Again, and in SPANISH!

"Would you like to pray your bedtime prayer tonight, or shall I?" I asked. Meg always wants to pray for meals these days.
"You do it!"
I open my mouth --
"In SPANISH!"

So I did. Kind of. It's a good thing the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, when we don't have words!

Input

Me: "Thank you for your input."
Jonathan, helpfully: "That means go away and be quiet."
Meg: "No, it doesn't! It means stand there and be miserable!"

King Daddy the First and his kind-of coronation

Meg just put a plastic ring on Jonathan's head and declared him "King Daddy the First." But then the ring slid off. As crowns so often do.

Jonathan: "While the king was looking down, the jester took his thorny crown."
Meg: "Are you the jester?"

No fishing

"We do not fish for our sister, not even with a leopard-spotted scarf." Jonathan

Just to clarify

Meg wandered out of her room and had some questions about the daily schedule.

"Is this naptime, Mom?"
"Nope."
"Was that just me playing quietly in my room?"

Yup!

Also - and this will be of absolutely no interest to those of you without babies, so feel free to stop here - I figured out what to do with those baby nightgowns with elastic around the bottom. As far as I can tell, they're kind of worthless for night wear once the baby's feet stick out, but I had two that still fit her fine through the top and sleeves. Today I put one on Kate and (this is the key bit) added pants. Duh! Now it's a shirt that actually stays put around the waist. I feel clever. Or possibly silly. But also clever.

The peacemaker

Our golden bust of Bismarck usually wears Meg's lei and necklaces, but tonight Jonathan found them jumbled in the living room and picked them up. Meg came running over in alarm.

"No, Daddy! They're mine!"
"No. Bismarck's."
She grinned suddenly. "Okay."

That's Bismarck, still averting crises a hundred-some-odd years after his death. Not bad at all.

Smile!

Kate started smiling last weekend! She's got a great smile. I'm trying to get some good shots, and I'll post them on Facebook.

Also, on the subjects of smiling and lipstick, I was reading and apparently you're supposed to apply lipstick with a brush. What?? Someone invented a double-ended lipstick-and-brush. I can see it maybe if you're a professional makeup artist and the lips are going on stage or a movie, but for normal mortals? Somebody explain this to me.

A daughter's prayer

In one of my notebooks, I came across something Meg prayed for me a while back. I think I had a headache that day, and it was too sweet not to write down.

"Oh dear Lord, please heal my muvver's head and her feelings. Please give her wisdom and patience and ibuprofen and her lipstick and... what else do you need, Mommy?" Meg 12/16/12

I think the Lord definitely heard her. :-) He has definitely kept me well supplied with lipstick and ibuprofen (jury's still out on wisdom!).

I'm still trying to make things

The phrase "You can do quilting" means vastly different things depending whether you're reading a sewing blog or a fashion magazine. Instyle does not, sadly, give you a tutorial on how to quilt something.

Now that I have two little ones, every stitch I sew is a victory. This even includes stitches I have to rip out, so there. Under this reasoning, any completed project is a lot of victories all rolled into one. I guess the big question is just how victorious it has to be, to be "finished" -- will anyone really notice if the hem is uneven? But if I don't fix it, will it look homemade? And what if it looks homemade either way? Decisions, decisions.

Today Jonathan taught me to tie a bowline knot and a drop loop knot. I'm really pleased - it'll be very handy to have knots that won't fall out. It's so aggravating to scramble after beads in the grocery store after one good tug on your necklace.

True observations about Brigadoon

Tonight I insisted on putting on Brigadoon instead of Treasure Planet. I billed it to Meg as a grown-up movie with singing and dancing and (just to make sure she was properly excited) said if she didn't like it now,  she would someday. She seemed okay with that and started a running commentary on it.

Me: "Those are the two guys this movie is about. Do you know where they are?"
Meg: "No."
"Scotland!"
"Scotland?! Dad has a story about Scotland!"
"Yeah! It's a good place."
"I wish we could visit Scotland, but it's not in Virginia."

Sadly true. Then some cows swam into view.

