Just file me under “THAT sappy mom”

Posted by on November 30, 2009 4 Comments

I audibly gasped when I opened his miniature back pack upon returning home from a day at Mother’s Day Out, “Awww! Look at how cute that is!” A smile spread across my face from ear to ear. I held it up and turned it around, took in all it’s crafty glory. The poem on the back read,

“This isn’t just a turkey,
As anyone can see.
This very special turkey
was made by hand by me!
Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Kendall”

The sap was oozing out of me like a maple tree. I bounded into the office and shoved the handprint turkey in Scott’s face. “Look at THIS! Isn’t it the cutest thing ever?! Can you believe Kendall’s coming home with little crafts already?!”

“Oh…hmmm.. yeah, that’s nice…. Cool,” he replied in a tone that meant he was merely appeasing me and only barely trying to match my level of excitement by raising his eyebrows for extra emphasis.

I took it back and headed to a wall with a random nail head sticking out of it, a leftover from the previous year’s Christmas decorations. Kendall tugged at my pants, “Goggle, goggle!” he said, pointing to the craft.

“Yes! That’s a turkey, and it’s says gobble, gobble,” I said as I started to hand him the handprint turkey for him to admire his crafty work. He snatched it from my hands and began ripping the yarn from the top.

“*GASP* Oh NO! Let me see that… no… you gave the turkey an owie… let me have it,” I huffed as I pried it from his chubby white knuckles.  I re-tied the yarn and carefully hung it on the nail.

It. was. perfect. You’d have thought I just put a new Pottery Barn sconce on the wall the way I was admiring it.

I showed it off to everyone who stopped by. “Did you see what Kendall made?!” I’d exclaim. I even shared it on my Facebook wall. Judging by everyone’s response, or lack thereof, it became pretty obvious that this is one of those things that only a mom would be so over the moon in love with.

And it’s not that he really “made” it. I’m under no illusion that he had anything to do with this other than allowing them to paint his chubby hand and smoosh it to a paper plate. That, right there, is the reason I pay other people to watch my son once a week. They will do things like craft and paint with him, things that I wouldn’t even dream of doing because it’s such a friggin mess. I’m still questioning how they got him to be still long enough to paint and smoosh his hand, and I haven’t ruled out that they may have done it during naptime.

We put Christmas decorations up on Friday and Saturday, and that random nail head needed to be cleared to hold the card box. I took the handprint turkey down and carefully sat it on the bar. It stayed there until today when I finally had the heart to put it up. I placed it in a box that holds several other small mementos of Kendall’s existence up to this point. Before putting it away, I made sure to write the date, Kendall’s age, and exactly where he made it on the back (could just imagine years from now giving myself credit for being such an amazing, crafty mom, forgetting that this was made at “school” while I was home watching a reality show or trolling TMZ.com).

It is one of my most treasured gifts ever. I tear up just thinking about pulling it out year after year and hanging it on the wall as Thanksgiving approaches. (This is really playing out like an awful Hallmark commercial, I know.) I guess it’s just such a mommy right of passage to get that first little handprint turkey. It’s like a fanciful little parenthood talisman.  Now I feel such incredible pressure to keep it safe and in one piece. We’ve been meaning to get a fireproof safe for a long time for things like, I don’t know, birth certificates and junk. Maybe this will be the extra motivation we need to finally purchase one.

Kendall is almost 19 months old, like just days shy, and that means he’s closer to his 2nd birthday than his 1st. I’m just amazed.

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Filed Under: Headed to Toddlerhood |Tagged With: , , , |4 Comments

Thankful

Posted by on November 27, 2009 4 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you and yours had a day full of family, friends, and food.

This is me demonstrating how thankful I am for devices that keep my screaming child contained while I attempt to run a 5k in the cold with over 30,000 other people.

Thankful for daddy transportation. It’s efficient and much better views than the stroller.

Thankful for interest in utensils, love for my cranberry sauce and for a mouth full of teeth and permission to eat any and all solids.

Just… thankful.

Kendall is nearly 19 months, and will someone just tell me how the hell that happened?

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Filed Under: Headed to Toddlerhood |Tagged With: , , |4 Comments

Nature or nurture?

Posted by on November 23, 2009 9 Comments

Kendall’s obsessed with football, and by obsessed I mean he wants to take one of his two footballs everywhere (he has two because I forgot his only one at home when we travelled to San Antonio, and I begged my mom to get him another before we got there so he would stop screaming “BALL!!” at me with those sad, accusing eyes). He screams “BALL!” anytime he sees a glimpse of it on TV, be it an actual game or a highlight, and when he hears the crowds and the announcers from another room he runs to the TV, hands in the air, screaming “BALL!”

