Peekaboo

I’m not feeling well enough to write fanfiction tonight, so I figured I might as well let you lot know that I’m alive and well (well, mostly) and not quite insane yet.

But yes!  I’ve been writing fanfiction lately.  I should probably put a link on the sidebar at some point, come to think of it.  Maybe replace the zibbet button, since I don’t think anything is listed there.  I’m writing under the name ladyphlogiston (what a surprise, I know) at fanfiction.net and I’ve currently got a shortish LBD fic (which is probably finished, but I might add another chapter so someone can ask Darcy if he has a bum-warmin’ toilet) and an AU Pride and Prejudice set in the 20s and a four-way Sherlock Holmes crossover.

I’m enjoying myself.  The Holmes one is fun and easyish to write (though I don’t actually know what the bad guys are up to yet, so I should probably figure that out) and the 20s one is harder, in part because I have to stop every other sentence and find the right slang term or figure out what hats men wore or whether the Charleston was danced in the closed position.  Which it was, at first.  Now you know.

I’ve also been reading a ton of Pride and Prejudice fanfic, because it’s relaxing and fun and usually decently written.  So has Hero, actually

In other news….Beauty and Kitten are still growing and doing their thing.  Beauty takes great delight in confirming (over and over and over) that the sky is blue and the clouds are white.  I feel like there’s some spiritual lesson in that, but haven’t bothered working out what it is.

Oh!  I finished a chainmail bracelet for my sister.

The weave is called Open Round or Roundmaille, and it’s pretty simple and quite fun.  I’ve started taking my kit to the women’s bible study sometimes – it occupies my hands, like some women do with knitting.  Anyway, I used that tutorial to get it started, but every time I dropped it, it got horribly jumbled and it would take me ages to figure out which way I was going.  (Once you’ve added a few more rounds that’s less of a problem, of course.)  So I threaded a piece of t-shirt yarn through it to keep the shape, and when it was long enough I replaced the yarn with pretty ribbon.  There’s a clasp under the bow, by the way.

I haven’t seen anyone else doing this (putting beads or more rings inside is fairly popular, but I haven’t seen the ribbon through) but I doubt I’m the first to think of it.

Dentist

I kinda feel awful right now.

Beauty’s first dentist appointment was today.  She’s three.  I keep seeing articles and things saying that your child’s first dentist appointment should be when she’s two, or one, or when she gets her first tooth, or whenever, but when I called a year ago they told me to call back in a year.

So there we were, and we put her on my lap and the hygenist counted her teeth, which went okay (though Beauty tried to close her mouth whenever they put something in it), and then they got out the polisher and the hygenist asked Beauty if she could use it on her teeth.

And Beauty said no.

And the hygenist asked a couple more times, and Beauty said no, no, no I not!  And I explained to Beauty that we needed to do this a little bit, and the hygenist got the first few teeth and then started asking again, and Beauty said no some more, and finally she gave up.

We’re going to a different dentist next time, I think.

But the reason I feel awful is that this is probably the first time that Beauty was asked if she wanted something, and she made it very clear that she did not, and I made her do it anyway.  If the hygenist hadn’t asked permission, but instead had taken a “this is what we’re going to do…” approach, I wouldn’t feel bad.  We’ve been down that road at the doctor’s office plenty.  But as it is, my daughter was asked what she wanted and then her wishes were blatantly ignored and I really don’t like it.

I feel like I didn’t have any good options.  Right now I wish I’d advocated for her.  I wish I had pushed the hygenist away and pointed out that she asked and my daughter said no.  But it’s also a fact that I need to teach Beauty that what she wants isn’t always what’s good for her.

It is not helping that I’ve been seeing a lot about rape culture and consent and things lately.  I haven’t been seeking it out, but it’s been there.

I’ve always embraced a mind-minded approach to parenting.  It’s one of the things that makes me good at it.  I don’t think I did a good job today.

I think I’m finding a new dentist.  In a year.  Her teeth are fine.

And so is she.

Update, later that evening: I’m a lot calmer now.  Hero says my neurochemistry is clearly off-balance, and he’s usually right about that so I’m believing him that this will all look much better in a few days.  Stupid hormones.

