Somebody get this thing off me!

I'm currently being crushed by a heavy weight, pressed down and completely immobilized. It presses down my shoulders, rendering me an inert lump. I shackles my hands, keeping me from cutting, pinning, drafting or sewing.

What is it?

It's the overwhelming volume of all the ideas I have right now. There are so many that I can't focus on any one at a time. It's sewing ADD.

I want to sew-along with the Cool Girls Club, but I'm pretty sure I need a full-bust adjustment on my t-shirt. Throw that on the to-do pile. I'm trying to think of patterns that will sell, so that gets slapped on, too.

Rylee has very few things sewn by me, in spite of all the sewing hoopla I've whipped up around me. But what should I make for her? I'd love to make everything she wears, where to start? I want to copy about everything I put on her these days so add those half-baked ideas to the heap. I have four or five patterns that aren't even opened. Should I sew them as is? Alter them? What fabrics anyway?

Not that this indecisiveness keeps me from buying fabrics. Oh, no. Must keep buying everything that strikes my fancy! And have those fabrics sit and say "What shall we do together?" And take sewing classes because they're "free" (included) and that loads me up with ideas.

And I sit and do...Not. One. Thing.

This is so not me. I'm a planner, a list-maker, a doer and executer. Steps one through five, I get them done and move on. I'm bold, decisive. Franklin Planner in hand, I bang out those to-do items.

I can blame sleep deprivation for at least some of it. Higher order mental skills are the first to go, or so I hear. But I wonder sometimes if something is fundamentally changed by all this SAHM business.Or maybe just the mom business. Can I get it back? Do I want it back? Maybe just some of it?

And so it goes...

I wish I hadn't let Rylee in on this computer super power

Yoga v. Sleep, Round Two

I mentioned last week that in trying to make peace with Rylee getting up at 6:30 I decided to start taking an 8:15 yoga class twice a week. To make that class we need to leave by 7:45. Here's how that went today...

5:30 am - Rylee wakes up for the first time, I put her back in bed
5:50 am - Rylee wakes up for the second time, I put her back in bed
6:10 am - Rylee wakes up for the third time, I put her back in bed
6:30 am - Rylee wakes up and since it's officially her morning I pull her into bed with me for a quick snuggle. Monday at 6:30 I was desperate for her to snuggle for even 15 minutes so I could be prone for just a little while longer. She lasted 5 minutes. Today at 6:30 she promptly fell sound asleep. Sound. Asleep. Oh, and did I mention on my arm?

6:50 am - I decide to extricate (successfully) but now I can't pack my gym bag or get dressed. But I can pack her a to-go breakfast and get her clothing out so I do that.

7:30 am - She's still asleep. I get my gym clothes and pack my bag without waking her. Dither, dither, dither, what to do?
7:40 am - She's still asleep! This would be a dream any other day. Ok, I decide to call this one for sleep but now she's slept so long that if I want to get a shower I'm going to have to be swift and silent. To keep the dogs from waking her up I decide to shut the bedroom door. I forget I live in an old house. So that goes about like this: "CREEEEAAAAAAAAK...Mommy!" She wakes up happy and I'm thankful for small favors.
7:43 am - Decide to go for it. Worst case I'll be too late for class but can still hit some piece of equipment and get a shower.
7:53 am - Pulling out of the driveway with a dressed baby who is munching on her to-go breakfast. That cuts drop-off time to two minutes, but if I carry her rather than let her walk in I can maybe still make it.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the area around my house currently looks about like this:

So to get anywhere I've got a few nasty intersections to get through. There's literally less than a lane in each direction. Two very narrow partial lanes are all that is available, one in each direction. Today that proved to be more exciting than usual!

See those two little cars at the top of the drawing? I'm in the one headed in the proper direction. At the entrance of these little traffic cone lanes there are signs that look like this.

I'm pretty certain that the sign the woman in the top, left-hand car saw does NOT look like this:

In her defense the traffic pattern has only been like this for about five months. But narrowly avoiding a head-on collision is good for my heart rate, right?

Having survived near-death Rylee and I are still on track to make it to the gym with about a minute to spare. Slamming on my brakes in the above scenario did fling her fruit mash-up onto the floor, but she still has dry cereal and milk to last her until the next red light. And please - feel free to cut-and-paste that breakfast description into any letters to the nominating committee for Mother of the Year.

For reasons best known to herself, Rylee has a little tantrum and flings her cereal all over the car. She then asks for cheese as we are just about to turn into the parking lot. She's not allowed to have any food there so I'm hoping she will finish her cheese at her usual quick pace. She doesn't.

I scramble into the gym, now already a few minutes late for class. The childcare workers inform me she'll have to stand in the hallway to eat her cheese. But they're willing to stand there with her so I can get to class. In the cooler light of now I'm blessing them for that but at the time I was irrationally irritated with Yet Another Hassle.

Zip down the hall, four minutes late for class. And so flustered that for most of the class I'm about like this:

Ohm well.

Why I hate Cal Patch

Design-It-Yourself Clothes, p 60

"Take a look at your armpits, and you'll see that they basically are right on the same horizontal line as your bust. [emph. mine]"


Sigh. This shirt is never going to fit.

The actions of a desperate woman

After the initial success of Rylee's new black out curtains, which lasted about a week, she's been gradually moving her wake-up time back earlier and earlier so that as of yesterday we were back to 6:15. It doesn't sound that much different from 7:00 but the extra 30-45 minutes really makes a big difference to my sanity.

Yesterday I bought some pushpins and pinned the sides and the bottoms of the curtains to the wall. Light had been seeping in the edges and bottom and with an earlier and earlier Arizona dawn I think it might have made a difference. It's now dark as a tomb in there, not to mention so fashionable and ready for House Beautiful!

This morning she woke up at 5:50 and I put her back down and she slept until just after 7. Then she took a 2.5 hour nap. Her usual is 1.5 - 2 hours. She didn't nap yesterday so that may have contributed. But I'm crossing my fingers again that this time the curtains will work.

Our new laundry room cabinets

I think I ordered the wrong kind by mistake.

At least this is what I think I must have ordered based on the quote I got today...

Stupid Lunar Calendar

This is Rylee last Easter.

She was wearing something else and spilled on it so I changed her into this. A hand-me-down pinafore over a cotton one piece.

I'm so glad she spilled because this outfit just screamed Easter and springtime. You can better see the one-piece, and her buddy Finn gathering information on the wisdom of putting your finger in someone else's mouth, here.

Now that the skirt for the sew-along is complete (pictures soon) I thought I should make something for her for Easter. I wasn't sewing last year at this time.  I was getting excited, doing some shopping on etsy, drooling over fabrics. I even made a little crayon sketch on her kids' menu at lunch the other day. And then I looked at the calendar. Crap.  No time to order new fabric AND come up with a new design. Probably no time to order fabric even for an existing design. Next year I have until April 24th, but not this year.

That means fabric on hand. I'm thinking a jumper and a hat from my final skirt fabric . It's cute, has a spring feel, and she can get more wear out of it.  So here goes nothing.

Because I'd love to have another picture that I love as much as this one.