Life In Color

Weekend

Hands down I had an awesome weekend. We didn't go anywhere but we did have lots of fun. Starting on Saturday when I went thrifting. That's right, Sciarrino and I were back up to our old tricks. I thawed some of my milk, left Tutu with Bj and headed out early. I didn't have any huge scores, but I did get some fun things, like this Mulder action figure and these games:

Most of my weekend haul was from an immigrant's estate sale, and everything had Russian price tags. I even got an atlas in Russian:

I got a few knitting books, including this one, and some older pamphlets, this is my favorite sweater from those:

I did end up getting a "come home quick" text message, after Tuesday refused the bottle. We had given her one before to see how she would do, but she has never had to miss a feeding (that's right my max time away from her before had been about 1.5 hours). When I got home she smiled crazy at me like she was saying, "hey you came back!" And then she was too distracted to eat. I didn't want to waste the pumped milk so I heated it and had Bj try again. He fed her, and she stared at me the whole time and chugged it down no problem, funny little girl.

Saturday night Ethan and Sciarrino came over and we did a classic BBQ and game night. Sunday I spent the whole day with Sarah, scrapbooking. It so deserves it's own post, if for no other reason than I got pages done and this post is already going to be picture heavy. It was really fun though, and Bj got in most of our new windows while I was doing that - so a very productive day.

Sunday my mom and Bill were home from a southwestern vacation so grandma came over to hang out with Tuesday :) We went for a nice long walk, it was great, I love my neighborhood more and more the warmer it gets out. We went over to my mom's for a BBQ in the evening. I had my little brother hold Tuesday:

Which was pretty cute, though not as cute as this:

Tuesday's first swim!

(Let me take this opportunity to say that while yes, I am wearing my maternity swim suit - I am not expecting again! Yes, I did get a congratulations this weekend on expecting again - yikes. The sad thing is I thought I was doing really well eating better. I'm at 139.4, I was 134 when I got back from Hawaii in January last year (damn chocolate covered macadamia nuts), and 124 right before I got pregnant. So, I'm working on it! I also have this bad habit of sticking out my stomach when I hold Tuesday, and I'm sure the bad posture doesn't help)

She loved the pool. I knew she would. She kept pushing herself up out of her little seat and kicking her micro sized legs.

I think this is going to be a very fun summer.

She as totally cracking us up.

I should say I'm not really sure when babies are supposed to go in pools, but luckily this is my mom's pool and I know it is very clean and doesn't have too many chemicals.

Awe Tuesday loves grandma! I think I'll wait a while before taking her to a public pool. Tuesday would have stayed in here all night, but she started shivering, so we got her out. I got her back into some knitwear and she chilled in her vintage pram while we ate:

Last night was a whole other story. She did not want to sleep - at all. I think maybe it's because she took a nap yesterday while we walked, and another micro one when we got to my mom's. So maybe 1.5 hours of sleep during the day total? She ate so many times I lost count, and by 7:30 I just had Bj bring her to me in bed so I could nurse her lying down, I was so exhausted. Bj was so cute he said, "Tuesday you have to remember to thank you mom for all this milky some day." She's napping again now, hopefully it won't be a vicious cycle, but she looks too peaceful to wake up. She may just be going through a growth spurt, I don't know. But I hope I get some more sleep tonight!

Making Tuesday Look HUGE

Are these two little peanuts:

Karen's beautiful twin (fraternal) girls. On the left is Kourtney, on the right Kathryn.

Tuesday and I spent yesterday over there "helping out" I use that term loosely, though I did bring food. My almost, but not quite 12 pounder is such a big bright eyed baby now! I notice all the little things she does, but seeing her next to these babies really showed me how much she's changed. She was about the same size as Kathryn when she was newborn.

That's Kathryn, Karen and I think that she and Tuesday might be bestest friends soon, as they seem to have similar personalities.

Little Kourtney is just mellow, mellow, mellow. This is the first picture of her with her (so pretty almost purple) eyes open.

Seeing Karen in that newest part of motherhood made me so happy. She has a wonderful fun spirit, and I know she is going to be (and IS being) a great mother. Snuggling with Tuesday and letting her nurse as long as she wanted tonight until her sucks were little flutters I'm just amazed with Karen and her girls. At only 18 days old we even loaded up our strollers and went out for a walk. I feel so lucky to know so many amazing women who are having or have just had babies. Lucky Tuesday to have so many little friends so soon.

Now Chloe we're just waiting on you, come out, come out!

I need a bigger allowance...

Seam allowance that is. When I calculate quilt stuff or any kind of sewing thing it seems the math and I never really get along. A few weekends ago Sciarrino came over so we could have one of our good old craft days (yeah!) and I worked on a project you might remember me blogging about a while ago... if you read my blog in April 2006, oh the shame of my half finished project pile!

I laid out all of the triangles for placement (pattern is from Denyse Schmidt Quilts - Flock of Triangles). My little Sparkle Pants took her longest nap ever in the swing in an attempt to get me to focus on this project:

A valiant effort. I did get it all laid out and into neat little piles ready to be sewn by row.

