As Daphne becomes more and more adept at talking, she has been starting to originate things on her own. I still have to answer when people ask her her name, and I often put the idea in her head to go tell her daddy that she loves him.

She was sitting on my lap the other day while i was doing some boring work and she gave me a giant kiss and started playing with my hair. She looked at me and said, “You’re gorgeous mama, just gorgeous.” It’s been a while since I recall saying that to her (I used to say it all the time), and it hit me completely from left field, but it made me smile.

Today, she was saying bye to her daddy so we could go swimming, she ran up and gave him a hug and a kiss and was running away. She took a pause in her run and said, “I love you daddy,” before racing out the door.

Daphne was playing today and out of the blue said:

“I love you mama, too much.”

The electrician came last week and spent several hours at our house crawling in and around reinstalling circuits and generally making sure that we were not going to burn down the house. I know that plumbers make about 100 per hour. The Light Man was here for a good 4 hours, and Jared and I were cringing about what our bill would look like. It turns out that it was less than $200 for the work that was done. He did a fantastic job and we couldn’t have been happier. What a relief to have that all sorted out.

By the way, we used Simpson Electic out of Mcminnville if you were in the market for a Light Man.

I have been waiting for months and months to get done with some other sewing projects so that I could make some wool pants for my babies. I finally got the pattern this week, and I sat down to sew a pair of pants.

Needless to say, I must be out of practice on sewing clothing because I had a lot of difficulty. In the end, I got a pretty ugly pair of pants that I’m not sure what to do with. Of course I used my most expensive fabric to make the first pair of pants. I’m going to rip them out and try to start again somehow, but for now, I’m just too darn frustrated.

The point of buying the pattern was to allow for extra room in the bum for a cloth diaper. The photos of the pants online are really cute. I must have done something terribly wrong.

Though they look Ok from the front
They are just downright baggy in the back.There is such a thing as too much room in the booty! I’m actually more concerned about the wrinkly, wavy pattern I’m getting in the fabric more than anything else. Time to save for another month or two before I get some more fabric to start again.

I got Jared a keyboard for Christmas so that he would be able to work on a lifelong dream of being able to play the piano. This has been a big hit with Daphne, and when she sees the keyboard she tries to play. It has an unfortunate side effect that when Jared tries to practice that he has a little girl in his lap wanting to learn also.

On her birthday, they were sitting together playing music, and Jared made up a song that he called Daphne’s song. It goes:

Daphne’s Song
Daphne’s Song
Daphne is… (enter random things here, i.e two years old today, etc.)

Today, Daphne was singing to herself while she was playing and this was the song.

Daphne’s Song
Daphne’s Song
Daphne is so cool…yeah!

I’ve been working on posting a lot more recently. Yesterday, however, I just totally missed out. Every time I sat down to write I was back up on my feet being taken somewhere interesting by a 2 year old just learning to discover life.

We spent a huge part of the getting the house clean. I’ve been on this organizing kick recently, and the house was getting a little out of control, so I spent a lot of time organizing the house. Hopefully, the result is that everything should now have a place where it belongs. If something is taken out, it should be able to be put back where it belongs without much fuss. That was a lot of the problem.

I have had a box that my mother-in-law brought up for me this Christmas from her mom’s house. It was a set of bone china that was being passed on to us. I finally got it out of the box and got it cleaned up and put away. It is a beautiful complete set of 8 settings. I am so happy to own it.

The sun finally showed his face yesterday, so during the warmest part of the day (it got up to 57 degrees), I took Daphne and Flaff to the park. We spent a good hour and a half on the swings and going down the slide. I even got a phone call in to my grandma. It was so lovely to have nice weather outside and to be doing something fun with the baby and the dog.

In my own personal organizing kick, I got my inbox empty of random things. I had an hour of video of Daphne to process and put on DVD, so I managed to do that, which is lovely. I am now fully caught up on DVD/photo processing.

I even got a chance last night to transfer some music off my computer that has been waiting to be put on my MP3 player for over a year. Now all my music is where it belongs and it has been backed up!

I started to go through some old photos, and I realized that I have a lot of photos that have not been backed up, so I’m going to be spending a lot of time uploading old photos to my backup site. This might take longer than I was thinking it would. However, I will be so much more comfortable when everything is safely backed up and in a system that I can use.

