form or function?

So, my sewing machine is currently downstairs. Usually, it is upstairs, in my sewing room (which is really the closet of the guest room…but hey, it’s a big closet! There are lights and a window!).

However, when I bought my new machine I put it on the kitchen table to try it, and there it remains, inviting me to cover the kitchen table with a ton of sewing stuff instead of using it for things like eating. It’s ugly and I hate looking at it.

But I’m getting so much sewing done with it right there. If I have ten minutes, I can sit down and do a little sewing. It’s so handy, and yet such an eyesore. I guess maybe the thing to do is to knock out some more diapers for Mary in her larger size, then some diapers for the future kid, then move it upstairs? I’m so torn. (When it’s upstairs I don’t think I’ll be able to sew during Mary’s naps–I think I’ll be too close and wake her up. She used to sleep through it but she’s gotten more sensitive to naptime noise.)

In a related story, newborn diapers are so tiny. They’re laughable. I’ll take pictures.

clearly a prodigy

So, Conor has an electric piano which Mary really likes. Here is a video of them using it–Conor calls this piece “Feud in Squeak Minor.” Ignore the thumping in the background–that’s me, applying snaps to some diapers.

that new classroom smell

Classes started today, so I met my students (of course it’s hard to tell what they will be like on the first day). Curiously, I discovered that the building I always thought was the Chemistry building was really the Engineering building all along. (That was inconvenient, since my classes are in the Chemistry building, but I found it eventually.) I always like the beginning of the semester. There’s no time to have fallen behind yet.

Last night Mary woke up in the middle of the night all sad because she was congested (we all have a minor cold). She cried and eventually I decided she wasn’t going to go back to sleep without some sort of attention, so I went in and tried her saline spray in her nose.

You know, in retrospect, I’m not sure why I thought that holding her down and spraying salt water up her nose would make her more sleepy.

She did feel better afterward, although she was furious–FURIOUS. I had to give her a bath to calm her down and then put her back to bed. Poor kid. Now she’s running around being crazy because she’s tired (it’s just about bedtime). At the moment she is running from the dining room to the living room and back, brandishing a brown crayon and yelling, “Go go go.” She’s been pretty funny this evening. Conor has been reading to her a lot from the book “Click, Clack, Moo.” She was reading her books this afternoon and just sitting and paging through them, whispering to herself, “mooo….moooo….”

everyone has high speed internet!

I have it on good authority that my grandparents are watching Mary’s video on their high-speed connection even as I type. I didn’t believe that it was really going to sweep the country, but I guess everyone really is getting DSL.

dissertation slog

I wrote 12 pages today.

That’s a lot, by the way. If you’re thinking, “I wrote a 20-page paper overnight when I was in college–who cares about your 12 pages,” let me say–defensively–that it’s not the same thing. 12 pages added to a document that is already growing outside the bounds of anything I’ve ever written before is WAY better than 20 pages on a single, new, exciting topic.

I also sewed two diapers, which was strangely soothing and exhilarating after my 12 pages. Now I might really get crazy and go check the mail.

I cannot wait to finish this dissertation and get my life back!

p.s. My weekly e-mail tells me that the new baby weighs 5 ounces. That’s almost as much as two little cans of tuna! No wonder I can feel him/her thumping around in there. I think I’m going to have to give Mary and the baby co-authorship credit.

goodbye to the sling

Mary is officially too big to be carried in her baby sling–it’s just impossible to carry all of her weight on one side for very long. So, I got brave and did some sewing, and now she has this:

She seems to like it.

It was really easy to make and it distributes her MUCH better than the sling. Takes a minute to get it on and get her in it, though–I think I like the sling better for a small baby for that reason.

Anyway, here’s one more picture of Mary enjoying her new high chair (Christmas present from my parents). I will take a better pic that shows the chair, since it’s sort of cool and hip, but you get the idea–she can sit at the table with us like a bigger kid. I thought about just getting her a booster seat but I really wanted for her to be a little bit secure because she’s so squirmy. This photo is mostly here because it shows a lot of her teeth–she’s got a ridiculous number of them. I believe in this photo she is growling at Conor.

strangely plausible

So, I forgot my book when I went to the gym the other day (usually I just prop it on the treadmill or bike and read). So I was stuck with the TV, which has the closed captioning on so that you know what the people are saying. The one I was watching had the worst closed captioning tech EVER! A lot of it was total gibberish and I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to say (sometimes it wasn’t even words). The best part, though?

George Bush, with the closed caption, “What this country needs is duck.”

???

Also, in a related story, the soap opera “All My Children,” which my mom used to watch, has not moved on in the decade since I last saw it. I think they’re having the exact same conversations I remember from high school.

high on video success…

…I bring you one more (short, though). During our trip we saw my friend Linda (and her very nice boyfriend Jacob, of whom I wholeheartedly approve–won’t she be glad?). Here is a clip of Linda trying to get Mary to help her put a shape into the shape sorter (a toy that Mary only sort of understands).

long-awaited video!

Thanks to David’s perspicacious comment on my last entry (who knew you had to export it as an AVI?), here is a fantastic video of Mary dancing–unfortunately I am sure that you will only be able to view it if you have high-speed internet, as dial-up won’t be able to keep up. If you’re on dial-up, go to my mom’s house! I’m sure she’ll love to show it to you. Just click the “play” button (the arrow) at the bottom left of the picture to see Mary dancing and then picking Conor’s pocket.

Okay, now that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time messing around with this video, I don’t have time for a proper blog! But, for those of you concerned about Mary’s social development, our latest news is that I joined a gym with a childcare center. So I get to go to the gym, and I just leave Mary with the other kids at the center, and she LOVES it! She thinks it’s the best thing ever. As far as I can tell she mostly steals the other kids’ toys, but I think that’s what counts as “playing” when you’re 1-1/2.

better blog pending

I will be posting pictures and whatnot from our trip soon, I promise. I just haven’t had time and mostly I’m annoyed because I have a really cute video of Mary dancing that I want to post, except that I filmed it in portrait view and I can’t figure out any way to rotate it so that it is right-side-up when viewed online. My software turns it for ME, but I can’t figure out how to turn it so that it stays turned when I upload it. Anyone with information is welcome to share it. (I tried QuickTime but that only seemed to work if you viewed the video in QuickTime.)

Anyway, I will post something good soon! Regardless of the video problem.