Busy Days

This pretty little Crocus popped its head out the other day to tell me that spring is around the corner, even though we are still having many cold days.

I have decided that I don't mind the cold, as long as it is sunny outside.

We have a wood furnace that we have used most of the winter (we took a break from using it in February), that is really nice, when we make sure to keep the fire burning good and hot. We try to be frugal when it comes to heating our house, but I am definitely enjoying having a warmer house! I have a hard time being motivated to get up and do stuff when I am cold, and being pregnant isn't helping either, so the warm house and sunshine are essential to a productive day.

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A few Sundays ago on the way to church we saw one of these beautiful landscape pieces. Edmund asked, "Mama, what's that?" (A classic three-year-old question.) I responded with a somewhat vague, "Oh, that's a tower of some nature." His deduction -- a nature tower! Which is what he continued to call them for the next week or two; until Jaired decided that his son needed to be properly educated and told him that, "Mama made a mistake, those are actually cell phone towers." I think that Edmund is getting it sorted out. he still calls them nature towers if he forgets, but he has graciously accepted the fact that I had misinformed him.

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One of my pre-baby goals was to finish all of my (several) sewing projects. And I am happy to say that I have succeeded.
Along with outfits for myself, I have been making some things for my SIL Chava, like the dress above.
In the future I hope to talk more about my sewing, for those who might be interested to see what patterns I use, how I get through the hard parts, etc. This dress though, I had no particular pattern for. Chava has had "this" dress for awhile, but it needed to be altered, so I took the leftover fabric from when it was made and redid the bodice using princess seams. I also turned the gathered skirt into an A-line, to give it a better figure. The sash was just for fun because I had so much of the contrasting fabric left after altering the skirt, but it really adds a lot to the dress.

Games for the Boys

As we buy toys for our boys we try to choose things they are interested in, such as trains and animals, but we also look for things that will teach at the same time as being fun. We avoid the commercialized, TV themed toys and games, and always enjoy finding things that we remember playing as children.

Books are one thing that both boys love. They read a lot, both by themselves and with us. It is not uncommon to have one or the other coming up with a stack of books wanting to be read to.

We have Chutes and Ladders; this game gives us a chance to count with Edmund and he really likes making his person go up and down the ladders and slides (as he calls them). If you are not familiar with this game, it involves the very simple use of the spinner to determine the number of spaces to move. Then there are good deeds, that allow you to go up a ladder, or bad deeds, that make you go down a chute. Edmund doesn't understand that going down is bad and going up is good, but we do talk about the pictures and the results of the good or bad deeds.Sometimes, instead of buying something we make it ourselves. Jaired is especially a game lover, and some day would like to make a "real" game, that is one for adults. For now he is starting on children's games. Jaired draws a lot and when we make games he gravitates toward the initial artwork, while I cut out the cards and color in the pictures.

We took one of the boys' favorite books and created a game which is played similar to Candy Land.

Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman is a fun little book about dogs, though really not so much about dogs as about colors, opposites, and a little bit of counting.


The playing pieces are, of course, dogs.

The players draw cards to determine their move. The main cards are the colored squares, indicating where to go. There are special cards that one gets to keep for the dog party at the end of the game, and there are other special cards that make you skip a turn, go forward, or back, etc.

Two shortcuts allow some variations in the game. In this game there is no one person who is the winner. Everyone keeps drawing cards until all are at the Party Tree.

This game helps with colors of course, but it is also fun for Edmund to see the different things that he is familiar with from the book. And he really likes the end of the game when we can "put on" the party hats, "eat" the birthday cake and ice cream, and "open" the birthday presents.

The second game we have made is Memory.

This is a very simple game to make and play. If you aren't an artist you could even print off pictures from your computer. You just need two of each picture. We currently have eleven pairs of cards (above are just my favorites), which is perfect for Edmund's attention span and playing level, but we may make more cards as he improves. Little children tend to turn over the same cards again and again, which means they never win. When we play, I encourage Edmund to look at cards he hasn't seen yet. I also will occasionally throughout the game go back over the cards we have looked at (without turning them over) and remember aloud what they are, to help Edmund grasp the concept of the game.

In addition to games, Jaired had made toys for the boys out of wood. Again, our woodworking tools are limited, but someday we hope to have the means to make really nice, durable toys.

These wooden blocks were made with a table saw out of regular 1"x2" boards. They work on a similar concept to Legos, starting with a small square, "one-size," and moving up by increments. Some of the ones pictured above were made by Jaired and some by his dad and brother.

Jaired also makes wooden swords, shields, and battleaxes. All three of them like to spar together, though Nathaniel often finds the action to be a bit too much for him. These wooden toys are all works in progress, as Jaired improves the design every time he makes another weapon or block.

Sleepyhead

Two minutes before taking this picture I asked Edmund, "are you tired, do you want to take a nap?" "No...zzzz." was his reply.

Silly Little Bear.

Snow and Peanut Butter Cookies

We have been getting snow every week for the last few weeks. This is pretty unusual for Missouri weather. In fact, back in the middle of January when the temperature was up in the 4o's and 50's we were not surprised and figured we had seen all of our allotment of snow for the winter. But just as Missouri winters are usually not very snowy, they are also not very predictable.

