I got wonderful surprise package from Sally today–she sent my number one most wanted Japanese craft book ever and chocolate.

CHOCOLATE, specifically the Moonstruck critters collection, from a Portland chocolatier. I am hiding the box and plan to eat the critters in secret, late at night or in a few minutes, because I might not be able to hold out.

I sat in the car for a moment before going in to fetch the kids and plotted baby crafts in my head. The sum total of my thoughts came down to this: I want to make it all.

Sally (who has the best handwriting I have ever seen, and the Husband agrees) also sent me a birthday card from Ms. Paisley Wallpaper/Shades of Violet, from whom I happened to make a recent purchase:

The cards are lovely–she sent two freebies with my order and I’m going to have to have some of the periwinkle bird nest cards for my very own. The glitter brightens each card subtly and the richly textured stock used for the gift tags is very nice stuff.

You may notice that the cards are spread out on the nearly finished linen baby blanket. All I have left to do is tie it off with some orange knots. It was very easy to sew up and it’s stuffed with two layers of thin, soft cotton batting. Note poor brokeneck, large-jawed Fleur Mandible, lounging:

Traveling off with Fleur and blanket will be this super soft cotton all-in-one:

It must be because of McPantses’ quilt, but I am drawn to pink, orange and brown right now for embroidery, which is a good thing because the birdie above is a bit too far to the right. I added an applique of Heather Ross fabric and I almost hate to send the outfit off! I happen to know that the recipient’s mom is fond of birds herself, so I think it’ll go over well.

I’m sending some onesies with it:

Bunny not complete. Also, the flower isn’t flourescent at all.* I swear.

As far as embroidery goes, this is how I roll [it's hard to type that and leave it here]:

Seeing all the happy little thread bobbin soldiers lined up in formation makes me content down to my toes. I keep extra needles in a small Altoids tin.

More to come, including a birthday present from south-er than me and Mason-Dixon knitting.

* My hair isn’t flourescent anymore, either. I’ve been blonded. The hairchickie said, “I do not remember your hair that dark and I’m going to make it the color your hair is supposed to be. I remember you as a blonde.” I said, “In my heart and on my drivers’ license I am blonde and skinny.” Ahhhhhh.

Questions

* Where should I purchase wool batting on the internets? I want to start using it to stuff critters and dolls.

* Where would one purchase wool felt on the internets?

* If I have only ever used one foot on my sewing machine, should I assume it’s the walking foot?

* Also, when I read about people using machine quilting and the feed dog mechanism, is the feed dog that little uppy-downy lever? Can I make delightful squiggles with my sewing machine (with great practice) if I leave the lever up and don’t clamp my wad of fabric down? Does this question even make sense?

Answers

(Or, suggestions, sorta)

* Buy Japanese craft books from one of my favorite e-bayers, willya? I’ve made a couple of purchases from her and she’s quick with the shipping and packages well and neatly. I live nowhere near a Japanese bookstore, so she’s the next best thing! I got the Delightful Embroidery and Applique book from her and, most recently, a book called A Doll Nina and Her Clothes, which caused me to purchase muslin to make a doll after McPantses sent me packing to the fabric store while she perused the book carefully and selected which outfits she absolutely must have for this nebulous future doll (which outfits? Why, all of them, natch.)

* What else am I buying off of ebay? Vintage embroidered pillowcases, of course! Little girls ’round here wear pillowcase dresses and Lemon Gardenia’s post about one she made recently spurred me into action. Snip off the top two corners, round them, split the top and fold it all under and stitch shut (with a gap for a ribbon to make straps and gather the whole top) and you’ve got an instant classic dress (or nightgown) for the princess at your house.

* I want one of these gorgeous personalized books for the kids and I want one to keep for myself. I am thinking that I’ll get two for each kid and give save their copies for when they get [gack, gasp, ACK!] married and keep one out for our household. They’re just amazing books and I applaud the company for the brilliant idea.

* Hand quilting tutorial that alternately intrigues and frightens me. I loves the tiny, even stitches, but I’m not positive my stitches are that tiny or that even. Oy.

