Mom is awesome!

Having an extra set of adult hands around is so great! We took the kids to library time today and they enjoyed it so much. It was nice to do something from our old routine, since we have been so loosy-goosy right now and that has been hard on the kids. Then we went to 2 stores and for lunch. I could never have done all that on my own. Then mom scrubbed my cupboards! I've done that before (they are white- or are supposed to be) but not in a while and they needed it. Last week she did about 10 loads of laundry- sheets, comforters and even pillows were cleaned. So wonderful.

Have you heard of women having weird pregnancy dreams? I had a dream that I had 4 babies in me to deliver and our daughter was last. I had to deliver my friend's son Isaiah (who is 2 1/2 years old) and a set of twins, then our daughter who is about to make her appearance. The dream was so real that when I had a contraction this morning, my first thought was "oh, no- all those babies to give birth to". Then I realized that I only had this one daughter and was so thankful!

While others are anxious for me to have our third, I've been enjoying getting some things done little by little. I have some pages to her baby book done and hope to be able to work on painting her clock some more before her arrival.

weird weather

Sat. it was hot here and Brian worked all day on the fort swing set. It is nearly done and I'll post pictures of the process at some point. In the meantime, I still have all these pictures from when dad was here, not to mention a bunch of totally awesome videos that I haven't been able to get to upload all week. I'm not sure why it's not working.

Monday morning, we woke up to the first rain we've had in 3 months. It was actually icy, rain. I woke up in the middle of the night and found little ice balls on the ground outside as it was raining. Brian was able to go with me to my doctor's appointment while mom kept the kids. I am dilated to a 2 now and so we wait. I'm sure that if I go a week past my due date on the 15th, my doctor will freak and have me induced, but she still has 10 days to make her due date.

Here is our family picture of 2008- which will soon need to be updated as we add another person to our mix! We are sitting on the bench where Brian proposed to me a little over 10 years ago.


We got the baby stuff out of storage and put together this weekend. Mom and the kids sterilized it all. My friend Tighe threw me a fabulous diaper shower Sunday. It was so great to have friends come and share stories, talk about and pray for the baby and her arrival. I can't believe how fast time is going by and that we will soon be on another grand baby adventure. We look forward to seeing her and getting to know who she is.

We are all enjoying the time we have with mom and she is spoiling us, much to our delight. She made us curried chicken this weekend, has been cleaning, singing to the kids and laughing with them. She just baked up some banana bread and muffins from a recipe out of deceptively delicious cookbook. Can you guess the secret ingredient? It's a vegetable. I'll tell you in the comments.

Singer Simple

Hearing that I had hand sewn a couple of rice bags as Christmas gifts, my mom asked if I would be interested in having a sewing machine. I told her that I was interested in doing some small simple things, and had gotten a hand held machine that was so pitiful I had to return it. Not too long later, mom and dad presented me with a post-Christmas gift of the Singer Simple.

It is a good machine with an even better marketing campaign designed to lure inexperienced sewers. The name in and of itself suggests that sewing is simple and maybe that I'll even sing through projects with pure delight. The DVD shows designer outfits, including trendy jeans and exquisite crafts, all the while explaining mightily complex abilities to soothing, yet upbeat music which cons the gullible sewer into thinking this is indeed simple.

I can say they are complex abilities because I have now completed 3 projects and 1 lesson none of which were enhanced with soothing, upbeat music or complete ease. I should have taken a hint when it took 3 of us adults with some 60 years and one semester of experience to figure out how to thread the machine and bobbin. Once this monumental task is complete, the beginner starts to get cocky thinking she can sew.

My first project, I have named "laughter". I had a t-shirt in the closet for the last year whose hem had fallen out. It's been there for 2 reasons. The first is that I am a daughter of parents whose parents survived the depression. This means that I am not allowed to throw away anything. And yet I'm of the generation that some would call lazy or that we would call economically savvy. When mom heard about the shirt, she said she would have hemmed it long ago by hand. This is where we differ. I know that hemming it by hand would have taken me a couple of hours, that time is money and that a brand new t-shirt from the store could cost me $10, thus I wouldn't even be making minimum wage if I had 2 hours to spare and if I wanted to spend those 2 hours hemming an old t-shirt.

