Happy 4th Birthday, Lila Quinn!

Fun with seed pods...and then, not.

Clare and Lila at the playground after school today

First Day of School

Something un-kid-related, and yet, it's all about making something kid-related.

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but I've taken to sewing. I started last spring with a hand quilting class. I figured that was a good place to start, since I didn't know how to sew on a button. From there I made a couple of small quilts and enjoyed the process very much. Then last August, Linda gave me her mother's sewing machine, a beautiful old Singer in pristine condition. It's a perfect machine for me because I find the modern ones overwhelmingly complex. It's electric, and it only goes backward and forward. You can change the length of a stitch, but that's about it for bells and whistles.

So since then I have determined that I don't really like quilting with the machine (though still make them by hand), but I am really enjoying using it to learn how to sew other things. Recently I started reading and researching clothes. I don't like patterns all that much - oh the tedium! - so I took a few old things apart to see how they were made. I even tried to make a few patterns myself, with limited success.


Front - Imps & Elves dress


Back - Imps & Elves dress


And then I found this great dress of Clare's from a Dutch company called Imps and Elves that she is starting to outgrow. She has two of them, hand me downs from our friend Dory, and they are made of t-shirt material. I couldn't bear to cut them up, though, so I spent a few evenings trying to measure one, but I couldn't get the math to add up because the t-shirt material was so stretchy. Finally I realized I could press it underneath my see-through grid ruler that goes with my rotary cutter, and I measured it out on a graph, inch by inch.







Then I traced it on muslin, and cut it out. Looks simple from here, right?






Turns out not so much.

I had an old skirt with a decorative bottom, so I cut it up and traced on my pattern. Then I painstakingly learned each step after doing it the wrong way, undoing it, and then doing it the right way. Piecing it together was easy - it was adding the neck, armholes and bottom hems that caused me the most trouble. And then I added the extra hem. All told, it took me a few weeks. When I washed it, it actually looked kind of good!

It's not ironed in this photo, by the way.














Lila wants one now, too. I guess I have to make another pattern...

Because Nana Ann wanted more pictures to look at.

On your marks...

Our lives have changed a lot in the last four weeks, because Clare has become remarkably mobile. Catherine thinks she's on target to walk at around 10 months, and I'm just not ready. Lila never cared for exploration, so I've gotten quite careless with what I leave out. Now I turn around and find Clare with a full pin cushion in one hand, a peanut in the other, balancing on a stair while trying to see her reflection in a mirror.

And speaking of my sister, Catherine, I can't get over how much Clare looks like her from old pictures I've seen.

This picture was taken by Carol, Catherine's friend from Chicago (my friend too but Catherine knew her first), who married Stu, Josh's friend from college. We went to visit them last Friday in New Jersey, where they were visiting with their daughter, Ruthie, who just turned two, and their son Teddy, who is six days younger than Clare (aka the future Mrs. Teddy Schweidel).

That's Teddy looking on with rapture in the background.

Fresh off the quote press:

Lila just said to me: "Mommy, when you get married again, can I be a flower girl?"

"Uh, I guess so," I replied.

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Lila's got a Florence Nightingale thing going on these days.


Lila and Girly Twirly tend to the sick.



Poor Ernie and Bert. They have a rash.



Bedtime!



I foresee a rash of rashes...



Clare, on the other hand, is crawling. Crawling! She keeps turning up under furniture.



We have our ways of dealing with such insubordination.

We are off to Nantucket through the holiday. The girls and I are leaving today and Josh will join us in a week. Happy 4th!

A story

So Lila and I were lying in her bed last night with the light off. Clare was asleep nearby in her crib. I was about to break into the nightly rendition ("2 times, please.") of "John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith" when Lila stopped me. "What does 'hesitate' mean, Mommy?" she asked me.




I stumbled a bit at first. "Well," I explained, "it's like waiting. Like if you were going to jump into a pool, but then you thought for a second that you didn't want to do it, so you waited, but then you decided to go...the part where you wait is called 'hesitating.'"




I waited for a response. Silence. I kept going.

"If you're scared and aren't sure you want to do something, that's called hesitating. Do you understand?"




She thought for a minute and then took her thumb out of her mouth.

"Julian says it means 'poopy'," she said. Then she turned away.




I'm pretty sure she believed Julian over me.

Summer awaits. So do we.

We rented a house in Long Island for August, and the owner graciously offered us the house for Memorial Day. I was excited before, but now I'm dying for August to get here. We all are.



This is one of two screened-in porches in the house. It sits on a small lake - you can see it in the distance.



This is the small private beach on Long Island Sound, about 100 yards from the house.



Lila was a little concerned when we told her that we were going to "the beach house". She pictured sleeping on the beach, and since she was small, the ocean has always made her nervous (though that was the Pacific - made me nervous too). So now we call it "the club house". She's fine with that.



Turns out, it doesn't take long for the beach to win her over.



And guess who likes to eat sand?



It's going to be a good summer.