* I’m reading more blogs lately:

The funny monkey mama…

O, the patterns this gal has included…

Such craftay goodness…

Knitterly gritterly delights…

Mah Lawrd, the quilts…

Conversations

* This morning, McPantses left for school wearing her new princess not in need of rescue tee shirt (chocolate brown with hot pink writing, thank you very much) and a pair of faded jeans and hot pink flip flops. She requested a bun in her hair (ballet class has drilled the importance of buns into our collective girl heads by now) and left with a ponytail made into a bun with a clear hair clippity thing and two barrettes holding back the wisps on either side and a “big girl” coating of my clear gloopy lip gloss slicked across mostly her mouth but a little on her face. She had her boat and tote school bag slung over her shoulder the same way I carry around the boychild’s bag and as she buckled her seat belt, the Husband leaned over and said, “She looks like it’s her first day as a Women’s Studies major at Brown.”

* I can only breathe out of one side of my nose when I lay down at night and I think that means I might have a deviated septum. Unfortunately for the Husband, it apparently also means that I snore like all hell sometimes which, quite honestly, doesn’t seem possible, but that’s the vanity talking again.

The Husband: “Last night you snored like a wounded animal for two hours.”

(At this point I start laughing, very quietly so as not to waken McScreamy Crabcake Teething Boy.)

The Husband: “I wanted to tell you to stop, but I knew that if I woke you up, you wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep and you’d stomp around the house and be mad at me for a week, so I just waited for my moment of opportunity to fall asleep.”

(He is a very heavy sleeper and pantomimed himself with the covers pulled up to his nose and his eyes going blink-blink-blink and looking back and forth. By this time in the conversation, there are tears running down my face from laughing so hard.)

The Husband: “You were snoring unevenly and making choking noises and I couldn’t decide if you were about to die and if you’d rather die or be woken up. Finally at 11:45, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I whispered, ‘Turn over; you’re snoring’ and you were actually nice about it and I got enough silence to fall asleep.”

Me: “Was I choking to death? Was I having a bad dream?”

The Husband: “I don’t know, but you sounded awful.”

The thing is, sometimes I do get all choked up in the middle of the night and when I wake up gasping for air, I’m usually dreaming that I’m drowning. It doesn’t happen very often and I take a slug off of the inhaler when it does. It speaks very poorly of my nighttime sleep temper that the Husband was going to let me stop breathing rather than wake me up, doesn’t it?

Or, maybe it just says, HEY! We upped our life insurance!

McPantses’ coolest made-up word from infancy was the word “bung,” which is what she called a sippy cup for years and years. The boychild has “cup” down, but we realized last week that he’s dead set on calling all shoes (which he likes very much) “gup.”

Shoes = gup.

My shoes? Gup. McP’s pink flip-flops? Gup. The Husband’s loafers and Birks? Gups. GUP GUP GUP! The crabcake is precise in his pronounciation and he’s adamant that shoes are not shoes (NO! NO!)–they’re GUHP!

It’s strange, too, how much the boy likes gup. We joke that this might be how Manolo Blahnik got started.

***

No matter how bored you are on a Sunday night, do not just pick up a box of Clairol Herbal Essence hilites at Target and say, “ahhh, what the hell. If something goes wrong, I can just have it fixed next week,” especially if your husband is encouraging you.* If you do that, you might end up with oddly flourescent cheetos orange hilites that are so bright they wake you up in the middle of the night.

It’s not pretty. It’s not so awful that it makes me cry to look at myself, but I did wake up at 5:30 this morning thinking about it. I caught someone at work staring at my hair earlier today, too.

Repairs coming Thursday. Approximate cost? $65- $95. It’s what I would have paid for hilites anyway. What the hell was I thinking?

* I now understand why I occasionally fork over good money to have someone else do this and if I were a hairdresser (which I am clearly not meant to be), I would stand in the haircolor aisle at Tarjay and hand out my card and say, “Call me next week and I’ll fix what you screw up.”

I think the Husband finds the whole hair-raising hilites-from-a-box-orange-bits-of-hair thing hysterically funny, but he’s afraid to laugh too much.

The first commenter who claims it (and who e-mails me her address before I head to the post office at lunch) will get a small package from me sent out in today’s post.

(Really small. Don’t get too excited.) Caveat: I can’t already be sending you a package today. You should see the stack in my office!

