I’ve got nothing.  I had a baby?  She breastfed a lot?  My eyes are bigger than the number of hours that exist in a day?

One of those items that were basically finished, except for the linings, were these super cute and designed by me hats.  I designed them!  I almost never do that!  I knit them using a basic ear-flap hat pattern – from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, Kim’s Hats - then embellished, embellished, embellished.  SO. MUCH. FUN.

plus MATCHING COATS. You know you love it.

I used wool from  my stash.  The grey was used to make a wee baby jacket for Callum, and the brown was a thrift store find.  The brown wool is ridiculous in how itchy it is.  It is NOT hat material and had to be lined.  I was stupid to use it.

It's a dog. Case you can't tell.

The grey is less itchy, but still itchy-can’t-wear-it even though the girls were desperate to wear the kitty cats.  I eventually got around to lining them about a week ago.  They sat in my mending basket for over a year.  It took me 15 minutes.  FIFTEEN MINUTES and I could have wrapped them and put them under the tree last year.

cuteness overload, yes?

I may be the world’s biggest idiot.

tweet tweet

This was the gift that Callum made for Claire.  The inspiration was this mobile, which I figured would be easy enough to recreate and make our own.  I cut out the birds from some neutral construction paper that I had on hand knowing that Callum would be coloring them.  I cut out many more birds than these two.  I would have used cardstock but I didn’t have any and I wasn’t about to go out and buy some for this since I literally have a suitcase full of paper.  One with a suitcase full of paper needs not to buy more paper.  Ever.

Then one fine day when Claire was napping – which, seriously, when was the last time that girl napped?  Last summer? – Callum went to work personalizing Claire’s Birds.

Callum wasn’t big on my abstract art idea, or say, wildly colored birds.  I even broke out the “good” markers but could not convince him to add any more color to each bird.  Once he started to get pissy about it I let it go.

I do love how he colored each bird a breast, and the eyes.

He also decided that two was plenty.  This may have been because I mentioned that when he was done we could go outside on an adventure and find the stick they’d hang from.  He was all over that.

I don’t think I used his stick to make the mobile.  Man, I’m a bit of a bitch Mommy.

ANYWAY.  Once the stick was collected, I had to assemble that sucker pronto because it had to be wrapped and let me tell you, the wrapping and presenting of presents is still a big deal over here.  It’s Very Important and honestly, happens a lot.  The kids routinely wrap up  my stuff and give it to me as a gift.

Getting your own bra wrapped up in a box is a bit of a letdown.  I’m just sayin’.

just hanging.

The birds were well-received.  My kids love to get stuff that the other made for them as I’ve brainwashed them well.  These now hang proudly over the head of Claire’s bed.  Where Claire’s head doesn’t lay because one day last month they decided to sleep backwards, so these birds hang over her feet.

This would look really adorable with pretty paper and several birds, don’t you think?  I mean, Claire’s Birds look adorable too and are totally awesome in that kid-made way, but you could inexpensively make something pretty stellar as a baby gift.  You should do that.  Go! Create!

Sadly it meant we had to postpone Claire’s birthday party.  She was cool, though.  Took it in stride, just like she takes being sick in stride.  This girl, a bundle of mixed messages is what she is.  Of course she still got presents and a cupcake with pink icing and a sparkler so all was right in her world.

When the masses were all sleeping this afternoon I did this mad clean of the entire house, and finally got around to taking pictures of these little Joy Boxes the kids made Steve and I for Christmas.  They each painted and stickered a box.  I had limited the paint options hoping to unify the boxes somewhat, and was surprised to see how differently they still turned out!  I had also tried to limit the sticker options but I wasn’t organized enough to have the stickers out before little people were present and then of course, little people had opinions.

The stickers still get moved around pretty regularly by little fingers, and I’ve noticed that my box is now just a j y box.  I’ve been robbed of my joy!

Each box is filled with little round notes from the kids, or little pictures they’ve stuff in there when the mood strikes and in my case, a rock painted red.   I took a moment today to pause and go through my box and smile.  I certainly needed a little jolt of joy this week.   Or, you know, j y.

Joy to the world!

a stack of joy!

