Petit Lapin au Chocolat

Petit work in progress

A new soft tree to round out a trio for my mother's birthday later this month. This is what I started last night instead of going to bed early.

Lily is, to understate the situation, not a good sleeper. And now that she's mastered trapeze arts and advanced tumbling, she has taken to catapulting out of her crib (actually a co-sleeper with the sides up), somersaulting across our bed, and landing in front of the bedroom door. She gives the door a few good pounds, then takes off running toward the bathroom (to bathe her hands and face in the toilet, no doubt). This is to ensure that we open the door and capture her quickly, after which she deems it crucial to stay awake for the next two to three hours while we perform a circus act to get her back to sleep.

We are wretched. Desperate. Frantic.

If you had to label us, we'd consider Attachment Parenters to be the closest description of our philosophy. But really, we're just trying to respect Lily's needs and phases, respond to her desire to be close to us, and not freak out when she's awakened for the fifth time in one night. We started sleeping in the living room (we have two rooms: a bedroom and a living room/kitchen) so that she would go back to sleep by herself when she woke in the night. She had been doing this well while we were still up (in other words, from her bedtime at 7 until 11 or midnight when we retired)... up until we began sleeping there. She quickly figured out that she was waking well into the night to find us STILL not in our bed, and started coming out to find us.

Last night before going to sleep I went to check on her, and found her sprawled on our queen-sized bed where she had fallen asleep mid-handspring, her feet on one of our pillows. I took a blanket from our pallet in the living room and covered her up. One blanket and a pillow short, we creaked down to the floor for the night, clear losers in the sleeping game.

After Sunday, not quite Tuesday

Works in progress, cut last night: The funky purple fabric is “oilcloth,” really vinyl coated fabric that I will back with flannel for portable diaper changing pads. The flower-ladybug fabric will be backed with the yellow flannel for baby floor mats. This will be the prototype, and my first foray into batting. Wish me luck. Someone (SouleMama?) recently used blue painter’s tape to mask off her quilting lines. I think this is a brilliant idea. I will steal it.

Today Lily’s babysitter called (again) to tell me (again) that she has “something to do” and wouldn’t be here at the appointed hour. Luckily my freelance work allows me to make up time at night or on weekends. I ask her to come only three days a week for a total of 14 hours, and almost every week, she either can’t come at all one day or she has to leave early or come late. I would get rid of her except that I shed blood finding her. Languages and learning about other cultures are important to me (read: an obsession of mine), and I have always wanted my child(ren) to have a Mandarin-speaking babysitter. Jenny is a lovely woman, is educated, speaks beautiful Mandarin, and came highly recommended. She just isn’t reliable.

The upside is I get to spend more time with Lily and blow off work. I’m wistful when it comes time to leave her with Jenny, and I always emerge from my home office (aka the unrenovated vacant disaster area with no ceiling that is the upstairs apartment) at least 15 minutes early to hear the stories of the day, see her latest tricks, and find out when and what she ate, whom she saw at the park, how she pooped…

This morning I couldn’t resist a photo of my pink princess next to my pink throne. This chair was rescued and then sat on for years with stuffing spilling out of its salmon-pink 1940s upholstery. I searched high and low for months for the perfect fabric. I looked at deep reds and some blue-greens. But the fabric I kept going back to matches the old upholstery almost perfectly. The chair was attached to its pink. Its will was too strong.

The aftercraft

My version of soft trees from the Little Birds pattern. I used a vintage Pendleton wool plaid shirt (and its buttons) from my friend Violette Crumble and an old red sweater I felted this weekend. The bows are made from strips of the plaid shirt. I sewed the trees by hand, because Lily was sleeping, and I was not to be stopped.

Thanksgiving was lovely and exhausting. I cooked for eight hours on Thanksgiving Day, which was luxurious because I never get to cook with abandon anymore. On the menu: broccoli casserole, roasted pumpkin, mashed rosemary potatoes, lima beans, poached pears, and pumpkin chiffon pie (an old recipe of my partner's mother, who was down from Vermont). Everything was divine, and there were barely any leftovers to gnaw the next day. I spent the rest of the weekend baking banana bread and waxing catatonic in my chair.

