Nailed It

I've been watching Nailed It while stuck in Scenic Under-The-Baby today, and wondering what I would do in the same situation.  I can't help but wonder how much of the recipe the contestants are actually given, and if they just select people who don't follow a recipe well.  Also, it always reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd be amazed at my mother's cooking skills.  "How do you do that so fast and so well?" we'd ask in rapt wonder, and my mother would deadpan, "Practice."  I thought I would never be so good, and I'm at about fifty percent.  My onion chopping is so terrible that I buy a pre-chopped onion if I'm trying to impress someone, but I can roll out and cut sugar cookies with a pleasing level of efficiency, though I was stunned by how small a single batch really is.  Everyone in my family quadruples cookie batches, because if you're going to make your kitchen messy, you need to have a lot of results.  Kiddo ended up with a mountain of cookies shaped like dresses for her Project Runway-themed party.  Everyone decorated them with frosting and sprinkles.  It was awesome.

Mom is crafty, in the pom pom sense rather than the diabolical schemes way.  Decades before Pinterest existed, she gathered clever ideas, and when time was available, we would end up with cool stuff.  We would make sugar cookies that we would paint with egg before baking, then we'd use craft sticks and frosting to make them into cookie pops for birthdays at school.  (PS Egg paint is cool--it creates a shiny glaze on the cookie that doesn't detract from the taste.  It usually appears next to the sugar cookie recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbooks.)  I remember doing Care Bears one year, and Earths another.  If Kiddo's school still allowed food treats, I'd probably do emojis at some point.

I think about this every time someone watches me crochet and converse at the same time, or machine hem a skirt without pins, or create a petticoat tuck using one chalk line and two pins.  "How do you do that??"  "Practice."

https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/paintbrush-cookies/71c57baf-3047-4fd7-b03e-f0488e9decc1

Library Thursday: On the Shelf This Week

I finally finished the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy today.  Getting all three books on audiobook was an arduous journey of waiting for the books to be available on Libby/Overdrive.  They showed up out of order, and I now know that I can just put the request on hold.  I did not realize that, so I tried to listen to the books out of order, then landed at the end of the list again when I failed.  I try not to read books in a series one after the other, preferring to put a different book by a different author in between to cleanse my palate.  It also keeps me from splitting hairs on details the author may have spaced on in the (sometimes) decades between writing the books.

The new work book, which is also the commute book until my hold comes in at the library, is Carol Burnett's This Time Together, which is a string of anecdotes inspired by a lecture tour of questions from the audience.  So far, I've learned of the legend of the orange audition dress, the story of how Hitchcock lost her a job, and how much she embarrassed herself upon meeting James Stewart.  It's wonderful.

At bedtime, I've been reading Something Wonderful, a biography of Rodgers and Hammerstein.  It's strange to realize that I know so much about the shows and yet so little of the gentlemen behind them.  I'm only a chapter or so in, and I may have to buy this one to avoid late fines from the library.

I'm gathering ideas for kid appropriate books for the summer day camp commute coming up.  Kiddo is joining me again this summer, and is actually in one of my classes, which makes me nervous.  The Anne of Green Gables books were hits, so we might finish out that series, as well as perhaps the Little House books, since we're at the best age for those (9), but I'm open to suggestions if you have any.  Travel back and forth to Larkspur is one hour or so in the morning and an hour and a half or so in the afternoon, so we can push through a pretty big book.

What I Do Wednesday: Why Is That in Your Sewing Room?

I moved my sewing room last year in preparation for Tiny's arrival.  Fuzzy helped throw things in boxes for the transfer, and he was mystified by a few things, especially the candle and metal bowl.  "Isn't everything in here kinda flammable?"

If you see a candle, a lighter and a metal bowl in a sewing workspace, it isn't to enact a ritual to curse a dishonest trim merchant.  I use a lit candle to seal the edges of poly ribbons and trims.  Just pass the end of the ribbon through the flame.  If the ribbon's on fire, you're too slow.  You just want to melt it a tiny bit to keep it from fraying.  It's like cauterizing the cut edge.  You can also use this method for plastic boning.  The metal bowl is for dropping fabric into when you're burn testing fabric.  If you're uncertain of the fiber content, snip a little bit of the fabric, hold it with tweezers, and then light it on fire.  Hard core.  Then observe how it's burning, what the ash looks like, and the odor of the burn.  If your kid's anything like mine, do not do this in front of her, because she will totally try it.