Then other nights, time outs are called (Steve), negotiations made (me), yelling (Steve), or physically placing uncooperative kids back into bed until they finally give up (me).   Sometimes all that might work.  And other times all of that ends in a tantrum so spectacular that I am usually thanking every possible deity out there that I’m not on a reality TV show.  Like I need to add that to the list of things I’m being judged for.

Tonight was a tantrum night.  I’ve got to hand it to my middle daughter, she’s got staying power.  And lungs.  Lordy, do her lungs work.  I was gently singing to her (“you are brave, you are strong, you can go to sleep”) on her bed, and rocking her while she screamed like I was BURNING HER ALIVE, which let’s face it, maybe me singing is equivalent to that, but honestly, do you have to scream?  A simple “Mama, your singing totally sucks” would probably be effective.

So, she’s screaming and I’m singing and Callum is complaining bitterly (they share a room) and finally he says to me “Mama, just take her some place else”.  Kid had a point.  So I moved the screaming, flailing one to my bedroom, still gently singing and swaying.  After a while I got bored of this, so I just left her on my bed where she continued to wail, back arching, legs kicking.  Occasionally she would get up on her knees, arms lifted to the heavens and wail. 

She better thank me win she wins the Oscar.

I lay down beside her, and stopped singing since clearly the singing was useless, and waited.  After a while, her screaming started to fade.  Then it was like she realized that hey!  Mama’s bed!  At this point she started trying to get under the covers, which was quite an ordeal since I have approximately 8 million pillows on my bed and I make it every morning (the one housewifely duty I actually do with any sort of regularity.  I enjoy a made bed.  Plus if it is made I reason it is unlikely spiders will find it inviting.  The theory behind that is that spiders prefer an unmade bed since spiders are, you know, icky.).  

So I’m trying not to laugh, and I am also refusing to help her because she just screamed for 45 minutes and isn’t supposed to be sleeping in my bed anyway and she doesn’t deserve any attention*.  She finally gets the pillows and the blanket arranged just right, and snuggles in with her back to me.  I took that as my cue to leave.

As I was getting ready to leave I opened my bedroom door than double-backed for the laundry hampers.  Girl sits up, firmly meets my gaze and says “Don’t forget to shut the door when you leave”.

THE MIDDLE CHILD IS WINNING.

Something about valentine crafting makes me happy, it’s quick and pleasing.  And full of hearts and pink.  I like hearts.  I like pink.  I like crafting. WIN-WIN-WIN. 

cutting. serious work.

Last week the kids and I made wax paper crayon valentine hearts that have been hanging in the window.  Callum informed my mother that we plan to pull these out every year when we decorate. 

keepers? really?

I totally planned to throw them out.  Decisions.  Decisions.

Yesterday I visited with the lovely Laura and adorable Gwen, and that little playdate resulted in Anna going to bed at 7:30 pm.  This is insane.  I was drunk with the possibilities of what I could do with an entire evening stretched out before me.  Inspired by the heart tic-tac-toe game on alphamom, I made the kids this:

heart on heart

Of course, I could have finished any number of unfinished projects I’ve got going on but hearts! pink! crafting!  THE STARS ALIGNED.  The kids played one game this morning, then fought about it for the next hour, Callum grasping the concept of how to play tic-tac-toe while Claire just wanted to carry her hearts around.  Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for. 

Love.  It was in the air today.

You know I have to do a side tangent and talk craft, now, right?  It must be done.   The game was super easy to make, I could totally see making it as a favour at a February birthday party.  Or changing it up to suit the birthday theme – pond with fish beanbags or just a square board with flowers, or trains, or if you’re really feeling it, a favorite character.  This particular version was super cheap as I shopped my stash.  It was almost recrafted, but not quite, the white felt was store bought.  My wee hearts are small, so it was about 3 teaspoons of rice to fill, and used less than one sheet of craft felt.  They were also hand sewn because I wanted to watch the grammies (PRIORITIES! Free evening!  I was multi-tasking!), and the game board itself is just another piece of felt and I used glitter glue for the lines.  I would machine sew the beanbags if I was mass-producing these as a favour though.  How cute would this look in a little felted bag with an applique?  I know right?  You’re totally dying inside.  I can tell.

nothing says "I love you" like a martian does.

