25% off burp cloth sets!

There are barfing babies all over the world right now who are soiling mom's shirt. Their faces have nothing soft and luxurious to rest upon. It's not right.

I have a few burp cloth sets in my etsy shop. I'm ready to just clear out my inventory and make space in my tiny storage area.

Everything is 25% off! Enter code BABYLOVE at checkout. Great, inexpensive, cute Christmas gift for a new mom and baby!

Double sided, made of flannel and flannel/cotton chenille. They are soft and absorbent.

If my description doesn't sell you on it, surely my fine photography will! This is what I have left and I won't be making any more. I'm closing up shop (again).

Thanksgiving. I am thankful for this monkey in a boy suit.

Turkey day was Daddyless around here. Mark had to go out of town on business Thursday morning. We had dinner at my mom's with my in-laws joining us.

Brock got GQ with a too-big vest and shirt.

Notice that I combed his hair to the side, but it won't stay that way.

I think that Brock is a robot because he doesn't eat food. I don't even know how he survives.

With his grandmas, my mom above and Mark's below.

At one point, I was telling a story about an automated voice on my answering machine and mimicked it. Boy did Brock think that was hilarious. So we all kept doing it, of course.

Tiny tots gone wild

We had a little playdate Sunday, many of us escaping Sunday football. Mark was out of town, so I had a football-free zone. We made little pizzas and let the kiddos run about.

All of these ladies except one I have known since we were pregnant. Our kids range from 13 months to 20 months.

It looked like a toy explosion.

Olivia has the most lovely lips, if I only could take a proper picture! She is the oldest of the kids.

Emery is a doll. He and his mom always look like fashion plates. He's younger than Brock by 2 months, but is much bigger.

Brock said, "Look at me! Look at me! I'm classy too!" as he nommed on a ball.

Brock loves the ladies. "Hey, baby. They must be missing an angel in heaven ..."

It was a great time catching up with friends and letting the kids have some fun.

Furniture giveaway in Albuquerque, N.M.

I got an email through my blog about a giveaway for children's furniture. It's only for Albuquerque-area residents. Basically, this company works with Costco and sometimes people return brand-new furniture to Costco but they can't really re-sell it. This company, Epoch Design, doesn't want to have to pay to ship it back to them or come pick it up, so sometimes they just do a giveaway.

If you enter, you have to be able to arrange pickup very quickly. Please see their blog post for more details.

Evan Wolfe

This is Evan Wolfe. I know him. He is 9 months old, and he is fighting very hard for his life against a brain tumor. It's malignant and nasty and has already rendered him blind and deaf, hopefully temporarily. But he's a brave little boy and he keeps trying.

It's a rare tumor that's not very treatable. His only real chance was a controversial option of a FDA clinical trial through the Burzynski Clinic in Houston. It's really expensive and not very much of his medical care has been covered by insurance.

If you're a parent, you know you'd do anything to save your child's life. But this family will drown in these medical bills.

That's why I'm trying to make people aware of his story and lead you to a website where you can donate as little as $10. I say that because I'm broke and can't afford to donate to causes very often. If you're broke, you can probably still spare $10. If you're not broke, you can probably spare more. If all you can do is forward his link to someone else, please do. If you can blog about him, even better.

Here is his website.

Please pass the word on. It may save this little angel's life.

Tiny boy in a big Halloween world

Remember how Brock cried about wearing his costume? Well, once he got around all the kids and the fun, he totally didn't care! I had to work Halloween night, but Mark took Brock to Mall-o-Ween at the mall and he had a blast. He looks so tiny wandering around there. He got a lot of attention. I was a bit disappointed in how the wings worked out, but I guess it doesn't matter.

Information on the costume can be found here.

We're all winners. Except my husband

You! Don't you harrumph at my second place. Second place is not so bad. It's not every day that the least-ambitious journalist has a statewide award plop in her lap. A 1970s-looking plaquard, to be more specific. It's not every day that one wins an award for doing 2.3 seconds of (headline) writing while the reporter next to her gets a similar award for writing an in-depth investigative piece that single-handedly saved mankind or some shit.

Indeed, it's not every day you get a free, bland, mini-sized meal at a hotel along with a $7.50 glass of wine that tastes like equine urine. Nor is it every day that your arrogant, multi-award winning, journalist husband has to be your Plus-1 because he did not win an award.

So second place, I'll take it. It's like to be the only award I ever win, besides some lame "World's Best Mom" certificate my son may draw up with some crayons when he's 5. Only I won't think it's lame. I'll think it's awesome. And I'll clutch it to my chest as I cry when he tells me he hates me when he's 13. (UPDATE: I won another! Fancy that! I won third place, headline writing, Best of the West for calendar year 2014. UPDATE 2: I just found out I took second place in headline writing in Top of the Rockies, too.)

Wait -- it seems I did win an in-house excellence award one time years ago. I got a free dinner worth $75 wherever I wanted to go. Only nobody ever bothered to tell me, so it just didn't ring of the same excitement when I got a call from the newsroom secretary asking if I was ever planning to use it. And I'm like, "huh?" And she's like, "Oh ... didn't anyone tell you that you won like a year ago?"

And a giraffe was born

... reallllly slowly. It was a long and drawn out labor that lasted over a year and a half. But here he is. A big, heavy, yellow, squishy friend for Brock.

 I started making this sucker in March 2010 when I was pregnant. I got the torso and part of the head done during the last few months of my most miserable pregnancy.

The pattern called for 11 spots, but I really felt like that was asking too much.

After all this time, I was so close to being finished. No way I was making and sewing on five more spots. Six seemed sufficient.

Brock pretended to like it for all of half a second, and somehow I caught that on camera.

I filled the bottoms of the feet and the bottom of the torso with dried beans. Later, I wondered if they might rot at some point. 

 

All those pom-poms. I gave in and bought a pom-pom maker because people were raving about them on Ravelry. I guess it was simple enough. But ... well, see below.

I interrupt this project review to share my wee boy Brock, 15 months going on 5 years old.

So it took him less than 2 minutes from the time I finished photographing it (which was 2 minutes after I finished making it) to rip off one of the pom-poms and destroy it. Here are the remnants. I don't even know how to feel. I wasn't mad. I wasn't really sad. Just defeated.

It's still pretty cute though, and maybe it just needs to sit on a high shelf for a while till this little monkey boy is ready to play nice.

This project is from "Itty-Bitty Toys." I made a Wrap-Me-Up Puppy from it, too.