Two Blue Buttons

I’ve told you before about our house’s history. How the family that lived here, lived here for years. How they tended roses, collected agates and didn’t mind line-drying clothes.

What I didn’t mention, I didn’t know, but I know it now: the ground here is packed with bulbs. Spring has been an explosive affair, with color bursting out from unlikely corners, as beds that looked barren turned out to be stuffed with slumbering bulbs. Crocuses, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinth pack the beds now, but there are greens that promise to be poppies, geraniums and a number of other things we’ve yet to identify.

Almost every day we go outside and prowl the perimeter, looking for new flowers. The tulips are just showing their colors now, so that’s our current infatuation: the front ones, they’re yellow! Oh! Did you see here? These ones are pink and ruffly!

Among the agates are blooms. Along the driveway: blooms. On the far side of the house, where nobody goes: blooms! The earth is so full that, when my mom gave me a bleeding heart plant, I couldn’t find anywhere to plant it. It’s just sitting there, forlorn, waiting for a vacancy.

Mitch said it well one afternoon, as we studied the beds, anticipating the day when the green will burst into colors. “What we’re doing right now?” he said. “We’re reaping what we did not sow.” And we like it.

• fell asleep in the sun, reading Bleak House.
• got a sunburn (see above).
• threw a housewarming party!
• ate a lot of cupcakes (see above).
• planted things and dug other things up.
• read an entire book about compost and came away strangely inspired.
• celebrated the empty tomb and all that it signifies. Oh, joy!
• celebrated the empty tomb and all that it signifies with family and friends (see above).

Remember, months and months ago, when I wrote a few posts about Diaper Free Babies? Well, I thought I’d check back in and let you know how things are going.

If you need a moment to reacquaint yourself with the previous posts, here they are: An Introduction, Adventures with Lydia, and Lastly, Sarah.

So, Mitch and I assumed that EC with a second child would be harder, take longer and would probably be a sporadic affair, but we hadn’t counted on one huge advantage: we’ve done this before. With Lydia fully out of diapers, our day naturally includes trips to the bathroom, and the habit of leaving a child in a diaper for hours is not one we had to unlearn. When changing diapers, it’s second nature to sit Sarah on the potty for a minute (just in case) or to cue her if we know she’s going potty in her diaper.

Even then, though, we weren’t nearly as deliberate about EC with Sarah: we took her to the potty when we could, not every time we thought she needed to go, and she still wore diapers most of the time.

However – and this is an important “however” – somehow, EC took. I hadn’t thought much about it in a while, between moving and getting used to our new routine, but one day, Sarah just wouldn’t stay out of the bathroom. Sheesh, I thought, hauling her out each time, only to find her in the bathroom again a few minutes later.

Apparently, I just wasn’t getting the message, so the next time I went into the bathroom after her, I found her trying to climb onto the (closed!) toilet.

And the light bulb went on.

“Do you need to go potty?” I asked. Sarah nodded vigorously and said, “Yep!”

Just like that. Now, I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, of course, but she seems so close to graduation we can almost smell the absence of diapers in our house. I’ve even taken her out shopping without a diaper (but with a spare change of clothes), and she’s often in training pants for hours while we’re at home.

It’s that last part that I really want to share with you, since I’ve had a few potty-training moms ask me about cloth training pants recently. What we do is very simple, and results in few puddles: we use these simple, cheap trainers, and put them under fleece or wool pants. The pants absorb the extra, but if she does miss, she feels wet enough to come tell us that something’s up.

To be fair, Sarah still tells us after the fact when she does some bigger business in her britches, but the trainers keep everything contained, if you will, so I don’t think that’s any worse to clean up than if she was in a cloth diaper (especially if you have a diaper sprayer – spendy, but worth it). All in good time, though. We’ll get there.

So, with Lydia, we relied on timing – taking her to the potty when we thought she needed to go – while Sarah, who knows how to get what she wants, tells us, in one way or another, that it’s time. Sometimes she climbs on the toilet, sometimes she looks me in the eye, babbling earnestly away, and pats her pants. Sometimes, I ask if she needs to go and she yells, “NO!” and runs the other way. So one assumes that she isn’t interested.

Before I finish, I do want to mention one thing: I’m under the impression that people see this, some times, as a lot of work, more work than conventional potty-training, and I cannot stress enough that it just isn’t. EC is just a different routine: say, the process of potty-training begun earlier and diluted over a longer period of time. I didn’t do any more laundry than I would have if I’d been cloth-diapering full time. I’ve really enjoyed introducing the girls to the potty as babies, rather than toddlers, because they take it as par for the course (and there are no power struggles). Using the potty isn’t a new concept: it’s what they’ve always done.

That said, I cannot emphasize enough that every family is different, and it is always my goal to respect that. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and I know that there are a thousand decisions that we must make as parents: to do EC  with Sarah, I elected to buy her baby food, rather than make it, because I just couldn’t do both with two kids. I’m just happy to share what’s worked for us because it’s worked so well, and because it seems a bit misunderstood.

I suppose the moral of our story is: EC is worth trying. Especially, when faced with the prospect of a diaper free 18-month-old who doesn’t realize that she’s doing something awesome, I would say that it’s very worth trying.

