Archive for January, 2009

The transformation is almost complete.

January 27, 2009 · Filed under I make things.

Project Bedroom Transformation has now entered the final stages, marked with the completion of these curtains.

Curtain dressing is a tricky thing around here.  Privacy’s not so much an issue; the neighbors are too far away to glean a decent view of anything within these walls. (as far as I know…)  Having moved from a cave-like hobbit hole of a house into this spacious, well-lit dwelling place of light, we’re much more apt to worship the windows and the view they afford rather than cover them up with frilly dresses for modesty’s sake.  Until that view compromises nap time, of course, the most holy of daily rhythms.  The packing tape was barely lifted from the moving boxes before I rushed out to find the most opaque curtains I could afford to drown out some of that glorious light and allow my little one to maintain her luxuriously-long nap schedule.  These were what I returned with- a plain powder-blue velvet panel for each of her FIVE bedroom windows.  Oh how they clashed with the Caribbean aqua color of the walls, offending my comparatively liberal color sense every time I entered the room.  For over a year this battle went on; I don’t know how she got any sleep in there at all.  Finally, finally, we repainted the walls a lovely pale yellow and for the trim – a fresh creamy hue with a whisper of butter.  And the curtains let out a sigh of relief.   So I promptly hauled them to my sewing room where cutting and splicing and sewing and dreaming all came together to create the appliques that now adorn these powder-blue beauties.  Five curtains are a lot to transform from blah to 3yr-old-wonderland-worthy, and it took some time.  In the process, a thrifted suit jacket was compromised, lending its serendipitously-matching brown and blue plaid and silky brown liner to the creation of the gnarled oak branches.  A yellow chenille bedspread, used in countless projects before, volunteered its services once again to become the whimsical circle blooms that also happen to mimic the light of the newly-painted walls perfectly.

Shown here is the panel along her bed, with a special, custom-made hanging owl’s nest pocket to give a home to her favorite little owl, bequeathed the name Cucumber in a quick moment of inspiration from Daddio.

Cucumber could write her own blog, I think, being incredibly well-travelled for a little owl I made in a batch of 75 two Christmas seasons ago.  Something about her caught Isadora’s eye and she’s remained a faithful play companion in such adventures as “Fun in the Chicken Run”, “Carseat Companion” and “Going to Grandma’s House”  to name a few.

Just a few more loose ends to tie up today before I call the bedroom project finised for now.  A photo tour will follow, of course, so stay tuned.  In the future, I hope to make a quilted duvet and a nice, big rag rug, but even in my nesting-induced hormonal delirium, I recognize these as projects for later and not mandated before the arrival of THE BABY.  Though there are plenty of otherwise-irrational must-do tasks on that list…

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I am a cantilever.

January 26, 2009 · Filed under I'm Momma; this is my family.

I am a cantilever.

A marvel of visceral architecture.

A mind-blowing display of elasticity and a blatant defiance of gravity.

A literal refuge for yet 10 more weeks.  A figurative refuge forever more.

I house the mystery of Being and Living:  in this womb, amongst these ribs, throughout this blood.

We are growing.  Stretching.  Reaching out.

We are waiting.

I am hungry.

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Inauguration Celebration

January 21, 2009 · Filed under I'm Momma; this is my family., We like music.

In the wee hours of yesterday morning, Isadora and I lay snuggled together under the blankets’ warmth, watching as the room slowly gave way to the morning’s emerging light.  “Today is the day”, I said, “the day Barack Obama becomes our President.”  We’d been talking about him sporadically since the election, when she first took notice of him.  Yesterday, we talked of the excitement, the parties and parades, and the hard, hard work that lay ahead.  So began our day.

Shortly thereafter, my travels through the daily blog-reading route turned up these:  Baracka Maracas.  Isadora spotted them on my screen and as soon as as those words left my mouth, they were officially cemented as a must-have (or must-make) for our own Inauguration celebration.   We do love us a good, catchy name to attach to our crafty projects.  With the maracas already in our music-making collection, all we needed were the Barackas to seal the deal.

