That's ENTIRELY diapers. Good grief!

It's crazy now that she's in the large, brown-edged prefolds and using all the doublers. Some days it's literally the only laundry I can do because all the little pieces take up almost the whole line. (Of course, in the summer it's so hot, even my thicker fitteds are dry after they've been up an hour. So it doesn't really dominate the laundry then.)

This is basically two pails' worth. I get down to the last cover or two, and a few prefolds, then wash one full load. So there are only a couple not pictured (along with a few liners and doublers). I actually haven't paid attention to how frequently I have to do this load-- I think I have a subconscious aversion to knowing. It's probably about once per week. If it is indeed more often, I refuse to recognize that fact.

Some wipes:A bug on a cover:
The wildlife and I frequently startle each other when I'm out there doing laundry. I'm usually in la-la-land (it's a pretty mindless activity), so when you turn around and a squirrel is two feet from your face on a fence post, or you take down a towel in the evening and wind up with a big moth flapping in your face, it's fun. (Sure. Fun.)

And yes, I recognize diapers make for rather dull blog material, but hey-- the cowpoke's gotta keep her bum covered with SOMETHING. I'm just a little astonished at the quantity of that something!

More startling wildlife:

"Hey, Josephine...

...where's your EYE?"

hmmmm.

salmon eradication

Not the fish, the paint color from our living room. Here's a progress update so you can see where things stood last weekend (as of today, I'm done painting the walls I'm working on here). The going is slow. Nap times make for pretty short windows to get anything done. Helps a ton when Sean can watch Josephine on Saturdays and in evenings.
Below are pics of how it started. Except for two mustardy brown rooms, the whole house was painted either this salmon color or a dark green. To give a more accurate description of this space, an equal length is behind the camera (dining and kitchen area), creating one long room. All of which was salmon. That's a lot of salmon.
We also sold the Texan star themed fan on craigslist and installed the white one you can see in the top photo. Learned all about spin saws and vaulted ceiling fan mounting kits in the process. I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that a spin saw should not be necessary in order to replace a ceiling fan. The color is a little off in the photo below; the salmon is most accurately represented in the first old photo. But in this one you can see better the paneling on the back wall. I tore that off, which resulted in a lot of drywall work to get rid of mildewed sheets from previous laundry room leaks (which my parents fixed when we first moved in). Then I had to spray texturing back onto the wall to even things out. I had recently acquired an air compressor (long story), which led to me learning 4 things, since my previous texture work was only through some aerosol cans.

1) Buy the pre-mixed texturing. Total waste of time mixing it yourself, and nearly impossible if you don't have a drill mixer attachment, which at the time, I didn't (now I do-- that's another long story). (Most of my renovation stories are long, which is why I rarely post anything about them. I only WISH they were short and straightforward!)

2) The plastic hopper guns are lousy and you WILL end up with texturing in your hair and everywhere if/when it clogs (again with the poor mixing situation), but they seem to be the only option.

3) You achieve WAY better results with a compressor and hopper than you do with the expensive aerosol spray cans, and it is virtually odorless compared to the horrible chemical smells of the aerosol version.

4) Most importantly, you CANNOT store your self-mixed texturing in a container for a few weeks if your project gets put on hold. It will begin to smell like rotten milk. And that smell will NOT dissipate (insert tears) after you stupidly use it anyway. Your house will smell like a garbage can for weeks, despite repeated febreezing treatments and airing out. Not wise. (Thank goodness this situation has finally resolved. I waited quite a long time, until you could only smell it if you were right near the wall, then finally moved ahead with priming and painting-- and now no smell remains).
I'm sure I learned other things, but it's an exhausting experience to re-live, and no one wants to hear the gory details anyway! Back to the present: one of our favorite parts is how much brighter the ceiling is with fresh white paint on it. Previously the ceiling and all the trim were an off white and cream color. In short, every last inch is requiring paint and every seam requiring caulk,* in more ways than one. Sometimes I'm tempted to start a separate blog detailing the house renovation drama that I live out every day, the way Sean divides his material between his funny blogs and his gardening blog, etc. But with all the detailed explanations, writing it all out would only take time away from getting it done, and in the end the blog would likely just sound like one long rant. So for now I'll stick to the occasional griping overview. :-)