Then spend a little time on that trim merchant.  He deserves it.

Broadway Tuesday: I Got My Gossip Wrong

Today, I was telling gossipy Broadway tales to my boss while we were planning the next year or so.  Turns out, I got them mixed up, so Liz, this is for you.

Patti LuPone dodged almost all her chorus work in Les Miserables in London because she was in another show and kept leaving rehearsal to "rest" for the show.  It totally worked until the show closed during the staging of the second act, which is why the actress playing Fantine typically shows up as a boy on the barricade.

Patti LuPone, however, is not responsible for the M&M incident I went on to describe.  That was Andrea McArdle, who stored a quarter-pound bag of candy in her barricade boy costume when she was in the Fantine role.  She dramatically "died" on the barricade and M&Ms went flying everywhere, mostly into the orchestra pit.

My source for both these stories and other great didjaknows:  https://ew.com/article/2014/11/04/10-big-broadway-disasters-according-to-seth-rudetsky/

Regaining My Sanity with Zippy Bags

Do normal people still have kitchen canisters on their counters?  We have a set that we keep in a big drawer, ostensibly to keep the counter looking tidy, but mostly to keep all the stuff like flour and sugar together in the "baking ingredients" drawer.  They're not labelled, and when we moved into our current space, I was three months pregnant with Kiddo and too tired to care, so Fuzzy filled them.  I have been going through a cycle for the last nine years of completely losing my mind in frustration every time I bake, then promptly forgetting about the issue, then completely losing my mind the next time.

Because Fuzzy doesn't bake from scratch, he really didn't think too hard when he filled the canisters.  He did it in order of what we had at that moment.  Therefore, the brown sugar went into the big canister.  Am I completely out of line thinking that everyone who has kitchen canisters puts flour in the big canister, sugar in the next one down, and so forth?  He put flour in the smallest canister and powdered sugar in the next one up, so I always have to put some on my finger and lick it like I'm a narcotics officer on TV to be sure I'm not about to screw up my cheese sauce.

I finally just forced myself to stay in the kitchen while the blondies baked on Sunday and emptied all the canisters into zippy bags and washed all the canisters.  Tonight, I'm going to refill them and label them.  I know the two smaller canisters are for coffee and tea, but since we don't drink coffee and do tea in bags, I'm making those two powdered sugar and brown sugar.  It's hardly domestic-goddess-level stuff, but I feel better about myself.

Adventures in Old Town Sacramento

Out here in California, many of the cities will refer to the original downtown area as "Old Town."  Old Town Sacramento is one step above the other old town areas, with board walks and subterranean older buildings and such.  This weekend, they're putting on Waterfront Days, with re-creators and entertainers bringing a flavor of 1849 and the Gold Rush.  I keep calling this Gold Rush Days, because a similar event used to happen around Labor Day and was, in fact, called Gold Rush Days.

We had a free day today, so we hauled out to absorb some culture and history.  Kiddo wanted to dress up in her Dickens dress, and we had a dress that my grandmother sent Tiny, so we did a little parking-lot magic (you travel in your period underclothes and throw on the hoop and all the other stuff when you get there).  Somehow, I always forget that a child in period dress is total bait to tourists and photographers, even if the child is clearly not a participant.  I don't mind most of the time, because it's not like these folks are sickos or anything, but the lady who clearly got me breastfeeding in the background of her shot was given a good stinkeye.

We listened to singing groups and did olde-fashionede crafts and bought taffy (Candy Heaven has more taffy than I've ever seen in one place--across Front Street from the reproduction school house) and visited the brothel tent for an hour or so.  The difference of being a fair participant is that your friends at other fairs will invite you to hang out at their spot, even if you're not in costume, especially if you have a cuddly baby in period dress they can use as a prop.  Kiddo got to participate in "gigs," or little character scene bits, and Tiny was christened the "brothelsprout," and was held up next to various willing guests to attempt to determine paternity.

