvia is needy of being held and Andrew wants me to tell a story. That’s no time for me to be deciding if we have the ingredients to make some pasta dish. My meal planning keeps me sane and keeps us well-fed. And it means that I get to try out new recipes all the time, and that keeps my creative side happy.

Here are some of my meal-planning resources:

• I got a “plan-it” organizer when I was starting to meal plan.  A notebook would work just as well.  Really, there’s nothing special about this.  Well, maybe spending $18 on my meal-planning notebook made me feel obligated to actually do it.
  I do like having everything in one notebook where I can look back at what I did in the past.  On the rare occasions when I want to make a recipe twice, it’s easy to skim back and find favorites.
  I think after I fill this notebook, I’m going to use Google Calendar to track my meals.  That’s what Simple Mom does, and it seems like a good technique.
• My Woodman’s shopping list.  After writing up my week’s worth of recipes (and noting what page they are all on), I pull out a shopping list and start writing up what ingredients I need.  Here’s a copy of my list for others who might find it useful.
• Everyday Foods.  I seriously love this magazine.  Thanks to Jessica for introducing me.  It comes out 10 times each year, and I’ve made about 80% of the recipes in each issue.  They are all fast.  They are all easy.  They are all good.  And they tell me how much time it will take, which I love.
  Most of the recipes are available online.  They also have an e-newsletter you can subscribe to.   Go forth, enjoy!

Do you have any meal-planning tips or recipe-sources to share?  I’d love to hear if you do!

March 13: It’s Friday night, and Bryan and I are watching Battlestar Gallatica.  I’m also spending some quality time with my laptop.  Ahhh, a wonderful evening.  I’ve uploaded some new pictures from the last couple weeks into the gallery.  See here for set one (March 6-9) and set two (March 10-12).  Pictures include:

• Sylvie doing some of her baby signs (all done, bath, toes)
• Andrew having special moments with me and Bryan
• Andrew sporting his new bike helmet
• Andrew and Eli being leaping superheros
• Sylvia screaming bloody murder
• Celia and Sylvia pushing each other around in a cart

Continue reading “March pics”

March 13: Some of the blogs I have been reading have been participating in “green week.”  The first week in March, people all over the country were taking pictures of green things.  I didn’t know about it until it was over, but then I ran across a hand-full of my own pictures depicting green.  Here they are!

Into my will
Let there pour strength,
Into my feeling
Let there flow warmth,
Into my thinking
Let there shine light,
That I may nurture this child
With enlightened purpose,
Caring with heart’s love
And bringing wisdom
Into all things.
~Joan Salter, The Incarnating Child

I just ran across this on a new blog that caught my eye.  Lovely sentiment.

March 10:  Daylight Savings Time sure does weird things to my kid’s sleep!  Sylvia is just peeping now, and it is 8:20am!  She normally wakes up before 7am.  She got a new molar over the last week, and it was pretty uncomfortable for her.  There were several nights when she was up seven or more times between 10:30 and 6am.  Urgh.  She also had a low fever and some nose runniness for five or six days.
Seems like her tooth and/or her malady have gotten better.  She’s been a delight to be around the past couple days.  She is doing so many baby signs.  I’m going to try to take a video of her to share.
Andrew is currently watching videos of baby animals nursing on YouTube while I type.  He’s tucked between my arms.  On Sunday, he and I had a date with “just Andrew and Mommy.  No Daddy or Sylvia.”  He wasn’t too interested in such an arrangement (he very much prefers time with Daddy!), but we had a great time.  We went to a bike shop and tried out bikes.  Then we got him a bigger bike helmet.  Finally, we went to Andrew’s first movie in a theater.  We saw The Tale of Desperaux, and Andrew loved it.  He sat on my lap, with his soft cheek pressed against mine.  I imagine that he’ll go to lots of movies in his life, and I’m glad I could be his date for his very first one.