I made a laundry bag from yet another tablecloth. I usually don’t like to cut up perfectly good vintage linens, but this one was rather garish and had barely been used, let alone loved to pieces. I’m glad that I made a couple of prototypes before starting the real sewing, because I had to discard my original idea to make it fold up like camera bellows. Instead, I made a simple rectangular bag. I’m happy with how it turned out; I put two handles on it that fold down inside.

TLG has been teaching himself to sing, OLC has been practicing writing and a little Spanish, and StrongBaby has reached the dancing-on-the-coffee-table stage of babyhood.

I’ve been reading off and on; just finished Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. I liked this quote:

Many of these “thinking people” could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.

It reminds me of what I told MFH about an NPR program we were listening to in the car: “These people think they’re smart, but they’re not!”

I don’t entirely agree with Sowell in this book; conservatism has had its own misguided crusades, and most of our present ills have bipartisan roots.

I’ve also been doing some sewing off and on: two tablecloth skirts done, two to go. More than a year ago I was given a better sewing machine than my crotchety old one, and I finally took the time to figure out how to run it. Still, I don’t find sewing particularly relaxing.

I noticed that the city charges as much in fees on our electric bill as the state does in sales tax–effectively a double sales tax. We’re already paying for one new stadium via sales taxes here, and it looks like we’ll be paying for another one soon. This is the time of year when the “half of all Americans pay no taxes!!!” articles start to come out, and it is simply not true, or at least truly not as simple as the headlines try to make it sound.

I’ve also started to notice that I am one of the oldest moms with babies at the parks and playgrounds. I’m starting to wonder how many of my high school classmates have become grandparents already. Last year, I somehow miscalculated my age, and even now I keep thinking that I am a year older than I really am.

I’ve been thinking about writing some fiction, and it has been comforting to learn just how much some novelists have incorporated elements of their personal experiences into their stories. Julia Nunes’s “To the Damsels: Run” song (the sound isn’t the greatest since this is a live version) keeps running through my head; more for a character that I’m thinking up than for me:

I can’t be saved,

I’m not so frail

Fighting my battles tooth and nail

Searching for truth to no avail

I’ve been tweaking household routines since we moved, and it has occurred to me that Wash Laundry and Put Clean Laundry Away really need to be two separate tasks on the chore list.

TLG and StrongBaby recently celebrated birthdays. StrongBaby likes to sit on the bottom step of our kitchen stepstool, and use the second step as a table. It seems like TLG has been two years old for most of his life, but finally he has made it to three.

It is nice to once again have a yard to do yard work in. Our landlords have an old-fashioned reel mower, which I like a lot; it is quiet and I can mow while the children are outside with me, without feeling like they’re all going to get their toes chopped off.

I’ve been reading a lot lately: a couple of Stephen Covey’s books and Jon Katz’s Geeks, and also parts of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. H. G. Wells and Jane Austen, too.

I’ve added Laser Mom to my highly exclusive blogroll; a good place to brush up on one’s physics. I need to get myself one of those $10 spectroscopes.

Exercise in reframing: I have to sweep the floor at least twice a day, and what baby could resist a nice neat pile of floor sweepings? (StrongBaby likes to sit on them.) Henceforth this activity of sweeping around baby interference will be known as “Crumb Hockey” in our house.

Let’s build a new house.
Let’s build the new house out of the old house.
Let’s live in the old house until the new house is finished.

–Remy Charlip, Arm in Arm

Now that moving chores and tax season have begun to subside, I have been working (in my spare moments) on drafting an A-line skirt pattern for myself, and will be using the fabric from a couple of old skirts for prototypes. So the above quote from one of my favorite children’s books keeps coming back to me. I bought a commercial pattern to compare against my own, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy new fabric yet, so I went to the thrift store instead. I was looking for some larger items of used clothing to cut down, but everything looked too skimpy in yardage, so I ended up buying several tablecloths instead. The average used tablecloth is colorful, washable, durable, preshrunk, and economical, and is often made of natural fibers. (Stains and holes can be covered by embellishments.)

Our social calendar has been very full lately, StrongBaby has been sick (trying to get him to sleep seems to take up half of my day), and MFH is busy preparing for the Minne-Maker Faire on April 14.

I particularly like this quote from it:

Somehow He made me understand that a mother of toddlers just isn’t like anyone else. Most of the time, my life was not under my control at all, but more like a series of random events. It was in the way I responded to the events that my spiritual life could be measured….

Another thing I appreciate from this book is her refutation of the notion that God never gives us more than we can handle.

As a first-generation Christian, she very well knows what it is like to not have everything all together, but to be loved and accepted by God anyway (which is, paradoxically, a necessary precondition to growth and change).

One of my top reasons for switching to cloth diapers* was, indeed, “to keep my husband out of Target.” Considering the money we have saved on gas, and impulse purchases, and new-found “needs”, it has been a very profitable decision.

My midwives haven’t sold our information to marketing lists, so we’ve been spared most of the advertising bombardments that expecting parents usually get.

*Edited to add: This is probably why Target doesn’t sell diaper pins. The one time I was there looking for diaper pins, they had a huge picture of pretty pastel diaper pins in the diaper aisle, but absolutely no diaper pins at all. I almost filled out a comment card for that one. I would have loved to buy colored pins like the ones in the picture, but probably they never even existed outside of Photoshop.

Next week I begin the cleaning, too. The packing I am mostly going to save for the following week, and then do one room per day. MFH’s job in all this is simply to cope with his home office: for the last three moves, I’ve had to just shovel his things into boxes for him as the clock ran down. Having him do more of that himself this time will hopefully make my life a little easier.

Meanwhile, the whole family has had a couple rounds of vomiting and other assorted illnesses. All the dust we’re stirring up is giving me allergy trouble, too.

I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.