I figured I could tackle the rows like one a day or something (I have 24 I think). But I got stuck at how to even put two of them together. I have made a quilt with triangles before, but it was so long ago that I don't really remember the details. I finally figured it out (and in case any one has the same trouble on flickr I explained it in one, two, three pictures). As soon as I had one row together I knew I had a problem. The freaking thing wasn't long enough - UGH. Now, it's not like I didn't have enough fabric for this queen sized quilt (hopefully this will go on our bed). Oh no, when I ordered it I thought I would need like 11 yards for the front. I don't know how I got there (even though I found all of my notes on the matter), but I did double check that I had the right amount of triangles for the length and width I wanted when I picked this project back up. And it sure looked gigantic all laid out on my floor. But no. There is like NO WAY I'm laying this thing back out again, I mean Tuesday is pretty much done with naps, so it would be almost impossible. So I'm going to sew up the rows as they are, leaving off the very end half triangles. Then I'll lay those all out and add a triangle to one side or the other, and then put the half triangles on. And after all that I still will have to sew the rows together, which might end up quite tricky since I'm dealing with bias. Me thinks I will not be quilting this myself. :)

Is it any wonder then that I've decided to start a new sewing project?

With circles (which I've never done) and a pattern I'm making up myself? It's sure to be a success. Hopefully I won't be blogging about it in 2012.

Incentives

Bj and I were discussing ways we could get into better shape, and have decided we need incentives.

Bj: "Okay so how about this? You get down to 120 and you can have $X for the craft room."
(I want new cabinets in here)

Amber: "Ugh, 120, that's like 20 pounds."

Bj: "You've weighed that before."

Me: "I weighed 110 when you met me."

Bj: "I can't believe you were ever that small."

Me: ____________

Bj: "Wait no, you're taking that the wrong way."

Me: "How is the right way to take that."

Bj: "I mean you've always only been this tall." (holds hand up to his neck).

Me: (mimes digging a hole).

It is so on!

Windows

So original on the title, I know. So the bee situation seems to be under control. This is not what fixed it:

But it does show you the horrid state of our windows. It also shows you Tuesday's new My First Baby Legs. We picked those up at Target yesterday, love them! Okay so really it just shows you that they are dirty, which should be no surprise since they are still doing tons of work outside. Here is what they really look like:

I've done a pretty good job of keeping them nice on the inside (oh I still get a little sad seeing those trees my neighbor cut down), but once they removed the aluminum storm windows, you could really see the bad shape the frames, glass and glazing were in. So while pregnant Bj talked me into replacing them all to match the ones on the new second story. I was a bit hormonal and reacted with the classic, "well you just don't care how hard I work on things do you?" crying fit. Once I came to my senses and Bj explained that the the frames would not have to be messed with and I got to see what kind of vinyl windows are made now. We found some that I really like because the grid is not only in the middle, but also on the inside and outside. I thought I would share how we (meaning Bj and our friend Brian) retrofitted our old double hung frames for new windows.

Step one:

Using a cat's paw and hammer remove only the one piece of trim holding in the window.

After clipping the sash (if they are not already broken like at least 60% of ours), you should be able to pull the window up and out (bottom) and the top one down and out. You can do everything from the inside, so if you have a second story don't be scared to try it!

Next smash these pulleys flat with a hammer (both of them).

baby interruption! Had to finish up explanation with the next window, the  big picture window in the front of the house:

First put a bead of caulking on the bottom of the 3/4" stock then nail it to the sill, this will hold in the window.

From the inside put the bottom of the window in first.

You'll need to replace the trim piece you took out in the beginning.

Looks the same! I am especially impressed with the picture window.

The sills will still have to be touched up (filled with wood filler and sanded a bit) and painted when the whole house is, but I am loving it so far. The difference in noise and heat that comes through this compared to the old one is incredible.

Last weekend we had dinner across the street and we were talking with our neighbor's about how everything on our houses has been repaired/replaced in some way. It's true older houses (we think ours was built in 1941) need more work to meet modern standards, but I just love the look of them. I can't wait until all this work is done and we can tackle the yard! Bj was talking yesterday, "what if we lived here for forty years? Our house would be a over a hundred years old!" Now that is crazy!

Friggin Bees

We could go with a post about my lovely in laws visiting, or some new spinning, or the great weather we had, or even our three new windows, but instead: bees.

On Saturday when our tree stump removal guy was here (which is pretty awesome by the way, the process), he pointed out some bee action happening on the corner of our house:

Only think like forty times worse since Bj took this at dusk (with the flash) and there is only a tiny percentage of the bees active. I was like, Oh that's nasty, but we'll kill them no big deal right? Oh so wrong. First of all I go to the bathroom and realize midstream that there are bees all over the vanity. I have never pulled up my underwear so fast in my life! Bj's mom cleaned up the piles of them that had congregated in there by Saturday night (but I was feeding Tuesday so I didn't snap a picture). This is the next morning:

Ew, bees. They are coming in through the vent... we think. So Bj went ahead and hung some traps and sprayed some killer and....

it's worse (hey but a nice addition to the hovel that is our backyard right now).

