the best of the firsts

two things almost keep me from posting this: 1, i don't like tons of videos on blogs. 2, i sound utterly demented and deranged in this video.

but there was never any real danger of the world not being shown this, no matter how loud and stupid i might sound. this is layla's first real laughter. she's given a few little 1 second amused coo's before but never full blown. thank god for camera phones.

she isnt completely on screen all the time because i had to hold it out to the side or else she would be hypnotized by the apple logo on my phone, and so my aim wasn't the best. at 54 seconds that is her squealing, not me. and lastly, none of these are how i really laugh, in case you were thinking of not being my friend on that basis. i was reveling in layla's laughter and also hamming it up to try to get her to keep going, so they're a bit over the top.

there is one part where i say "oh my gosh, that's your voice" and i am seriously choked up. the moment passed pretty fast as i devolve back into a stupid guffaw to try to keep her going, but it was a magic one while it lasted. i think all babies sound pretty much the same when they cry or coo and that that isn't their real voice on display. something about the noises she was making here just snuck up on me out of the blue and slayed my lil' heart as the first time i was really hearing "her."

something from nothing

ok, game over. as of last night we decided layla HAS to have her own room. the plan was to move her in with judah after she grew out of our room, but i underestimated how big their developmental/sleep habits gap would still be in these next few months. it really wouldn't be fair to either of them, which would translate to way harder for us, to force the shared-room thing right now. additionally, we cant fit a crib and bed in there without serious crammage, so we'll need to wait until they can navigate bunk beds safely.

she's been sleeping in our room her whole life and will be for a while longer at least, but it's starting to feel crowded up in here. judah only stayed in our room the first 3 weeks, so this has felt like a loooooong stretch. great for breastfeeding, bad for me and jesse doing anything more noisy than miming in our room if she's sleeping.

the baby, the bed, the bassinet and the bald spot.

the problem: we have a tiny three bedroom house: our room, judah's room, and the craft room. ruh-roh. there are no extra rooms, so you know which one has to go. peace out sew-cave. this is actually not bad however because we do have one space that is NEVER used: the dining room off the side of our kitchen. we are horrible and eat most of our meals in the living room so the dining room table has just become a convenient horizontal surface for us to dump piles of stuff on when we come in to the house. here it is after we cleaned it tonight (yes, after. it is usually piled about 3 feet higher above sea level):

its an ikea table (free china set with purchase!) with a wrought iron frame and lattice shelf suspended underneath. great place for storing placemats and napkins but also a horribly restrictive cage if you like to cross your legs under the table. the space, layout and table just don't make for a great setup for the traditional family dinner. we mourn this, but move on.

that brings us to the craft room/office/layla's room. when i first added a craft space to the house, it was just a nook and we still had a couch/bed (pride keeps me from calling it a futon, but 'twas). here is what that looked like. since then we ditched the couch/bed and the baby turtle that was my nook rolled in some mutagen ooze and became a massive ninja turtle:

kind of awesome. messy, utilitarian, mega-productive.

after she was born, we decided layla had to have a dresser for her every day clothes. the closet in this room is already for her special and future clothes, but we had piles of onesies all over our bed and it just couldn't continue. so in came a little dresser. but with just her clothes in this room and nothing else layla-related, she never actually came in here to change. we'd just snatch a onesie and run back to change her in our room. i never kept them organized after washing them, a pile began to grow on top, she was growing out of clothes before ever wearing them because i didn't realize what we even owned. chaos reigned.

layla's dresser and the crafting companion's chair. jesse spent many an hour in there keeping me company watching TV or reading while i sewed.

that brings us to THE PLAN:

1. abolish dining room-CHECK and good riddance. when the kids are school-aged hopefully we can reinstitute family dinner at an actual table in a new house or with a better layout in this one (perhaps i will sew in the attic)

2. sewing room becomes sewing table-CHECK. all the dangerous stuff is stored in a closed-up box out of judah's reach (though i WILL let him touch non-lethal things so he can learn the hard way). this will be good to because now i am right in the middle of the family action space if i want to sew during the day, and can stay connected with living room play, or even keep an eye on something cooking in the kitchen while i sew. i used to have to shut myself away, and i didn't always love how isolated i felt.

that undershelf is super useful for my often, but not always-used sewing accoutrement. and while sewing i never need to cross my legs so the shelf doesn't annoy me at all anymore . (first project in new room: replacement ironing board cover)

