Author: Sarah

Two…and a half!

Sarah Monthly Updates

Dear Carolyn,

Today you are officially two and a half. We celebrated by going and getting our hair cut. Actually, I got my hair cut, and then you wanted a hair cut too, so we’re now sporting matching kicky summer styles. I’m a little sad, because your hair was finally getting long enough to braid, but now you actually look two and a half – strangers kept assuming you were much older between your hair and your height.


You are so excited that it’s spring. Every time anyone walks out of the house – to get the mail, take the dogs out, go to work, or anything else – you immediately drop what you’re doing, run to the foyer, start putting on your sandals and exclaim “I go out too because it’s spring!” I think you’re having a hard time understanding that sometimes when it’s spring you still need to wear a coat and socks! You’ve been having so much fun outside with your tricycle and your chalk that I can’t blame you for wanting to be out there as much as possible. We’ve also been planning what flowers to plant in our garden this spring – you’re sure you want purple – and I have a feeling gardening is going to be one of your new favorite activities. Maybe we’ll try planting a container garden of vegetables on the deck this year.
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Your imagination has really taken off this month. You have an imaginary friend, Mimi, and you have tea parties with your baby dolls. You love to pretend to be things, like an octopus or a puppy. The other day you wanted me to be Carolyn while you were Mommy. For some reason you didn’t want to fix me a snack, though…

This has also been a month of fine motor skills. You’re starting to hold crayons and pencils the “right” way – and you favor your right hand when you do, so it looks like you’re not going to be a lefty like me. You want to know how to write letters. I think you may learn how to write before you learn how to read! You’ve also discovered that you can form your fingers into the ASL numbers and letters – including the “ILY” sign for “I Love You”. It’s amazingly cute (and wonderful) to flash you the ILY sign and have you sign and say back “I love you too Mommy!”

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I figured out today that you’ve been here for more than 900 days. Even if I’ve only given you 11 kisses every day (and that’s a pretty low estimate, because you’re awfully kissable) I’ve already given you 10,000 kisses. Mwah!

Love, Mommy

Mini Socks

Sarah Knitting

I’ve been working with the same pit orchestra director for three years, and she’s seen me knit several pairs of socks during breaks over the years…so, I thought I’d gift her with a pair of mini socks as a thank you for being such a great orchestra director.


Carrie thought they were socks for her baby dolls – and really, if I made the legs a bit shorter and ribbed the whole cuff and instep I think they’d stand a good chance of fitting. And they take so little yarn, I can probably make dozens out of all the leftover bits of sock yarn I have!

Mambo!

Sarah Music

West Side Story is finished. As usual, a happy and sad thing – as much as I really, truly hated the accompaniment in the beginning, it kind of grew on me, and I actually got pretty good at playing it, too. And it really seemed like a very large proportion of the cast and the pit were seniors this year, so next year will be mostly new faces. (Always assuming they ask me back, of course!)

But I am looking forward to getting back to putting Carrie to bed in the evenings, and eating dinner at home more often than not!

And I’ll get back to doing some knitting just as soon as my wrists forgive me for playing 6 full shows in 5 days…

First Imaginary Friend?

Sarah Firsts

This morning while Carrie and I were snuggling she mentioned “Mimi”. I asked her who Mimi was, and I discovered that Mimi is a 3 1/2 year old little girl with red hair who was sitting on the bookshelf. I asked Carrie to tell Mimi that 3 1/2 year old little girls should not sit on bookshelves and could she please climb down, and then asked her how she knew Mimi. She said that they have been friends for a long time. After Mimi got down off the bookshelf she declared that she was going to go eat at Wendy’s. Um, OK.

We’ll see if Mimi becomes a regular visitor or not.

Lovely Vase

Sarah Family

vase_by_dad.jpgMy mom gave my dad a lathe a couple of Christmases ago. Ever since then, their breakfast bar in their kitchen has been filling up with random turned pieces of wood – some functional, some decorative, but all lovely. My dad has made us a set of wooden bowls, and he gave Carrie a wooden egg-shaped kaleidoscope.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I was in Michael’s the other day and found some small silk flowers that I thought might look cute in Carrie’s play kitchen. But a quick trip around the store didn’t yield any plastic vases. Then I ended up in the ready-to-finish wood objects aisle…and had a thought. (Rare, but it happens sometimes.)

So I went to my parents’ house last night to work with my mom on a project, and mentioned to my dad that if he had some spare lathe time Carrie would really adore having a vase to put her flowers in near her kitchen. Two hours later I came home with this little treasure.

Isn’t it lovely? It’s wild cherry, and the grain pattern is just beautiful. I’m having a hard time putting it in Carrie’s kitchen – I want it in mine! I wonder if I could make a request for Mother’s Day for one of these for me? :)

What I Did On My Spring Break

Sarah General

My bedroom walls before, and after an insane number hours of painting:

And here, here is the vile tan gold ugly, nasty and definitely not hypo-allergenic carpet we needed to tear out, and the pre-finished bamboo flooring we’re putting in it’s place:

There’s still a lot of work to do. High on that list is to actually move the furniture back into our room! But first, we have to, well, finish installing the floor. And then re-install the baseboards, locate, purchase and install quarter round molding…actually, that might be it. I think.

As is always the case with home improvement projects, this one didn’t go quite as planned. But still, overall, it was better than I expected.

Initially, I was going to leave the border up, tape it off, and paint under it. Obviously, I changed my mind, and had to tack on an extra couple of days for wallpaper removal (but the orbital sander wasn’t required, so really, that hardly counts.)