Beethoven

Just a little recent art today…

Postcard for a swap I’m in.  It’s a challenge swap – make a postcard with elements representing window, marsupial, Beethoven, purple, and six.  At first glance I dismissed it as impractical, but my brain kinda liked the idea.  Beethoven was the hardest – I didn’t want anything stodgy.  Eventually I found an image of his signature online, pulled it into Inkscape and made it into a stamp or brush or whatever you want to call it, and made the background you can see there.  (I printed it onto tissue and mod podged it onto my painted background.)

A progress shot from halfway through, so you can see the background properly:

The colored strips are from a photo of brightly painted windows that I found on Pinterest.  They’re my window element.  I had planned to gesso over this and get partway back to neutral, but I liked it so much I went with it.

So I stenciled on my purple six (done with bubble wrap – a few days ago we got something wrapped in bubble wrap, and I cut off a chunk and attached it to the bottom of an Altoids container for Beauty to stamp with.  We’ve both been pulling it out at every opportunity ever since :) and added my marsupial (that’s a sugar glider, found on wikipedia) and a few other odds and ends.

I really like the composition on this one – I feel like there’s a good balance.  There’s the purple curve triangle (the two parts of the six and the purple circle) and a yellow-greenish triangle (the strips of paper in the upper two corners and the green gem dot by the six’s tail) and it seems to keep the eye moving.  I like it a lot.

I liked the background enough that I did it again, to see what happened if I did gesso over it.  I like this one too.

I’ll probably just send this out as random mail art.  The strips are from an old map, again printed onto tissue.  (You take a facial tissue, separate the two layers, and use a gluestick to glue the edges to a piece of printer paper.  Then run it through the printer.  We have a laser printer, so the toner doesn’t smear if it gets wet, which is handy.)

Why “flutter”?  I don’t know.  Why not?

Time for some thrilling heroics

Can I just brag about my Hero for a minute?

I had an awful “fussy hour” today, with Kitten fussing and Beauty melting and demanding more stickers to put on me and too much touch and too much noise and I burned the greens I was trying to cook for dinner and things were just miserable.

Hero got home after a two-hour commute through the snow and popped Kitten into the Hotsling, snuggled Beauty back into sanity, and then made an omelet for dinner.

He’s pretty amazing.

Hope

I’ve managed to keep doing a little art, despite children and things.  It makes life messier, but it keeps me happier, and that’s important.

This isn’t quite done, I don’t think, but it’s getting there.  And I think it’s called I Hope So, because one of the layers is a page of journaling and that was the last thing I wrote.  It’s been an experiment in layers – Karen at I am Rushmore has been doing the 40 Day Creativity Experiment by adding one layer per day for 40 days.  I’ve never been one for layers, but having a target seemed like an interesting thing to try.  So the background here is about 20 layers and the spiral is about 10 more, though you’ll need a looser definition of “layer” for that.  It’s been interesting.  I find I do like having some variation in the background, so we may see more layering in the future.  Maybe.  And probably not collage.

And these are some postcards I’ve done.  The red one with fishes was started before Kitten was born, but I only recently figured out how to finish it, with the quote and the white ink.  (That’s an opaque white Sakura Glaze pen, which I’ve discovered I really like.)  The quote is from Emma: “It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was.” Emma thinks that as she’s admiring Knightley’s estate.  (I’ve noticed that for art I like quotes that barely make sense in context and feel rather surrealist on their own.  It’s and interesting discovery.)  The card doesn’t have a destination yet.  Random mail art.

The two blue ones are for the Mail Me Some Art blue postcard swap…I think.  I’m feeling odd about sending them in, and I’m not at all sure why.  Admittedly I’m feeling a bit insecure about the abstract one, which is not one of my best efforts, but the turtle one came out fine.  So I dunno.  If  decide to just send them out at random that will be okay too.

The two turtles are from a stencil I cut with my Silhouette from a design I made.  I cut it in a few different sizes in a sheet of cardstock, and then coated both sides with cheap spray paint to keep the cardstock from absorbing moisture and buckling.  It makes me happy.  I mostly did it to finish that top one, which was a background seeking a subject until recently.