Things are blooming. The wind feels mild now, though we still wake up to snow sometimes. We put crocuses in old vanilla bottles and set them in the windowsills; the birds return, and taunt the cats by perching just outside the screen. And I get that bug, the one that makes me organize and declutter and hold things up in the air and cry, “Really? When was the last time we used this?” There’s a pile marked “Yard Sale” in our garage, and the warmer the air becomes, the higher that pile climbs.

I’m turning that energy toward my Etsy shop right now, as I’m getting a feel for what sells and what doesn’t, for what folks admire, for what I enjoy making so much that I don’t mind making them again and again. I’ve thrown in some new designs and will add more with time, but what concerns you most are the ones I’m throwing out: I’ve marked a bunch of things down (fairly dramatically, in some cases), and they’ll probably stay that way until they sell.

Please take a peek and look for things with “SALE” in the title. I’ll add to that category as time goes on, but things are already disappearing into homes (that aren’t mine) at a satisfying clip, so keep an eye on it.

In the meantime, may your spring cleaning be ruthless and deeply, deeply gratifying.

On knitting

I knit an entire (toddler-sized) glove while visiting with friends yesterday. When one of them commented on the glove’s sudden arrival (“That just appeared while we were talking!”), it occurred to me that that is exactly what I like about knitting: you begin with a ball of yarn. You click away with your needles for a frenzied while, then poof! A glove appears.

On embroidery

I’ve used embroidery to embellish things, but only this weekend did I grab a hoop, some muslin and a few feet of charcoal floss and sit down for some quality time with needle and thread. As I stabbed away at my tiny stitches, Mitch observed, “Pretty slow going, eh?”

It is slow going, partly because you do need to acknowledge each stitch in a way that isn’t necessary while knitting: instead of clickclickclickclickclick, your solitary needle goes down…pull through…tighten; up…pull through…tighten. Maybe the pace will pick up as I improve, I don’t know. But I kind of like hovering over those individual stitches, watching the word “Goodbye” appear on the fabric.

There are a million things to love about life with little people, and a handful of things to watch out for (flying shoes, for example, or suspicious puddles on the floor). But there is one aspect of it that I’ve been savoring lately, and that is our ability as a young family to concoct traditions out of nowhere.

Some traditions we brought with us; some fell in our laps. Some, we very deliberately invented with the help of books and friends and, possibly, Pinterest. The tradition I want to share with you today is a hybrid of the last two options: there was a book involved, but there was also a degree of the haphazard. It happened like this:

One day, I picked up a book and read a poem at the table, while the girls finished their quesadillas. At the next meal, I read another. The next day, a few more. Then one day, I forgot, and Lydia demanded, “Poem! Poem!” (she hangs out with a toddler, you know). I grabbed another book and began again.

And just like that, poetry became a part of the fabric of our meals. Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Shel Silverstein and Madeleine L’Engle have all been our distinguished guests, but I thought I’d share some of our very favorites with you:

A Child’s Garden of Verse, by Robert Louis Stevenson is the absolute favorite, requested by name at every meal.

When We Were Very Young, by A.A. Milne is a close second, and one that usually gets us laughing.

Thirst, by Mary Oliver gets rave reviews, and somehow Lydia never lets me put it down without asking, many times, for “one more.”

Small Poems, by Valerie Worth, was a library find that we enjoyed so much I’m hoping to get a copy of my own soon.

Images of God, by Marie-Helene Delval isn’t strictly poetry, but it reads like it and each entry is a very nice length for reading at the table.

…that for the month of February, I’m giving away free patterns! I have a handful of free ones on this blog, yes, but I also have a handful listed in my Etsy shop, normally sold for $3 each. But the spirit of Leap Year/Valentine’s/random generosity has gripped me, so until February 29th, The Box House Baby Blanket, Button Up Fingerless Gloves, Classic Fingerless Gloves and the very popular Half-Pint Fingerless Gloves are all free. So stop by, add one or all of them to your cart, and select “Other” when you check out! I’ll take care of the rest.

If there is one thing that a girl learns while living in small spaces, it’s how to use a small space well. No nook goes unnoticed; no cranny unused!

And if you have lived in a number of very small spaces and then move into a house with a hallway – a phenomenon you’ve possibly never encountered before – you promptly put it to work.

You, in fact, make a hallway into a library.

I got this idea from Pinterest and those red shelves from Amazon. Together, they put the books out where the girls can see them (and nobody’s run afoul of them yet!):

Here, we showcase a rotating display of the girls’ artwork in red-coated Goodwill frames:

And yes, I sort our books by color.

Lastly, no hallway library is complete without a princess:

(You can’t see Sarah because, for most of these photos, she was sitting in my lap.)

Before I show you a photo of our bedroom, I must open with a disclaimer: I borrowed this idea. I borrowed it from JJ Heller, a lady I admire in many ways, not the least of which is that she paints trees on bedroom walls. I “borrowed” it in the way that some people “borrow” cars and are later convicted of a felony, but I don’t think that my sort of borrowing is illegal – it’s just not terribly original. And I thought you should know that up front.

Disclaimer aside, here is what our room looked like before we stormed in with paintbrushes, sloppy sketches and Adele.

Then we got to work and it began to look like this:

Then I got to work, and it started to look like this:

And now it looks like this:

And now we sleep there (that’s my favorite part). We’ve since added curtains, snazzy lamps and some art. We have more to do, but it’s lovely now. I love being there.