I really like snow. I think it is beautiful, it sure beats plain, old grayness, and it covers up all the ugly brown grass. I like it when we get snowed in and Jaired has to stay home.

Of course it has been snowing so frequently that if he had stayed home every day he would be really behind with his work. So, since he does have to go to work still, I am glad that 1) it has mostly been warm enough that the snow doesn't accumulate much on the roads and 2) the snowplows have been doing a great job keeping the rest of the snow cleared away.

And, if it is snowy and cold outside, what do you do? Maybe Papa can take the three-year-old into the kitchen, ignore the fact that he didn't eat very much supper, and teach him how to make peanut butter cookies.

And I smile as I type and he sings: "Happy Birthday at baby in Mommy's tummy."

The Baby's Birthday

Yesterday, I had a prenatal and got the baby's birthday set up. March 12. That's is as long as the baby behaves himself and waits patiently. If I start having contractions before that day we will have to have the c-section right away, to avoid any possible dangers to me or baby.

Otherwise, my pregnancy is going great. Everything is normal and the baby is growing like he should be.

Praying that this birth and newborn will be a lot less "eventful" then the last two.*

5 weeks. Oh, my.



*For those who don't know:
I had some small complications with Edmund's birth, but then he had to go back to the hospital twice before he was even two months old. First for severe jaundice, second for severe anemia.

Nathaniel was 7 weeks premature, born via emergency c-section, spent three weeks in the NICU, then had anemia at 6 months.

For people who don't ever go to the doctor we have spent a lot of time at the hospital because of our boys!

The Big Boy Room

Stage Two of moving the boys' bedroom out of the playroom was actually an idea born before we even decided to move the nursery. One of the bedrooms was already painted a lovely "boy" blue when we moved in. This room was our storage/catch-all room. Maps on the walls, boxes of dance stuff, sporting goods equipment, anything that didn't have a particular place found its way in there.

Of course this room being the only big bedroom that was unoccupied it was the logical choice for the new boys' room. We decided that the new room would be the boys' main Christmas present from us. This included building beds for the boys and making coordinating quilts.

We started planning in the fall and I began sewing the quilts right away. The beds, however, were somewhat of a procrastination project. In fact, we did a good bit of the work on them Christmas week, even staying up until 2 a.m. one night, in order to have them ready. They are compatible as bunk beds if we ever would like to stack them. We measured the family's bunk beds to get the right size, then cut and sanded each piece of wood before assembling them. They are made out of pine and we bolted the pieces together.

The beds will be stained this summer, hopefully.

Jaired and I put our heads together to come up with the quilt design. The Lion and Unicorn were drawn by Jaired, then I cut them out and appliqued them onto the quilts. I have made quilts before, but this was my first time doing applique, so I was a little nervous. The little squares give a very deceptive idea of this quilt being difficult to make. The only hard part about the quilts was making sure to keep the diagonal pattern going throughout. The quilting itself was relatively easy, too. I did free-hand on the rectangles around the animals, then straight diagonals through the blue squares. These quilts were very fun to make, and I am now doing some brainstorming about curtains for the windows.

Jaired really likes the medieval time period and likes to draw knights, swords, castles, etc. So the Lion and Unicorn go along with that idea and Jaired plans to do the artwork for this room himself in the near future.

The Thomas the Tank Engine sheets and the tractor pillowcase are gifts from the boys' Aunt Ellie. Sure they don't go with the "medieval" theme, but they are great for our train-loving little boys.

I also made these birthday cross-stitch samplers for the boys. Edmund's has been done and rather homeless for a couple of years. Nathaniel's I just finished this month. I am glad to have a permanent place to hang them. We plan to print and frame pictures of the boys, probably from when they are a year old, that we will hang with their cross-stitches.

A view of the closet: up until now the boys were sharing a small chest of drawers, but they have outgrown it. All the shelves in here make for pretty good clothes storage and eliminate the need for a new chest of drawers.

The world map was drawn by Jaired when he was about 13 or 14. The frame is blue and I really like how well the colored pencil artwork goes with a children's room.

That is all we have for now, though between when I started this post on Saturday to now Jaried has started, and made good progress on, one of the drawings for this room. I will post pictures when he is done, and maybe we will see some curtains go up in the next few months.

The Nursery

With the boys getting bigger and more active, and a new baby on the way, we decided it was time to separate the nursery from the playroom.

Our house has a small, sunny room at the end of the hallway that has, up until now, been our guest bedroom. I moved all the nursery furniture into that room and it fits perfectly.

The crib made up and ready for a tiny newborn. With Winnie-the-Pooh to keep watch.

I made these curtains for Edmund's nursery in Virginia Beach. This was my first attempt at curtain making and I did not make them the right width, so now, for the first time, I get to see them as they should be, nice and fully ruffled.

The Halls bought this antique cradle when Edmund was born, but since they didn't have much space to store it we get to use it here at our house. I will actually move it into my bedroom once the baby is born.

And the changing table all ready to go.

This room, like so many others in our house, is sparse on the decorations, but hopefully I will be able to find some nice wall hangings in the next few months.

The best thing about this room though is the many blessing s that it contains. All the furniture in here was given to us, as well as most of the baby necessities and all the infant clothing we have. Though we have moved and lost contact with some of these people we have a constant reminder of their love and friendship when we go into the nursery.