So I take out the t-shirt thinking I can sew a simple hem. Mom looked at me warily saying it was a knit fabric- like that should clue me in! I was thinking it's a t-shirt- how hard can this be? 40 some years of experience shakes her head at her naive daughter. I start sewing and the material is not moving through the machine well, plus it's making weird noises. Mom says something is not right and proceeds to read through the manual. Being of the now generation, I know the clock is ticking and know it's only an old t-shirt, plus I'm not a perfectionist, so I just keep on sewing and drag the hem the entire way through the missing section. Mom comes to see the finished product and this is how the moniker "laughter" is appropriated. My hem is now a ruffle 3/4 of the way around the shirt. Undaunted, I hem the rest of the 1/4 hem which was intact and make a completed ruffle. Now I'm laughing too. This is not how the t-shirt was originally, but I have now made a fortune. You see I've been to the Houston galleria, where they sell $300 jeans that they have gone to great effort to make look worn in, torn up, antiquish, but trendy and new. Now I have a t-shirt that really is an antique, but newly done over. I'm not sure how trendy it looks, but I tell mom over her laughter that this will be the latest style and that everyone will want one.

Project #2 is another redone shirt that becomes the cover for my machine. Yes, technology fools us by trying to pretend it gives us greater ease in life while causing more work all on it's own. I named this project "ah-ha, oh-oh, hooray". The ah-ha came when I discovered why project "laughter" did not feed through the machine- the feeder feet were not engaged. I start sewing project #2 and complete 3 sections with no problems, getting all cocky, singing inside, thinking this really is simple. That is when the machine launched it's protest saying that I was just a monkey with a peddle and that it's under belly contained the real brains and work of the operation. I started to stitch and it went on strike. The DVD always showed one thread on top and one on bottom, but now 40 friends joined the under guy to mock me. I cut them loose and tried again, and again, and again, then called my mom who said the tension must be wrong. Now I saw my error. I really had no clue what I was doing. There were 4 dials, all of which are tension somethings, none telling me to what they were or which one was not properly adjusted or how much to adjust it. I quickly learned that every fabric, thread and project has it's favorite tensions that they hold in secret to the inexperienced sewer. I'm not sure what all I adjusted, but the underbelly got tired of holding up the project, most likely anticipating it's delight in the next step of my humiliation. I was about to stitch two long straight seams. This should be easy, simple, singing time I thought. Instead, I once again became the 12 year old behind a car who realized on our acreage that a machine with a motor is not as easy to steer or control as it had seemed all my life. The sewing machine is no different. The gas pedal is an art to be mastered in and of itself and there is no steering wheel, but steering is very much necessary. I weaved all over the desired place, but stayed on the road and determined my project a monumental success. (see green cover in picture)

I have actually been slowly gaining skill- I think. Project #3 is called "unmatched beauty". I was hemming the sleeves of an old cardigan sweater. It was a man's sweater at one time, but now it has feminine flair with a ruffled look (that I actually tried to do- on purpose- sort of). Only the sleeves do not look the same. One has lots of ruffle and the other a slight wave. It is indeed more beautiful and no longer falling apart, but please admire each sleeve one at a time and not side-by-side.

No matter. I now have several functional pieces that were once only taking up closet space, a machine for all my "simple" projects and the memories of laughter, ah-ha, hoorays and beauty that I'm sure will continue for years to come.

Thanks mom and dad for all my future adventures in sewing!

Bon voyage grandpa Ian!

Grandpa Ian has to go back to Canada today. The kids had so much fun with him. Ivan said that he is so not excited that grandpa has to go and that this is a bad day. Of course they don't mind it so much right now since they are getting pushes on the swing as I type.


The kids liked to play board games with grandpa and build the fort with him and get pushed on the swings. At one point, mom and I even left the kids and grandpa in the car while we went in the store to get a few groceries. I was trying to hurry as I imagined anyone with 2 toddlers in a car for an extended period of time. They did have a huge bowl of pasta salad from a party we were just at, that they nearly demolished by the time we got back with a full cart. Apparently they found things to do as seen in these pics. When we arrived back to the car, Dominique was crawling in the back window and Ivan was in the front seat "driving". Grandpa didn't even seem distraught! He must have done this kid thing before!

We will miss playing Settlers of Catan and it feels like we hardly got to visit at all, but I guess we'll have to go back to settling for interaction through the net. I'm sure I'll get stronger arms pushing the kids on the swings or maybe I'll be able to teach them to pump!

Happy New Year!

I can hardly believe dad is already getting ready to leave. He just got here didn't he? It was too short, but he left his mark. Dominique wanted us to rearrange the table tonight so that she could sit beside grandpa. Both kids are playing a new game they got with him as we speak and they have been wearing out his arm as he pushes them everyday on their new swing set. Yes, pictures will be coming. The kids have been "helping" on it. So far it has a partially finished fort, a sandbox area, rock wall and two swings. Yet to come is the tire swing, the rest of the fort walls and slide, maybe a rope to climb too. It is looking really good and I hope will entertain the older two while mommy is a little occupied with our new baby coming soon.