There is a rapid-fire, slightly racy patter to being at a fair--a bit of a combination of broad jokes and subtle humor.  At the brothel tent, the woman at the front had a rotation of things to call out to passersby, such as "You ever need a night off, dearie, you send him to us.  Give us $3 and take the rest of the wallet for yourself!" and "Now I know why I haven't seen you, Charlie!  She's beautiful!"  It's fun to play a role once in a while.

The Waterfront Days are still going on Sunday, so swing by.  There's history and shopping and dining and singing and performing and roping and stuff.  Awesome.  I'm hoping the museum keeps the exhibit about the Transcontinental Railroad Sesquicentennial going until the end of the year so I can drag my mother over. 

Aaaaand, you can ask Zoltar stuff, like to be big or something.  He takes credit cards now.

My New Fabric Boyfriend (Our Love is Real)

Okay.  So Renaissance Fabrics (renaissancefabrics.net) is a sponsor of this blog in the sense that I work there and spend at least some of the money I make there on stuff for the blog.  And I don't mean to be pushy, but this fabric is ridiculous, and I have to share it with people, because blue and gold brocades/damasks/etc. are hard to find.  So, this is not a sponsored post, and Diana does a way classier job over on our Instagram and Facebook feeds, but I just need to talk about this.

Look at this stuff.  It's so yummy that I could eat it with a spoon.  I think I'm secretly dating this stuff, and Fuzzy would understand our love.

I am currently looking for a project to justify owning this fabric.  To be fair, I already have a dress in a similar color way, but the float threads catch on everything--this fabric doesn't do that.  Also to be fair, that event has been cancelled for the last two years, but...  I just like this fabric.  Fabric boyfriend.

It's Navy Blue Lionheart by the way.  https://www.renaissancefabrics.net/product/lionheart-navy-silk-damask/

Making Stuff to Make People Happy

I've been a bit absent lately, because I have a big dress due at the end of the week for Gold Rush Days in Sacramento.  Jennifer over at The Reluctant Seamstress (http://thereluctantseamstress.blogspot.com/) just couldn't seem to get started on this bad boy, so I took over after her initial bodice fitting.

The striped beauty on the left is her inspiration.

Her fabric.

I admit, I've only done a few dresses in this period, as opposed to the four a year I do for the next decade in history, so I was pretty nervous about this one.  Because she started with a bodice mockup that was already partway fitted, it felt a lot less like reinventing the wheel, which helped immensely.  I fitted the bodice just a bit more, then put it into a paper pattern, then did one more mock-up to be sure I'd done it right.  Judging by the squeeing, I think she was a bit happy.

Through judicious cutting, I was able to squeeze one more skirt panel out of the yardage, so the hem is almost 200" around.  Jennifer is all about the twirl factor, so she was totally fine with that.  In addition, the extra panel makes the skirt look much more period on her slightly-larger-than-period-pictures frame.

After I put together the dress and installed a few dozen buttonholes--thank you, one-step buttonhole machine!--to allow the dress to open all the way down the front, I swung by for another fitting (more squeeing), and then I started to figure out the trim.  I honestly thought I would just blow up the picture in PowerPoint, then trace it and start sewing.  It...did not work.  At all.

ew.

We had a term in grad school that covered this.  Happy pencil.  Some costume designers will include precise sketches of the trim layout.  Others will draw squiggles that are vague representations.  The trim looked precise until I blew it up, and I suddenly noticed how many times the trim stopped and started.  Jennifer and I researched new braid patterns (hi, Pinterest!), then selected a new one.  I traced it onto tissue paper, pinned it to the bodice, then did a tiny running stitch to apply it.  Why, yes, my wrists do hurt right now.

I'll be removing tissue paper with tweezers tomorrow.

At this point, I'm finishing things up, and I should deliver by Friday afternoon.  I am so excited for Jennifer to play in her new dress!

