Small Fry has been very into mimicking lately. His latest trick has been wrinkling up his nose and making a snuffling sound. And when you do it back to him, he just gets going more and more. It’s really funny :).
Have a wonderful weekend!
–Wendy
We have a small planter near our front porch, and I’ve always been a bigger fan of veggie gardens over flower gardens. Yes, flowers are beautiful, but they’re the same amount of work without the “payoff” of fresh produce. I might come around next year and do flowers in the planter instead, but I don’t know. We’ll have to see.
Anyway.
So, because I favor veggies, I put carrots in the planter. my thinking was that it’s deep enough to get decent sized carrots, and carrots don’t flower like other veggies (since they’re a root vegetable), so they wouldn’t attract bees to the door – yet another reason to put something besides flowers there. I started the carrots from seeds a couple months ago, and it’s been exciting to watch the tops get bigger and bigger.
Because of their root nature, we’ve all been horribly curious how the carrots have been doing. Hubs even pulled a couple up a month or so ago – they were very spindly and not at all carrot-like, so he carefully replanted them. I decided to take a chance a couple days ago, and guess what?!
A real carrot!! A small one, but a true carrot nonetheless. Our tomato plants have really started thriving recently as well. And we’ve already used our own lettuce on sandwiches and burgers. It’s very exciting :).
So maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with a good harvest of fresh veggies this summer after all.
–Wendy
P.S. Did you notice my new header? 🙂
I’ve recently been serving only homemade bread instead of store-bought, and since it wasn’t hot yesterday, I made it bread baking day. I use this recipe from “the mrs” – I tried a few and this one is by far our favorite. I make a few modifications, though. Her recipe calls for honey, and since babies can’t have honey for their first year, I substitute agave nectar so Small Fry can enjoy it. I only own 2 loaf pans, so I cut the recipe in half. And I don’t have a stand mixer, so I do it all by hand. Oh, and she grinds her own flour; I don’t have the ability to do that, so I use half all purpose (I buy it in 25 pound bags) and half whole wheat. Considering all my modifications, I’m sure hers is much better! lol. But it’s still amazing bread.
Anyway, so the picture. When it was time for the kneading process, Munchkin wanted to help. So of course I let him :).
Happy First Day of Summer!
–Wendy
I haven’t bought a purse in years. Whenever I feel like I want a new one, I just make one. I’ve tried several patterns over the years, but always come back to the Lindie bag. It was the first one I ever made, and to this day is the one best suited for me.
It’s small enough that my family doesn’t feel the need to put all of their stuff in it but big enough to hold my stuff along with a single diaper for short trips out when I don’t need the full-on diaper bag I made.
So if you have even a little sewing experience (the tutorial is very well-photographed and clearly explained) and need a new purse, I highly recommend the Lindie!
–Wendy
I’ve never blogged about Munchkin’s heavy medical issues from when he was younger – they all took place long before I started this venture – so with what I have to share today, the timing is right now.
About two weeks before he turned 3, he and Seahawk (who was 5 at the time) were playing; I was in the other room sewing. I suddenly heard a thump, followed by screaming. Seahawk came rushing into my room telling me that Munchkin had fallen off the top bunk (we’ve since gotten rid of the bunk beds – even now that they’re older, I don’t trust the safety of stacked beds). As I was hurrying down the hall to the kids’ room, I asked Seahawk if Munchkin was bleeding. He replied, “I don’t think so.” To this day I don’t know if he was lying to avoid punishment (it came out later that he was at fault in the fall – they were playing pirates, Munchkin was at the top of the ladder, Seahawk said “reach for the sky!”, and Munchkin did) or if he’d come to get me before the bleeding started. in any event, by the time I got there ten seconds later, his nose was hugely swollen and his face very bloody. Without further hesitation, I loaded the kids into the car and drove to the ER. Hubs was at a book signing that day; thankfully I’d driven him, so I had the car.
At the hospital, they decided to do a CT scan to make sure he hadn’t done any brain damage in the fall. The scan was inconclusive. There was a shadow there that they couldn’t identify. No one was sure whether it was bleeding on the brain or something less sinister. To be safe, they took us by ambulance to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland for an MRI. I called my mom to come get Seahawk so I could focus on Munchkin. I also put in a call to my in-laws so they could pick hubby up and bring him to the hospital. As we were loading into the ambulance, the local hospital gifted Munchkin with a quilt.
Two MRIs, an angiogram, and four days later, Munchkin was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. basically, he had a clump of “extra” blood vessels in his brain. Eventually, they would have caused him to stroke.
