April 23, 2010

Jeans Recon

denim a-line skirt

I've been obsessed with my new J. Crew skirt (thanks mom!), and decided to approximate it with some denim from a pair of ill-fitting jeans. It looks better in the photo than in real life - I give it a B-, I think. Turns out, sewing stretchy denim is a little more complex than I realized. But, definitely wearable!

April 22, 2010

Career Day with the Rockets

All this month, Lara's preschool is learning about different careers. Doctors, teachers, fire fighters, policemen - these guys all come with props. So what do you do with someone like yours truly?

You start by talking about a special school where grownups write really, really long books called dissertations. You bring a copy of the dissertation to show and ask the kids to guess how many pages it is. The answers vary - "One hundred million million!" "Ten!" "Thirty ten hundred!" - but all are given with mild awe at the stack of sheets you're holding in your hand.

Then you bust out the story book you wrote about Lara, which goes over well. Lara repeatedly announces to the other kids, "That's a picture of me. That's me with the sword. That's a picture of me talking to the pirate."

And then? Then you make with the craft you prepared the night before - making graduation caps!

The night before, you cut craft foam into the right shapes and made a bazillion tassels:

Career Day - Grad Caps 1

The kids put then together (and they stay together far better than you were expecting!):

Career Day - Grad Caps 4

All are resplendent in their new duds:

Career Day - Grad Caps 2

And you take a cute picture of Lara, knowing that she was psyched that you came to school and "pretended to be the teacher":

Career Day - Grad Caps 3

April 21, 2010

11 months!

Happy 11th month birthday, little Jakey baby boy!



You are still our happy piece of laughing joy. You have worked out a surprisingly rich communication system of grunts, groans, coos, yelps, bird squeaks, and pointing. You have figured out that the smallest need to yell the loudest. Also, I think I am getting a good sense of how our hominid ancestors developed language.



You love your daddy, cling to your mommy, and are a devoted follower and fan of your sister. You always want to be where the action is, have a fairly high level of disdain for your toys (in favor of any electronic devices that happen to be lying around), and smile and wave at all strangers. You make us laugh, you still wake us up at night, and you are constantly impressing us with your resourcefulness at getting into things.

We love you!

April 18, 2010

Then and Now

Then:



Now:



Lara is about 13-14 months in that picture. Which probably accounts for the more mature-looking arrangement of lids and containers. Jakey is clearly still making more student-level compositions.

April 17, 2010

A new Little Kitchen

Jen just put this little number together. I love - love - those little red knobs for the stove top. So cute!

April 15, 2010

Xbox Tee

Before: an Xbox tee. How did we end up with one of these? No idea. But I did love the circle print and the nicely soft gray color.

xbox tee to tank (before)

After: a tunic tank for the summer! I actually got to wear it out today in the lovely sunshine.

xbox tee to tank (after)

Sleeve detail:

xbox tee to tank (detail)

April 13, 2010

Muir Woods

We are back from an amazing trip to San Francisco! It was lovely, and my grandmother's birthday was such a wonderful huge family reunion. I'm waiting for all the pictures that other people took, because I? Had a tiny Jakey baby hanging on me grabbing at the camera. Which does not lead to good photographs. Or even ones that are in focus.

In any case. Have you ever been to Muir Woods? It's a National Monument established by Teddy Roosevelt (under the huge influence of John Muir), and is a huge sequoia grove. Sequoias are big. Really, really big. How big? Here we are inside one of them:



That whole thing is one tree!

Lara climbed inside a baby one that was felled by fire:



This tree was born in 909 AD and fell in 1930. Both Misha and my dad calculated its age as 2000 years. Um, aren't you guys supposed to be some kind of mathsters?



The park is open to visitors, but you have to stay on a boardwalk and aren't allowed to go near most of the trees. It reminded me of that Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder" where the time travelers have to stay on a floating path so they don't disturb anything in the past.



We stayed on the path. The only thing that was disturbed was a baby who failed to take a nap.



Nice work, Linda! This is the best picture of us in existence!



And finally, this interaction has to be described at length:



Lara: I'm a wild bear that lives in a cave! This is my cave and I'm a bear. Rrrarrr!
Boy: (looks at her skeptically) You're just a pretend bear.
Lara: No, I'm a wild bear! We can both pretend! I live in this cave.
Boy: (more and more skeptical) You're not a bear. I live in a house.
Lara: (totally frustrated) No, you're a bug! Bears like to eat bugs! I'm going to eat you! Rrrarrr!
Boy: (with conviction) Kids aren't bugs.

We were dying, as you can imagine. My dad decided this is the prototypical "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" exchange.

April 1, 2010

Baby Food Factory

baby food - apple & plum, carrots, sweet potato

Yesterday was baby food production day. Since we are going away for a week, I decided to make a whole bunch of mushies for Jakey all at once. I made so much it ended up filling up every single jar I have in the house! Looking at it all made me feel a little bit like Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. Remember that sweet movie? I just recently watched it again, and it's sort of sad and shocking how completely undated her experience in the corporate world is. Doesn't it feel like we should have moved on from 1987 and should be laughing at the crazy system that disparaged working women with children the same way we laugh at those crazy 80's hairstyles?

From left to right, six jars of plum-apple sauce, one of steamed carrots, two of boiled sweet potatoes. All now in the freezer, ready for their trip to the other side of the country.