And then, I wasn’t going to paint the trim, but the baseboards had to come off the walls to install the flooring. Aside from the fact that they got a little dinged up in the process, because part of it had been covered up with carpet the last time we painted they weren’t actually all one color.

Well, once you paint the baseboards, you have to paint the door frames. And then the doors look really dingy and aren’t quite the same white so you have to paint those. In for a penny, in for a pound, the windows and frames need a fresh coat too.

So between the two coats of wall paint (that color just makes me deliriously happy – or maybe it’s the paint fumes?) and the trim I hadn’t intended to paint, I spent sixteen hours painting our room. (Spread out over several days of course!) What that meant was that we didn’t rent the giant floor stapler thingy until today. And since one of us had to watch Carrie, Denis had to do the whole process himself: staple in some boards, measure, head to the garage, cut an end piece, repeat, repeat, repeat, jigsaw the board going around the closet door frame…you get the idea.

So, next Sunday we’ll hopefully manage to finish the floor. And then it’s just a matter of moving several large, heavy pieces of furniture back in. Oh, wait, I forgot about the baseboards…

More Knitting?

Sarah Knitting

A cousin of mine is expecting a little girl in a couple of months. I picked out a cute little pattern, and I was going to do it in the pastel pinks, purples and blues shown, but then I spotted these colors:

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Really, how cute will that be? If it turns out even half as pretty as I think it will I might just have to make a matching one for Carrie…

Happy Easter!

Sarah Carolyn

What a nice day we had – if you don’t count the fact that it was cold and snowy enough to be Christmas instead of Easter!

Carrie was thrilled to find a half-eaten carrot next to her Easter basket when she came downstairs for breakfast. I didn’t leave it there, so the Easter bunny must have raided the fridge while we were sleeping. But he left behind a Little People Easter train for Carrie, along with a couple of books and a small stuffed bunny.

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We went to church, where I very nervously played piano and sang – I can’t believe I used to do this every week (sometimes twice!) and it was so normal, and now I get nervous and shaky and choke up when it’s time to sing the descants – and Carrie did a fabulous job of being quiet and attentive and good sitting out in the congregation instead of the “cry room”.

We talked Carrie into taking an early nap, and then headed to my Grandma’s for dinner. Carrie was hungry and as we were setting the table she kept saying “We eat now? Time to eat?” and I’d tell her we were almost ready. Finally she got fed up with waiting and said “OK, we eat now. We eat cake!” But she was happy enough with the ham instead – actually I think she ate more ham than I did – and wasn’t too disappointed that dessert was fruit and the cookies we baked yesterday instead of cake.

The only thing we didn’t do was any sort of egg hunt, but it was too cold outside really. There’s always next year!

Easter Preparations

Sarah Carolyn

Today Carrie colored eggs for the first time. I didn’t even bother for the last couple of years, but I thought she might enjoy it. Well, that’s an understatement! She’d drop the eggs into the dye (we had a couple of casualties with her method) and say “Bye, bye egg! See you later!”

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a “normal” egg coloring kit. You know, the Paas tablets that you dissolve with hot water and vinegar? No, there were several varieties of another brand: glitter eggs, tie-dye eggs, painted eggs… So I bought the kit with the paints. Carrie was delighted. Me? Not so much. Check out the kid’s hands:

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Plus, the dye colors just didn’t look the way they should. The purple was magenta and the green looked exactly like the blue. I wound up putting the “purple” eggs into the blue and the “green” eggs into the yellow to make them actually look right. Yes, I’m picky about my colored eggs. Next year I’m buying a Paas kit if I have to go to ten different stores to find one!
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Besides the eggs, we also made some cut out cookies of bunnies, chicks (or ducks), eggs and flowers. Carrie still only dabs a tiny bit of frosting on her cookies, but now she likes to pile up as many sprinkles as she can on that wee little dollop of frosting.

Now I just have to try to make her very colorful hands a bit less colorful before church tomorrow…

Look! Knitting!!

Sarah Knitting, Project Spectrum 2.0

(I’m hoping that the exclamation points and the word ‘knitting’ will divert everyone’s attention from the lack of posting for the past several days…)

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So, the finished Pomatomus socks. These were actually finished…um…a week and a half ago…but between the toddler, the musicals, the never-ending battle I wage against laundry, dishes, dog fur and clutter, and just a general lack of free time, I haven’t had a chance to post about them. Having said that, I really liked this pattern. It was interesting and complex, but I found it to be a fairly quick knit. I even managed to work on them during bits and snatches of rehearsals where I knew I wouldn’t be playing for a while. They also fit really nicely, no sagging or bunching. I think if I did this pattern again I’d start the chart halfway through the first repeat, because the leg is just a bit longer than I like. But really, overall, a wonderful pattern to knit!
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And, since it’s becoming quite a habit to have a pair of socks on the needles at any given time, here are my new “girly” socks. They fit in fairly well with the Project Spectrum colors for April and May – well, at least there’s a whole lot of pink in them!
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In other Project Spectrum news, here’s a yellow bunny to go with the hat I made for a friend’s new granddaughter. (I cheated and started it last month, but who cares?) It doesn’t have a face yet, because the black yarn I need is trapped in my craft room behind half of our bedroom furniture. (Don’t ask.)

The final Spectrum color for this round is green. I have a much bigger project in mind for the green. It involves paint…