*A side note on paint and caulk: to paint contrasting walls without your color seeping under your painter's tape in the inside corner-- here's some advice I found on-line that has worked very well for me.
A) Paint one wall. Let it dry thoroughly.
B) Put painter's tape along the inside seam, approx 1/16" away from the corner, on the wall you just painted. Don't put it all the way into the corner because you will need to do the following:
C) Smear a VERY thin layer of painter's caulk into the corner, covering the edge of the painter's tape. Let it dry thoroughly. This seals off your tape edge, which your contrasting color would otherwise seep under. Make sure the layer over the edge of the tape is very thin (the closer you put your tape into the corner, the harder it is to keep the layer thin).
D) Paint your contrasting wall. Pull off your tape (no need to wait for paint to dry). So long as your caulk layer was thin, it will tear off with a fine, clean line.
E) Cheer.

\|/|\|/|\|/ all done \|/|\|/|\|/

Did you like my signlanguagecons? ...kind of looks like hands waving back and forth...

Soooo, we didn't quite make it to a year with the breastfeeding. 11 months and some change. About a week ago, we were truly "all done" with that, and I'm left with very mixed emotions. Which isn't surprising, since I've had mixed emotions about nursing for quite a few months. I've discussed before how she just hasn't been a huge fan of the whole thing ever since she discovered solid food. I THOUGHT we were going to axe the whole thing over a month ago when she delivered a couple seriously malicious chomps two days in a row (very different from "slipping" or a teething bite, etc.). But she only did it twice. Had she committed the crime a third time, the whole thing would have been promptly terminated; I warned both her and Sean, who was very sympathetic. We plugged away though, with her clearly tolerating the whole jig and me wishing that it would just feel more natural and bonding and less about "ticking a box." I really don't mind nursing and have always wished she'd continued to like it as much as she did as a newborn.
In the end, what did it in was unrelated. What her doctor had called "winter skin" began to develop into full blown eczema all over her trunk, shoulders, spreading down her arms, into her elbow and knee folds, up her neck, onto her forehead, and exacerbating her already chapped-prone cheeks. (I am now thinking that the "rosy" cheeks we've been battling for a good while was some mild eczema all along. I didn't realize cheeks were a common place for it to flare up in babies until I started looking into eczema seriously.)

As it grew worse and worse, I started reading how eczema was normally caused by something dietary, and simply flared up when something external exacerbated it (like wool or dry weather). I also knew that nothing had changed about anything coming into contact with her skin, and our detergent is a clean-rinsing organic one, which I was rinsing extra well, so I went with the diet idea. Dr. Spock's manual also indicated that apparently it can flare up more in babies that gain weight rapidly, and that he rarely sees it in thin babies. Josephine had been packing it on since I started giving her more cheese and the yo-babies, which have extra sugar added (previously we'd just been feeding her very plain whole yogurt). So I started cutting back on the extra calories, and when none of that helped, I axed the egg yolk, since it has high concentrations of arachidonic acid, which I'd read could add some inflamation to various issues. Wheat was already out, and we weren't adding anything new in. Sometimes the rash would seem especially red, othertimes calmer, but all the dry patches remained. Once, after seeing it looking particularily angry when I was putting on her pajamas (even though it'd been calmer that day), it seemed that REALLY the only possible culprit was yogurt she'd had for dinner. Not a single thing else had happened or changed. So we totally dropped dairy. I got soy formula to supplement with, we cut ALL yogurt and she was already not eating cheese. Within a couple days it started improving, whereas before, it had been spreading consistently. I only saw some flare ups after our morning nursing session, which was being her biggest source of breastmilk. So I started exlusively pumping and just giving her the soy formula, since my diet wasn't dairy free. (And since I'm already avoiding carbs, I wasn't about to give up dairy until we were totally sure the dairy was the culprit).