Gail, if you’d like a piece of the AH countdown fabrics (I have both colorways now!), e-mail me and I will get you a bit to play with!

1. Last night I slept for 11 hours, which is more than I slept the previous two nights combined. I fell asleep on the couch with one of the dogs warming my feet, but after a while I halfway shoved her off and then I had the whole couch to myself and I could have slept there all night, but the Husband made me come to bed at about 10:30. I am so rested that I could almost hug a stranger. But only almost.

2. My friend delivered a [beautiful, healthy] baby last Friday. Her daughter was breech and my friend had an unmedicated vaginal delivery. I am amazed.

3. The boychild has started tapping out the beat to songs when we’re in the car. The tapping makes me uncommonly happy.

4. I have 16 paper-covered composition notebooks to mail out. SIXTEEN! It took nearly 16 glue sticks to cover that many notebooks with a sheet of white paper and the patterned paper.

5. McPantses has excema and it’s gotten out of control. We are doing an intensive Eucerin/ointment routine twice a day now (and olive oil after baths–blech) and starting on Sunday or Monday, we’re eliminating dairy from her diet to see if that helps. I can’t keep smearing my kid with ointment from head to toe when it doesn’t seem to work that well. I have carefully prepared McP for the whole dairy thing, but I still worry that it’s going to be tough on her. Another kid in her class is allergic to dairy, so it helps that she knows what to expect. In the meantime, we have two cartons of ice cream to finish off. I need to see if I can find a recipe for chocolate sorbet this week.

6. My right back turn signal/brake light was out for a few weeks and all of a sudden, it started working again earlier this week.

7. I am on book four of Elizabeth George’s mystery series. She uses the word miasma a lot (either two or three times in book three, but not once so far in book four).

8. I found half of a robin’s egg on the steps of my office building yesterday and picked it up because I was going to take it home to McP, but I decided I like the way it looks on my desk and kept it instead. It’s now resting between a pig’s ears. (I have a small white ceramic piggybank on my desk and the half egg looks like a party hat.) I feel vaguely guilty about keeping a bird egg part from my poor child, but not guilty enough to give it to her.

9. I am very, very bad at shaving my knees. It’s 307 degrees outside already this morning and I have finally eschewed pantyhose forever and ever and I can see that the knees are neglected. The hair is blonde, so it’s not easy to see, but it’s there.

10. I could pack up the personal contents of my office and be out of here permanently in less than 20 minutes. I think I could fit my junk (including robin’s egg and a desk lamp) into one copy paper box, too, and no one would ever know I had been here.

11. I have seven pictures on my desk. Two have both kids in them. Two have McP and me in them. The other three are solo girlchild. The Husband was here yesterday and said, “I’m going to bring you a picture of me to put on your desk.”

12. When I see a beautiful vintage book on a craftay blogger’s site, especially an embroidery book or a children’s book, I often check ebay or alibris to see if I can find a copy for myself. I’ve discovered (through someone else’s discovery) some great books that way and every time one comes in the mail, I feel like I’ve gotten a secret treasure.

13. I just checked out the “keyword” feature on my DVR recording dealie and am having a great time looking for Doris Day movies.

at the end of children’s church, no less, with another mom.

A woman came marching back into the Sunday school room where we, with another couple, had the kids from age three up to “not in kindergarten yet” and said, “I just want to know what kind of marker Little Kid [who shall remain nameless] used to write on my son’s shirt.” She was ransacking the room looking for the marker as she spoke (to me).

I said, “There are no markers out. They colored with crayons.”

She plowed through three crayon boxes on three tables and said, “It was orange marker and I want to know what kind so I can know how to wash the shirt.”

I said, “They colored with crayons. Is it orange crayon? There are no markers out.”

She said, “It is definitely marker.” She went to a cabinet and pulled out a brand new box of fat crayons, clearly unused, and studied it and put it back.

She went to the corner of the room where Little Kid was playing and said, “I need to know where the marker is that you used to write on My Kid.” Little Kid showed her the back of his shirt and said, “He wrote on me, too.”

I said, “That’s crayon,” and thought, ooooh, that bites because everyone knows crayon doesn’t really come out.

She said, again, “I want to know where the marker is.” Little Kid showed her where he and the other kid dumped crayons on the floor and she said, to Little Kid (though she was clearly still speaking mostly to me) “You two know better than to write on each other and to act like this and My Kid is going to be in trouble.”

