Jedi Training, part 2

Charlie's turn

Kitchen reorganization in action

Oh No...

Carter has mastered the skill of opening cabinets and emptying them of
their contents. And he's fast.

Jedi Training, part 1

Conversations with Charlie

Charlie is very much my son - he looks just like me and has my same
easy-going personality. Sometimes I wonder if he has any of Casey's
genes. Then we have moments like this and I don't have to wonder any
more...

It's our 3rd day at Disney World. Charlie climbs into bed with us this
morning, cuddles with us and says, "I want to go home so I can play
video games."

Sent from my iPhone

A Decade's Worth of Procrastination

(My college roomies will enjoy this!)

12 years ago, during the same Christmas break when Casey proposed to me, his mother helped me pick out a pattern and fabric for a quilt (she’s a great quilter).  Choosing the right pattern was important because I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time (she got me one for Christmas a few years later) so I needed a pattern that could be done mostly by hand.  So we chose a pattern called “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” which was mostly hand appliqué.  Basically I hand stitched all of the half-circles on each square.  There are 4 half-circles on each square and the quilt is made up of 108 squares. Then the squares were pieced together with a sewing machine.  I’ve blogged before about my skillful procrastination techniques and, boy, was this a mammoth of a project to procrastinate! 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the process, here’s a brief outline –

First, you piece together the top of the quilt.  This is the nice decorated part.

Then, you take the fabric you are using for the back of the quilt, a layer of batting (fluffy stuff for the middle) and the top and sew the three layers together with long, loose stitches.  This is called basting and it holds the layers together during the quilting process.  These stitches get pulled out after it is finished.

Finally, the quilting - these are the tiny stitches that run all over the quilt.  You can hand quilt or machine quilt.  Hand quilting instills an heirloom quality.  Machine quilting is faster and good for quilts that will face repeated washings and rough treatment (good idea for kids’ quilts).  Wanting to maximize my opportunities for procrastination, naturally I chose to hand quilt…

I can’t remember exactly when I finished the top of the quilt and basted it together, but it was either before Coulson was born, or when he was still an infant, so I’m going to guesstimate it around 7 years ago.  Well, it turns out, hand quilting’s not really much my thing.  My barely quilted quilt sat around for years.  About a year ago, my mom was going to Florida to visit her cousins and I knew that one of her cousins was a huge quilter.  So I tossed my project in my mom’s car and begged her to ask her cousin to finish it for me.  Then I forgot about it…

So I was super excited to unwrap this at Christmas!  12 years worth of procrastination and finally outsourced, but my quilt is finished!!!

Dirty Laundry Triage

About two weeks ago, our washing machine broke.  The repairman looked at it briefly and said, “That’s not good.”  We had to order a new, expensive part and of course he would have to take apart the whole machine, so labor would be intensive.  Yay!  Well, it took a whole week for the part to arrive and then the snow came, so we weren’t able to get an appointment for the repair until Thursday morning.  So the laundry has been piling up.  I did take some laundry to my mom’s house once, but mostly was just waiting to get my machine fixed.  Friday we were leaving for vacation, so my plan was to wash laundry all day Thursday after the repair.

Thursday morning two repairmen arrive and start to dismantle the washing machine.  The boys were fascinated by this, naturally.  After a while, they leave the house and go out to the van.  They were out there for a long time, so I looked out the window to see them both sitting in the van with one on the phone.  I tell Casey, “I don’t think this is good…”

Sure enough, when they come back in they say, “It’s not good.”  I won’t bore you with all the details, but I didn’t get my washing machine fixed that morning.  We were faced with the unhappy dilemma deciding to spend a ton of money to get a fairly new machine fixed (It’s less than 3 years old) or toss it and buy a brand new one.  I try to curb unnecessary consumption of goods – If it’s not broke, don’t replace it, and if it can be fixed, fix it – so I opted to fix it, although Casey (and many others we’ve spoken with) thinks the machine will never run the same again.  But if it cleans my clothes, it works for me. 

****But Casey does want me to highlight his dissatisfaction with Whirlpool and their lack of regard for the quality in their product; it should not have broken after less than 3 years! We were able to buy the replacement part for half price, but we’ll still have to pay labor, so we were hoping to get it for free.  (Whirlpool says it’s company policy to only give half off, but the repairmen were the ones who told us to ask to get it free, which makes us think that other manufactures might replace poor quality parts for free)   Bad Whirlpool!

Anyway, as I mentioned before, we were leaving for vacation the next day and by now I have mountains of dirty laundry.  Thank goodness for wonderful friends!  I triaged the laundry – picking the clothes that we would most likely take with us on our trip – and took a couple loads to my friend’s house.  She had to work that day and her mother was there watching the kids.  And her mom is just like my mom, always helping around the house.  Actually as I arrived, she was busy fixing the door to their laundry closet.  So I popped in my first load and told her I was going to run some errands and come back to finish in an hour.  She convinced me to just let her put in the next load and not worry about it.  So when I went to my friend’s house later that night, all of the laundry was clean, dry and neatly folded in my laundry basket.  Awesome!  (My friend was disappointed that her secret weapon had been revealed - now I know how she makes working motherhood look so easy!)

So I got the most important laundry clean and thankfully we will be staying in a condo with laundry facilities.  Although I am not looking forward to all the laundry that awaits me when I get home….

Conversations with Coulson

On Brotherly Love
By revealing in my previous post Charlie's inner fratricidal-redemption fantasies, I have shown you that my family is not perfect.  So let me enjoy this rare moment of beauty from Coulson -

Speaking with a friend of mine shortly after Christmas...
My Friend: What was your favorite Christmas present?
Coulson: Hmmm (thinks about it...)  Well, I didn't get it for Christmas, but it's my favorite.
My Friend: Oh yeah, what is it?
Coulson: Points to his baby brother, Carter

Ahhh, so sweet!

On Anachronistic Thinking
Coulson has been recovering lately from severely chapped lips.  Very severely chapped lips.  They are getting better, but now he has some tiny red dots on his skin around his mouth, maybe a reaction from the stuff we've been putting on his lips to help him heal. 

Tonight he says to me -
"Part of my lip is feeling queer"
And then later he says to me -
"Mom, I think I have a new disease that I've never had before. I think I have the measles."

At first, I'm taken aback by this shocking failure of our public health system, but then I relax as I realize that my son has simply time-warped back into the 1950s when he might indeed feel "queer" and be concerned about measles.  You see, for Christmas, Coulson got the first 12 books of Bobbsey Twins, a really old book series about a family and their adventures, kinda like Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys for a younger reader. He's been reading these books almost non-stop - Christmas was just over 2 weeks ago and he's already on book 11.  I can't imagine what diseases he'll think he has when he gets into the Harry Potter Series...