Thankfully, that really did the trick, and a rash that was seeming to consume my daughter (yes, my nerves felt like it was that dramatic) day by day since at least Christmas, finally started regressing and now we just have a tiny bit of residual dry skin, but no redness or itchiness. Her pediatrician, while she felt like eczema was usually caused by external factors, said it is certainly possible for babies to develop a dietary sensitivity. My guess is that I just overdid it too quickly with all the cheese and yogurt, dairy formula supplement, in addition to my own increased dairy consumption adding cow milk proteins to my breastmilk (in my opinion, when you cut carbs, your only consolation is cheese!).

Anyway, to wind up the story, breastfeeding has been hard, but exclusive pumping is miserable. I also watched my supply drop; with each new bag, it took more pumping sessions to fill it. So I had to decide: do I cut dairy out of my already deprived diet so we can try to ramp my supply back up only to A) have her exposed to cow milk proteins until it's all out of my system and B) wean a mere couple weeks later? Or do I just stop pumping, one session at a time, and wean the Medela machine? Since Josephine wasn't appearing to miss nursing at all, and hadn't really seemed into it for many months, I went with the latter. So yes, Medela is now weaned. I did nurse her instead of pump on the last day, since her rash was vastly improved and I figured what she drank wouldn't be a big set back if it was a one-off exposure. Wish I could say it was a lovely last moment. But she'd clearly gotten so used to sort of a teething chewing motion on her bottles, that the idea of sucking properly was gone.
Soooo... oh well. :-)

All your breastfeeding books advise going however long possible, preferably at least a year, until mother and/or child feels it is time to wean. My conclusion is that in the "and/or" part of that equation, that's a big "OR." In all honesty, I was not ready for her to wean, just like I was not ready for her to prefer solid food to me several months ago. (<-- SEE, even the language I most naturally type indicates a rejection of ME, not nursing.) I would have rather been the one deciding at 12 months, "Okay, kiddo, you're done!" That makes me the wise, decision-making adult, and it wouldn't have been something I had to say until I felt like that level of bonding had run its course. Or perhaps we'd have grown tired of it mutually. But all along, Josephine has seemed quite ready to move on to the next level of independence way before I'm ready for her to. Something tells me this is a heartache I can expect to experience for the next 18 years.

Moving on... I've also been moving Josephine away from the bottle towards the sippy cup. We're now at one bottle a day, right before bed. The rest of her formula comes through the sippy cup at mealtimes. I'd also REALLY like to move her away from the soy formula (which, I have noticed, has the primary ingredient of corn syrup solids), and on to another alternative. She seems to be responding fine to goat milk products so far, but obviously I'm a little concerned about doing too much of that at once and making her sensitive to it!! So hopefully we can transition off the soy formula soon.

Moving on FOR REAL...

Josephine has 8 teeth as of Monday.

She's also adorable as of always. :-)


And Miss Adorable will be turning ONE YEAR OLD on April 2nd! What a big girl!
As I mentioned when I told her birth story, focusing on Josephine herself is the best note to end on that I can imagine. Since she's been around, whenever I've found myself encroaching on a personal pity party, I have perspective handed to me on a silver platter by two tiny hands. The kid can really save a day by simply adding her needs and innocence to ANY situation. I wouldn't be struggling with various challenges if it weren't for her, and yet BECAUSE of her, I realize those things aren't actually worth struggling with.



On the other hand, too many camera flashes right before bed = undeniably valid struggle.

Little Leprechaunette

Josephine would like to give everyone

a big, mildly slobbery hug

from the bottom of her partly Irish heart.

So here you go.

:-)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

I CAN'T DECIDE, OKAY? JUST LOOK AT THEM ALL.

My closet light fixture project isn't going well. I have some pent up angst. I'm tired of ceiling crumbs falling into my eyeballs (AND NO, I DON'T WANT TO WEAR GOGGLES, DANG IT, I JUST WANT IT TO BE DONE). Anyway, I can't handle any extra pressure, including choosing which photo is cuter.
She's just precious.
They ALL are.
So there. (Take THAT, stupid ceiling crumbs.)










And NO, I don't have any idea where my child might have gotten her moodiness. So just hush about it.

one part crazy, one part innocent

Can we say moooooooody?

If seeing those three faces in quick succession just did to your nerves what it does to mine far too often-- you can take respite in her somewhat calmer alter ego, below:

I just don't know where this CALM kid disappears to half the time!