The thing is, neither of the kids knows better. They’re both heathens, which is fine, we’re all familiar with their behavior. Acknowledge it, woman. Embrace the heathens. Don’t act like we have any more control over your kids than you do.

Throughout this minor ordeal, the Husband and another dad just stood there and grinned. I turned around to look at them and they laughed at me.

I said, “There are no markers out.”

She said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, really. I just want to know how to get the marker out” as she walked back out the door.

I called after her, “They didn’t use any markers today” just for good measure and because I felt like getting the last word, even though what I said really just floated through the air behind her (and probably because I’ve watched a lot of Larry David since we got tivo through the cable company).

What I don’t get is why she didn’t just tell me what her problem was. She clearly meant to say, “You didn’t watch my [horrible heathen kid who acts like a wild goat, particularly when around the other Little Kid] precious angel boy well enough and someone colored on him with MARKER MARKER MARKER I SWEAR TO GOD IT IS MARKER AND JESUS SAYS SO, TOO, AND YOU AND THAT MARKER SHALL BE BANISHED TO MARKER HELL FOREVERMORE! and it’s All. Your. Fault. because you are a bad parent, a bad children’s church teacher, a bad person, a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad Christian and a bad church member and you owe me an apology of the deepest sort, complete with prostration before me and a new foofy southern pilgrim outfit for my son.”

If she had just said, “Hey, how did this happen during your watch?” I would have said, “No idea, but I’m really sorry and by the way, have you ever tried to get Your Kid and Little Kid to participate or behave during children’s church?”

I think we might sit children’s church out next year. I also think I might start carrying an orange sharpie on my person whenever I’m at church so I can secretly mark on Her Kid’s back every time I see him. Wonder if she’d like a nice 666 formation…

Every weekday, after work, the second I unlock the back door, the dogs go completely insane. They want to be fed and they don’t stop barking until I dish out kibble.

To feed the madly barking dogs, I have to put the boychild down as soon as I step inside and he hates it–after school when we first enter the house, all he wants is to be held, and he’s so cute about it, too, even when he’s furious that I’ve put him down. He holds up his little arms and gazes at me and waits (and yells).

I run to the bathroom for a pit stop, then tear off my suit and change into shorts and a tee shirt and scoop up the now screamering boychild. During all this, McPantses is going back and forth between her room, where she puts her school bag and takes off her shoes, and the kitchen, where she helps me feed the greedy pig dogs.

The Husband would never choose the bathroom or to change clothes over picking up a kid. If the boychild’s arms go up, he’s guaranteed safe respite with his DahDah, even if it means sticky hands on a necktie or a crisp white shirt or a poplin suit. McP has a fond narrator for all of her dances (which require constant narration) and her stories and her general tomfoolery. The Husband may end up covered in playsilk scarves, forever stuck in the groom role in a little girl’s pretend princess wedding tales, but everyone is happy.

These are tiny everyday things, but they’re also everything. The children at my house are lucky to have such a father and I’m lucky to have had children with such a man.

Happy Father’s Day, all.

Two funny things said to me yesterday:

Friend: You’re not fat, you’re a mom.

(Said after I compared her relative skinniness to mine.*)

The Husband: This is like trying to make out with Woody Allen. Anything else you need to say, Ms. Neurotic?

(Said after I said, while giggling, not to lick the rash** under my eyeball.)

* She is childfree, happily and on purpose. I salute people who know they don’t want to have kids and take active measures to prevent accidents. That’s way better than deciding, hmmm, maybe I didn’t want this after all, after having a kid or two.

** I have a mystery rash ‘neath my left eye precluding the use of any cosmetics. I suspect I’ve developed a strange allergy to my overpriced concealer (YSL: $36/tube), which bites for two reasons: (a) it was expensive and (b) I have undereye circles that look like black eyes. On the plus side, my three minute a.m. makeup routine has shortened to about 12 seconds because all I’m doing now is slathering on lotion which doesn’t burn or itch and using a bit of cheek smeary stuff. On the negative side, I look like I’ve been beaten up or have sobbed for a week on end. Fortunately, I don’t have to look at myself.