Redemption for the Second Born: A Room of Her Own

In the months leading up our firstborn's arrival, I pored over nursery bedding, studied paint swatches, researched cribs, and literally obsessed over getting her room just perfect.

In contrast, four months AFTER our secondborn arrived, we shoved our clothes into one side of our bedroom closet, crammed a pack 'n play into the other side, and called it good.

(first she slept in the bouncy chair)

(then in the pack n play)

Oh, to be a secondborn.

Then we moved into a new house!  To assuage the guilt of banishing Tess to sleep in a closet for the first year of her life, I wanted to create a really awesome room for her in the new place.  Without spending much money.  And with limited snatches of time.  The previous occupant was a 14-year-old boy, so it is taking some work to transform the room from a teenaged-boy-cave to baby girl sanctuary, a process that very well might take months.  Or years.

But for now, here is project #1, the refinishing of an old dresser.

I picked up this cute little dresser at our neighborhood yard sale, where it was offered for $15.  After some discussion, I ended up paying . . . $20.  Seriously, I might be a cheapskate, but I am the world's worst barterer.

Anyhow, the little dresser was so cute, but someone had decided to paint it eggplant and forest green.  Seriously?  I'm not sure which decade this color combo was hot.  So we read this awesome tutorial on painting old furniture and went crazy.

First came the sanding.  This took forever with our little sander and my hands are vibrating just remembering it.

Then with a half-empty bottle of spray primer, some old ceiling paint from a prior plumbing disaster, and some new drawer pulls from Home Depot, we transformed it into this:

Now it matches her crib, and one day we'll re-do the little dresser that we use as a changing table to match as well.  Every time I walk into her room and see this dresser, my heart does a little happy dance knowing that soon my little girl will have a room as sweet as she is.  Plus it sure beats sneaking into the closet to get clothes without waking her up every morning.

Crocheted Flower Hat 2: the baby sister version

I wrote this post several months ago, but I forgot to post it with all of the craziness of buying and selling a house plus travel and work.  Then all of a sudden it was summer and fuzzy winter hats and mittens were replaced by sunhats and sunscreen!  Alas, it was hard to let go, but we are full-on into cold weather again.  Once I made it through the denial stage, I realized that I truly do love fall, with its autumn leaves, hot drinks, hearty soups, and of course, warm fuzzy clothes:




At 9 months of age, baby Tess (above) almost had as much hair as Anna had at birth (below).  Almost.



But it's not quite enough to keep that little noggin warm in these cold, breezy days.  So with the leftover yarn from Anna's hat, I whipped together a little matching beanie for Tess.  I used a spiral pattern rather than crocheting in rounds and joining with a slip stitch, since I wanted to avoid the subtle "seam" that comes with crocheting in rounds.  I modified this pattern to make a hat that had some room for Tess to grow.  The spiral pattern gets a little funky where I start and end the border, but a well-placed flower motif hides that bit.



I couldn't get a good shot of the hat before Tess would pull it off, so I borrowed Anna's bear for a close-up.  Hold still, Baby Grandma Bear:

Happy Halloween!

This picture pretty much says it all.  Tess feels somewhat disgruntled at being made to wear a bumblebee costume for no apparent reason.  Candy has not yet entered her sphere of consciousness.  Anna, on the other hand, is overjoyed at her first trick or treating experience AND is happy to have her costume on correctly after her self-dressing mishap at preschool yesterday.

Life has been busy lately so we haven't been doing as much making/crafting/creating as we'd like, but we had a little fun making spooky foods for our old PEPS group's Halloween Party last weekend.

mushroom skulls

carrot fingers

olive eyeballs

Happy Halloween!

The Stool Stool

There was a time when it would've seemed strange to me to see a toddler scoot across the floor, poop underneath the kitchen table, and ask for a cookie.

That time has long passed.

In fact, this scene unfolds pretty much every night around 5:30pm.  Just as we get that first bite of steaming food into our mouths, the resounding cry bursts forth from the littlest member of the clan demanding her potty chair: "Potty!  Poo-poo!  Potty!  Poo-poo!"

From all this dinner-time defecation sprung the idea for our next baby gear invention: the high-chair commode.  Basically an elevated potty chair with straps and a tray.  Or a high chair with a removable trap-door.  You get the idea.  We would call it "The Stool Stool."  Why not take advantage of the gastrocolic reflex to do a little double duty feeding and toileting combo?  Another weapon in the fight against the poop-ocalypse.  We have yet to work out the issue of offensive odors during mealtime (Jeff proposed a fan with charcoal filter), but perhaps in The Stool Stool version 2.0.

The Caboodle

Upon first inspection to the unsuspecting male, this might seem to be an ordinary, albeit pink, little box.  But any female born circa 1980 would beg to differ.  When I found my old Caboodle tucked away in a bathroom at my parents' house, I was instantly transported to the time of  scrunchies, crimping irons, and Aquanet hairspray.  Oh to be a girl in the 80s!  Home perm?  Oh yes.  Gravity-defying bangs?  You betcha.

I had no immediate use for my Caboodle, yet I couldn't bear the thought of throwing it out.  By happenstance, around the same time, Jeff let drop that he was looking for a storage bin for his soldering supplies.  But could he really bear to store his manly tools in a box that once held a collection of Wet n Wild nail polish?



Good thing he is secure in his manhood.  And I love him for it.