When I got back home from the walk, Daphne and I made some mashed veggies and chicken rolls. After all that work, neither Jared or Daphne were hungry, and poultry is difficult for me to eat right now. No one was going to eat dinner, so I sat down and ate half a chicken roll myself just for good measure. Also, home made ice cream came up on a Facebook conversation, so I whipped up a batch of egg nog ice cream for fun. Ice cream has been a nice little treat for me before going to be recently (I know I’m bad).

It was a domestically boring day, with plenty of little exciting parts. It surely is becoming spring because I hear the bird migrating. Daphne dragged me out onto the porch yesterday when she heard a migration of Canadian Geese. She said, “mama, mama, I see birds.” I had to go out and look for where the bird were with her. What a sweet little end to the day.

After Daphne’s nap, I headed to the kitchen to get dinner started. We get our vegetables from a CSA, so we get and awful lot of veggies sometimes. It often is overwhelming because it is meant for a larger family, and there are only two of us that are eating large meals consistently. I have 3 weeks worth of vegetables that I needed to get cooking.

I was going to make chicken rolls, which is a really cool Rachel Ray recipe, but I was going to put rapini and mashed roots into it to use up some veggies. I was using some thigh meat from the chickens I butchered last year, but I had to debone them. I was not meant to be a butcher, nor was Jared, so getting meat off raw bone is not easy for either of us. When I finally got it off the bone, Jared showed up to grind it for me.

However, in my frustration of getting the meat off the bone I forgot I was sauting the rapini, and I ended up burning it to a crisp. Two weeks worth of rapini gone. I really wanted to try it too because I had never eaten it.

In my frustration over the rapini I threw out the chicken bones rather than put them in my boiling pot of chicken stock on the stove. That was very frustrating to me because I RAISED the chickens FROM SCRATCH, and the fact that I wasted a perfectly usable product that I had worked so hard for was upsetting.

I lost my will to cook after that. After all, the smoke detectors have already gone off twice since I started cooking, so Jared’s reheating taco meat and making some taco shells so I can whine about it on my blog. Bad job Chris.

After working on it for three days straight, I’ve finally got all my photos backed up online! It is a complete relief to have the photos up there because now I know that they are in a safe place should something ever happen to both of the hard drives they are stored on now.

Now I’ve just got to get the other files on my computer backed up, but that’s not going to be a problem at all, it’s less than 1 gig of stuff.

Before the winter started I decided that I was going to sew my way through the winter making baby things. You’ve seen many of the photos that I’ve posted of the various creations, and sometimes, I have a hard time thinking that this baby could need ANYTHING ELSE.

Truth be told, many of the swaddling blankets that I have from Daphne are just too darn small to swaddle a baby that is any older than a few weeks old. I did some research online, and I decided to make some blankets that were 36″ by 45″. I went to the fabric store and found two flannel prints that I liked that had animals on them and were unisex. I then bought a ton of muslin.

I made a blanket with each of the flannel prints backed with muslin. They came out REALLY well. I then made a blanket out of 100% muslin. I also have my 100% wool blanket.

I like my fabric choices because this baby is going to born in the summer, so it is going to be hot, but swaddling is comfortable for them. The muslin is very light, so it won’t be too hot. Additionally, the wool blanket will be fantastic for the summer as well because wool insulates against heat the same way it insulates against cold.

Just one more step on my baby sewing project that is complete. What a relief!

On Friday, our dishwasher completely died, and we were having some other electrical problems in the house, so we waited out the weekend and I called an electrician on Monday.

It turns out that the circuit that runs many things in the kitchen had failed. The electrician couldn’t find the wiring for it, so he had to set up an entirely new circuit. While in the process, he discovered that our other electrical problems were due to the fact that some rats, yes RATS had chewed through the insulation of wires and they were sparking and running hot under our house. That’s a pretty scary thought, and considering the fact that I’ve been on a kick to get things organized and sorted out, it made me even more resolute in my decision to get a few things done.

I need to finish uploading all of my photos to an off source site. This is taking forever, but I will sleep so much better when this is done.

I then need to take our video camera around the house and document all of the things that we have. I went over our insurance policy lately to make sure that we had enough coverage. My insurance agent reminded me that even though we have the coverage, we will not be reimbursed for personal property unless we have a way to prove what we own. This is now on the top of my list of things to do.

As soon as my house is clean again I am going to go through our entire house and document our belongings to make sure that we would not be at a total loss if there were a fire. It’s better to spend the time to be prepared and never need it than to lose everything.