cheap thrills

there is nothing better than a tea party with my favorite hostess with the mostess.

it was only after taking this picture that i realized my daughter is a walking cliché of suburban liberal hippie parenting: dirty faced and barefoot, wearing a gay pride t-shirt while her cloth diapers dry in the sunshine, playing with toys crafted of recycled milk jugs. awesome.

the daily DIY

i was inspired by a cool piece of art i found online here, but because i'm cheap and fancy myself to be a crafty little devil i tried to make it myself.

the original...

and my copy...

it's hanging on my living room wall, and looks kind of bare....maybe it needs a little something to snazz it up a bit. or maybe not. i kind of like the simplicity of it.

the online site is selling it for 170 pounds, which at the current exchange rate is about 282 dollars. (thank you, google). i spent about $15 to make my own version. i bought two planks of precut birch plywood at hobby lobby. i'm sure i could have bought cheaper wood at home depot, but that would have required measuring and cutting, this was a much simpler alternative and it guaranteed me that the two pieces would be the same size. i'm not certain that i would have gotten that same guarantee had my husband been manning the table saw. a bit of black spray paint, some letter stencils (lowercase, natch, as i am obviously averse to capitalization), gold acrylic paint, and a few eye hooks. done. not too bad, if i do say so myself.

coming up...DIY curtain panels for my daughter's room, modeled after pottery barn kids. but cheaper. they're done and they're cute, and they were a fraction of the cost. stay tuned!

she ain't pretty, but she's all mine

if there were a cash for clunkers program for sewing machines this little gem would be worth its weight in gold. i know a lot of the new models out there are super cool, full of whizbang awesome features that embroider monograms with a push of a button, automatically sew button holes, and probably make wicked capuccino...this is certainly not one of those. the new machines are thoroughbreds, the race horses of the sewing world. this old gal is the workhorse, the old nag. sure, she's been around the farm a few times but she has a lot of life left in her yet before the glue factory comes calling.

the users manual that came with her says that she was purchased at the sears & roebuck in oakland, ca in december of 1977. for those of you playing along at home, that means that this beauty is as old as i am. she was given to me by a friend who inherited it her from the mother of another friend who was giving away all her worldly possessions before a move to thailand, or maybe indonesia, or somewhere else really far away, thus prohibiting the relocation of an 80 pound sewing machine.

she might not be pretty, but she works like a champ. she's actually very similar to the machine i learned to sew on when i was a girl; my mom's old singer that she got for her high school graduation in 1964. incidentally, my mom still has that sewing machine and it still works just fine. a few months ago i opened up the outer case to oil the inner workings. this gal is solid! all metal, nary a piece of made in china plastic to be found. i imagine that with the proper care, i will be teaching my daughter to sew on this same machine in a few years and it will still work just perfectly. maybe someday i'll invest in one of those newfangled fancy thingamajigs with the whatnots and the buttons, that is, if i ever learn to sew more than just a simple straight line.

the weekend kitchen

banana bread, because i have 18 billion blackened bananas in the freezer

strawberry blueberry cake, because happy hour with friends is better with dessert

and tonight i made tomato-mozzarella bruschetta and a salad with strawberries, goat cheese, and pecans. but i was too busy drinking wine to take a picture.

cheap thrills

my daughter, my dog, and i ran in the sprinklers at the park today until we were soaked to the bone. our shrieking peals of laughter, hers and my own, were enough to draw attention from other park-goers, and probably made them question my sensibility. their curious stares made me question their vivacity.

missing: one perfectly intact sense of sanity

we've been on a bit of an organizing spree around here - purging junk, cleaning out closets, putting stuff into storage. my husband was taking large bins of too-small baby clothes out to the garage to store in the attic space above the rafters. when he got to the bin containing maternity clothes, i told him to stop. "i'll store that bin inside somewhere, in case we need it sooner rather than later." the Me of about three months ago - the Me that was feeling certain that we were going to be the one-and-done kind of procreaters - just shrieked "do you KNOW what you just said?!"and then promptly she lay down and died.

in recent months i have transformed my thoughts on having a second child from no way, no how! you must be crazy to want another child, to okay, let's just see what happens. if we get pregnant, great. if not, no big deal, to the point i'm at now which is more like, "honey, you know i'm no biologist but i think i'm ovulating (did you know there's an app for that?) so get on over here and hop on this." clearly, i win high marks in the romance department, probably not so much in the tact department. i am clearly failing in the sanity department, but i am really excited, actually, to see where this journey takes us. hopefully we have an easy road to conception, an easy pregnancy, and an easy, healthy baby who sleeps 10 hours a night and takes two 3-hour naps a day, rarely fusses, eats like a champ, and is potty trained upon exiting the womb.

fingers crossed that this is just a phase

i'm a firm believer in using positive reinforcement to influence a positive change in behavior. i don't believe in spanking, yelling, or other sort of punitive physical or emotional punishment, though after the shit my kid has been pulling lately i can totally understand how some parents end up at that place.

we've been using timeout with her and it works to stop the negative behavior in the moment, but i want to teach her make good behavior choices; to set herself up for success by earning rewards for good behavior instead of receiving punishments for bad behavior. besides, timeout is hard on all of us when out in public, which is where most of her outbursts are occurring these days.

after a rough couple weeks, culminating in a public tantrum to end all tantrums, i've decided to implement a simple reward system for the kiddo. i've created zillions of star charts for kids in my past life as a child & family therapist. typically, with the population i worked with most frequently, our target behaviors were more along the lines of "don't set the cat on fire" and "no threatening my classmates." our target behaviors will be much simpler, more age appropriate, and specific to the behaviors we're struggling with as parents of a willful toddler.

it will look something like this:

the language we're using (use nice hands, make good choices etc.) is very familiar to her as we've been using those words with her since before she could understand what they meant. now she can fully understand what we're asking of her but her willful two-year old personality and lack of impulse control to reign in her behavior has left us looking for a more workable solution. the bruise on my left cheekbone (from a hurled nalgene sippy bottle) and the scratches on my neck (from fingernails on definitively not nice hands) are proof that our discipline strategy needs a boost. she's wearing me out and she's still 12 days from her 2nd birthday. how much more terrible can The Twos get? again, please don't answer that question.

so, wish us luck. i'll keep you posted.