Inspiration Board

Somedays I'm ready to toss it all and remodel from the ground up.
Most of the time, though, I'm content to snip out pages from magazines and bookmark blogs as decoration inspiration for that vague time in the future when I may or may not actually own the four walls that contain all my stuff...

How great is this wall? I love the organized chaos.
Everything all hodge-podge together, the nice clean white of the table and couch calming the overall effect.


And this, I have about a million photos of the kids and scraps of their artwork I'd love to frame. I'd cover an entire wall, just for that silent 'oh' of wonder the first time someone new walked into the room and saw an entire wall covered in great photos and funky mismatched frames...


And how fantastic is this bedroom? I fantasize at least once a week about walls covered in chalkboard paint. The simplicity of this calms me. My house, however, will NEVER be this clean.


Nor, sadly, will my closets ever be this organized.
I can dream though. And in my dreams I have an entire room devoted to an office/craft den. And it has lovely painted closets full of perfect little IKEA baskets of supplies and pristinely washed, ironed, folded and hung bits of material just waiting to be used. It also, incidentally, has a monstrosity of a butcher block table smack dab in the middle of the room. One that's ancient and shows it, with strident hash marks crisscrossing it and worn corners softened by age and kids hands running round it. In case you were wondering...

The Eternal Appetite of Infancy

I am in love with this quote. Thank you, Steph, for sending it my way today. Sometimes I forget to take time out of a shitty day to offer up a prayer. And this quote will serve as mine today.

"Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that God has the eternal appetite of infancy. - G.K. Chesterton

Wedding Bells

My son is getting married.

Okay. Not yet. But some day.

In addition to the tooth trauma we had last night, I also came to this stark realization: My son is also growing up. Hence the copious amount of tears post- I-lost-a-tooth -laughter.

While climbing into the car & buckling up yesterday, my son glances up at me through his open car window and very casually begins the following conversation:

Baz: "I found the one I'm going to marry"

Mom: "Oh Really? What's her name?" (at the same time stunned and immediately struggling not to smile or make light of things)

B: "Salome"
M: "Well that's a nice name. Is she in your class or do you ride the bus with her?" ( oh god. oh god. I can feel the chuckles building. Must. Not. Laugh.)
B: "She's in my class. She's got black hair and brown skin and a nice voice" (this I can't fault him with. I'm a sucker for accents myownself)
M: "Well I'm glad you're making so many new friends in your class"
B: "Mooo-ooom... she's not my friend. I'm going to marry her."

M: "Oh. Okay. Well. I'm glad you found her so early on then, buddy! Is she very nice?"
B: "D'ya think I'd marry her if she wasn't?" (this accompanied by a disgusted Tsk and a shake of his head. I swear my children think I'm an imbecile sometimes.)

As completely freaking adorable as this is...oh and he was dead serious too. The mulish tilt of his chin through the entire conversation just dared me to crack a smile or make fun of what he was saying...it just further drove the stake into my heart about this whole growing up thing.

I don't know if I'm ready for this.

Trauma!

Trauma!

Wherein Belle loses her first tooth,
and Mommy's PMSing and finds herself in tears over her babies' continued growth.

So Belle lost her first tooth last night.

It was a momentous occasion full of jumping and cheering and bleeding all over my white shirt. *sigh*

When I picked The Munchkins up from school yesterday evening, #1 had me feel her wiggly tooth three times, in the four-minute drive from their school. So, after dinner we sat down at the dining room table/craft station and I let Belle pick through the scrap basket for some fabric she liked, and we stitched her up a quick Tooth Pillow.

I remember my tooth pillow. It was the little yellow gingham check and it had a small white ruffle and a dainty little pocket on one side. It was feminine and girly in the extreme, But my girls? Nope. Belle picks the boldest, darkest prints I've got on hand. With a shrug & a smile I stitched it up in just a few minutes, stuffing it with some random filler I stole from an old porch pillow.

I was, very literally, tying off the knots and trimming the threads on the pillow when Belle bolts into the room and screeches to a stop in front of the sewing machine. Momma Look! She says. I can fit my whole tongue under the tooth! And, quick as a wink she opens her mouth to show me and the tooth goes flying out across the room to ping against the far window. I laughed so hard at the shocked look on her face that I was crying. And then I kept crying because I realized that my oldest was growing up. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it, except get her a pink bendy straw so she can drink her Kool-Aid, with her mouth closed, through the new gap in her smile. Because isn't that the coolest part about losing teeth anyway?




