Sep 12 2007

Four months

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Welp, it’s time for another installment of “What’s Baby Doing?” She…

+ rolls side to side over and over and over again for hours and hours at a time
+ can almost roll onto her tummy / off of her tummy, but her arm gets in the way
+ knows that if she pulls on the handle on her bouncy seat, the music will start, and mommy and daddy will dance for her
+ eats her feet
+ outgrew size 1 diapers and most of her 0-3 month clothes
+ drives the bottle during feeding time…we just have to support it for her
+ can sleep all the way through the night, but chooses not to
+ splashes happily in the tub
+ said “mama” twice (and if you give her a typewriter, eventually she’ll write Shakespeare)

Sep 10 2007

120 DIFFERENT colors!

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I bought a box of crayons today. One hundred and twenty different colors. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY. Wow. One hundred and twenty DIFFERENT colors.

We were at Walmart today, and while Andy hunted down cat food, I meandered into the back-to-school section. Crayons. The smell of them is pretty much as good as it can get. Ranks right up there with new text books, clean baby, and cinnabuns. I stared at the boxes and boxes of crayons and remembered, as I always remember when looking at new crayons, how cool it was in elementary school to get a new box at the start of the year. Back then getting a box of 48 was pretty much the cat’s meow. A box of 64…well, I don’t think I got a box of 64 more than a few times. When I saw that box of 120 crayons (each a different color, I checked), I gave a little yelp of glee.

And I knew I had to have them.

One cool thing about being a grown up is that if you want a $7 box of crayons, you can buy them. I bought them.

120.

What good are crayons, though, without coloring books? I don’t understand why the coloring books are not in the same place as the crayons. At the grocery store, there is often a banana display rack in the cereal aisle. At the hardware store, the paint brushes are always near the paint. Coloring books, though, are in the toy section while the crayons are far far away in school supplies.

I’m picky about coloring books. I don’t like those pesky mixed books…with coloring pictures and silly activities. I don’t like to be distracted by goofy crosswords or lame-o connect-the-dots. I just want pictures. I also prefer simple pictures with heavy black lines. Some coloring books have pictures with such high level of detail, the crayons don’t fit between the lines. Maybe those are good for colored pencils or even skinny markers, but for crayons? Nope. I’m also not real keen on books about cartoon characters like Dora or Cinderella. Even with this stringent criteria, I managed to find half a dozen books (strangely, three were about cats). With Andy’s help, I narrowed the stack down to three: baby animals and two of the cat books.

When we got home, I took out my crayons…peeled off the plastic…and took in all the glory of those wonderful colors. Only one problem. The (120) crayons were stuck in the boxes (two 48 boxes and one 24) all random! How can you know which green you really want when the greens are spread out over three boxes? How do you know the purple you picked is THE purple you need?

I dumped all the crayons out on the floor and spent the next hour putting them in order.

I found out why the crayon people put the crayons in randomly. It’s tough putting them in order. Does this green-blue crayon go with greens or blues? Should I put all the fruit-named crayons together? Must Caribbean Sea go next to Pacific Blue? Where does white go? It sticks out no matter where it is. Do the colors of the paper wrappers mean something? Should all the crayons with the same color wrappers go together? But if so, why does a crayon that is surely a yellow have the same color wrapper as a crayon that is surely a red?

I broke the crayons down into six groups: reds, blues, greens, yellows, purples, and earthy colors. The earthy colors managed to fig quite nicely in the 24 box. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to box up the others…I could put the blues, greens, and yellows in one box but was left four short. If I put the reds, blues, and yellows together I had one too many. Should I break the blues between boxes? If so, which few blues were most un-blue? Andy kept looking at me funny this entire time…asking me if I sorted my legos when I was a kid. (No, I didn’t. I remember being more concerned about the number of bumps on the lego blocks than the color (2, 4, 8?). After all, color isn’t quite as important when you are building as size and shape of the block.) After I got things broken into boxes, the arranging went fairly quickly. Some crayons really didn’t fit the progression from light to dark I was working for in each color group, but I just stuck them in where they seemed to go best.