Then we made pink popcorn for Callum’s preschool, the recipe from Dinner with Julie (a treasure trove of awesomeness).  Good stuff although it is very sweet.  Callum made each kid in his class a red valentine martian, so we attached those to the little baggies.  Be still my beating heart, people.   He wrote out every kid’s name himself, too.  Took him two hours of sitting at the kitchen table, thinking about each kid, creating their martian, then writing out their name and his.  There is love oozing out of every pore of my body.  How’s that for a sappy Mommy Moment?

Then we made chocolate cupcakes with pink icing.  I used the kitchenaide mixer Fearthainn gave me for Christmas.  IT WAS HEAVEN.

Then we made pizza dough to make the annual heart-shaped pizza.  I always have a heart-shaped pizza.  It’s my thing.  The kids cared not at all but my heart likes to be bursted with cheese.  Cheese.   The reason I’ll never be skinny.

i love me a heartfelt pizza

The kids and I enjoyed the pizza before Steve got home to quickly whisk Callum to swimming lessons (his interest in swimming lessons does not equal his interest in making valentine martians) while the girls and I had a bubble bath.  I try to get in the bath as often as I can because I know that these opportunities are fleeting.  We play rocketship when I bath with the kids (all four of us in there is ridiculous, no doubt).  So we all buckle in and zoom off to the shark planet and then pretend to be sharks, or the frog planet with a lot of hand hopping, or the crab planet where there is a lot of pretend pinching.   There is blasting off and crash landings and we take our buckling up very seriously.  That is the effect the car seat manufacturers has had on an entire generation of children’s imagination.  We can’t even take off on an imaginary rocketship without first doing up our seatbelts.

blast off!

All in all, not a bad Valentine’s Day.  Even if I didn’t get that gift certificate.

Giving back doesn’t have to cost you money if you don’t have it.  Give time.  The time you give doesn’t have to cost you much either.  A couple of hours a month can make an enormous difference to a non-profit struggling to do the work that they do.  Those few hours can be made even more enjoyable if you find a way to donate a few hours doing something that you excel at. 

If you don’t have time, then give money.  Money always helps. 

I am very passionate about volunteering, but I also believe that you should give of yourself only what you are capable.   If you’re not having fun, reassess and give back in a way so you DO have fun.  Look to give back to organizations that you’re passionate about, and in ways that use your mad skillz.  Trust me, you have mad skillz.  We all do.

Currently I am president of a local environmental group that focuses on watershed conservation and restoration.  That sounds like a full time job, doesn’t it?  It isn’t.  My main job is to chair our monthly board meetings and help ensure that we have the proper information to vote on board items.  I had to learn how to move a motion.  For someone who trips over her own damn name, learning how to properly move a motion wasn’t as easy as you’d think, but look, I learned me some new mad skillz!

The people that do the “real” work are our (rather poorly) paid staff.  Chairing the board meeting takes about 2 hours every month, plus having to read some emails.  2 hours.  I bet you can spare 2 hours.

Since finding reliable volunteers is the struggle of just about every non-profit I know,  I also maintain our website.  This takes up a considerable larger chunk of time because I am not that savvy on the web - probably around 6 hours in a slow month.  A task that would take a savvy web person about 2 hours.

AND since we have yet to find a replacement Secretary to fill the position I vacated when I accepted the position of President, I rather grudgingly still type up the minutes.  This takes another 2 hours (however, I believe I may have found someone to pawn this job off onto.  Can I get a HELL YEAH?!  HELL YEAH!). 

What I’m getting out here isn’t that I’m super woman, I’m not, a lot of that work never gets finished, or takes a back seat until I can get to it or find someone else to do it.  What I’m saying is that organizations like this one need you and a couple of hours a month can make a huge impact.

Some ideas to get you started: many non-profits are always looking for directors to sit on the board, volunteers to do things like maintain websites, update the social media sites, help prepare brochures, help with fundraising, help with proposal writing, photography, web article writing and editing.  These same groups then need volunteers to do the core work of the organization as well.  In my group that includes things like being a volunteer steward in the estuary, beach seining, water testing, setting up our booth at fairs, etc.