Meg: "And those are the cows this movie is about."
We had a brief digression on hairy cows or harry coos. Then Meg got to the essential question of any art analysis.
Meg: "Are there any dinosaurs in this movie?"

"The girl in red is the one getting married. The one in yellow is her sister."
"Is she getting married?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because... she hasn't found anyone to get married to yet."
"Maybe she could marry the guy singing Bonnie Jean."
There, she solved it. Note: if my bright three-year-old can predict the plot, your plot is not, um, twisty.

A minute later she sees them singing about heather together. "Hey, her sister found someone to marry!"
Yep.

Scene change.
"He's trying to make her go away so he can take a nap. He's tired."
"Why is he tired?"
"He was lost in the woods all night!"
"Is he a wood man?"
"No, he's an American."

The American who isn't a wood man: "If there's anything I hate, it's you. Any civilized person would be dead by now."
Meg, disapprovingly: "He's not kind."

"They're all going to the wedding? Are they all going to marry each other?"
"Well... the bride and groom are going to marry each other."

"Did he fall out of a tree?"
"Yeah, he fell out a tree because Jeff the American, the hunter, wasn't careful and he shot him!"
"He should be more careful next time. I'll be more careful when I shoot a monster--"
"YOU don't get a gun until you're older and we teach you how to use it!"
Maybe we need a new rule: no shooting monsters in the house.

"What's going on?"
"She's sad because he's going home to America and she has to say goodbye forever."
"Oh. Maybe she'll find someone else to marry."

"Is that the end?"

Not squishing Kate

I had both girls in the chair with me, which is generally a supervised sport. Me: "Don't squish."
Meg: "I'm not squishing. I'm just keeping her toes from wiggling."

Kate has felt recently that she should be held at all times. And held properly, too - none of that putting her in your lap and using your hands for something else nonsense, either. Computers are okay sometimes, though she likes frequent, if not continuous, eye contact. One of her grandmas was able to come down on Friday and hold her, and I got so much done!

Why you should put all your clocks back promptly instead of piecemeal over the next week...

For whatever reason, the big clock in our living room was running ten minutes fast. It wasn't a big deal, and probably helped us get out the door when we were running late, and the rest of the time we just remembered it was actually ten minutes earlier than it said.

Then the time changed. The clock now proudly proclaimed a time an hour and ten minutes off. This was terribly confusing to Meg, who kept trying to say naptime should be over an hour early, and furthermore we're starting to talk serious math calculations when actually we just wanted to know what time it was.

So Jonathan corrected it. It's the simple things in life.

Pretty to go

It is a truism, right up there with a-single-man-in-possession-of-a-large-fortune-must-be-in-want-of-a-wife, that you never have enough burp cloths. (Less euphonious, though.) Kate's burp cloths were all Meg's, and there never seemed to be enough of them, and while they're fine with the nursery, they don't match the cute diaper bag. 

The solution was obvious.

To the fabric store!

Rather to my surprise, Joann's actually had half a dozen cute flannels in orange and turquoise. So I got them. And prewashed them so they'd shrink before sewing instead of after, because that's just annoying.

Yesterday afternoon I lovingly, meticulously, made three big squares, each with a different pattern on each side and cut out on the grid so they had actual right angles and genuine equal sides. I poked the corners out and ironed them and topstitched all around so they'd stay put. Boy howdy. I did them right. Besides being nicely absorbent, they'll be good to lay her on or to cover her feet when we're out and about, or for a nursing cover in a pinch.

But that sort of precision is exhausting and took like three hours. I took the rest of the flannel, sliced each piece into quarters without measuring, and zigzagged around the edges. Boom. Done.

And that is the story of how I made two dozen burp cloths and three big squares, all cute to go with my pretty diaper bag.

The end.

I love her more than monsters, too

"Mommy, you're the best mommy and God's the best God of any other gods in the whole world! I love you and God more than monsters." She frowned. "I don't love monsters." Then she gave me a kiss. "That's because I love you so, so much."

She's so sweet.
Jonathan: "And quotable."

::update:: Meg came and kissed me again. "Just because I love you. QUOTE IT!"