And in case y'all don't realize, I post things like this for my own benefit. On tough days, when she goes down for a nap, I'm too zonked to start in on a project or chores. So I'll crawl wearily to my computer with the intention of simply getting my mind far away from the present situation, and it's very therapeutic to eventually wind up at a post like this, reviewing pictures of Josephine when she's calm and sweet. It hits some internal reset button.

So thanks for tolerating cheesiness for my own sanity's sake! :-)

correction

I have been informed that the footage in the backyard with Dad was her very first exhilirating game of chase. They were not "exploring."

four random videos

Velcro imitation:



This lovely and exquisite velcro noise is also used to mimic sneezes, food containers snapping open and closed, and her dad, when he feels like engaging in a really strange noise making game that I don't totally understand.

I've also got to point out the red sweater in the video above. It was Sean's as a baby, so it had his name embroidered on it. For Christmas, his mom had the embroidery extended so it now reads "Sean's Baby Girl." I love it!! I also like how you can see a slight difference in the string color and slant. I have visions of this being added on to for ages to come until it reads like a string of "begats" from Numbers.


Yard exploration with Dad:


Yes, rolling around in dead leaves and crawling through twigs and prickly grass is considered a fun Saturday afternoon at our house.



Uh-oh:

We have the beginning stages of an "uh-oh" going on. I didn't get very good footage, but we played a "pass the toy back and forth, then throw it on the ground and say 'uh-uh-uh'" game for a looooong time this afternoon. Sometimes she jumps the gun a bit, but I find it funny nonetheless how she cops this serious, wide-eyed face and tries to say "uh-oh."
Yes, I am aware that this game is going to get old really fast. :-)


Two objects, same hand:
(You might want to turn off your sound for this one, or the ticking will drive you crazy)

This is her ultimate past-time and has been for a while. Palm TWO objects-- not just one-- and then attempt to do all other feats such as crawling and pulling up while holding onto both.

This video is from her "blanket time" which I've mentioned briefly before. It took a good amount of training and we practice it once or twice every day (average 20 min. each time). It's worth it, though. She knows to stay on the blanket, and it's a great way to have her out in the main living area with us, without worrying about what she's getting into. (Plus it makes for the most compact traveling play pen ever.)


Well, okay then.
I guess that pretty well portrays the excitement around these parts.
Y'all have a great afternoon.

"Temporary Environments"

So here's the funny picture I've been promising. I'm sure it won't take long to see what caught my eye in this setting, and about half a second later you'll realize what I was actually looking at. (I think. I can't truly be objective about how this looks to someone who wasn't there. So I will explain below.)


This post is especially intended for my brother, Jason, who as part of his architecture master's degree did a project on "temporary environments." He interpreted this by creating a large black box (3'x6'x6') with a sheet of glass covering one viewing window into the box (4'x1'). He painted the inside of the box yellow. The box was in a room painted red. With spot lights, he illuminated the left wall of the room, and the interior right wall of the box. Which meant that on and through the glass viewing window one would see both red and yellow, and in the overlap, the color orange. In reality, the orange color existed only in the viewer's mind. And that was the point: the non-existent, but very real, temporary image.

I remember him describing this project all those many years ago-- saying how he was capturing that space where a reflected image is overlapping the object you're actually seeing through the glass, and I remember being utterly fascinated and thinking (as I often did and do) that my big brother was a complete genius. And since then, EVERY time I see an overlap of a reflection and an actual object, I think of him and that project, and I think it's just all really cool.

It's not hard to prove how much I like this. A quick browsing through some of this last year's images turned up this, from our trip to California last September:
I liked that so I did it again in November on our trip back from seeing family for Thanksgiving:

Our San Antonio date, however was the first time it was so downright amusing!! There we were, sitting in our little booth at an Italian restaurant in a surprisingly cute and hip part of the city, and I looked up and about choked, because I thought I saw an enormous person in a tiny car in the parking lot outside the window. Then I realized that the woman in a booth about 20 feet behind Sean was being reflected in the restaurant window, and happened to line up perfectly with the little red car's windshield. I was overjoyed with this, and even further elated that I actually had my digital camera with me and it managed to capture a fairly representative shot with no flash.