Without TV reception, I had initially feared that watching the ceremony would not be possible, but it turns out you can watch just about anything online.  Failing that, the entire ceremony was broadcast on NPR, so I knew that somehow or another, I’d catch it and participate in the excitement and history-making.  Except that I didn’t.

As our 44th President was being sworn in, I was lying flat on my back in the Doctor’s office, feet in stirrups, naked from the waist down.  An impromptu visit; nothing serious, but rather disappointing nonetheless.  And a rather funny anecdote to contribute to all of the “where were you when…” conversations that have ensued since.

Instead, our celebrations commenced later in the evening, with Daddio joining us on the harmonica and lollipop drum.  We shook those maracas and danced to the beat of our own drums and found our own unique way to join the worldwide celebration.  It was perfect.

Even Svejk joined in the fun, in his very own I’m-Old-and-Cold-and-Grouchy-So-Please-Leave-Me-Alone sort of way.

And now Barack Obama has joined the ever-growing cast of imaginary friends that inhabit our home and Isadora’s play, surely one of his more pleasant new appointments.  Welcome, Mr. President!

I should also note that Isadora is clad in her 3rd wardrobe ensemble of the day, coordinated by herself, and wished to give a shout-out to the Green Bay Packers.  Our loyalties in this house are far-reaching, afterall.

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Trimming the fat.

January 19, 2009 · Filed under This is where we live., We grow things.

Today we turned off our TV.  For good.  Or at least for a long while.

Like so many of you out there, we’ve pulled out the magnifying glass to take a closer look at our habits.  How do we spend our money?  How do we spend our time?  How can we maximize both?  Call it a sign of the times, a product of New Year’s Resolution Idealism, or even Make Way for Baby nesting.  We’ve taken a scalpel (not a hatchet) to our budget, to our habits, to our goals.  And it’s been far less painful and far more rewarding than I could have imagined.

Financially, the To-Do list has been rather conventional.  Refinance.  Shop for better insurance rates.  Call the phone company for better rates.  (funny how you have to call them and pretend to be on the verge of canceling to shave that $20 off the monthly bill)  Assess the grocery bill, our area of greatest spending.  Can we buy more in bulk?  Make more ourselves?  Do more canning and freezing? Sure.

Then there was the matter of television.  With the impending switch to digital broadcasting in less than a month, it’s likely that we’ll not need satellite service to get reception on our free channels.  Turns out we don’t watch a whole lot of cable shows anyway.  We don’t, in fact, watch much TV at all anymore, much to our delight.  So we canceled the satellite, hewing a hefty chunk of monthly expense from the log of monthly obligations.  (A wood-chopping analogy is especially fitting here, as we are also trying hard to get more of the toasty wood heat from the stove in the kitchen to the living room where the thermostat does its assessing and where we’d like to do more curling up without 7 blankets.)

So the satellite’s gone, but our old, wonderful TV is without its digital converter upgrade and without any reception at all.  After a bit of thinking and talking, we’ve decided to keep it that way for awhile.  I’m sure that we’ll pick up a converter box sometime in the future, but not anytime soon.  (we sure aren’t buying a new TV!) How liberating!  I’ve always secretly wanted to be one of those families without a TV, but thought I was too dependent on it myself to go without.  It always seemed a bit radical.  Then there was Sesame Street, adding value to our everyday and representing a tic mark in the “Pro” column of my internal tally.    Never mind that the “Con” category was filling up faster.  Now that we’ve grown out of Sesame Street’s range of interest, however, the time has never been more ripe to let go.  So we did.

Filling the void is an ever-growing stack of library books.  There’s a lot of gardening in our future, bees, a greenhouse, perhaps.  And projects to do together – birdwatching, singing, building, making, hiking, drawing, dreaming.  And a great, big void in our living room left by the Christmas Tree that is now earmarked in BOLD for a beautiful old piano…earmarked by me, at least, and I have a lot of pull here.

Just how many months of saved satellite bills equals a new (old) piano?  You can bet I have my calculator in hand to figure it out.

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It’s another story about lard…

January 7, 2009 · Filed under I'm Momma; this is my family., We are busy in the kitchen.

