Heathbar's Hearty Weblog

Jag and I have found that we’ve started talking about ourselves in the third person a lot ever since Griff came along. We now frequently use phrases like, “Mommy’s making lunch, so hang on, sweetie” or “Daddy needs to put you down for a moment and run to the potty before his bladder explodes”. As a result, we’ve started referring to ourselves as “Bob Dole”. This isn’t too weird when it’s something like, “Bob Dole needs to go get a glass of water, so wait here in the exersaucer”. But it gets pretty creepy when you’re telling your kid, “Bob Dole knows you’re hungry and will give you a boobie in just a minute!”

On the crafting front, I’ve taken a little break from sewing to do a little knitting, instead. One project is a not-yet-presented gift for a new baby, so I’ll show you this one instead.

Meet Mister Scoopy!

Mister Scoopy magically appears to reward good children who take naps longer than 15 minutes. (This is so their mothers have time to finish knitting him, stuff him, and embroider his face on).

Napping Griff seemed to like Mister Scoopy.

Wakey Griff was a little more skeptical. “You used my rare super-long naptime to knit me a fake ice cream cone instead of baking me more sweet potatoes? Get your priorities straight, woman!”

The pattern is very well-written with lots of cone and ice cream scoop variations, it’s free, and it can be found here.

We finally broke down and bought a stroller, since Griff is a few ounces short of 20lbs now, and long walks with the mei tai were becoming not fun. We’ll probably reserve the stroller for walks and places like the zoo and whatnot; the mei tai is still working fine for the grocery store and other shopping trips, and will be fine until Griff is able to sit in a cart comfortably.

It’s a pretty inexpensive “Dream on Me” model, but it’s very nice so far. The ride is very smooth, the height is great, and I don’t kick the back of it while walking. It’s pretty lightweight as well; we wanted something more substantial than an umbrella stroller, but smaller than one of the giant “SUV” strollers. Griff fell asleep in it on our walk this morning, so it’s apparently comfy for him, too.

Today’s random project was a sun hat for Griff. We have one for him that’s almost too small, and another one that might fit him when he’s three. I cast about on the intarwebs looking for a suitable free pattern and ran across this one:
http://www.ottobredesign.com/fi/kaavat/pdf/girls_hat_EN.pdf. It’s supposed to be a girl’s hat, but aside from the rose decoration, which I left off, I can’t see what’s so girly about it. The brim does widen at the front and give it a bonnet-y look, but Griff’s a baby, so he gets to wear a bonnet if he wants to. It would be easy to modify the brim pattern piece to give it a uniform width, though.

I found some of the pattern directions a little confusing, so I applied Heather Logic and made it the way I wanted to. It’s not reversible the way I put it together, but I only used a single fabric for this prototype, so it doesn’t matter. If I make another one, and I probably will, I’m planning to use several different fabrics for the 6 crown “slices” to give it some variety.

This was a really good weekend. On Saturday, we visited my parents and celebrated Robin’s birthday. There were enough potato pancakes to sink a battleship and a very tasty cake.

Griff ate his first (baby) oatmeal, and seemed to really like it. This is the first food he’s gotten that’s a commercial product rather than something I made. (For example, his ‘rice cereal’ was brown rice that I ground up in the blender and cooked.) It just didn’t seem like a huge money savings to buy organic oatmeal and throw it in the blender when I could get a box of pre-pulverized organic baby oatmeal for around $2.50. I think we’ll need to evaluate on a case-by-case basis what makes sense/saves money for us to make at home, and what’s easier to just buy.

Today I made homemade pizza with 1/3 whole wheat flour in the crust, and my favorite combo of toppings: mozzarella and goat cheese, red onions, bell peppers, and a whole pound of Italian sausage. (Luckily, Jag likes these toppings too.) Two slices of this beast and you are full, full, full.

Jag took Griff out to visit friends for a few hours this afternoon, which went really well even though Griff still isn’t taking a bottle. I spent the baby-free time going to the library, doing some grocery shopping, cooking plums for a batch of puree to make into baby food ice cubes, and making the pizza dough.

Over the past week, Griff has started sitting unsupported for surprisingly long stretches. It’s amazing and a little scary how quickly babies can master new physical skills. He also loves to play peekaboo these days.

So yeah, I made Griff another hooded towel. This time: a frog! Complete with a tongue! With a dead fly on it! Whee! I lightly stuffed the eyeballs so they’d stick up better.

And here’s Griffin after his bath, all clean and happy and amphibious.

And this one is just because he’s cute.

Earlier today I stopped at the library and picked up Suzanne Collins’ “Catching Fire” (second in the Hunger Games series), which I had on reserve. Griff was in an extraordinarily nappy mood this afternoon, so when he fell asleep in my arms, I had no choice but to start reading. And reading and reading (with a little nursing thrown in). I managed 300+ pages before dinner. So far I think it’s every bit as good as the first book, and I’m hoping to finish it tonight. At which point I’ll be chomping at the bit for Book Three, which came out today!

Why me and Jag are very tired today.

