Fancy attire, dinner music, and a little gourmet dining {p.h.f.r}

{pretty}

My first lace shawl, which I recently finished knitting, but now need to block (eek!)  I've never been one for blocking - of course, most of my knitting items have been made of acrylic (though I recently learned it's possible to block even acrylic - drat! now I have no excuses.)  I'm especially intimidated at the thought of blocking mohair and silk - decadent fibers that I'm now terrified I'll ruin in the process!  ::SO FLUFFY!!!::

 

Our most recent trip to the zoo yesterday revealed that the trumpeter swans were, in fact, a pair and have a new family!  So cute!  And such a good excuse to use a rarely enjoyed and slightly snooty word: "cygnets"!

{happy}

 

My little pianists - even Jelly Bean is getting in on the action these days.

 {funny}

Toddler Gourmet:  Pan-seared HotWheels, anyone?

My little guy still refuses to try out potty training, but apparently Potty Scotty is interesting to him again.  After requesting the doll, he entertained himself for at least an hour, asking me to "make a bottle" (i.e. refill with tap water) for Scotty.  He even admits that Scotty is a big boy for using the potty and gets to wear underwear now instead of a diaper.  Progress?  Could be...

{real}

If I can't stop her from eating Cheerios off the floor, I can at least distract her with Cheerios on a clean surface on the floor.  She adamantly refused to sit in the high chair for this snack.  (Too restricting apparently.)

Back in high school, I used to ponder strange questions like "If we took the contents of every locker in the entire school and dumped it all out on a big scale, how much would it all weigh?" and "If I were stranded on a deserted island with only a pile of tomatoes, would I be able to make ketchup?"  (At the time, I hated tomatoes.)  These days, I find myself still pondering odd questions whose answers have no real value, like "If we were able to save every UN-consumed Cheerio over the course of our children's lives (including children yet-to-be-born) just how big would that pile of Cheerios be?  How many boxes would they fill by weight?"  And the related question:  "What is the average number of Cheerios that stick to Jelly Bean's butt every time I lift her out of the high chair?  How many days would it take to fill a whole box?"  These feel like the word problems we had in middle school math.  Maybe we are meant to homeschool the kids after all.

Research Nerd

Yeah, ok, so... I'm a researcher.  (Whew, glad I got that random confession off my chest!  "Say what?" you're thinking...)

I'm a researcher.  Not in the searching for a way to cure cancer or product test-panel-y sort of way, or even the college paper-writing sort of way, but in the sense that if there is ANY question of how to do something best, or which {insert random product here} works best, or even the perennial favorite of "just how much is this kid of mine supposed to be eating???", I am instantly on the web, scouting out reviews and options and "highly touted" methods.  I think this "research mania" I suffer from is connected to my 8 years of collegiate study in two ways:

1.)  I'm stuck in that financial mentality that once obligated me to "get the most bang for my buck" (aka Ramen syndrome)

and, to a lesser extent,

2.)  Yeah, yeah, those paper thingies assigned in nearly every class EVER.

So, I'm a researcher.
Which is how my family came to be the proud owner of one of these:

Quite possibly the creepiest looking boy doll ever marketed to the paranoid parenting community.

Toilet Training in Less Than a Day (sounds too good to be true, right?) is a book my aunt loaned to me shortly after the birth of our son, along with Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (which I'm still on board with  ...I think).  I read it, I researched it, and I thought, yeah, this could work!  

Well, I still have no doubt that the methods behind it can work, but someone in the family, be it myself, my son or Potty Scotty himself was not quite ready to undertake the task at hand.  We'll try again in a few months.  In the meantime, every time my son sees the box that Scotty lives in up on the shelf, he asks about him, in that cute little 2 year-old voice and barely decipherable pronunciation.  When asked whether he would like to try potty training again, he immediately responds with a very abrupt "No!"  The thing I need to wrap my mind around is that sometimes, what works for us is going to be what works for us.  No researching, no polling, no worrying that I'm going to somehow scar my child for life because I introduced pears before green beans.  God gave us moms a certain intuition, and if we (I!) would just learn to trust it and act in love, our kids will thank us in the end.  Regardless of which "method" we end up going with (the Ramen syndrome in me desperately hopes Scotty will still be an asset in this endeavor), it's not going to matter exactly when my son is potty trained, and potty trained is potty trained.  He's not going to be 20, wishing to himself that his mother had gone a different route.

Of course, ...for boys, I hear shooting cheerios works pretty well too.