Alternately, like Lisa mentioned, you can forgo the usual gift-giving for the 8000 gift giving occassions that we celebrate in this country and ask family and friends to make a small donation to your favorite do-good society.  $5 from all the people that love you can add up quickly and could mean you save a rescue animal, dig a well, or implement an educational project that protects your watershed.  It might mean organizations like my own could get enough core funding in place to actually pay our staff a reasonable salary.

Let’s do it.  Let’s make the world a better place in 2011.

I’m still struggling to get Anna to bed at anything resembling a decent hour (typically she isn’t asleep until sometime between 10 and midnight – this means I’m very close to dropping over the edge into insanity.  Tread carefully people.  Tread carefully.). 

That said, I will be in this space fully in the coming week.  I have so much to share!  But first I have to finish my Christmas newsletter and address the cards and finish making a pile of Christmas presents that need sewing up (they are cut and ready to be sewn, but I have yet to be able to get out my machine!).

I can’t even upload a picture because I’m on the wrong computer and there is a baby attached to my boob.  I suck as a blogger.

Actually, turns out my littlest wee one takes up the majority of my time. The Toddlers just happen to be a lot louder and are mobile which gives the illusion of taking up time but it really doesn’t.  I can hear them and see them just fine while I do other things like cook dinner and fold laundry.  I have yet to master the skill of  baby carrying/breastfeeding/diaper changing and doing something else so even though the house managed to stay clean once I cleaned it because little hands weren’t wildly touching every surface, I didn’t get much else done.

you're blaming me?!

Although I suppose I could also breastfeed and update the blog.

I do have several blog post ideas bouncing around in my head, and one in the works to post over at a friends blog (details to come) so don’t go!  Please stay!  Check back!  I’ve also toured locally!  There are blogs to come, I swear it.

Sadly, tomorrow is my last day of “maternity leave” and I’ll be doing the part-time, work-from-home thing I was doing before Anna was born which might mean I’ll never post again.

Why yes, this is just boring filler to make you think I’ve posted when really all I’ve done is tell you that I’m going to post.  I imagine that’s annoying. 

But you know what? It wasn’t that bad.

It was our preschool’s weekend camp-out and it was nice to get to know some of the families a bit better, get to know some people in our little community better, and get to sit beside a little pond and splash around with our kids.  Steve and I are terrible about getting out and about in this little place of ours, so being a part of the preschool has been good for us.  Maybe we’ll even venture out to our local farmer’s market this coming weekend and be able to say hi to people.  Maybe we’ll even talk to them.   Whoa.  Wild.

Actually hanging out with the preschooler’s families isn’t what was scaring me as I prepared for the weekend.  It was all 5 of us sleeping in a tent that had me petrified. 

I have a confession to make: Steve hasn’t slept in our bed since Anna was born.

I bought two twin sized beds just before Anna was born for The Toddlers but my real intent was that Steve wouldn’t sleep in our bed for a little while.  Steve is not a nice person when he is tired.  One might say he’s a bit of a jerk.  That one being me.  The man is a jerk when he’s tired so I much prefer him well rested.  Babies don’t typically allow for well restedness (I don’t care if that isn’t a word, it makes my point well so I’m using it).   I can’t make Steve suddenly be all rainbows and lollipops on 5 hours of sleep so I decided that he would sleep elsewhere.  He very happily agreed to this arrangement and has been bunking in Callum’s room on the spare twin bed and relishing the fact that Callum doesn’t snore so he doesn’t have to wear earplugs.  Callum LOVES that Papa is there first thing in the morning and he can start talking right away! (Callum doesn’t yet care that Steve is Mr. Grumpy first thing in the morning, he just starts talking.  I find this hilarious.).

Since this new sleeping arrangement has been so well received the thought of getting into a tent with Steve, The Toddlers and Anna was daunting.  That’s a lot of sharing after two solid months of sleeping in a queen sized bed with a baby that just hit 9 lbs.  I wasn’t convinced it was something that would end well.

But it did end well.  The Toddlers sleep like champs anyway and once asleep stay asleep.  Anna got to cuddle in my sleeping bad so she was problem free, and Steve just pulled out the old earplugs and all was well.

The only drawback to this experiment is that he’s decided that we should once again start living life as a married couple and moved himself back into my bed. 

Or rather, our bed.