Everyone should have a friend who makes you feel really good.
More pictures of our trip to the Leopold Nature Preserve are in the gallery.
More pictures of our trip to the Leopold Nature Preserve are in the gallery.
October, outdoors, outstanding
Oct. 13: We’ve had some great outdoor adventures this past week. It’s been warm, it’s been sunny, the trees have been oh-so colorful. It’s been great.
On Wednesday after story hour, Jessica and I took our kids to the Aldo Leopold Nature Center. I’m regretful to admit that I have never been there before. It was a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. The boys were so sweet together, running amidst the prairie grasses, the girls had fun being carried and then hanging out on a grassy clearing, and we basked in the realness of it all. Afterwards we stopped by a great yarn store I hadn’t been to before. Off the Beaten Path was so great! Maretta, next time you’re in town, we’re going there!
Jessica and I met for some knitting on Thursday night. I just love sitting with friends, drinking warm beverages, and knitting or talking and in either case, laughing. It restores my soul.
On Friday, we returned to the Door Creek Orchard with Jessica and family and with Terry. We had a nice picnic amidst the apple-laden trees, and we bought many jugs of cider. The boys had fun looking at the black Welsh mountain sheep. They then crawled around on the grass pretending to be Art and Andy, sheep.
On Sunday, we met my dad out at Cherokee Marsh and had a wonderful time walking through the forest and the prairie. It’s one of my very favorite places on earth. That and Jack’s place. Beautiful.
As the sun came up today, the trees behind our house were glowing with a purplish-red. Our tree out front is starting to turn yellow. It’s a wonderful time of year.
Playing with Granny
Oct. 13: We have Granny here for the week! I’m taking a big sigh of relief. Sylvia is on the mend, and I have some major child-care assistance. In fact, today I only moderately assisted with child-care. It felt so nice to have a little break. LuAnn drove up all the way from Texas. My white car is going, going, going… To our great delight, relief, and surprise, Bryan’s parents offered us their Toyota Camry as a replacement. LuAnn drove from Texas up to Wichita last week and then on Friday did the 11 hour trek to Madison. She’s amazing.
I used some of my free time this afternoon to process some of the many, many photos I’ve taken in the last week. The fall color is so incredible. We’ve been having fun in the out-of-doors!
Photos of Andrew and Alivia having a painting fest, Sylvia crawling in the back yard, and the young girl munching on some breakfast are in the gallery.
Development milestones
Oct. 11: Amidst a week of major unhappiness, Sylvia is still charging forward on her quest to grow up. On Thursday night, she pulled herself up to standing in her crib. Never mind that she pulled herself up as she was screaming in her crib after we attempted to put her down for the 8th time at 10pm… She’s been going from lying down to sitting for quite a few weeks, and she often wakes up a little bit and sits right up, making it hard for her to fall back asleep again. She’s not crawling in her sleep anymore (at least she’s not bashing her head while trying to crawl!), but there’s lots of sitting up and now standing in the crib. It’s truly shocking to see my baby standing in the crib! She hasn’t pulled up on anything else yet, but she’s started reaching up to pull things off the coffee table. And she loves crawling over to the front door and trying to push through the screen! She’s got some get-up-and-go. And a whole lot of get-up-and-follow-her-brother!
Ear infection: part deux
Oct. 11: Sylvia has had a really rough week. She’s not been sleeping for much more than 20 minutes (other than one blessed 80 minute nap), and she’s not been getting more than an hour of sleep between the time she wakes and when we put her down for the night. Then she’s been waking every hour or so in the evening. It’s been rough. For everyone. I’m kind of kicking myself, because I thought she was just really off her schedule and teething (she’s getting a new bottom tooth), but it turns out that she has an ear infection again. Left ear. I took her in yesterday after a particularly rough night of waking and inconsolable crying.
