I'm selling some mei tais!

Baby carriers, that is. Not to be confused with a delicious alcoholic beverage, the Mai Tai. If you're interested, all the info & photos can be found here: www.mei-tai.blogspot.com

Happy Birthday, Ambrose!!!

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

adventures in cloth diapering...

I'll spare you all a lengthy post about all of my newly-formed opinions and preferences within cloth diapering, but I wanted to post some pictures of my new all-in-one (diaper + cover) pocket diapers that I've been spending most of my free time working on. I'm really pleased with them! And the best part? To buy diapers like these new, they would be $11-$13 each. I, on the other hand, hit the Veteran's day sale at Joann's and spend $10.66 total, and made 15 diapers. They've basically already paid for themselves, in relation to disposables. One side is flannel, and the outer layer is high-performance alpine fleece (as a cover--though some would insist that you need even higher quality fleece, this works just fine). I'm stuffing them with prefolds and an extra soaker made from scraps of flannel, old towels, and fleece. Anyway, here they are: Inside the pocket And, of course, sealed with a snappi. Maybe someday I'll get the boy to hold still long enough to get a shot of him wearing one. Until then, you'll have to take my word for it. :-)

and another thing...

Little boys really DO instinctively know what sound cars/trucks/other moving vehicles make. No one taught him this, but over the last few days, Ambrose has started pushing around his little yellow dump truck making a "vrrrrrrrrrooom bvroooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOm" noise. He also knows that trucks are supposed to crash, and that when that happens, it is loud. Little girls do not do this. When did my baby become so much less of a baby and so much more of a boy?

baby talk

I just can't get enough of Ambrose's sweet new words. Today he started saying "Oh no!". He says it so passionately, too, like he honestly thinks whatever misfortune has just taken place is really a tragedy. I think that sometimes I don't give him enough credit for his communicating efforts. For example, today, while I was folding some laundry, he crawled up beside me and started pointing to his high chair repeating, "num num, all done, num num, all done." (He pretty strongly associates being "all done" with being in the high chair, since we make him say it before he can get down after meals) I was sure it was just a fluke that he seemed thrilled when I responded by putting him in the high chair and giving him a banana--but he did the same thing again at dinner time. This morning, I sat him in the rocking chair while I was making the beds and handed him a few books. He proceeded to "read aloud" from them in this deep, droning baby-babble. It was very adorable, though I'm hoping not an accurate reflection of how he perceives my reading aloud to be. :-) And a bonus picture. This is what we call "Sunday afternoon" around here:

so, things have been pretty quiet around the ol' blog...

so I thought I'd ramble a little about the small happenings around here. I'm officially over the halfway mark this week--21 weeks pregnant. Woohoo! I have a consultation set up with Homefirst, the homebirth/uber-crunchy medical practice in Illinois. For those of you who know something about them, it should humor you to know that I'll be consulting with Dr. Rosi. More on that later. I will almost certainly walk away with a story to tell. Ambrose, of course, has been busy. He's not very good at staying still long enough to stand on his own for very long, but has attempted to take a few steps here and there. To his vocabulary, he's recently added "night-night","up", "down", "uh-oh" and now actually correctly addresses "mama" and "daddy". He is in love with his daddy, and has taken a preference to him over me when given the option. Well, usually. We've slowly been making the switch to cloth diapers over the past few weeks, which has been surprisingly enjoyable, and not nearly as gross as I'd expected it to be. There is, of course, alot of trial and error involved, and alot of experimenting to find your own personal preferences. But, on the whole, it really saves us money (really! I honestly debated this for a long time)--and I'm all about that, especially with the prospect of two in diapers. Other than that, I'm having a ton of bizarre pregnancy dreams these days. Last night, I dreamt that I was in labor in a hospital in a labor/delivery room with another woman who was also laboring. Her birth was super fast, and she was just sitting there, holding her baby and telling me that she didn't understand what was taking so long, and bragging that she'd already had her baby. This dream made me very, very angry. Other dreams almost always leave me very panicky, and usually consist of me hopelessly forgetting Ambrose's name, leaving him someplace that I can't remember, or just not being able to find him. Still no buyers for the house, though. It's a bad time of year to be selling, but I'm soooo praying that we won't be moving when I'm 9 months pregnant. *sigh*