People I don't want to be overly dramatic... but I can hear them, yes, HEAR them in the ceiling of my craft den (which means they are between the floor of Tuesday's room, or around there). I'm sure I'll sleep great tonight. No bee keeper wants to take them because they are so high up (we called  them first to try and do the "right thing"), so tomorrow we're bringing in the professional bee assassins, wish us luck.

Just because it was sunny

I had an idea to take pictures of Tutu in her birthday suit. But thought better of since you never know when the girl is going to pee.  She doesn't normally wear these diapers, they are like back up emergency ones. But they do the trick.

She loves to eat her hands.

Ah silly girl, I think she was saying something here.

Okay so that was a pretty  pointless post, but the grandparents might go nuts if I waited another day to post pictures of Tuesday. :) I have lots planned for this weekend, we'll see how that goes. Oh and I did want to mention that I just sent off my fiber for the second round of the swap. Someone else took over for me this round and fiber must be in by the 31st if you want to play. This is the yumminess I got last time, it really is a fun grab bag of fibers.

You didn't think the remodel was done did you?

Because it is so not. The night before I went into labor I enthusiastically ripped up the paper protecting our wood floors and vowed we were done, no more workers upstairs at least. Of course they still did pop up a bit to finish a few things. And when Tutu was a couple days old they started on the front porch (we actually had a pile of rubble at the front door when the first visitors came to see her). After the porch was put on (and the bathroom downstairs tiled, and a few other random things), we had no workers for a while. But the other big project could not be started until the weather was somewhat "stable" (meaning not raining 24/7). And that would be the siding project (because we didn't really want to match our existing aluminum when we did the upstairs). Let's call this photo the before:

Though this should probably be the real before. I took that picture almost three years ago before I even bought the place. From the front you can't tell we remodeled the upstairs, which is what we wanted. But from the side you can:

Oh ya, did you notice something else? Like the absence of even more barriers between my neighbor and I? Imagine my shock when I woke up from a nap with Tutu and found my neighbor had commandeered the tree trimmers I hired to cut down the whole hedge. Since that protected us from the intersection as well we are now meeting with landscape people as well. I think it will turn out to be for the best. We had the property surveyed and found out that our yarn went further over than we thought. We also have a rock wall buried under there, so it's quite a ledge, and we'll need to put something up so Tutu can't fall over the edge. Oh the tree trimmers were here to take care of this:

Our jungle. We had some issues from an ice storm a couple (okay five) months ago, and I'd never had anything trimmed up. Of course now this picture is outdated for other reasons - the deck was ripped off to get out the old siding in the back (which is really two layers - the original lap and aluminum over the top). So we're living in this:

It's hard to tell from the front, but all the siding is gone, the window frames are now gone (did you know that stuff is called brick mold? I'm learning so much), and the storm windows are off of course. Oh my goodness it is so loud now. The windows might as well be paper, and they the workers might as well be ripping nails off on the inside. I think it is going to be awesome. And I'll finally get to tackle the yard, something I've been wanting to do for years, but knowing that this and than that had to be done, it was not very motivating to plant anything for fear it would get ripped apart. Those fears were well founded as you can see. 

Projected project completion - oh these things are supposed to have those?

P.S. I have to give a shout out to my friend (my architect friend - how cool is that?) Matt, who figured out how we could put a porch on in like five minutes and we were at a loss as to how to do it for months because of the weird roof line. Of course it looks like the obvious solution now, Matt = genius.

A new voice

For Bj's birthday he got a new camera, a tiny little Elph that also takes video. And for mother's day he taught me how to upload it.



That's Tutu working on her voice and playing with her new toy, which we call her teething landmine. She loves this thing (and at only $5 it was well worth the money). I'll have to get more video of her looking in the mirror, playing with her feet, and all those other special skills. She seems to learn something new everyday.

Finished Object - The Copycat Blanket

Little Tuesday has had her first real sickness this week. A cold that gave her a really stuffed up nose, a low grade temperature and really gross diapers. We've been spending a lot of time here:

Which has led to lots of knitting time for me, in spurts, with a baby on my lap. Which led to a finished object:

The Copy Cat Blanket (rav link). Tuesday was feeling better yesterday afternoon so we did a little mini photo shoot.

I still got lots of the blank sick stares:

Poor little bean.

About the blanket: finished it measures about 32" square. I used almost two full skeins of Socks that Rock Medium weight, plus a quarter skein more for the garter edge (so the blanket won't curl). This has to be the easiest thing I've ever knit, but it's not perfect. It's sort of wonky and puffy in the middle, and I'm not quite sure why. I think I might be able to fix it with blocking, but the blanket is already in rotation, so I'll just try and stretch it when I wash it. It is supremely tasty (apparently):

and:

Knit blankets are great for swaddling. We still swaddle her at night, but in a blanket with Velcro, because she can get out of these kind pretty quick. She thought this was a funny game though. And I figured I should get a few more shots of the little miss all wrapped up while I still can:

And after lots of nursing and humidifier action and grandma snuggles:

we're feeling lots lots better.

*Your eyes do not deceive you - while she was sick she took a pacifier. It must have made her feel better, because usually she shoots them across the room.