Ornaments

Well, you wouldn't believe it from looking at our homemade ornaments this year, but I really can do crafty things...

The trick is getting Noah to do crafty things. Now, this salt-dough ornament may look ugly, but let me at least point out that someone (cough-cough) had the brilliant idea to let a three year old use a straw to punch holes in the cookie-cutter ornament and it's almost, almost cool. Even when he doesn't punch the holes all the way through. Right? Right? Family Fun will be calling me up any minute to learn all about our clever technique.

And why, yes, that lovely yellow gold color is organic turmeric powder that I worked into the dough for 15 minutes while the piccolini poked each other (and themselves) with straws.

Sigh. I'd like to say Noah made that all by himself, but even that ornament needed lots of help from Mommy.

Sitting by the tree the other day, I saw this old salt-dough ornament. I put them side by side on the soapstone counter so you really get the full effect.

That beautiful little Jack-in-the-Box ornament was painted by my mother the year that I was roughly the same age as Noah. And my brother was roughly the same age as Mattias. AND my mother was pregnant with child number three.

Wow. I'm humbled. You know what the problem is. Let me quote myself: "Sitting by the tree yesterday..."  Um, yeah. That's the problem. You can't make beautiful things when you sit on your lazy butt looking at the ornaments on the tree.

Still an architect

Every year at this time, in addition to Christmas, New Years and my birthday, I re-register myself as an architect.  For the last 3 years, I've groaned especially hard about this whole procedure.  It costs about $600 and requires that I complete some continuing education requirements.  None of which would be very much money or very much time if I was actually working as an architect.  But I'm not.  I'm at home with the piccolini 100% of my time - and I'm paid zero.  Keeping myself registered feels like a real effort, but there aren't alternatives for someone who wants to take a mid-career break.  At least, not in my state of registration.

I'm not ready to give up architecture entirely. I still have a desire to practice. In the last year, I've had about 5 inquiries from people who want my help with a project of some sort.  And I really want to say Yes.  But it's difficult for me to do anything other than taking care of the piccolini right now. Life was far more complicated for our family when I worked part time. Continuing to put all four of us under that kind of stress seemed unwise. And we've built our lifestyle accordingly. But work that requires more than 10 minutes of time means I need to hire a sitter.

Speaking of which, my 10 minutes is up.

Moving Target

Mattias is crawling all over the place these days. Today, he discovered he can crawl from one room to another. He was so excited. It's not clear whether he had any intentions as to where he was going - or if he just thought, "Hey, that looks new interesting, let's go that way!"  But he was clearly pleased with the results.

Of course, there's that lovely evolutionary tendency to become extra-clingy when one discovers one's own ability to move. That part is not so fun for me, especially since Noah never outgrew the clingy-phase. Um, let me rephrase:  Noah has always been in the clingy-phase.   So, two clingy-phase piccolini makes progress difficult.  And you know how goal-oriented I can be? And you know how crazy everything gets around the holidays?  I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.

In fact - if I think for a moment - it's almost not worth mentioning the crawling, because Mattias is also pulling himself up on things now. He stands just about everywhere and anywhere that he can.  Meaning that I need to be careful about stuff like piles of boxes. Between the move and Christmas, piles of boxes are EVERYWHERE in our house. Just one lightweight box tipping over can send him tumbling down onto the hardwood floors.  And wisely, we got hickory floors instead of oak, because hickory is much harder than oak. It's good to be prepared for all that damage piccolini will do to your wood floors, you know?

I think Mattias' mobility has Noah on edge as well.  These days, Noah's doing a lot of yelling at Mattias to leave his (fill in the blank) alone. I thought I had it all figured out yesterday. I let Noah play on the stair landings.   Mattias kept guard at the bottom of the stairs.  Since we moved in (three weeks ago?) Mattias loves guarding the bottom of the stairs.  As long as he's not thinking about Mommy, he can guard the stairs for almost 20 minutes.  Quite a while for someone so young.

So, with Noah playing on the stair landing and Mattias guarding the bottom of the stairs, I had almost finished washing the breakfast dishes (which I must do by hand because the soapstone people ruined the dishawasher and it hasn't been fixed yet poor me) when I watched Mattias climb up the first step. Damn. So much for that solution. He must have heard me thinking, because he looked over at me, reach out his hands for me, fell off the step, bumped his head on the hickory floor and started crying.

Solving problems with piccolini is such a moving target.