Now they are all tucked in happily. All one hundred and twenty colors. Time to color.

I started writing this about a week ago but didn’t finish it. I’ve since found out another reason the crayon people didn’t bother to organize the crayons. Once you get them where you want them, it’s tough to keep them that way. When you take one crayon out, the others wiggle around to fill in the gap and things get all wonky.

Aug 31 2007

No more babies!

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Last night we came home and Cabol, proving she is right as usual, pointed out that some of the d’Uccle chickens looked rather small. And sure enough, there were two new babies running around. Good thing we’re trying to reduce our flock, eh?

After dinner, I went down to set up a little ramp so the chicks can hop back into the house at night, and I found a sad wet chick outside the cage, all soaked from the rain and cold and on its side and cheeping pitifully. I picked it up and rubbed it with my shirt, and was torn whether it was so far gone as to just put it in the bushes or what. I decided to put it in the chicken house and see if mommy chicken would warm it up later, and this morning all three chicks were alive and running around!

Aug 16 2007

It’s all ball bearings these days

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This evening I was watching Fletch for the first time in forever, because I have a weakness for 80s comedies. And all throughout the movie, Chevy Chase’s voice, mannerisms, and one-liners kept sounding so familiar, yet it has been ages since I’ve seen him in anything. Finally at the end, I realized who I was reminded of:

Dirty Jobs will never be the same.

Aug 15 2007

Master Gardener

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Our gardening output this year has been pretty bad. Sure, we did have a disruption during prime planting time (hi, Anya!), but we also have been kind of lazy. Or basil is doing ok, but I never took them out of the smallish pots, so none of it is much taller than a foot. Our ‘main’ garden is completely overrun with weeds. And grass. The peppers pretty much disappeared. The pole beans never got poled, so they are intwined in the grass. The tomatoes are small and stunty, but at least they have (green) fruits on them. We have a drip irrigation system I installed, which has at least kept things alive, but I think the weeds suck out a lot of the water. It’s depressing.

Even more depressing is my hop plants, chewed to the ground by the sheep during the winter and early spring, have produced more hops than they ever did when I patiently watered them and put up a trellis. Oh, and there are two HUGE tomato plants growing…in the compost bin.

EDIT: I was down in the garden this evening, doing some weeding (although it’s more like mowing since the ‘weeds’ are 90% grass), and there were a few ripened tomatoes. I also started pulling out the bush bean plants, since they are mostly all dried up now. I think the beans still need to sit out a few days more to dry completely.

Aug 10 2007

Basement Floor

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Well, the floor is finished and covered in polyurethane. The walls still look like crap, but we haven’t really decided what color we want to paint them. Plus, Cabol wants to put a real wall up behind where the dresser is, and possibly another one dividing 2/3 of the basement into a room that could be used as a bedroom. I guess that will be the next project when her parents visit this fall! Muahahaha.

There is still a little bit of cat pee that is wicking up in the corners when it is really hot and humid (which it has been all week). This should eventually stop – and any stains will eventually be hidden under base trim anyways. Once the new walls are installed.

And here’s what Anya thought of it all:

Aug 9 2007

3 Months

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Three months now. I’ve been back to work since July 2, so this last month Anya has spent her days with her zookeeper. I suppose there could be other things she can do that I don’t know about because of that, but I think she’s been pretty good about sharing her tricks with us. So, without further ado, here is what Anya was up to in July:

+ With the help of her Aunt Rebecca (a champion thumb sucker in her youth, I hear), Anya now knows that thumbs are quite tasty and good for slurping on.

+ She has almost total control of her head. She says that life is much more interesting now that she can turn hither and yon at will.

+ She can also sit up with help. She likes to sit up. Sometimes she likes to spit up, but mostly she likes to sit up.

+ She has mastered the friendly skies and took her first plane ride to / from NY.

+ As shown in the hippo picture a few days ago, Anya is an expert grabber. Since her hands are so tiny, though, she is a bit limited into what she can hold onto. So far the list includes Hippo (duh), her feet, my hair, my shirt, my bra, my dinner plate, and cat tails.