2 of the 4 P’s of Motherhood + fire

Well yesterday evening was a doozy.  As reference I’ll refer you to my original post about the 4 P’s of Motherhood.

And now we begin:

As you may know my lovely friend Ilana watches Mazie while I’m at work.  After a very long weekend of work, plus two intense days this week I venture home to pick up Mazie at Ilana’s house.  I walk in to a strange smell in the house, but decide not to say anything about it because I can see Ilana has had a rough day and don’t think telling her that her house smells horrible makes it any better.  I think the girls have really worked her over during the day and she needs a hug.  A hug for being a great mom to her daughter and for being a great caretaker of mine.  Anyway in the chaos Cat their cat walks over to me as he always does for a little snuggle.  I pick him up only to notice that the strange smell is coming from him. Unfortunately, Cat got a little too close to the burner while Ilana was preparing dinner and singed his tail fur.  Cat the cat is quite old and apparently can not feel his tail anymore. First let me tell you Cat is just fine.  It seems to only have singed the outside fur and he’s unphased by the whole thing, wondering why I’m now holding his tale under the bathroom sink faucet and rubbing it vigorously with paper towels to remove the burnt fur and inspect for any injury.

Anyway we venture home confident that Cat was ok.  I guess Mazie hasn’t eaten much during the day, but you know that’s not all that unusual some days kids eat and some days they don’t.  Just before bed she is telling me her mouth and her tummy hurt her.  She’s getting her two year molars and they are definitely giving her fits.  As I go out of the room to get some teething tablets I hear her SCREAM that she doesn’t feel good.  So I’m rushing in to grab her and rock her in the chair when I’m suddenly being thrown up on.  Hmm maybe it’s not just the molars.

Now we’re rushing to the bathroom where I again take a direct hit on our way through the kitchen because I can only imagine trying to clean puke off the kitchen rug.  Ok now have I mentioned that during the lead up to this whole ordeal I’ve had to go pee for at least 30 minutes? Now we’re standing in the bathroom both covered in puke and I realize oh my god I’m going to pee my pants and be covered in puke.  So I quickly manage to make it to the potty so I’m only covered in puke and not in my own urine as well.

Oh did I mention that Mazie is still throwing up this entire time and we are both standing in a bathroom covered in kid puke. Now I’m stripping us both down, trying to comfort my extremely upset child, and clean the bathroom at the same time.  I quickly grab paper towels to wipe the floor and in haste toss them into the potty for disposal, which as you can imagine was THE WRONG IDEA.  They quickly clog the toilet and I’m facing an overflow situation.  Smart thinking averts disaster when I turn the water off behind the toilet bowl.

I rush into the bed room to throw on a bathrobe so I can try to finish cleaning up and put my sick kid to bed. Oh have I mentioned that Robbie has been on a VERY important business call during this whole fiasco and is standing in our bedroom closet, which seems to be the best place to both get reception and a quiet place to speak to someone? Still on the call I bust is with a dreadful look on my face, still partly covered in puke, and search for my bathrobe.

I’ve managed to clean up most of the house in a whirlwind, grabbing rugs and throwing them in the tub, filling the bathroom sink with water to soak our clothes and opening up the bathroom window to remove the smell.

Robbie’s now off his call and comes out to survey the scene of our house turned upside down with only one rug left on the floor from Mazie’s room to the bathroom, the toilet disassembled, and his wife and child sitting in the rocking chair as if nothing has happened.

Today I experienced two of the 4 P’s of Motherhood plus fire.

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Hey did I tell you Easter was tons of fun this year?

He’s whee-lee scar-wee:

Look he’s not so scary:

The hunt:

The hunter in action:

Oh wow:

The loot:

Come back next year Easter bunny:

It’s a late recap, but here it is.  Easter was a blast this year.  Mazie was old enough to really be able to celebrate spring.  Although you’ll see from our atire, it was FREEZING.  But anyway we decided to celebrate spring anyway.  The Easter bunny brought lots of fun things to explore nature: a new bird feeder for outside the window, garden gloves to help Mummy and Nannie, an adorable egg shaped chick that sprouts grass for hair, and some water colors.  Of course there were lots of sweets as well from the best candy store in the world — the Chatham Candy Manor.  OOOh are those chocolates good.  I think Mazie thought so too.

Updated April 23th: Lots of folks have asked my about Mazie’s adorable attire in the last two pics.  Although in these it looks like PJ’s it’s actually this lovely mandarin-style jacket with satin ribbing and frog closures.  The farbric is an amazing garden print with sweet peas and other country garden style flowers.  My mom picked it up for her at this thirft shop in San Fran on a trip out to see a dear friend Sarah.