Tonight I am home alone with Lily, and I plan to make another little tree, this one out of strips of fabric, and affixed to a base. It's an experiment, inspired by a Christmas ornament my sister gave me last year.

Random day of the year resolution: Learn to take better pictures.

Thinking about starting a business, as I wrote about below, is daunting. I seem to be frozen in a state of indecision / fear / self-deprecation / apathy / inability to perform simple mathematical equations. Everything has derailed from my own indolence. And when I see people who aren't any smarter or more talented than I am running successful businesses, it aggravates my (inflated) sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't I have my own business? If it's because I know how to use apostrophes and quotation marks, I can fake it! Why shouldn't I be running a craft group for "mom's" and "baby's"? Or more to the point, a language immersion playschool for small children?

Clearly, I must stop making these soft trees and get back to my business plan. But not until I've finished that stocking...

Worst Thrift Store Ever (WTSE)

The promised pictures of my new fabrics, soon to be works in progress...

On one of the coldest days of the fall so far, feeling lame for having kept Lily inside for most of the day, I trekked over to the thrift store closest to my house (WTSE). The impromptu trip was made possible by time I had left over from our visit to my friend J's and her baby boy H, onto whom Lily unleashed some serious attitude... after which we were asked to leave. So we nursed our wounds out in the blustery cold (thanks a lot, J) and over to Atlantic Avenue to hunt for wool.

I freely admit to jumping on the felting bandwagon, and was hunting for sweaters to felt for the adorable hat pattern in November's MSL. Despite Lily's piercing rendition of Go Down, Moses, from her prison on my hip, I managed to stay long enough to score three of the only, say, six? wool sweaters in the entire joint. But they are nice, all-purpose, muted colors, one of which is a lovely powder blue cashmere I will make into the hat for Lily and some booties for gifts.

I lived for a few years in Cleveland, where the thrifting was the stuff of madrigals and fairy dust, until New York got wind of it and started renting minivans for weekend raids. My favorite was Unique Thrift just down from my old neighborhood, which by the way is so fashionable now that just last week I saw some hip Brooklyn whippersnapper wearing a Tremont T-shirt for the love of Pete! Back in my day [creak of the bones, pinch of snuff], Tremont was full of dilapidated houses and boasted one indifferent little coffee shop. I had an 18th-century two-story house of some Civil War fame on a high bluff overlooking the hideous Cuyahoga River and the skyline of Cleveland – with a full attic, a back shop room, a laundry room (how I pine for one of those again), a charming little backyard with a patio, fish pond, and mature fruit trees (including two sour cherries!) – for 600 bucks a month. I was one of the hated gentrifiers. But I was one of the first with my then-boyfriend, now friend, Kyle. My boyfriend Kyle became my ex-boyfriend Kyle because the thrifting was so damned good (that's my story). I brought home countless projects-in-the-making, and never did anything but work in my vegetable garden.

The upside to this is that we stole two beautiful cats who loved gardens. One of them is the larger of my two babies (yes, still larger than Lily), The Black & White Kitty (Kitty for short – and Lily's first word). I lost Betty in the split-up, and she is now retired in South Beach.

I digress. I was spoiled by Unique thrifting. I bought tables for a dollar that I have sold for hundreds to New Yorkers (of course, I moved them across the country and stored them for years while I lived in Paris, so I made money on them not so much?) – my current sewing table is one I bought for three dollars (pictures to come). I found amazing vintage coats and all manner of pristine vintage housewares for pennies. So New York thrifting by comparison, to say the least, is dismal. Hell, it's dismal even not by comparison.

Is there any thrifting stone left unturned? I know you wouldn't tell me if there were (and you shouldn't).

I did manage to get a photo of the zucchini-oat-currant bread before it was duly et. This one's for you, E. I call it Still Life with Mini-loaf.