She started on a new antibiotic last night, and already this morning there was a big improvement. I’d forgotten that it’s possible to sometimes put her down without having her cry, to leave the room even without a howl following me. She went down for her morning nap without protest…10 minutes so far. Her eyes still look rather “off.” Sick or super tired or hurt. Hopefully after a few days of this new antibiotic she’ll be feeling even better.
Best fudgy brownies
Oct. 9: [Note: Sylvia just fell asleep after working on it for an hour and a half. I’d go in to pick her up and soothe her, and she’d yawn and yawn. So we took a break and spent some time outdoors, I put her down, she cried for 10 minutes, I held her and bounced her, and at long last, she fell soundly asleep. Hope it lasts at least a half hour. Cat-food-breath was one tired girl.]
In other news, I’ve recently been making a brownie recipe that I found on a bag of King Arthur Flour. It’s so good. So Good. I had to share.
The Best Fudge Brownies Ever
1 cup (8 ounces) butter,
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups Dutch process cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cup King Arthur unbleached all purpose
2 cups chocolate chips, semi-sweet
Note: Increase salt to 1 teaspoon if you are using unsalted butter.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9×13 inch pan. (I lined mine with aluminum foil).
In a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, or in a saucepan set over low heat, melt the butter then add the sugar and stir to combine. Return the mixture to the heat (or microwave for 1 minute) and heat until mixture is very hot but not bubbling; it’ll become shiny looking as you stir it. Heating the butter and sugar a second time will dissolve more of the sugar, which will yield a shiny top crust on your brownies.
Transfer the mixture to a bowl (if you melted the butter and sugar in the mixing bowl, you don’t have to transfer anything).
Stir in the cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla. Add the eggs, beating till smooth; then add the flour and chips, stirring until combined. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.
Bake the brownies for 28 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out dry. Remove them from the oven and after 5 minutes, loosen the edges with a table knife. This helps prevent sinking as they cool. Cool completely then cut and serve.
Makes 2 dozen brownies
Amazing October morning
Oct. 9: October is undoubtedly my favorite month. Unless you were to ask me in May. Or maybe June. September is good too. But October. I think it’s #1. This morning is sunny and with a brilliantly blue sky. The maples are all just starting to turn, so there’s lots of green with bright splashes of scarlet and fiery orange and that amazing yellow. Yellow locus tree leaves against the blue, blue sky. Nothing like it!
In case you were wondering, this is a post about my abiding love for autumnal beauty. It is not a post about how Sylvia is not napping this morning. [I had to stop for a moment there. Sylvia just discovered the cat’s food for the first time. Fishing cat food kibble out of her mouth…] She almost fell asleep while we walked Andrew to preschool. But then she cried for a half hour in her crib before I decided a nap was right out for a while.
By the way, on the walk to preschool, Andrew said a couple delightful things.
“Hip hip hooray! It’s preschool today!”
“You’re the best mommy. Even better than I’m an Andrew.”
Have a good morning!
iPod maddness
Oct. 8: I’ve ripped 1,000 songs in the last couple days. It’s been an all-day affair. Tom got an iPhone a while back, and since iPhones are also iPods, he offered me his iPod. This is new territory for me. I’ve never had an mp3 listening device. But now with this new gadget, I’m excited to re-vamp my music-listening habits. We’ve got loads of CDs, most of which we haven’t listened to in years. My plan is to rip all our CD to the computer. I’ll hook up the iPod to our stereo. It’ll hold all our music. I’ll keep the CDs that we like and actively use, and I think the rest we’ll find new homes for.
It takes 10 minutes or so to rip a CD. Andrew’s been very engaged in watching and counting as each track is checked off. Then he gets to put the new CD in the computer. He’s have a great time. We’re both somewhat obsessive personalities:)
I’m about a quarter of the way through my CD collection. I’m excited to use the playlists and other nifty features to shake-up my music-listening habits. I often listen to the same 5 CDs for months…even years at a time. Hey, when I find something I like, I don’t seem to mind listening to it over, and over, and over and over. Should be fun to re-explore some of my old music and maybe try out some new tunes too. I found that nearly all our CDs are from the 1990s. Except for the recent influx of children’s music! If you have favorite artists or albums, let me know! I’m game to explore.
