shiso mama

OK, OK, it’s not Sunday. But all the antibiotics are making the days blur together. It’s the desperado edition of Fashion Show Sunday.  Don’t even try to resist the bandana. It’s covered with foxes!

Here he’s telling me he’s hungry. For cookies. Or ice cream. No, thirsty! For juice! Or soy milk! Or, hey, that looks tasty too!

My mom is only here one more week, and I’m trying to get as much done as I can in this next week, but the ill is really slowing me down. When I’m trying to work, I think about how tired I feel, and when I’m lying down, I think about all the things I want to do.

But on a brighter note, I went to one of my two favorite fabric stores yesterday, and was pleasantly (or maybe frezied-ly) surprised that they were having a 20% anniversary sale. I couldn’t resist. When I came home, I admired and fondled all my new purchases and then immediately washed them so they’d be ready for sewing.

PS - thanks to silk felt soil, Z Recommends and Think in Pictures for the links!

Maybe being sick isn’t too bad if you get to lie around like this, watching cartoons and being force fed sorbet.

Hello friends,

I feel like lately I’ve been posting without really saying much about what’s going on in our lives. There are some new ideas that we’re thinking about - nothing I’m ready to talk about yet, but dare I say that I generally feel good? Although not healthy, since I’ve once again managed to catch Otis’s cold (I think he’s just caught his third cold without having yet recovered from the first or second cold) and it’s starting to settle into my lungs.  While I was teaching today, all the kids were coughing coughing hacking, several cheerfully telling me while standing awfully close, “I haven’t been to school all week but came just for this field trip today!” One very ill-looking girl even coughed directly into my palm.  How could I not get sick?  OK, enough about me.  Now to Otis.

Otis is huge. I mean ginormous. No, gargantuan. Is mammoth bigger than gargantuan?  I look at him sometimes and think, “How could he look so old?” I pointed out that picture above to F, saying, “Doesn’t he look oooooooold in that picture?” and he conceded, “Maybe. He looks like he could almost be a THREE year old.” How dare he mock me and my aching ovaries?

He and my mother are thick as thieves, with their games and their jokes. It’s gotten to the point where my mother’s almost better than I am at deciphering his toddler jibberish. She leaves in a week and a half and everyone’s sweating and shaking, thinking about the inevitable end.

His Chinese has improved immensely since her arrival, his vocabulary of jungle and forest animals far exceeding mine. I occasionally have to cheat, pretending to ask Otis, “Baby, what’s this animal?” pointing something out in a book like I’m testing him, but really, I once again forgot how to say camel in Chinese. And ever since that day when his father looked at him blankly while Otis commanded “Zwuo! Zwuo!” until he changed to “Sit!” Otis has been speaking English with F and Chinese with me. The sign language has fallen by the wayside, unfortunately, but we still occasionally use it to good effect (he almost always remembers to use it when he’s asking for a cookie or ice cream, just to MAKE SURE we understand).

Enough Otis minutiae? OK, I’m now going to make a DISTURBING confession. Tonight, I baked with Splenda.

*gasp* *faint* *gag*

My mother was diagnosed with diabetes over a year ago, and while she’s always been a careful eater, she’s now fanatical about her diet. Basically, if we weren’t around to bully her, she’s eat boiled vegetables with a pinch of salt every meal. So I basically believe it’s my duty to make her cheat while we’re together, which her doctor encourages her to do. I make her eat small amounts of her favorite pastries and breads, which she can’t even get back home, and take her out to eat various ethnic cuisines, which my grandparents and father refuse to eat. She loves oatmeal cookies most of all, so I figured I’d try to bake with the Splenda.

I guess I should say here that I never touch artificial sweeteners and flat out refuse to drink diet soda. I hate the taste and the idea. But Fifth Aunt Grandma K lives on diet soda, and buys artificial sweetener by the Costco-load, so she had a big tub of Splenda for me to use. There’s nothing like a large mayonnaise jar full of fluffy, chemically-looking Splenda to make a girl feel like baking!

I combined it with regular brown sugar, because you do need some real sugar to give the cookies some tenderness and rise. It didn’t cream well with the butter. Adding an egg curdled it further.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so careful to not let a stained finger go near my lips. I mean, not even after I’ve touched poo.  And luckily I peeked halfway through baking, saw that they weren’t spreading, and flattened them so that they looked like cookies rather than turds.  But the report from Mom is that they’re tasty, and she can’t tell the difference, so a success overall.  I’ll bake her a ton of them to take back when she leaves.

Otis’s friend, Stella, turned two in December and just had a birthday party over the weekend. Too bad Otis was too vomitously sick for us to go, because I’m sure it was great fun.

It’s easier to make and buy presents for babies when they’re still little and still can’t express opinions or preferences.  I wasn’t sure what to get Stella for her birthday. She’s got a pretty fantastic selection of toys, so I couldn’t come up with any original toy ideas. But I heard that she likes cats (and I was forbidden from buying her an actual pet), so I made her a black cat purse.

It’s made from fleece so it can be thrown into the washing machine. Its ears are looped so they act as handles, as you can see from our once-again uncooperative model here:

I hear that when she opened the present, she said, “Jiji purse” (Jiji is the name of the black cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service, one of her favorite movies) so I’m glad that she feels some connection to it.

Dear babies,

You are killing me. Not mine, for once, but the rest of you, with your all deciding to arrive around the same time so I gotta make so many presents at the same time. Can you cool it? I mean really, didn’t you hear that the year of the Golden Pig is coming up? It’s auspicious. You know, lucky? Just hold off, OK? Wait, but not all of you. Just a few of you.

Thanks.

I went to a lovely baby shower today for my friend Carey. What a talented group of friends and family she had there. So many thoughtful, handmade gifts - receiving blankets, a quilt, a Raggedy Ann doll made from a pattern passed down from Carey’s grandmother. I made my own humble handmade contribution: a baby starter kit.

It had a blanket, “for the SWADDLING of the baby,” two burp cloths, “for the BURPING of the baby” and two bibs, “for the DROOLING of the baby.”

I made them with some Marimekko fabric and lined them with some soft flannel. I feel like I’ve been so up my to eyeballs in boy stuff that I had a little difficulty choosing gender neutral colors (they are waiting to find out the sex of the baby). I think this will work for either, but then again, I’ve been known to dress Otis up in feminine colors, tights, and leggings from the girls’ department.