And the cream one isn’t finished yet, but I like the background I’ve got so I included it.  It’s for a swap that was very complicated and half the people sent to the wrong partner and as a result one of my partners (the one who was supposed to send to me) didn’t get anything, so I’m making an extra to send to her because that doesn’t seem fair.  Anyway, that’s a painted paper with doodled lines in clear Glaze pen (the doodles are meant to look like a topographical map, which I tried as a layer in I Hope So and decided I really liked) and then cream paint scraped across, so that the clear ink lets the paper underneath show through.  (Glaze pens have a raised ink, so the scraper pulls the paint off the lines.)  It kinda looks oyster-ish now, but that’s okay.  I still like it.

Hebrews 11

At CBS last week we got asked to define faith in our own terms. (This was part of a study on Hebrews 11, naturally.)

The first thing that came to mind was this blog post about this research paper about teaching computer programming. Apparently Computer Science teachers and professors have consistently found that about half their students just never learn much of anything, no matter what approach they use to teach programming. As you can imagine, this is very frustrating for everyone involved.

The researchers claim to have found a way to predict who will succeed. They administered a test with very simple programming questions to the class before they learned anything. Naturally they didn’t get the answers right, but some of them assumed the computer would follow the same rules every time, and they were the ones who learned well and eventually passed the test. The students who did not start with that assumption were (usually) not able to grasp the computer’s behavior and did not do well.

Computers follow rules. It’s what they do. They don’t understand anything that is happening, they just march through the instructions and spit out the result.

Faith, in my mind, is believing that the universe works a little like that. It follows rules. If God says something will happen, then it will happen, because that’s the set of rules He’s given to the universe. He can compensate for chance and predict reactions and already knows what the weather will be like. None of that bothers Him. He never says He’ll do something “if it works out” because He knows it will work out.

He wrote the program. The universe will march through the instructions it is given and spit out the result He planned for. His program is the substance of things hoped for. Knowing that creation follows the instructions it is given is my evidence of things not seen.

Soothed

Stick

 

I am insanely proud of my daughter today, guys. She is amazing.

The last few weeks have been…not so amazing. Beauty’s been dealing with the stress of the holidays and a cold and a depressed mother* and having a new baby sister and etc and it’s been showing. She’s been having complete meltdowns at every. single. thing. When I wake her up in the morning. When I announce it’s time for a diaper change. When I put her shoes on. One meltdown when we leave the house, another when we get out of the car, and generally at least one while we’re driving for good measure. You get the idea. She hasn’t been violent or avoidant, and she’s still doing as I tell her, so it could be worse. But it hasn’t been fun.

(And yes, we have tried all manner of cuddling and reassuring and managing expectations and everything else that occurred to us. Didn’t seem to accomplish much.)

So this morning we were sitting on the couch and I was dreading the constant crying but I knew that if we just stayed on the couch all day I’d regret it. After a bit I gave myself some extra incentive by calling a friend and arranging a playdate…as soon as I’d gotten everyone dressed.

I hung up and, with a certain amount of trepidation, announced, “Beauty, it’s time to get you dressed.”

She looked up and I heard her breath catch and the wail start, but then it stopped again and she very deliberately said, “Shh. Shh. Shh.” and trundled down the hall to her bedroom.

And that was the end of it.

She soothed herself.

She did it again and again, every time I expected her to collapse into tears. I’ve been cheering her like mad and calling people to tell them about it (preferably in her hearing) and I am so, so proud of her.

This right here – watching her grow and figure things out and become able to manage her own emotions and address her own needs and communicate her own thoughts – this is what I love about being a mother.

* I’m fighting it and taking my fish oil and it’s getting better. I was thisclose to calling my therapist at one point but I don’t think I’ll need to.

Scent

I smell of blood and baby and breastmilk: earthy and powdery with hints of caramel.

That sentence formed itself in my mind when Kitten (Kitten and its variants have been displacing Snuggle) was a few days old, and is still kicking around.

I seem to notice smells more than usual lately: the soft smell of her baby wash and the sharp smell of her head from cradle cap and the sweet smell of her diapers and the caramel smell of breastmilk and the earthy smells of my own healing body. I don’t mind them much; in fact I rather like most of them. But they’re very present.

Snuggle!