Library Thursday: On the Stack This Week

I make a goal every year to read a whole bunch of books.  This year, the goal is 100.  Almost all the books are audiobooks that I listen to while I work and drive, but I can never decide if it's cheating or not to have someone read to you.  Typically, I have one book for work, one for the car, and one in my bedroom for before sleep.  Sometimes, I have one more out in the living room for reading while feeding Tiny.

I just finished Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in the car this week.  It was one of the books I read in seventh grade English (Hi, Mrs. Turner!), and I am starting to wonder if I paid any attention to this thing at all when I was 13.  The plight and the bravery of this family is just incredible, and it's really striking to revisit this story as an adult parent.  I'd forgotten that so much of the pressure was around the fact that they owned the land they worked, while all the other families around them sharecropped.  It's also striking to realize that Kiddo is now the same age as Cassie at the beginning of the book, which led me to imagine how she would handle this stuff.  The mind reels.  Kids are not as prepared for making grownup choices these days.  Oh!  And Lynne Thigpen does the reading, and that is never not awesome.  It was so fantastic to hear her voice again.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=roll+of+thunder+hear+my+cry&crid=38MUU7D5G0WC8&sprefix=roll+of+th%2Caps%2C235&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_10

The work book this week is Mary Boleyn--Mistress of Kings by Alison Weir.  You know when you're dealing with a woman in Renaissance history when one whole chapter is dedicated to figuring out when the central figure was born and where she was in the birth order of her family.  We're not up to full equality, but I hope that when someone writes a biography about a woman who was peripheral to history, they'll be able to declare a birth year, rather than guessing at a five-year range.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mary+boleyn+mistress+of+kings+by+alison+weir&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

I just received Dear Mother:  Poems on the Hot Mess of Motherhood by Bunmi Laditan, who is also responsible for The Honest Toddler and Confessions of a Domestic Failure.  She is a motherhood hero of mine, modeling being an okayish mother with anxiety and other issues.  She is brilliant.  Any mother you know can connect to at least some of the poems in this book.  It's ten bucks in print.  Acquire it.  Share it.  Pass it around at those wine nights you call book clubs.  Love.  It.  So.  Much.

https://www.facebook.com/BunmiKLaditan/
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bunmi+laditan&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

What I Do Wednesday: Why I Have So Many Machines

A couple years ago, our part of the world was on fire, and when it got within ten miles of our house, I freaked out completely.  Fuzzy, who is experienced in California wildfires, indulged my panic, but assured me that the fire was going to have to act completely unnaturally to get to us.  I continued losing my mind creating a mound of what needed to go into the cars and taking pictures of our stuff for insurance purposes.  These pictures are ridiculous, with mass amounts of clutter in the background, since the fires were happening during a tech week that was at the end of putting together three shows in a row, plus commissions and classes and all that other stuff.  These pictures look like the first fifteen minutes of an episode of Hoarders to me.

Not the point. Anyway.  There are six sewing machines in the pictures.  Six.  It sounds insane until you realize that they each have their own unique purpose, and they're all necessary in their own way.  Pay no attention to everything in the background.  These are the actual pictures from the panic photoshoot.  It's mostly better nowadays.

This is my workhorse.  I bought it on Ebay over ten years ago as an early graduation gift for grad school.  It does just about everything I ask it to do, and I have acquired lots of goodies for it, like an eyelet maker and a ruffler.  It weighs a ton, so I've only taken it out for classes a couple times.  Moving it makes my husband roll his eyes in frustration, because it is almost exclusively genuine metal.  They don't make 'em like this anymore, and it shows in the secondary marketplace.

The old serger and the new serger.  I bent the crap out of a really integral piece of the old serger when I was working with very little sleep at one point, and I'm pretty sure it is fixable, so I keep it around, especially since I looooove it.  It was the first big present from Fuzzy, when we were living in a two-room efficiency apartment with a landlord named Monty who drove a gold Cadillac (that tells you all you need to know.).  It has been a trooper, and I owe it a lot, at least buying the couple parts and attempting to make it right.  The new serger came in because I needed to do knitwear fast and it was affordable.  It does a great job, and the balance is amazing.