As you can imagine, for someone who's been really into this whole concept ever since her brother brought it up nearly a decade ago-- this made my day. :-)

The Word is, yes. But typists, NOPE!!!

Infallible, that is.
Why am I so tickled that I found a typo in my Bible???
Maybe I am deprived* of winning things. I felt a similar sensation when I was taking a walk and found the lost pink shoe of a neighbor's toddler. I do believe I started jogging towards it and then lifted it over my head like a trophy, while doing a happy dance and excitedly telling Sean, "I know whose this is! I know whose this is!!"
Really. WOOOHOOOO!! I won!!! As though I found a chocolate factory golden ticket.
But it's a shoe. (And it was right across the street. This really can't even be equated to an Easter egg hunt).
And a typo. (Which I found by accident-- I wasn't LOOKING for one).
And I get no prizes for this... What is wrong with me???

But I cannot deny that this has me all giddy, to the point that I really wanted to share it with everyone!

*Uh, deprived? People have a RIGHT to win things? Good grief, Jenny.

Want to see if your Bible has a chocolate factory ticket??? Hit Luke 8:16-18. My sections have little subtitles, under which are cross-references for the passage. Having grown up in a liturgical church that follows the 3 year lectionary cycle for readings, one of which always comes from the gospels (in which there is already a lot of overlap)-- gospel verses are about as unanalyzed in my mind as the alphabet. Some parts of the Bible are easy to read with fresh eyes, because I'm less familiar with them, but only in the last few years have I been trying to truly read the gospels as though I've never seen them before. Takes effort, because it's like questioning WHY "p" comes after "l-m-n-o." It just SOUNDS right. But in reality, some of Jesus' parables kind of cram altogether in ways that don't actually make immediate sense to me. They might sound as familiar as my own name-- but occasionally I find that I am skimming over vague passages simply because they are familiar, without actually making sure that I know what he's saying.

By now, you think I'm off on a tangent, but here's my point: When I catch myself not truly following his train of thought, it can help to find the same passage in a different gospel-- sometimes there are further clues. That's what I was trying to do, since this part seemed to skip around a bit, yet still be loaded with important stuff. And here's what you're waiting for-- the TYPO-- my cross reference said to go to Mt 4.21-25. !!!!!!!!!!! Pure nonsense!!!!!! They're WRONG!!!!! They meant Mk. 4.21-25!

They typed a t! They should have typed a k! Yes, fascinating!

(I'm beginning to realize this might sound a little anti-climactic).

If, however, you're as excited as I am-- there's a chance your Bible will have the same typo! So grab your red pen and see if you can't go make a little correction! It's really fun in a "playing God and editing the Holy Word" kind of way. :-) (Disclaimer: Um, that's a game I don't actually recommend playing. What with eternal damnation and all.)

P.S. For anyone wondering if my cross-referencing taught me anything beyond how arrogant I can be when I find a typo, the answer is no. Didn't help in that regard. The Luke one was more helpful because the first part of verse 18 in that gospel is translated as "Then pay attention to how you listen" (as opposed to Mark's "pay attention to what you hear.") The "how you listen" part intrigued me. I have always read the rest of verse 18 as referring to more tangible gifts, like wealth or abilities. And I've never really understood the logic or justice involved in reading verse 18 that way (because why if you already have a lot, do you get more? And people with little get less??). But the previous verses, with talking about not hiding the "light" and secrets coming to "light," would be referring to more nebulous things, like truth and understanding, through faith, through Jesus. So "how I've listened" has been as quite the materialistic, possession-oriented, first-world citizen. But perhaps he is continuing to talk about faith and knowledge of God, in which case, the rest of verse 18 does make logical sense to me.

Not that the Bible always has to make sense, and not that I have ANY theological training or even a good commentary to turn to. So this is wholly uninformed layman talk. Please keep that in mind if you actually engage in a mental [or real] discussion with all that.

P.P.S. I previously promised a funny photo from our San Antonio date. It is on it's way. But it was temporarily sidelined due to my jackpot experience this morning. Still giddy.