In fact, any time he sees a flat screen TV, on or off, he screams “BALL!” And that’s not because we have a super fancy flat screen HDTV at home where he watches hours of ESPN Classic games. Our TV is of the cube-like ancestry, but every time we take him out to eat we always end up at some klassy place with flat screen TVs broadcasting football. So you can see why he would assume that the TV at our playgroup friend’s house would be a special “BALL!” TV, and he would incessantly break free from the blocks and toys and children to run to the flat screen, demanding to watch some “BALL!”

A couple nights ago we treated ourselves to some burgers at one of the aforementioned “klassy” restaurants. ESPN was playing on the TV in front of us, and each time they cut to a highlight reel Kendall screamed out “BALL!” We were doing our best to shush him (though our best was not much considering we were the only people seated to eat) when the waitress walked by and laughed, “Wow! He’s starting early! That man (she eyes Scott) must really be brainwashing you young!”

“Oh my God,” Scott said when we left, “do people think that of me? I bet they do. I bet they think I’m one of those dads… those TEXAS dads that forces football on my son.”

It’s funny because it’s so far from the truth. Scott likes his football, but I’m by no means a “football widow”. He can take it or leave it most weeks, and certainly doesn’t schedule his weekends around any games. (Now, keep in mind that his teams, the St. Louis Rams and the Missouri Tigers, both SUCK, so it’s easy for him to not care.) He enjoys sitting with Kendall every now and then and checking out a game, but he hasn’t pushed football on him at all. It was just something that one day, a few months back, Kendall became immediately fixated on and fascinated by.

If anything, we’ve tried to “push” things on him like books and science (hello solar system mural on the bedroom wall and nightly recital of the planets). He’s taken to them both, proving that eventually babies stop eating the board books in favor of turning the pages, and a nightly reminder that our generation and his will forever be separated by whether or not you believe Pluto is a planet.

I love to sit back and watch him sometimes, imagine that I’m looking into my mommy crystal ball and think about what he will be in twenty five years, what will be his passion, what will drive him.  Scott and I like to joke that maybe he’ll be a physicist/quarter back. Scott swears he could use the scientific knowledge to a nearly unfair advantage while playing the game.

The whole football obsession may very well be a flash in the pan and replaced in months by a love for all things trains, cars, art, whatever. I get that. It’s still intriguing, though, to think about how much of the person he will become is already inside of him. Also a little scary to wonder how much will depend on our successes and, yes, even mistakes as parents.

From my parent’s accounts, I’ve been talking and telling stories to an audience since I was old enough to make noise. My mom has a picture of me, pulled up and holding onto a small chair at about 10 months old, “speaking” to what was probably an audience of stuffed animals. My dad tells me that when I was about 4 or 5 I walked out to the end of a pier with him and began loudly yelling stories to all the fish in the sea.

I’m sure my outgoing nature and desire to talk to and in front of anyone who would listen came as a bit of a surprise to my young, wallflower parents, but I’m lucky that they never tried to silence me and that passion. They encouraged me, sat through many a play and poety recital, travelled out to countless football and basketball games to watch me cheer, and saw me off to pursue a degree in broadcast journalism at a school halfway across the country.

So I sit back and I nurture Kendall. I support him to the point that I’m not enabling anything destructive (like running with the football headfirst into the wall.. I sort of discourage that), and I wait, watch… and I guess I let nature do what it has plans to do. Years from now, maybe I’ll be cheering him on as he intercepts for a touchdown…. or maybe I’ll be reading his first published study… or maybe both. The thought of the unknown is both exciting and a little scary.

What about you? Do you think you are a product of nature, nurture or both? Are you anything like your parents imagined you’d be? What about your child?

Kendall is 18 and a half months old and is 3.5 years away from the age limit for Pop Warner football

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Filed Under: Headed to Toddlerhood |Tagged With: , , |9 Comments

If I had a little girl, she’d wear pillowcase dresses.

Posted by on November 20, 2009 32 Comments

You know what’s funny? When I was pregnant it seemed like EVERYONE was having a boy, but after I had Kendall it seemed like the world is full of little girls. Case in point is our local playgroup. Out of seven regular members, only 2 of us have boys. And even as we’ve started to add new members to the mix, it seems like they ALL have girls.