3. clean out sewing room storage: partial check. i went with clearly-labelled boxes for materials and fabrics that i rarely use and stored them on our garage shelves. we still need to remove the desk attachment from the bookshelf and put it in the attic for "someday" use in another house. and i still need to find somewhere for my main fabrics.

it remains to be seen if this will have been a smart system or just drive me out of my mind

4. come up with a clear design idea for layla's room. preferably stolen from someone much more stylish than me so that it isn't a disaster and raging waste of money that i come to hate 40 days later: CHECK BABY!

i went to oh dee doh and browsed through their baby room tours with the intention of narrowing it down to 3 i loved and asking what yall liked best. however when i found the first one, nothing else ever came close, i was so in love. this room is what we are gonna model layla's after:

DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

can we discuss the greatness here? the charcoal walls repel any accusation of "too girly" but ask for and go with every color under the sun which keep the gray from being dreary. we are gonna spray paint judah's crib light gray just like here and keep the big square black bookshelf in that was already in that room for storage and cutsey-thing showoffedness. the dainty little white wallflowers are like $20 for 25 and at my local store and i am gonna try to ghetto rig the yarn ball mobile too. my mom's amazing sewist friend offered to make crib bumpers for layla a while back so i am gonna pick a cool fabric in a neutral color and pray the offer stands. warning: don't fall too in love with the rug like i did because its a heartbreaker at $300 from anthropologie and will never grace our floors. but the rest is doable and should be budget friendly, i think.

the entire tour can be found here.

5: DO IT! no check yet. must comparison shop and find a bit of time, we only decided all this last night at 7pm, after all. inspiration abounds though. i woke up this morning and remembered this project and i couldn't go back to sleep i was so excited and ready to start working. for a mother with a newborn, that is something.

it feels good to get over my pouty "this house isn't big enough for us so i'm not even gonna try anymore" attitude i was rolling with there. the fact is that for 4 humans, our little ranchie is a palace compared to what we would live in if we were in almost any other time period or country. we are going to make it work and make it lovely for as long as it's ours. game on, suckaz!

lil' sailor

there are two things that i have always looked forward to in parenting. even since i was a little kid, i never did the doll baby caretaking sort of thing, but these two tiny random slices of parenting i always looked forward to. the napping toddler in arms, and the secret language.

i specifically remember leaving a braves game one time and seeing a 3 or 4 year old kid just passed out in his dad's arms. i remember thinking that is so cool that the kid is so very comfortable with his dad that he can just splop all over him and find perfect rest. no matter the noise, no matter the movement. 100% of his little person depending entirely on someone's arms. and the bigger the kid, the better, because obviously a newborn could be held by stalin or whitney houston and still feel secure. but the older we get the more likely we are to distrust or worry that something bad will happen or that we'll be dropped. judah definitely distrusts some people and situations. so that makes this even better for me:

note his arm, which could be limp, hugging me instead. MELT!

and the second thing about parenting that i always was excited about was how a parent is sometimes the only one who can decipher the weird toddler babble that flows free at this stage.

judah's vocab has skyrocketed in these past few months. i would say he has about 200-300 words now and he understands almost 100% of what we say to him. it's becoming insane. and SO flipping fun. this kids slays us. we are screaming laughing on the floor at least 3 times a day over something he has said or tried to say.

even stock vocab like "tractor" comes out kind of whack from the untrained mouth of an 18 month old ("GACK" in judah's case). when i would babysit kids this age and they would say something like "shmor buggin flizzhen bloop," with total confidence, i would just stare at them like they were having an absent seizure. then the mom would come up behind me and say, "oh, he want you to put his blankie on your head and spin around." DUH!

but i thought that was so neat that the mom and dad have the inside edge to this totally unique language. only they can understand him. they turn tiny babbling ozzy osborne into an utterly intelligible silver-tongued bob costas (my gold standard of oration).

we have an example of this as well. a terrifying example of jesse learning one of judah's new vocab words. in fact, jesse didn't figure it out until later that night when judah grabbed his thomas and friends train and said it again. it was "murdoch" he was saying, the name of one of the trains. he had dropped his train on the floorboard and was asking for it back.

you will note that this sounds NOTHING like the english pronunciation of murdoch, and instead sounds very much so like something that he should NOT be saying over and over again and that i promise you he hasnt heard from us (me).

the thomas website describes murdoch thusly:

"Murdoch is a mighty engine with 10 wheels. He was brought to the island to help with the heavy workload and pull freight on the mainline. As shy as he is strong, Murdoch can often be found seeking peace and quiet."

evidently judah doesn't like the strong silent type