Riley and Avery

Oh, where to start cleaning? Add two days of me not feeling well to nearly two days of children being stuck in the house and you have one heck of a mess. I just haven't been able to catch up from being sick. And it doesn't help that Rudi (who was not working Thurs or Fri) constantly nettles me about how messy it is, yet does absolutely nothing to even minimally clean up after himself. The constant criticism is getting old. Like if I'm holding Avery and we're getting ready to go somewhere and I ask Rudi to hold her while I get my coat on, he sighs and makes a comment like that I'm always passing the children off onto him. What?! To make matters worse, Riley has been staying up until 11:30pm or later, which eliminates my "me" time and this has been going on for days. And Avery is resisting her naps, so it takes multiple trips to the bedroom to finally get her down. I feel like a big grumpy bear surrounded by people with poking sticks. Somebody might get hurt.

I'm trying to have at least a halfway decent day. I cut out six fish from construction paper, put a paper clip on their lips and wrote a,b,c and m,s,t on them. Then I cannibalized a refrigerator magnet and tied it to a piece of yarn and tied that to a stick (which we have a lot of thanks to Riley the junior stick-olgist). So now she can go fishing for letters. Her Montessori school teaches those letters (actually those sounds, they don't really use the names for the letters) first because a lot of three-letter words can be made out of them. They also don't teach upper-case letters yet, because 90% of letters are lower case. I think that I may really try to teach her her shapes using this method as well, so that I can get her tested for color-blindness for this pesky red-green thing. The ophthalmologist uses shapes in young children.

I am going to start auditioning cakes for Avery's birthday, which should make Rudi happy. I am wondering if I can change the family chocolate cake into a vegan cake. Not harm in trying. I've found a great website for replacing eggs in recipes. We shall see. The hard part is changing a low-land recipe (and they're all low-land recipes) to a high-altitude recipe, and then changing it back to bake in Maryland and hoping that it still works. Humpf.

You know, there's a large market for breastfeeding and babywearing here in the Springs, as there are pretty much no resources here for such a lifestyle. I bet I could make some wrap slings and simple ring slings and such and be an independent consultant, like meeting people at Barnes & Noble or something, and show them the slings and how to use them and selling some if they're interested for reasonable prices. I've looked on the internet, and there is absolutely no reason why a five-yard piece of fabric should cost $80 (usually more). They justify the expense by claiming that the fabric is hand-woven in Guatemala by a woman named Maria from wool sheered from her darling lamb who eats only grain blessed by the Dalai Lama. Please. Man, I am dripping acid lately...But if Rudi can manage to support me in this, I could probably make it work.

Avery finally went down for a nap and I noticed that she smells like chocolate. I don't know how the pineapple, papaya, mango, and wheat bread that I've feed her this morning add up to chocolate. Maybe it's not for us to question why our baby smells like chocolate, just to sniff the chocolate baby. Mmmmm...

And thanks, Mom, for your comment. I can't wait to come home. It seems like it's been so long.

Now to dig up a photo to post...Always a delight.

Yes, that's Avery in the corner. I'm not so good at taking pictures of her while holding her, but it was too muddy to put her down.

Goog luck finding Riley in this class picture at the pumpkin farm. You can barely see her hat. Oh well, I hope to have new pictures tomorrow!