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Old and new reading

I’ve been reading through these two mags dreaming of my next project.  I liked the juxtoposition of the old and new patterns and layouts in these two books.  There are some wonderful little gems in each one.

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Purl Bee and Mimi Kirchner

Not sure if anyone saw these amazing doll patterns that the Purl Bee “commissioned” so to speak from Mimi Kirchner.  I fell in love with them at first sight.  They have a very turn of the century feel, but still modern and updated.  You should check out all of Mimi’s work.  I’m new to it but thanks to Purl Bee have been really inspired.  I have a few felt dolls in the works for Mazie, but I think they might take a back seat to making these.

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No more bird poop on these

Another project undertaken over the last stretch was to recover some of our couch pillows.  I used to have a nice lovely arrangement of pillows on the couch and then came kids.  Two little girls (ours and my friend’s daughter who watches Mazie while I’m working) have successfully transformed the once beautiful pillows into some weird science experiment that I’m sure have made all of my guests’ stomachs turn as we suggest they sit on the couch.

So I’ve decided in general our house needs a bit of freshening up but I didn’t want to spend any money.  So I had this old cashmere sweater that had seen better days and turned that into a pillow cover.  I’ve also had excessive amounts of this rather bland beige linen and I’m struggling to find uses for it.  Truthfully, I don’t really like this fabric, but I had lots of it and it’s clean, and it’s better than the ones before.  I kid you not, I think one of them had some residual bird poop on it from when the girls dragged it outside with them and then in a freak incident it was pooped on.  No matter how much you clean I don’t think all that stuff comes off.

So here they are.

I now hate the two pillows from the original arrangement that were not nasty and disgusting.  They just don’t work with these so I’ll have to find something else in my stash to recover them, but that’s for another day.

My bedroom is the next item on the list.  I think once you have kids your room is always the last to get any attention.  Still have the same comforter from before Robbie and I moved in together.  It was mine immediately following college and was the nicer of the two options we had — mine from post college or his from college.  His swiftly went into the trash.  I couldn’t even donate it.

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Hats — See I told you I had been doing something

So I finally had a moment to get my s#*t together and upload and organize some photos.  I’ve been meaning to post the hat I made for my husband for some time now and here it is finally.  He received this hat actually pretty early on in the winter considering the previous attempts at making a hat for him were horrible.  I know, you’re saying “seriously dude, it’s a men’s hat.  That’s really not that hard.  What the f%$k where you doing.” Well I don’t know they just stunk and even though there is something kind of funny about insisting he wear them because he loves you and you made them even though they are horrible and look funny on him.  I thought that might actually look bad on me so I released him from bad hat wearing duty.

So here’s the good one.

And no I didn’t make Mazie’s sweater.  But it is handmade and absolutely adorable.  I picked it up at Crunchy Granola Baby. Insert shameless plug here: Crunchy Granola Baby (owned by my good friend Jennie) is a great place for all your natural baby needs. AND their website (designed by my very cute and talented husband) is a great resource.

It’s the Jacques Cousteau Hat pattern by I found on Ravelry translated by Kaisakaisa.  It’s a great hat to knit.  Completely mindless and quite soothing.  Once you establish the rib and then place the markers for the decrease there is no thinking at all until you’re done.  Love it.  My father in law got one of these for Christmas this year too.

So I needed a new hat.

This is the Side Slip Cloche Hat from Boutique Knits by Laura Irwin a book in which I am IN LOVE.  I think I might have to knit up every item in here.  Also let me just say that I’m not in the practice of posting photos of myself, especially like this one with sort of a goofy look on my face, but I wanted to show you the hat and Robbie was kind enough to get some photos of it for me.

It’s not quite like the pics in the book.  Laura’s seems to be a bit rounder at the top.  Maybe my head is just bigger or something, but I do like the way it turned out.  I have to admit that I NEVER would have picked out this yarn (Rowan RYC Soft Lux) just from seeing it in the skein, but when it knits up it’s quite beautiful.  It has little gold threads running through it and would normally be a bit to “jazzy” for me, but maybe I’m trying to step up my game or something.

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Working on stuff

You may have noticed that I’m not posting as often as I have in the past.  That’s because I’m working on a new project.  Not a craft project really, but a life project.  More details on that one to come as things develop, but needless to say its taking up a bit of my time.

Crafting and homemaking has not stopped either, but my ability to get pictures transferred to the computer and then up on the blog certainly has.  I’m hoping to get moving on that one this weekend.

Anyway, just a not to say I’ve not forgotten about you all entirely and that I’m hoping to have some new exciting goodness to share shortly.  Stay tuned.

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