This is a mid-level machine I picked up from Target after getting our tax refund a few years ago.  Fuzzy was starting to feel guilty about always getting a big Lego set with the refunds each year, so he insisted I pick out something for myself.  This machine is in the arsenal entirely for the one-step buttonhole feature, and it paid for itself when we did 1776.  I probably have done 1500 buttonholes on this thing by now, bless it.

This was a Valentine's Day present from Fuzzy years ago.  He is terrible about presents for the little holidays, and so most of the time, I just let him skip them.  I saw the listing for this on Overstock, though, and suggested this might be a great catch-up gift.  He loved the idea that he could hang out with me without a stack of hems in my lap, so he went for it.  This is a blind-hemmer, by the way, which does a fancy stitch that makes a relatively invisible hem stitch that can be easily pulled out when it's time to change it out.  One place I worked actually used a blind-hemmer to put in petticoat tucks, allowing them to release the tucks in about one minute instead of ages.  I was nervous about using this machine for a long while, but now that I use it, I can't imagine my life without it.

Not pictured:  The travel machine.  I bought a basic Singer for about $150 on Ebay in 2001, when I was in undergrad.  It was a stretch at the time, but I didn't realize I would still be using the machine when it would be old enough to vote.  I need to tune it up a smidge, but it has gone with me to classes, tech rehearsals, and Dickens Fair (I work in the costume shop each year, making life better one emergency repair at a time.).  It lives in a carrying case I acquired from a dead machine I was given that I just couldn't fix.  I wish I had that machine now, because I could probably fix it now.  Alas.

If the sewing person in your life is trying to explain to you that another machine is needed, just let them get it.  Mine have made my sewing life so much easier.  The only machine I'm still eyeing is an embroidery machine, but that is waiting until after other goals are met.  I'll live vicariously through my friends who have such machines.

My oldest sister is currently looking at the titles of the books in the background of the blind-hemmer.

A Tribute to Fuzzy

Every married person I know who has a husband grouses about him once in a while.  I grouse about mine from time to time, too.  He was raised in a household very different from mine, so he must occasionally be reminded that the magic fairy who shows up in the night and throws away the packaging from food used to be his father and is now me, and his Lego collection is to the "No, it's not that you need more shelves!" stage.  That being said, the man is a saint.  I'm a lucky girl.

Right now, he's washing the dishes so that I can write.  With Tiny being in a growth spurt that turns her into a human Hungry Hungry Hippos game and Kiddo needing me to be her personal Tim Gunn at the dress form, I only get a couple hours each night to pursue any of my personal goals like finishing commissions, building my stock, or writing my blog.  He takes over what he can to give me those hours, be it washing dishes while listening to a podcast or folding laundry in front of a movie.  His father taught him well.

We lost Fuzzy's father when Tiny was about a month old.  He had been fighting cancer for a long time, and when we announced our pregnancy, he pushed himself mercilessly to make it to meeting her.  I think every doctor was given "My new grandbaby!" updates at every appointment for those last months.  Fuzzy's father loved children immensely, especially babies, and had been looking forward to grandfatherhood for decades (Fuzzy is the youngest, and has two older brothers, one of whom is considerably older than him).  Kiddo was his buddy from her first seconds of life on the outside, and he just loved every minute of her.  He also taught his son to father by example.  He taught his son that because the child's mother had done the work of creating the child and the food for the child, surely the child's father can change diapers, master the "it's sleepy time!" bouncy walk, and handle more of the household chores until things get a bit easier for his partner.  Fuzzy gets up at our baby's cry, and if she can't be soothed, brings her to me in bed.  He sleeps while I feed her, then gets back up to put her back to bed.  Bless him.  Lucky me.

He also shows his awesome Dadness with Kiddo, being the present parent for most of her activities while I work tech rehearsals and finish commissions, as well as introducing her to many of his favorite things.  His work lets out early enough that he has been the ballet Dad, the gymnastics Dad, the yoga Dad, and so on.  They create Lego designs together, and are thick as thieves.  I adore them together.

Thank you, Fuzzy.  I love being a mother with you as a father.