Yes, still with the silly photos. Most of these are Picsart, actually, because we got a tablet and I discovered I really like the Picsart app and I get bored during midnight feedings because she’s too floppy for me to just go back to sleep (also breastfeeding still kinda hurts) so I mess around with pictures instead. Such is life.

Or possibly Kitten.  But I’m pretty sure her blog-name is Snuggle.

(My policy is to confine real names to images, which aren’t indexed by search engines.  At least, not yet.  It’s really only a matter of time.  I figure a sufficiently determined stalker could probably find me already anyway, so I’m mostly relying on the sheer number of people on the internet for anonymity.)

….since her full name is rather a mouthful :)  (It’s pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, by the way, and the i is an “ee” sound.  It does not rhyme with Delilah.  It means “made perfect” in Hebrew.)

Labor and delivery was much better than last time.  I’m not all glowy about it, but I wasn’t freaked out and I didn’t need meds and it was pretty okay.  It was fast.  Fast is good.

(I get very annoyed by the glowy birth stories, mostly because I don’t have them I think.  I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they genuinely had glowy laborm but to be honest I tend to figure it’s mostly hormone-induced retconning.  Sour grapes much?)

I am making that face in every single picture taken in the L&D room. That’s true of Beauty’s birth photos too. No idea what’s up with that.

I had my mom the whole time this time around, which was good.  Well, actually she came for transition and pushing, but that’s when I needed her.  My sister was there too, which was pretty cool.  And Hero.  Hero was wonderful.  I’ll probably write more about that later.

Snuggle is…well, she’s not her sister.  She likes being swaddled, and if you put her in her swing she stays asleep, and there are times when she is awake and looking around and not fussing or eating, which is a nice change.  (I’m sure Beauty woke up properly sometimes too, but she was certainly fussier.)  Overall Snuggle is pretty calm and pretty expressive and we’re good.

Beauty is adjusting phenomenally well, so far at least.  She wants to come say hi to her sister at every opportunity, and stroke her face and hair, and show her how to play with a rattle (no luck so far, though it would help if she’d try when Snuggle is actually awake) and she always asks if Snuggle is okay if she cries or snorts.

Okay, I need a nap.

Conspiracy

So I have a paper trimmer now.  Apparently God decided I need one.  A free one.  Which is a bit mysterious, since it’s been on my list of things to buy at some point for ages, and we could afford to pay for one if we wanted to.  But I have no other explanation for the fact that I mentioned that I don’t have one on an online forum and someone offered to send me her spare one.  For free, as I said.  I’d link to her blog if she had one, but she doesn’t.

Anyway, I now have an Awesome Paper Trimmer.  I mentioned it in the context of ATCs, but of course I haven’t used it for those at all, at least not yet.  My first thought was that I can finally try some bookmaking!

Isn’t it pretty?  I made the cover before she sent the trimmer, which made me vastly impatient once it was done.  The cover is actually a box from Trader Joe’s for…curried tuna, I think?  Anyway, I cut it up and gessoed it and painted it and designed the paper cutout for it (designed in Inkscape, cut with my Silhouette) and ended up lining the inside with pink cardstock to stiffen it a bit.  I love it.

The binding is a “buttonhole-longstitch-hybrid” (whatever that means) and it looks pretty cool.

I don’t know how well you can see that but the signatures show through the spine and the thread wraps over it and it’s all pretty awesome.

So I’ll be sending that back as my thank-you gift for my awesome free paper trimmer at some point.  Have to get to the post office to make that happen.

In the meantime, since I’m not swapping (too big a chance of missing something due to the pregnancy/baby thing), I decided to make some handmade thank-you notes for the people who make meals for us in the first few weeks.  Because that’s not ambitious at all :)

Actually, it dovetailed with the book project quite nicely.  I cut and scored ATC-sized cards with the paper trimmer, and isolated the flower from the Inkscape design to cut as a stamp.

The swirls were added for this design, obviously.  I stamped it in acrylic paint (in brown, navy, and black) and then went back with the watercolors.

Not all of these are done, but you get the idea.  I’m pleased with them.  The envelopes take a little longer (I used this template, except I made the “D” side match the “C” side) but they’re not too bad.

I’ll share this on PPF, and do my best to visit a decent number of other blogs.