{Insert bells, whistles, applause}

Ladies and gentlemen…this is the 100th post.  Something of a benchmark in blogland, I’d say, and an accomplishment not to be taken lightly.  With that in mind, I’d like to devote this monumental post entirely to….

Lard.

(that unsung animal fat much maligned and swiftly dismissed)

I could start with a few facts to counter lard’s poor reputation, like it’s potentially high vitamin D content, or the fact that it’s mostly monounsaturated… I’ve soliloquized it before, though mostly tongue-in-cheek as I reported on a cooking experiment gone bad.  But none of this appears to be relevant to this particular story.  This is a story about lard soap, the kind our thrifty ancestors made in times of Waste Not, Want Not.

It turns out I was bequeathed this lard soap, which was indeed made by my very own ancestors and found among the household contents of my Great-Aunt’s estate after her passing.  Grandma remembers it – remembers both the making and using it and therefore wanted nothing to do with it, period.  Mom, on the other hand, carries a bit more sentimentality towards such things and also happens to be my soap-making partner in crime, with more appreciation for handmade soap than the average person.  In all of her wisdom and imagination, she swiftly claimed it for me and set some aside for herself.  Above you can see the box of lard soap pieces I received – a generous endowment.  They must be, by my estimate, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-75 years old.

The women of my family used it as laundry soap.  It seemed appropriate that I do the same.  I can’t speak to the cleaning ability of lard soap, nor how it compares to other detergents or fat-based soaps.  I’m using it because acquiring a box of handmade lard soap from eons ago presents something of a romantic challenge, just the type I relish.  I’m using it because some women with the same blood as me spent a long time making this soap and I’ll be damned if all of their hard work turns out to be for naught.  Even if the gratification is rather delayed for them, I do imagine that my efforts will be appreciated from their lofty vantage point, wherever that may be.

The women of the soap? Perhaps.

The women of the soap? Perhaps.

A quick search of handmade laundry soap recipes offered no shortage of concoctions to choose from.   That, paired with the laundry soap expertise gleaned from washing our own cloth diapers, I was able to make a rather educated choice of a good recipe and am entirely confident in its cleaning abilities.  This recipe is in powdered form, which I prefer, though there are plenty of recipes out there for liquid versions.  It’s adapted from one I found on the Tipnut website, linked above.  The ingredients were all on hand, as borax and baking soda are among the cleaning product heavyweights in our house.  I also happened to have the Washing Soda, or Soda Ash, as it’s also known, left over from dying loads of baby clothing.  All of these things can be found in the grocery store, likely in the laundry detergent aisle.

Got Lard? Powdered Laundry Soap

Mix equal parts of the following:

  • Borax
  • Baking Soda
  • Washing Soda (soda ash)
  • Grated Bar soap
  • Essential oils, qty adjusted to your nose’s suggestion

Use 1/8 cup powder per full load of laundry; 1/2 that for a front loader.

The bar soap need not be lard, of course!  Castille or Fels Naptha or any old bar soap should work fine, just try to avoid the heavily perfumed ones.  Grating can be done with your standard box grater or much more quickly with a food processor using the shredding mode.  If your soap also happens to be 50-75 years old, you’ll likely find, as I did, that it crumbles nicely into a fine powder in the food processor.

About the other ingredients:

Baking Soda deodorizes, whitens, brightens, and generally boosts the cleaning ability of the soap or detergent.

Borax acts as a water conditioner, boosting the cleaning power of detergent by controlling alkalinity, deodorizing the clothes and aiding the removal of stains and soil.

Washing soda also helps remove dirt and odors.

The essential oils I used were an off-the-cuff mix of orange, lemon, and lime, for a nice citrus-y smell, as well as some Tea Tree oil, which is a tried and true antibacterial that found its way onto my shelf during the cloth diaper laundering days.