Archives: Self Care Musings

Tiny Magoo is already six and a half months old, which means that Kiddo Magiddo is nine.  That was fast.  I can't help but remember what Kiddo was like at that age, and think about how much we've changed.  Fuzzy lost his main job a bit before Kiddo was born, so he spent most of Kiddo's first year as a stay-at-home father in between gigs.  With Tiny, he's the one with the full-time job and I take Tiny with me to my jobs.  Sometimes I'm tempted to quit the jobs that are outside the house and just put our goals on hold to stay home with Tiny.  The driving is hard, and some days, I just don't want to have her strapped to me for the whole 4-6 hours.  All the same, though, I feel so much more in tune with Tiny than I did with Kiddo. 

We opened the big spring show a couple weeks ago, and the online fabric shop just wrapped up with the spring sale, so now I just have one biggish commission and the piecework to catch up on.  A friend and I were talking today about self care.  There's so much out there about treating yourself and pampering as self care.  For me, very little of self care is about scented bubble bath and vacations to Las Vegas.  Most of the time, I need some down time, a genuine nap and perhaps a day trip to something I haven't seen recently.  I haven't given myself this care recently, and it's showing.  It seems I see those "put on your mask before helping others!" memes, and we all claim to be supportive of people putting themselves first, but the roar becomes a whisper when it appears that we may have to give something up for people to put themselves first.  "Yay, boundaries!"  "Why are you saying no to meeeee?"  Tiny's appearance on the scene has forced me to create some boundaries, and it's hard.  I'm a natural people pleaser in addition to being endlessly convinced that I can't afford to be replaced.  Thank goodness I have two team leaders who recognize my limits and allow me to back away once in a while. 

I just have to stay focused for just a little while longer, and then I get to take a bit of a break.  Pay no attention to how long I've been telling myself that.

Momming Monday Archive: Middle Class Frugality

Kiddo Magiddo's birthday party was this weekend, and I frantically prepped the house for it.  It was pretty bad, and we are going to have to go through a bunch of random piles and boxes in the next few weeks.  I let a lot of things slip in the endless shows and in my exhaustion around Tiny Magoo.  My standards always climb sky-high when it comes to someone else viewing my house, so it created massive amounts of stress.  By the time the party finally started, I was practically listless, and I had done it to myself.  Fuzzy was of course right that no one cared, and the second and third kids to arrive were highly enthusiastic about potato chips, but terrible at keeping them on plates, so there's that.

I was struck by something in talking to the other parents, though.  We are in the lower middle class, in a bracket I like to call "Bay Area Broke."  We would be downright comfortable in many areas of the US, but out here, we are definitely closer to broke.  I can do what I do (contract sewing and costuming) because Fuzzy has a full time job and a side hustle and because we bought our house at the bottom of the market 10 years ago.  Our cars are smallish and ordinary.  My mother-in-law was stunned by how tiny and "boring!" our house was when we first moved in, but she suddenly understood my requirements when Fuzzy lost his job within a couple months of closing.  They sidled up to me, quietly asking how much we needed from them to pay the bills and were stunned to discover we could cover it on my then-full-time job. 

Most of our friends are in similar set ups in our town.  At the party, we had one set of parents who had recently transitioned into the mother staying home.  She was considering returning at least part-time to work, as she had not anticipated how difficult losing money for little extras and such would be.  Another parent was a single parent living with her own parents.  Her income is limited by her inability to drive or afford a car.  Talking with her made me realize that I am much more wealthy than I usually think.

There has been a lot of talk lately about privilege and the fact that, once you get below a certain level of income, the rules of frugality and saving change.  I recognize that I am privileged to practice what I call "middle class frugality."  I have not purchased new bathroom towels in over a decade, simply because I haven't needed to.  I received several sets of high-quality towels at my wedding from generous friends.  I'm lucky that I had a wedding and generous friends.  I wear many of the same clothes I purchased years ago, because I have the space to store them and laundry facilities that allow me to keep them up.  I work hard to keep things under budget, but at least I have a comfortable budget to work in, as well as space on my credit card to float things that I will be reimbursed for later.