Our baby is now officially full term. I am still dilated to a 1, but 60-70% effaced, so we are on our way. I still need to do many a project, but I started her clock today, so that felt good. An e-mail told me I should have my bags packed, so I guess I should have Brian go to the shed and drag out my overnight bag, the parts to make the crib a crib again, the baby bath and bassinet, the car seat... Oh we'll get there right? Funny how we are so laid back with #3. With Ivan we had all this done a month in advance and now we're not all that concerned. We live five minutes away from the hospital, so if I don't have my "stuff" I can send someone to get it and besides the hospital supplies fashionable lingerie and so forth, they also offer you a car seat, if we really needed one and it only takes 2 minutes to put up the playpen/bassinet, we've done it a hundred times.

Did you ever see the Cosby Show episode where the doctor (Bill Cosby) had 3 babies to deliver at the same time? There was newbie parents (with fainting dad), Spanish couple who didn't understand English and the 5 time parents who came in bearing zucchini cake, playing cards and cracking jokes between breathing through contractions, telling the doctor not to worry about a thing, they would be fine on their own if need be. I always thought it would be great to be that relaxed about the birth. I'm not sure if we're there yet, and I don't think we'll have 5 kids to see if we could be that cool about it, but it is nice to know a bit what to expect and not to have to sweat all the details.

Dad keeps trying to finagle the baby name out of us. Ivan actually knew it, and remembered it for a few minutes which scared us knowing the grands would try to draw it out of him, but we told him lots of other names and he quickly forgot it. Yeah for 4 year old attention spans!

Mom was humming Old langs eye (or whatever it's called) and cracking pecans... guess I should go be sociable. Happy New Year to all of you. May it bring goodness your way. We are looking forward to our life as a family of 5. We ate out at a chinese restaurant last night and my fortune said: The coming month shall bring winds of change in your life. (That will certainly be true!) Brian's said: The current year will bring you much happiness. (I take that as in the current year about to start and we'll take it ;)

The promised Christmas day videos

Our Christmas Day

We had a wonderful time together for Christmas day. We enjoyed waffle breakfast and opened tons of gifts before we had to get the house in a bit of order, start a turkey and stuffing, house rearranging and party with friends. We had a huge houseful, so that was a bit crazy, but nice. It was most especially nice since my neighbor Linda saved the day. I had asked everyone to bring two side dishes, but instead she cooked all day and brought about 6 huge side dishes- which was very good because I think we might have run out of food! We demolished a 20 lb turkey and the African dishes were gone before I'd gotten a plate to fill. The funny thing is that we had 4 pies, cookies and a huge fruit salad, but barely any of that was gone. Mom said that Africans don't eat desert much, but apparently they like turkey ;)

The kids got special gifts from even great uncles and aunts. Notice all the Canada shirts (even one for the baby). And Uncle Archie made the doll crib for Dominique. Brian's Star Wars movie collection is complete once again (they better stop making movies). I'm glad mom liked the painting I made for her. She was captivated by a scene in Jamaica and it only took me most the year to get it painted. But it was all worth her excitement over it. A little piece of her "homeland"- do you still call it that when you've lived much longer elsewhere?

Apparently my sister and I still think the same way as we had both gotten doctor type kits for the kids and they also got two sets of tools. This actually turned out great since they both have a stethoscope and hammer... so they don't have to fight quite as much over it all. But then, I think they enjoy fighting some, so they make up reasons to get at each other. I think mom and dad forgot what it's like to be around toddlers 24-7 and I hope we don't scare them away forever, with the energy, squabbles, screaming, whining... Of course all the change in routine and holiday craziness has not necessarily brought out their best qualities.

Hope all of you enjoyed your Christmas and were able to get together with friends and/or family. Sorry we haven't posted our family pic yet. Some immediate family haven't gotten their copy yet, so I am making all the rest of you wait until the new year. Then we'll be adding another new member and have to do another picture! I can't believe our baby is nearly full term! Only 3 more weeks until due day! Dad hopes she'll come before he leaves Thurs. but I don't really think that will happen. Mom got me pajamas and a robe so I'll be all ready for my hospital stay and for those mornings once baby is here when getting dressed becomes a monumental task.


My videos aren't uploading, so I guess that means I've put enough pictures and blah, blah to fill this post. Maybe tomorrow it will work better ;)

They're here!