*A note on construction:

The pillow itself was simply at 12"x8" rectangle of (not-so)coordinating fabric.
The pocket was a 2"x2" square. I ironed & hemmed all the rough edges in and stitched the bottom & sides to a corner of the pillow.
Match wrong sides to wrong sides of your two pillow pieces, and stitch 3 & 3/4 of the way around the rectangle.
Turn right-side-out and press your seams down. Stuff pillow & hand stitch your opening closed. Viola! World's easiest project.

Now that the pillow has seen some action, I'm going to sit down & applique #1's name on it per her request... And, of course, both siblings are already clamoring for pillows of their own, so I may delve into some patchwork pillow patterns I've been keeping on hand...for fairness' sake...





*also? I promise they aren't really that lumpy... we weren't exactly done when I snapped those oh-so-flattering photos...

Venting my Spleen

A moment for navel gazing...

or
W.T.F.?!?!

You know...most days I feel like I've successfully shored up my self-image over the past few years so that it will survive the little nicks and cuts that it takes on a daily basis. Having a bad hair day? No problem. Having a fat day where none of my pants fit? Better than that few months where I was depressed and lost 30 pounds! (although, really? what I wouldn't give for THAT body back... hah). Arrive to work wearing mismatched socks? It happens! These things I can handle.

What I've found I can't handle very well any more? Receiving purposefully hateful, spiteful, unfounded texts from someone I, at one point, trusted. I don't know whether I'm just out of practice (because trust me, there was a time where receiving hateful texts, voicemails, emails, etc was a daily occurrence) or what, but I was stunned the other night to receive several from the Exhubs' girlfriend/ex-girlfriend?

I don't often use this blog to rant and rave about things in my personal life. But sometimes I get so thrown for a loop that I'm unsure where else to vent my spleen on things. Isn't that a great phrase? Vent my Spleen. I should use it more often... Honestly though, and without going into too much detail, I am torn between lamenting the loss of someone who I once respected, and who means a great deal to my children; and feeling just some good old, plain, white-heat, searing anger at the effrontery of some to assume superiority over others.

The exhubs and I have worked hard and long to ensure that our post-marriage relationship (because, believe me, people... for any of you on the fence between marriage and divorce... you don't get to end a relationship when you go through a divorce with children...you simply change the nature of it! And I think sometimes that this is easily overlooked on the part of people who have gone through a divorce without children, or the fracture of a long-term relationship without the benefit of children or marriage.) is more than just a cordial one. It's taken years of tears, laughter, acceptance and fine tuning of what was once a friendship, then love, then marriage, then family, then hate, then hurt, then ambiguity, then tenuous-at-best acquaintanceship, just to get back 'round to friendship again. And it burns my biscuits to no end that some insecure chit is trying to destroy that hard-wrought friendship.

I understand insecurity. Hell, I battle with it internally ALL. THE. TIME. But I'm always very careful not to let it show. Not to let it seep out around the cracks and chinks in my armor. And, for god's sake NOT to let it spill onto other people.

...

So, like a good little ostrich, I've chosen to officially Ignore any hateful communique from the opposite camp. What say you, oh faithful small handful of readers? Is that the best course of action?

Eyelets and Grommets and Tiny Successes

Check out these cute little bracelet cuffs I made last night!

I was cleaning out my scraps basket
(which means I was just playing around with it...not really cleaning per se)

Saw something similar to these on etsy the other day and thought I'd give 'em a whirl.

Also,
I'm having a brief flirtation with eyelets and grommets
They're just so much fun.
And the hammering's rather cathartic...



I whipped up these three random bands in under an hour
and that includes ironing AND pinning the strips before stitching them down. (blech. you all know how I feel about ironing and pinning)
Don't be surprised if you see these random bits popping up on the arms of friends and acquaintances, as I'm in love with a project that yields multiple successes in under an hour. Doesn't get much easier... AND the next batch is going to have to include some of the wicked huge buttons and snaps I've been hoarding for just the right project...

Wilco is my Happy Place

If Jeff Tweedy were an ice cream flavor I would eat him up.


He makes me sigh. Seriously.
Also, how happy does this photo make you?




Next Year, I'm bound & determined to be AT the Solid Sound Festival.
*sigh*