When my full-time job disappeared with little warning soon after Kiddo's first birthday, I learned the hard way that I needed to create multiple streams of income.  I am not wealthy enough to have real estate or investments to turn to, but we have several jobs at this point.  Right now, Fuzzy works a full-time job in manufacturing, a part-time job running lights and sound for a community center near us, and an on-call job doing backstage work for a local venue that hosts touring bands, dance troupes, and the like.  Meanwhile, I do costume shop management for an independent designer, hourly customer service and order fulfillment for an online fabric retailer, piecework for a vendor who sells at historical events, teaching at a summer day camp, overhiring for other costume shops in the area, and commissions, which are almost exclusively historical costume.  I also sell some pieces at certain events.  All this somehow adds up to what we need each month, plus (in most months) a little extra to work towards our goals.  I assure you, tax season at our house is exciting.

We work very hard, and we carefully plan our lives, but I recognize that we are intensely lucky to have our opportunities.   How do you make it work?

Momming Monday Archive: Easter Candy

My kids are cute.  I am not.  They are ridiculously cute.  Tiny Magoo looks suspiciously like the Gerber baby picture on the food, and I have been studiously avoiding telling Kiddo Magiddo her actual pretty factor to avoid an ego blast, but she is sweet and funny and charming to boot.  Suffice to say, they are ca-yute, which is fun and all, but it cases a problem on candy-related holidays.  Kiddo attended three Easter egg hunts and received three baskets in addition, so my house is stuffed with chocolate and jelly beans.  And she scored some really good stuff, which I am trying my level best not to eat while she's asleep.  Halloween is worse.  She smiles up at those nice people in an adorable costume I made, and the handfuls of candy go flying. 

After years of this (and of trying to guess what she wouldn't miss if we ate it in the middle of the night), we have come up with a system.  She can bring home as much as she wants, as the thrill is in the hunt.  A day or so later, we gather all the candy in one place, and the candy she wants goes into one bowl, while the candy she doesn't care about goes into another.  We then pick out the handful of goodies we want (peanut butter cups are wasted on the young, I tell you), and send the rest to Fuzzy's work or to be used in the next thing. Kiddo gets to have a piece or two every night for dessert, and after about two months, the rest gets tossed.  It's not perfect, but it exists, which is better than our previous method, which was to have a huge container of the stuff in the cupboard for six months at a time.

Tiny, luckily, seems to be mostly verbally appreciated and snuggled right now, which I enjoy, because (1) that kid is so sweet and (2) I have less stuff to locate.  We're consciously acquiring less stuff for Tiny.  She has all she needs and more and is a happy little bean.  I now know that she will use these things for so little time that I don't need to overwhelm her with everything under the sun.  Right now, the big winners are the ring of plastic keys, the dog who rides with her in the car, and her changing table lovie, Biedermeier. 

Kiddo just turned 9, and is fascinated by fashion for right now.  At least, she's obsessed with Project Runway.  I've been avoiding giving her a sewing machine until she understands more fundamentals, so she's been handsewing everything.  We gave her a dress form that's close to her size and another close to the size of her dolls for her birthday.  She is loving them, and I need to find more fabric for her to play with.  I figure I'll introduce her to patterns in about six months, then perhaps a sewing machine for Christmas.  Any advice, sewing moms?

It's Just Time

I have been feeling the pull to write for quite some time now.  I probably am not the finest writer available, but I showed up, which probably puts me in the top 55 percentile or so.  My family, Fuzzy (adorable husband), Kiddo Magiddo (age 9), Tiny Magoo (age 7 months), and Nina (the cat who can't ever sue me, so real name), and I live in the space between San Francisco and Sacramento that isn't the Bay Area.  Sometimes, we defensively call ourselves the Greater Bay Area, but we all know that's just code for somewhat affordable housing and the commute that audiobooks were made for.  I make costumes, attempt to be a reasonable mother, and enjoy gossipy Broadway history.  Add to that a slightly odd relationship to finances (I can pinch a penny until it slaps me for impertinence, unless there's a fabric sale on), and here we are.  I can't promise anything, but when even your gynecologist tells you that you should write, it's time to get something started.  Welcome.