The new year will be rung in here on the heels of my now half-gone cracked molar I got yesterday and Gilbert’s fever and green nose.

Bah!

Happy New Year, all the same.

Well, see me now actually.

If you can’t see the pictures in the post below (Number One Son At Play), please comment here - thanks!

New things learned this week: Sharpie wipes off tile and glass with enough elbow grease, and Bede can open the bathroom door and scale the sink in less time it takes me to change Gilbert’s diaper.

I dunno, you think he likes the train set? Thomas and His Friends (Now Including Bede), indeed.

You may recall my previous post lamenting the utter lack of organization of toys in our house. Well, today Sean went to Target and bought for us four 66 qt. storage bins. We already had one so that brings our total to five. Here’s what they’ll be used for, each category in its own bin:

Dolls
Stuffed animals
Silks/blankets/dress-up
Books
Miscellaneous (balls, pounding block, spinny top thing, large dump truck, etc)

Tomorrow or this weekend, Sean will be affixing said bins to the wall under the windows in the Jungle Room so as to eliminate the dump and run tendencies of my children.

Next up: sweating the Small Stuff. We need about a half-dozen of the 15 qt. containers to hold:

blocks
cars and trains
people figures
horses
dinos
non-equine, non-saurian animals

Sorry this entry is dull with no pictures. Knitting deserves pictures.

I’m knitting a raglan sweater for Abby and I’m at the shoulder decreases. I had previously been wondering about knitting the sleeves and the body in two colors all the way up to the neck, like a raglan baseball shirt, but after much consideration I’m just knitting it in the round with stripes. It’s going to look pretty good, I think!

To compensate for no pictures, here’s the pattern. If you click through you’ll see that it’s not really a pattern, but instead a tutorial on how to measure your sweater recipient’s (that would be the sweatee, I suppose) chest circumference and from there, by using the Power of Arithmetic, make the sweater custom-fit from any yarn with any needles! Tada!

Congratulations Jennifer, Zach, and Zane!

One of my friends is eyeing what she needs to get and do for her upcoming homebirth and it got me to thinking too, so now I’m looking over stuff I need for the birth. It’s in about 8 weeks (!!!) so I’ll be ordering in the next week or two.

This is my fourth homebirth - I have a very good idea of what I will need and use and what I won’t, so I don’t just get a generic kit. I’ll be ordering the following very lean and mean set of birth supplies:

12 of Underpad, Large (23×36)
2 of Peri-Bottle
2 of Cord Clamp plastic sterile
1 of Scissors (5.5″ operating)

The scissors are to cut the cord - all the ones I own are plastic handled and I don’t trust them not to melt if boiled. Besides, who doesn’t need another pair of scissors, anyway? Some things I don’t need are the birth certificate thingy, the footprinter, the iodine scrub, the fancy herbal postpartum bath soak, three million latex gloves or cord care balms/powders.

I’m thinking of getting a couple of those big plastic slide-on mattress bags too, they are handy. Make bed with new sheets, slide bag over, make bed with birth sheets. Then after the birth it’s hey presto, nice clean bed. But they are so crinkly and LOUD to birth on. Bleah. I think I’ve used them maybe once (twice? truly, it is a blur.)

From local sources I need a few more towels because somehow every clean towel in the house gets used during labor, birth or immediately after, and a few more flannel receiving blankets.

I think that’s it for the actual birth. Yay! Birth!

h/t: scarletmama

Most of them look like this:

(Legs, paper, arms. Luckily, no one lost any limbs.)

One of them looks like this:

(She’s upset about a Hide and Seek game between kinfolk chilluns. Sean has more to say about his Sharpies, though.)

But then there are a few like these:

Choo choo! Trains!

Tweet. Tweet. Tweet.

Bede attempts to remove T.J.’s hat.

(Aww! Shhh!)

…in about a year, okay?

[Yawn!]

(Here’s hoping your Christmas was as joyfully tiring as ours.)