Baby Rimes

overheard this morning:

Mommy: Where’s Daddy?

Miss R: In the chicken.

Mommy: Where?

Miss R (slightly exasperated): In THE CHICKEN!

Mommy: Oh, of course.

a little later…

Mommy: What are you doing?

Miss R: I’m in the Chicken making breakfast for Baby.

Mommy: You’re where?

Miss R: In THE CHICKEN!

Mommy: Oh, ok.

For those of you who still need a translation: chicken = kitchen

So, Daddy and I were chatting the other night, and we think it’s time for a move. Baby Rimes is not really a baby anymore, and the title of this website is a bit misleading.

I think perhaps we should move the whole blog to a new page seeing as how I spend just as much time writing about our child as I do about all my crafting, cooking, and other exploits. But how to accomplish this without sending all 3 of my readers elsewhere because they can’t find my site any more?

So be on the lookout!  We might just up and move to a new bat time at a new bat channel!

I had the chance to see some of the most beautiful quilts in the world this weekend. Really. The best quilts from Japan, Australia, Germany, South Africa, US, and a whole lot more that I’m forgetting right now, but were all wonderful.

One of my favorites was the artist from Australia. These quilts were so amazing, and photographs cannot do them justice. There were these trees. And they were everywhere. Simply stunning.

Gloria Loughman   “Canopy”

I’m also a big fan of sparkles. I love embellishments on quilts. Especially beads and sparkly thread. It must be the little in me. One quilt was not only sparkly, it had CDs sewn right onto it. Talk about some major bling!

Debra Hosler   “Cosmic Debris”

There were also some wonderful colorwork quilts that never cease to amaze me. I am just in love with these color wheel type quilts. Would you believe I’ve never made one? I’m such a bad art teacher.

Judy Coates Perez   “Primordial Sea”

I just want to say Congratulations! to every single person who had art work at this show.  It is an amazing feat to finish a quilt, let alone to finish one as beautiful as all the quilts that I had the pleasure of seeing.

Look out Keith Haring, we have a new Baby Picasso on our hands.

Today, as is usual on our Mondays, we went to the library.  We played with the puzzles, picked out some books and colored.  Miss R wanted to color hearts.  So as we were coloring hearts, Mommy got a bit distracted about looking for books.  Miss R was happily coloring her heart with a wide range of colored pencils and as I peeked over the book I was looking through-something about Really Loud Songs for Toddlers-she continued happily coloring.

Until I heard, “Mommy, I coloring!”

Now, she never really says this unless she has done something new.  So I look over my book to see her perched on the chair, backwards, pencil in hand, and beaming at the painted post right behind her chair.

Mommy voice comes on, “uh-oh.”

“Miss R, what are you doing?”

“COLORING!”

Yup, you got it.  On the wall.  With pencil.  Does anyone know how HARD it is to get pencil off the wall?  Nearly impossible.  Erasers don’t do it.

So, in typical teacher fashion (which goes against EVERYTHING that is Mommy behavior), I said very quietly, “Miss R, I think you need a time out.”

She took it like a good little 2 year old.  She sat right down looking at me with eyes that said, yup, Mommy you are absolutely right.  What I did was completely wrong and I DO need a time out.

I’m so amazed at how  well she processes things.  I looked at her after cleaning up our coloring mess and suggested we clean up her mess.  She jumped up and said, “yeah.”  So we got some paper towels and did our best to clean up the wall.  She was such a good girl and scrubbed and scrubbed.  She wanted to clean it all up herself.

When we were done, I asked, “What do you think we should do now?” She hung her little blond head and said, “I sorry.”  I kid you not.  Without any prompting, that’s what she said.  I was so proud of her at that moment.

We went up to the librarian, who is not named Marion, but is named Jo, and who Daddy Rimes knows as the mom of one of his friends.  I said, we have something to tell you.  Miss R hung her little head down even further, looked at me and begged me to pick her up.  Jo the librarian was so sweet as Mommy explained what happened.  She even said that Miss R was very brave for coming up and telling her.  She had a stash of Magic Erasers for this very thing and said not to worry about it.

Long story, but the end was so sweet.  Miss R was so sad, and I’ve never really seen her show remorse for something she did.  Which really helped the Mommy side of me from becoming completely embarrassed by something my kid did in public.

But in the end, we went home and made waffles for dinner, which is Miss R’s current favorite pick and made up for a messy afternoon by dancing around the living room to the Corrs after dinner.

Mommy and Gramma spent this weekend in Chicago, at a very nice Quilt Show.

So while we were away, Daddy and Miss R had the house to themselves.  What did they do you ask?  Well, a little of this, some of that, and a whole bunch of this.

Sorry there aren’t any pictures, but they were so gosh darn busy playing that they forgot to stop long enough to take any.  What a wonderful weekend.

PS. More on the quilt show as soon as I recover enough to get the pictures up and running. 