I'm Still Here, El Guapo

We're back after a four month blogging hiatus, and what a whirlwind these past four months have been.  We started casually talking about moving, with hopes of finding a new house in the next couple years before Anna starts school.  We thought, why not have a look at a few houses?  Who knew that in our first DAY of visiting houses that we would find the one?.  Apparently, we're the kind of people who take three years to buy a couch, but one day to buy a house.

our awesome realtor, wheeling and dealing to make this house ours

The harder part was/is selling our old house.   First we had to prepare it for staging.  This meant removing 75% of the furniture from the house, though really that meant removing 100% of useful furniture and leaving only decorative display tables and wicker baskets.  Then our realtor hired a professional stager.  The stager continued on the theme of rendering the house unlivable by replacing kitchen appliances with fake orchids and placing breakable knicknacks in low places.  For an entire month, we had to pull the coffeemaker out of the oven in the morning and go to the garage to toast bread.

this is how it looks all the time, really

This was all while going about daily life with a toddler, who has an affinity for scattering toys to the farthest corners of the house, and a baby, who insists on feeding herself and does so with exuberance.  Every morning, the beautifully staged house would last about 10 minutes before being returned to its natural state.  Whenever a realtor would call wanting to show the house, I would fly into a cleaning frenzy while the kids attempted to undo my efforts.  Did I mention that they were also on totally opposite napping schedules, meaning that any time of day that someone wanted to see the house, one of the kids would have to be rudely awoken from a nap?  If I had known how difficult this whole process would be, I would've said, "Forget it, dream house.  You're pretty great, but this might be the death of me."

In the end, we survived the house showings (though it's still on the market), survived a nail-biting multiple offer scenario on the new house (thank you, Jesus!), survived a move (just barely),  and here we are.  After the move, Anna told us, "I want to stay here in the new house forever."  We couldn't agree more.

the new house's treehouse

The new house is rife with possibilities and just crying out for projects, so we hope to get some of them up on the blog soon.  First up is putting Tess' room together.  After living in our closet for the first year of her life, she deserves some guilt-ridden overcompensation in the form of a really cute room.

Cloth Diapers and the Poop-ocalypse

Like many Seattle-ites and other parents out there, we jumped on the cloth diaper bandwagon when our firstborn made her entrance into the world.  For all the benefits (saving money, sending less junk to landfills, getting to outfit your baby in cute diaper covers, blah blah blah), there’s no getting around one glaring downside.   You will be washing out a lot of poop.  A few years back, our then-single and childless friend Jeremy expressed shock and disgust that we washed cloth diapers in the same laundry machine that we use on our regular clothes.  Is that disgusting?  Maybe to non-parents.  But Jeremy's day is coming soon, for he and his wife Chrissie are expecting a little bundle of joy, AND they're planning on using cloth.  Yippee!  So this post is dedicated to Jeremy and all parents who are considering cloth but aren't so excited about the prospect of handling poop.

In the pre-kid era, Jeff and I considered ourselves somewhat immune to the yuckiness of poop.  After all, Jeff grew up on a mini-farm and once almost drowned in a lagoon of cow manure.  And while I wasn’t literally up to my neck in poop, I have done my fair share of gastroenterology rotations in med school and residency.  Not to mention working as a nanny before that.  But nothing could prepare us for the sheer magnitude and variance of the poop that parenthood would bring.

I remember the early days of Anna’s life, when she would leave tiny streaks of sticky newborn poo on her diapers, and we would naively congratulate ourselves on our fortitude for not being grossed out by diapers like so many parents we knew.  Then in the coming weeks, she impressed us with her, well, productivity.  And explosivity.  Jeff developed a rating scale to quickly communicate the magnitude of her output, ranging from a 1 (barely necessitating a diaper change) to a 10 (full soilage of diaper, outfit, surrounding environment, and caretaker, thus necessitating a load of laundry, a shower, and a glass of wine).  This is also known as the poop-ocalypse.  Yet we still patted ourselves on the back for handling her mustardy breastmilk poo-poo with hardly a second thought.  But, oh, did we have another thing coming.  Enter solid foods and a new realm of utterly foul diapers.  Suddenly our pro-cloth diaper stance began to waver. If we were going to make it to the potty training stage with cloth diapers, we were going to have to add some anti-poop weapons to our arsenal.  Here were our weapons of choice:

Weapon #1: The disposable diaper liner.  These little papers resemble a dryer sheet that goes inside the cloth diaper.  If the baby leaves a little present, the liner can easily be dumped into the toilet and flushed down.  While great in theory, these failed the practicality test, since they cost up to 5-10 cents a piece (seriously? for a sheet of beefed up toilet paper?).  We didn't use these for long.



Weapon #2: The diaper sprayer.  We hit a freecycle jackpot on this one!  This hooks up to the toilet and sprays poop off the diaper into the toilet bowl so you don’t have to do the whole “dunk and swirl” business.  Caution advised, my friend, spray downward.  Downward!

Weapon #3: The potty chair.  At 8 months of age, Anna decided to go poop every time she sat in her high chair for dinner (oh she’s going to love this story when she’s a teenager).  Seriously, every single day.   Invariably, our hot dinner would grow tepid as one of us left to deal with a poopy diaper.  After a few weeks of this, we decided that enough was enough and in frustration, plunked her on the potty chair to let her do her business.  Who knew she would love it so much that she would then refuse to poop in diapers from then on?  We started the same thing with Tess around 7 months, when she could sit on the potty without falling off.  Boy does she love using that potty chair!  Unfortunately, it hasn't solved the problem of cold dinners (tonight BOTH of the girls interrupted dinner to use the toilet), but it sure has cut down on dirty diapers.

Parents: how do YOU handle cloth diapers and the poop-ocalypse?