7:45pm: Griff goes to sleep in crib.
10pm: Me and Jag go to bed.
11:30pm: Griff wakes up, is hungry, needs changing. Jag changes Griff, I feed Griff.
2:45am: Shastes sneaks into the master bedroom and starts playing with the closet doors, waking us both up.
3:15am: Griff wakes up, hungry again. I feed Griff.
4:30am: Upstairs smoke detector decides battery is dying, starts beeping loudly. Jag drags smoke detector off somewhere to shut it up.
5:15am: Griff wakes up, starts babbling cheerfully at great volume. Griff volume is too much even with baby monitor turned off, so action is required. He goes back to sleep after reswaddle and pacifier reinsertion.
6:15 am: Griff is really really really awake. Jag takes him downstairs so I can get some extra sleep.
7:15am: I wake up from lovely dream about going to a fiber festival (that exists only in my dream, sadly).

My wonderful parents agreed to watch Griffin yesterday while Jag and I went out on our first grownup date since March 16, in celebration of Jag’s birthday. We went to Firebirds for dinner and had a great, relaxing meal.

I checked my phone for messages as we made our way back to Wake Forest. There was a recent missed call and voice mail from my dad, saying that Griff had refused both bottles I’d left and had been crying on and off for the past hour and a half. EEEEEK! We rushed back so I could rescue my poor parents and nurse Griff. We all chalked it up to teething pain; since he had been fine earlier that day, I hadn’t packed his Oragel, Tylenol, teething tablets, teething rings, etc etc in the diaper bag, so my parents hadn’t been able to try to make him feel better with any of those methods. Griff hadn’t had a bottle in a few weeks, but that didn’t seem to be enough time to have caused a problem.

Today we decided to have Jag give him a bottle to keep him in practice, and we bought a pack of Medela medium-flow nipples to see if that would help, since we suspected he might be unhappy with the old low-flow newborn nipples.

Nope. Griff flat-out refuses to take a bottle now. This is the kid who took his first bottle at less than 4 weeks old, who took periodic bottles all during my maternity leave, who drank every bottle he was given in day care without a peep of protest, who drank bottle after bottle of thawed stash milk with no problems when he stayed with my parents for over 24 hours while I was in the hospital back in May.

We’ll start experimenting with cup feeding and other tricks now, but I’m kind of worried that the 200+ ounces of milk in the freezer may be useless at this point.

I used to bake a lot more, but in recent years my yeast usage has been limited to pizza dough and the occasional batch of cinnamon buns or dinner rolls. This week I got the urge to make something that required kneading, so I picked a recipe for cheddar-parmesan bread from the King Arthur Baker’s Companion that I thought would go well with tonight’s dinner (tortellini).

Oh my, this is some intensely cheesy bread! I can’t wait to mop up some spaghetti sauce with it. The leftovers may make some truly insane grilled cheese sammiches tomorrow.

As unbelievable as it may seem, someone is FIVE MONTHS OLD today!!!

Griff has had a very rough couple of days (and nights, oh lordy) due to teething pain. Last night he slept much better than we were expecting, and today I had my happy little guy back.

You’ll just have to take our word for the teeth. If you hold Griff down and put him in a straightjacket and use two hands to push his tongue aside and shine a Maglite in his mouth, you should be able see them poking up about an eighth of an inch through his gums. (However, if you let him chomp down on your hand, you will be in no doubt whatsoever of their existence.)

Griff is sitting up pretty well these days, almost unassisted. If he gets distracted or reaches for something too far away, he tips over, bumps his head on the floor, and starts screaming. He always falls in the direction of the pointiest/hardest/most fragile object in the vicinity.

He certainly seems to enjoy being upright.

Could he look any more like Jag?

After he falls over, he usually ends up on his tummy. Luckily, he’s much happier on his tummy these days than he used to be. Recently he’s been showing a terrifying tendency to creep/hump along the floor.

Also, he’s still obsessed with the measuring cups/spoons I gave him to play with.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m two rows and some borders from being done with a Thousand Pyramids quilt top! I had originally had big plans for this thing involving carefully arranged color gradations, but now that Griff is here, I’ve realized that finished is better than high-concept. Although I used to be strictly in the hand-quilting camp, I’ll probably use some kind of sturdy cotton duck or canvas for the backing and tie this one, maybe for use as a picnic blanket.

Meet Griff’s newest playmates!!!!

This is Wilhelmina the Gnome.

Wilhelmina enjoys reading classic literature.

She also has a side business reading tarot. Uh-oh, looks like someone drew the Death card!

This is Willie the Gnome. Willie lives on the back of Wilhelmina’s head, kind of like Voldemort did on Professor Quirrell’s head. You could also think of this as a Ladyhawke kind of thing, except completely different.

Willie is named for Willie Nelson, because he definitely has that Willie braid action going on when Wilhelmina flips her hair back. Let’s hope we don’t catch Willie smoking weed on the White House roof, like his namesake!

Willie’s hobbies include reading about his favorite Gnome heroes…

…as well as developing unusual cocktail blends as part of his mixology studies.

The End