This is the practice pair I made of cotton yarn (not my favorite choice now that I’ve tried it) of the Hurry Up Spring Armwarmers from the SNB book by Debbie Stoller.

This was also the first time I did a cable. You’ll notice the right glove looks a little funny. I don’t have a picture of the left glove for a very obvious reason. All my cables went backwards. So instead of nice little leaves, I have this crazy looking spots of raised cable while the edges are all furry. Oh well, I finally got the hang of it and am now working on those fabulous Fetching gloves I like so very much. I’ll try this one again soon.

So, when we moved in to our new abode, the first thing I thought was, “oh! those birds have got to go!” For those of you who haven’t been to my house, the kitchen is a very lovely little cottage/farmhouse/contemporary disaster of design styles. The black appliances scream “contemporary modern!!” while the blue plaid knobs are crying out, “farmhouse chic!” And of course, there’s the fact that it’s cottage sized. But the one thing that I just couldn’t stand was the birds. Someone along the line decided to use a wallpaper border around the kitchen and dining room that contained birdhouses and birds.

The birds had started talking to me, and what they said was, “please, ma’am, take us out of our misery and pull us off the wall.” So I did. Almost 6 months ago. Did I do anything else for 3 months? Nope, we just stared at the empty space where those birds used to be.

Not the best picture in the world, but you get the idea.

Then, I got motivated to take down some more wallpaper. Unfortunately, instead of wallpapering with real honest to goodness wallpaper, they (someone who owned this house before us) decided to use shelf liner OVER wallpaper. Yup. So I steamed and steamed and steamed and finally got down to the nasty wallboard that is up on the walls. Some of it was primer gray, while patches were yellow. The trim had all been painted mauve at one point in this poor house’s existance.

So, a few weeks ago, my wonderful mother-in-law said, come on, we’re finishing this thing by Thanksgiving. We cleaned all the walls and got the remaining ook off the walls. We patched and primed.

Then we painted. What used to be an old faded blue mottled wallpaper is now…

Pumpkin Toast!

In a fit of Autumn, I decided to paint my dining room the color of a squash. Albeit, a toasted squash. Now, Daddy Rimes is telling me that I cannot repaint this Christmas to a Poinsettia Red or Pine Tree green. I have assured him, this will not happen.

However, I cannot promise that come Easter I will not have visions of Pastel Pink walls.

 Until I became a parent, I never thought I’d be so excited about potty time.  Every time that I go potty, there’s Miss R telling me that I get a potty sticker and a “special” m & m. And of course, as soon as I get my m & m, she wants one too.  Which then means a trip to the potty with our pants hanging down and our diaper torn off and strewn about the bathroom (whether or not it has something in it-more on this in a minute) and the happiest face when she actually does make potty IN the toilet.

*And to any non-parents, I’m terribly sorry about what I have to say next.

But this morning takes the cake.  She ran into the bathroom while Mommy and Daddy were in there (it’s a VERY tight squeeze with all 3 of us) and declares, “I going POTTY!” and rips off her diaper before I have a chance to catch her and “plop” out falls the contents of her diaper to the floor.   Daddy and I just stared a moment.  He said something like, “eww, is that really…?”  And I said something like, “yup,” while I grabbed a baby wipe and starting cleaning up the mess.

Before I was a Mommy, I don’t think I could have done that.  After 16 years of cleaning up horse manure, goat droppings, kitty litter, doggie doodoo, and rabbit pellets, I really would have said, “eewww, gross.”  But now, it’s just another day.

Hooray poop.  Have an m & m.

As you may recall hearing in another post, we have a new game in the house. Daddy Rimes really likes his Wii (get your mind out of the gutter, this is a family page). Last weekend, he went out and bought a new game, this game to be exact.
It comes with a very fancy controller that looks like a guitar. And you play it, just like you would a plastic, stringless guitar too.

Daddy really likes this game. He likes it so much, he’s taught Miss R how to play.

She likes to stay up late and play in her jammies.

Even Mommy likes to play. In fact, Mommy is quite good at it considering she has no rhythm, can’t sing, and has two left feet. But apparently, having artist fingers with a lot of dexterity seems to be working.

Since Mommy is the official photographer though, there are no pictures of her playing.

But there is another cute baby shot!

She really rocks out!

I’ve never been to California and I’ve never seen a Redwood tree, but it is on my list of things to do before I get too old to really enjoy them.

I read yesterday on CNN about this wonderful new technology which may make it possible to clone Redwood trees. In the future when Miss R is all grown up and we have cut down all the trees to make parking lots, there is the hope that they will still be able to grow a new forest in Al Gore’s backyard.

One of my favorite stories is the Lorax by Dr. Suess and this story sort of reminded me of it. When I worked at the Kalamazoo Nature Center one summer, we put on a play version of the Lorax. I got to be “backstage” and work with the “Oncelers.” They were so cute with their arms all painted green.