And?  Does it work?  Was it worth it?  I’ll say it does; it was!  Granted, I’ve not submitted my laundry to a lab for actual scientific testing, but I’m completely satisfied with the results.  The essential oils make my laundry smell SO WONDERFUL, in a not-at-all-offensive-like-synthetic-fragrance way.  The laundry appears to be just as clean as with my former Arm & Hammer powdered detergent.  I mixed up enough to fill two empty detergent boxes, so we’ll be in clean clothes for a long time coming, as long as I keep the washer going.  And I have plenty of powdered lard soap for future batches as we approach our reentry into the cloth diaper washing club, just around the corner…

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Getting it done.

January 6, 2009 · Filed under This is where we live.

Soule Mama wrote about  superheros today, and I think that rather captures the spirit of Right Now for me.  Superhero is pretty much what you get when you mix the forces at work in this house right now, as long as your definition of Superhero allows for an afternoon nap to recharge the high-voltage battery.  The forces at work here?  Well, there is the gentle persuasion of the Season, which whispers, “Start fresh.  Assess.  Plan, hope, strive for more.  Purge the old and embrace the new.  Reincarnate.”  Add to this lovely mix the potent cocktail of pregnancy-induced Nesting hormones, and you’ve got a force to be reckoned with.  Indeed, I’ve been something of a force, whipping through the house with an urgency never before experienced.  Now that Christmas is over, we’ve entered Babytime!, with the clock ticking and the To-Do List in full control of my sanity.  ”Time to turn inward” means tackling grandiose projects around the house.  Like finally (finally!) cleaning and organizing and reorganizing the Room With An Ever-Changing Name:  Library Guest Bedroom Computer Room Play Room Which Also Houses the Computer and Our Books.  Dewey Decimal would scratch his head at my idiosyncratic organization of the bookshelves in here, but AT LAST, I know exactly where to look to find the answer to the burning question of which herb to apply to that persistent cough.  In the grand scale of sanity-building exercises, this project ranks very highly.  Now that we have a firm handle on the lay of the land and how we use our space here, I’m able to organize and maximize and make efficient.  And purge!  Each of the last few forays into town have been choreographed to coincide with the most-accessible thrift store donation drop-offs.  Ah, what wonderful release!

At the same time, I’ve decided to give some attention to Isadora’s bedroom.  In a particularly exuberant flurry of activity, we set about rearranging her room into what has to be a Feng Shui-compliant new setup – it’s amazingly spacious and fresh, so much so that I want to sleep there. Careful if you try this yourself at home; the results are intoxicating and will likely lead to more “improvement-type” projects.  The dust had barely settled in the vacuum before we headed out to the paint store to select a new shade for the walls.  (No-VOC paint, for anyone paying extra-close attention)  Then The List came out, and the finishing details were added to it, filling out the crafty void that had been created with the end of Christmas and gift-giving.  A new patchwork duvet, a rag rug, embellished curtains, new laundry bin….my sewing machine is already doing its warm-up stretching to prepare. 

Driving by our house this weekend, you would have seen us through the uncurtained windows, that picture of the classic Preparing for Baby tableau:  kerchief on my head, belly-out-to-here, paintbrush in hand.  Of course it wasn’t Baby’s room we were working on, for we’ve already learned that Baby doesn’t need a room for the first several months in our house, save our own, or even a bed, save our own.  This preparing is for Big Sister, who’s world is going to be rocked in a very big way in three short months.  Who’s likely going to need a sanctuary of some kind once the center of our universe becomes a little more crowded with a tiny addition to the family.  After a little more than a year in this house, it feels so good to claim a room fully and make it our own.  We can hardly believe we’ve not done any major painting up to this point; we who are notorious for our impromptu painting weekends and bold color palette.  It’s about time.

Up next on the agenda is our bedroom, where we hope to welcome this little one into the world, and then cocoon ourselves in the precious get-to-know-you babymoon.  It’s as close to “doing the Baby’s room” as we’ll get for quite a while, I think.  No doubt you will feel the reverberations from that crazy, crazy, unstoppable activity in your part of the world.  Should you find yourself in the path of a Superhero near you, just step aside and let her pass, marveling at the swath of order and clean that she brings, making the Scrubbing Bubbles with their superficial sudsy trail jealous.

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