Parenting: Choices may be harder than they appear
Oct. 5: Sylvia has me at a parenting low this morning. I laid her down for her morning nap, and she cried and cried. Last night when I put her down to sleep, she was quiet for about 20 minutes and then she screamed…not just cried…for about a half hour. That little girl has very strong opinions, and one of them is that she’s not so in to sleeping these days. The whole topic is sort of breaking me into little bits.
This little girl needs a consistent sleeping pattern. Her ear infections got her way off her game, but even before that…throughout August…she has had an erratic, not-very-happy sleeping existence. At night she’s back to waking every three hours and then going straight back to sleep. I’d rather her sleep for five plus hours at this point, but I’m not too worried about it. It’s the daytime naps, especially the waking after 20-40 minutes that is driving me crazy.
And if that was all the sleep she needed, I’d figure I just didn’t get a baby who needed much sleep (oh, well!), but she does very much need more sleep. After two lousy naps, she’s a total crab apple. Just as I’m trying to get supper ready.
When she was sick, I picked her up and nursed or rocked her each time she woke up. But that resulted in her waking every thirty minutes or so for hours at night. Since she’s been healthy (for the last six day), I’ve been letting her cry herself to sleep when she won’t go down or when she wakes mid-nap. She’s a determined girl. There’s a lot of crying.
I wish that parenting were easier. I wish that if you loved your baby more than anything you would just be able to do the right thing. But I’ve seen with Andrew and now with Sylvia that what they need more than anything else is a good parent. And from my perspective, being a good parent doesn’t (unfortunately) mean always doing what the baby wants. It is doing what is best for the baby, and for the family, so that everyone gets their needs met (whether they want them met or not!). From napping to discipline to manners and routines, sometimes the parent has to be the “bad guy.” Kids need their parents to set limits, to say “no,” to be consistent and firm as well as flexible and giving. I really don’t like, though, how much it can hurt my heart to be the kind of parent that I think and somehow know that my kids need.
I’m open to any suggestions anyone has about how to get Sylvia sleeping more consistently. Right now I put her down for her morning nap between 9 and 10 am and her afternoon nap between 1 and 2 pm. All I do before her nap is nurse her. She doesn’t like me to read or sing to her.
We’re thinking about switching the nursing to be just after she wakes up. Before her nap, I think we might try giving her a massage or rocking her in the dark room.
I feel like this time with Sylvia is particularly hard because it’s really just me who is responsible for her napping. When Andrew was little, Karen, Bryan, and I were all sometimes responsible for putting him down for naps. That had it’s own challenges. But with Sylvia, there’s no outside-the-family childcare, and due to division of labor and doing what is easiest, I’m the one who puts Sylvia down while Bryan takes care of Andrew. I guess that makes it a little easier to be consistent, but it also makes me feel that the responsibility for Sylvia’s sleeping unhappiness rests primarily squarely on my shoulders. It’s a heavy weight.
OK, I think I’ve had enough feeling sorry for myself. Off to get dressed and fold some laundry. Have a good Sunday! Wish Sylvia a long nap. It’s been about 20 minutes now since she stopped yelling…
Orchard afternoon
Oct. 4: Sarah, Wes, Charlie and our gang met at Door Creek Orchard this afternoon to enjoy the lovely day. Being a picturesque location, we took loads of photos. I can’t get enough of my sweet kids:)
Andrew was having a good time covering Sylvia in grass. She was having a great time munching on said grass. Perhaps she believes she is an ungulate.
OK, I’ve got to turn off the computer. It’s midnight! Tomorrow afternoon/evening I’m going to American Players Theater and Bryan will have both kids. Wish him luck if you wouldn’t mind. He hasn’t had Sylvia on his own very much, and these days she’s pretty keen on having her mom around. Hopefully it’ll be a good experience!