Mom and dad got here a little late and much weary, but here none the less. Dominique did her typical shy routine for about 10 min. then enjoyed doing sommersaults by holding on to dad's fingers and walking up his legs- the shyness stage was a thing of the past. The kids bounced around both of them all night and it didn't take long until someone had brought dad an album and they were looking over the last couple of years. The traditions live on. The MacLeods are renowned for taking lots of pictures, having tons of photo albums and boring anyone who enters the door with the snapshots of our lives, so it was only right that one of the first activities, before a suitcase was cracked open, was to look through albums.

Tomorrow we need to bake pies and get things set up for Christmas. Ivan will be so glad that he finally gets to see what is in the gifts under the tree. He has been asking if we could open them for the last several days. Apparently the kids also think my belly is a giant gift that should reveal it's treasure soon. They keep asking if the baby is coming, like they think I'll go into labor at an second. Well, I guess they are not the only ones. People in the store were wondering if she was about to come too. Patience, she's almost ready ;) Meanwhile, let the feasting and festivities begin!

zzzzz

They play hard and then they...









Today we got our big Christmas day grocery run done. I was so happy the kids were good! I let them cross off items on the list, since it was so big, I knew we would get lost in it all. I normally don't like getting things that aren't my usuals, because they are hard to find and I end up going back and forth through the aisles, plus the store was full of everyone else doing the same as us, but when the kids are pleasant, even the grocery store can be fun- a place of discovery and "treasure hunting". Several people who saw me mentioned that I may get a baby for Christmas or would comment on how cute or good the kids were. Kids seems to bring out the friendliness in others- especially older people. Their eyes light up and they talk to us.

We then went out to the house Brian is working on in Clyde, where he gave the kids the grand tour. I saw it on our date last Fri. We got to the partially finished master bath and I asked the kids what was missing. They said a bath (it just has a shower) and I said "yes, what else?". Ivan whispered: "there is no potty". When I exclaimed "yes, there is no potty!" excited that he had solved the riddle, he started hushing me and telling me to be quiet, like I shouldn't say something like that so loudly! I'm sure he would be most horrified that I just posted this information for all the online world to see.

We went out for lunch together with Brian at Subway and Ivan thoroughly enjoyed choosing his vegetables for his sandwhich (he picked everything!) If I had made it at home, he would have complained about the toppings, but there, it was exciting to tell the lady everything he wanted and then to eat them all.

Tomorrow the grands arrive from Canada, so that is very exciting. I can say that then our holidays really begin!

So much fun!

We had such a super anniversary. We had to stay in town since I could have a baby any minute, but several friends came together to make our evening so precious. Tighe took the kids for the night on their first friend slumber party. The above pic. is Dominique with some of the items we packed, a blanket, Dora pillow and Dora doll. She and Ivan loved their slumber party and want to do it again! Olivia, Tighe's neighbor, also played with the kids, which was one of the special highlights of their stay. We went to a movie, at a theatre! That deserves an exclamation point because we don't get to do that much anymore. We saw Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and were very moved by it. It's not exactly your feel good, romantic anniversary movie, but has a lot of substance and meaning that spoke to us on many levels. We ate a most incredible meal by Chef Joel, of TruBlu catering. They had made us a romantic little getaway in a part of his kitchen and he served us a most exquisite meal of lamb and couscous, salsa verde, spinach salad, pecan and berry desert... So yummy. I felt like we were eating in NY. and listening to music from New Orleans, but there we were in little Clyde Texas. I gave Brian what I guess you'd call a framed collage, with a picture of us at our wedding and one now. I need to scan it and show you what I did with it. I think we look different, a little older, but I like the us now, even more than the us then, because now we have 10 years of depths, experience, love, growing together...

Here we are with the master Chef and dining.




In the meantime, our house is getting into shape bit by bit. I've recuited some very underage, cheap help. They loved wiping down the baby toys we pulled out of storage. Of course Ivan remembered every single one of them from when he was a baby (even the ones that we didn't have yet when he was a baby). Here they are with the loot.

I got another clutter space organized because I was moving some stuff out of the baby room and into the cabinet when I realized that the cabinet would not accept anything more without a thorough going through and restructuring. So, I complied and we can now fit everything and more as well as find things which is good. Like who knew when I bought glue sticks a couple of months ago, that I still had about 10 of them in the cabinet from our neighborhood club days. Well, I know now, and can find them!

Brian baked a couple of pies for Christmas and I need to go through the recipes and find ingredients for a grocery run tomorrow. We have some friends coming by, but I'm making them all bring something because I'm mean and can't deal with the stress of doing a big meal by myself. Last time I did that pregnant, I actually got sick that night. Learned my lesson. So we'll get to have fun and a great meal, but I only have to cook a couple of things- yeah!!