There was a question with the insurance we had to resolve before we could schedule the corrective surgery. The only doctor in the state who was qualified to perform the surgery (he actually invented the procedure!) wasn’t covered under our plan. Dr. Barnwell and his staff took care of talking to the insurance company for us to explain the severity of the situation. The surgery, with the right doctor, was approved. The initial fall had taken place September 5, 2009. His surgery was October 21, 2009.
This is his “after” MRI. I wish I could’ve found the “before” one at the time of this post; the difference is astounding. In the before shot, those white coils on the left side of the image (which is actually the right side of his brain) were a black muddle of misdirected blood.
So…
How does this relate to “quilts for kids”? That quilt we received as we were getting in the ambulance really stuck me, even though it hasn’t really stuck with Munchkin. Because of someone’s generosity, he received a lovely gift. I want to pay it forward, so to speak. I was given a bunch of quilting materials by a friend of my mom’s a few weeks ago, so I’ve used them to put together these 5 quilts. There’s enough for one or two more. When I get them all done, I’ll take them to the hospital for them to pass out as they deem necessary.
I won’t ever see the kids who receive them, and I’m okay with that. I just want the quilts to be a blessing for them as the one we got was for Munchkin.
So, I finished the last four “Sunbonnet Sue” blocks…
You can see the first eight here and here.
March:
June:
This isn’t the June one from the book; I didn’t really like theirs, so I made up my own, which I really like :).
August:
December:
Now I have the daunting task of making sure they’re all exactly the same size (which they’re not right now…) so that when I put them all together with lattice between, it looks right. I’ll keep you posted on that step when it’s done.
–Wendy
First of all, happy Father’s Day to all the amazing dads out there. I was blessed with two (my real dad and my stepdad, who I lived with full time as he was married to my mom). My children are equally blessed with their dad; I couldn’t ask for a better father for them.
I saw this idea on Friday and knew it was perfect for the hubs this year.
He needed new socks, and since socks aren’t a very “fun” gift, I decided we should at least present them in a creative way. Before we went shopping, I showed Seahawk and Munchkin the picture of the bouquet so they wouldn’t be “bummed” about offering a practical gift. My plan worked; they were super jazzed to help pick out the socks and then to roll them into roses and arrange them into a vase (well, mason jar) when we got home.
We used a paper grocery bag to cover the gift since it wasn’t really something that lended itself to wrapping very easily. When hubs revealed his gift yesterday morning, his reaction was priceless. He’d never received socks in such a creative way before. He’s even decided to leave them wrapped up as roses except as needed, so we’ll have the “beautiful flowers” around for at least 10 days (I found a great deal on a 10-pack of men’s socks).
I hope your fathers and children’s fathers had a blessed day as well.
–Wendy
This fun riding toy is at our church. We spend a lot of time there, and on this day, Seahawk was pushing Small Fry around the hallways (we were the only ones there – hubby has his office at the church while we’re painting his home office). Small Fry was having so much fun!
As for not having any posts this week, I just couldn’t think of anything, and it didn’t seem worth it to try to come up something mediocre instead of waiting for something good to write about.
Happy weekend!
–Wendy
I walk to the store with the kids nearly every day. It’s not the most efficient use of time (or money) as opposed to buying big and freezing, but I don’t like not leaving the house at all on a day, especially as the weather gets nicer. I also don’t like walking without a destination in mind, so this is the system that works for us.
On the edge of the store property, there are two rocks that look just like those in The Lion King, and every time we walk by, the boys ask if they can climb on them. About every third time, I let them. Last night was one such time.
I hope your weekend is full of God’s wonder.
–Wendy
Nursing Small Fry hasn’t been as easy as it was with his brothers. I didn’t gain any weight when I was pregnant (none!), and my doctor said that when women don’t gain, it can take longer for their milk to come in. That was the case for me. We had to supplement with formula for the first two months, which was hard for me. I felt like I wasn’t providing properly for him. I know that’s ridiculous because formula is a perfectly acceptable form of infant nutrition. But it wasn’t acceptable to me. Feeding him formula felt like giving up on some level.
I write about that today because he and I experienced something similar yesterday. He was sick.
But not really.
He’s 10 1/2 months now, and still nursing several times a day. I love spending that time with him, especially at naptime or at the end of the day when his eyes are droopy and he’s still. Yesterday, he would throw up violently every time he nursed. He was able to keep solids down and was happy as a clam all day. But there was that pesky vomiting that lasted about 20 hours.
I know in my head that it wasn’t my fault; he probably just had a tummy bug. But having him be unable to stomach the milk felt like a throwback to his early weeks when “I couldn’t provide fully” for him.
Fortunately, he was fine this morning and didn’t lose his morning “meal.” Mama feels better that way too.
–Wendy