So as birthday season approached this year (there was a stretch of 4 months where I swear we had at least 2 birthdays to attend each month), I had to get a little creative about what to give for birthday gifts, and after seeing so many pictures of adorable little girls wearing stylish pillowcase dresses, I set my mind on figuring out how to make them. They sell on sites like Etsy for $25+, but you can make one with less than a yard of fabric and a couple yards of grosgrain ribbon.

Now, pillowcase dress tutorials are not hard to find online. There are hundreds, or… I don’t know… maybe thousands? I looked high and low for the easiest one I could find. I ended up mainly following one from AndersonsPlace.net.  A few months ago a friend asked for a link to the tutorial, and when I went to send it to her I noticed the link was dead. It hasn’t come back up since, and AndersonsPlace appears to be blank.  Luckily, I printed out the tutorial long ago and it’s still readable.

So I’m going to just type out the tutorial below based pretty closely on what I printed off from AndersonsPlace.net If anyone from this website reads this, please contact me! I’m not trying to rip you off, and would LOVE to give credit. It was such an easy, helpful tutorial that I think it needs to be accessible again. The photos that I’m using are mine.

I always start with a yard of fabric and have never actually used a real pillowcase for one, but you can do it either way.

If you are using a pillowcase, cut it off, leaving the hemmed end, based on these measurements:

6 months -14 1/4″
12 months – 16 1/4″
18 months – 17 1/4″
2T 18 1/4″
3T 19 1/4″
4T 20 1/4″

If you are staring with a yard of fabric, cut it to the length specified above, and a width of 28″ for 6 months, up to 33″ for 4T (adding one inch in width for each size up). This, however, can really be based on your own judgement, depending on how wide you want/need the dress to be on the girl.

While you are cutting fabric, go ahead and cut one piece 1 1/2″ wide and 30″ long and set aside for later.

Fold up half an inch along the bottom of the large piece of fabric (will be the bottom of the dress), press with iron, and fold again. Stitch along the top fold to hem.

Fold the fabric vertically (lengthwise), right sides together, pin and stitch 1/2 inch from un-joined edge to create a tube of fabric.

Use pinking shears to trim excess fabric from the seam.

Lay the tube, seam side up, with the seam in the middle and press to one side with an iron.

Fold the tube in half vertically to cut the armholes. From the top (un-hemmed) edge, measure 1.5″ in and 3″down for sizes up to 2T. For 3 and 4T measure 2″ in and 4″ down.

Using your marked measurements, cut a J shaped armhole through all 4 layers of fabric. Don’t stress about perfection.

Okay, this next step, for me, is the most difficult, but once you figure it out, it gets much easier. (That’s why I included a ton of pictures.)

Unfold the dress (guess we can stop calling it a tube now) and line the 1.5″ x 30″ piece along one armhole, right side of the strip to wrong side of the dress (dress is still inside out at this point). Fold down the top of the strip about 3/8″ and meet the top of the fold with the top of the dress. Stitch the strip all the way around the armhole. I tried pinning this, but it’s really much easier if you just freehand it. Maybe pin the top to help you get started.

When you get close to the end of the armhole, cut off the extra fabric, leaving enough to fold down 3/8″. You will use the remaining fabric on the other armhole.

Fold down the 3/8″ and finish off the armhole.

Repeat on the other side, then turn the dress right side out.

Next fold the strip in half so the raw edge is touching the raw edge of the armhole.

Then fold again over to the other side of the armhole, creating a binding. Pin as you go along the entire armhole (I use about 4 pins and just keep most of it in place with my fingers while sewing).

Stitch along the binding and then do the same for the other side.



Turn the dress inside out again.

Fold the top of the front and back 1/4″ and then again 5/8″ and press with an iron to form a casing with no raw edges. Stitch along the bottom fold, similar to what you did for the bottom hem.

Thread 1 yard of ribbon (or less for the smaller sizes) through each casing. I like to pin a safety pin to one side and use that to guide it through the casing, then trim the ends of the ribbon when I’m done.

Gather the ribbon and tie bows on the shoulders and you’re done! You can also secure the ribbon by stitching it in the middle to the inside of the casing (wrong side of the dress) by hand.

Now, even though these dresses don’t make appropriate winter wear by themselves, they do look adorable over long sleeve shirts and jeans or leggings! So you can make and give these all year, even for the holidays :)

Hope this was clear! Please let me know if you have any questions.

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Filed Under: Crafty! |Tagged With: , , , , , |32 Comments
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