The Queen's Rambles

Facebook can be such a double-edged sword, but when you have real life people on there it can be fantastic. This morning I made a complaining post about having no school, no play dates, no classes, nothing to do with Erik. It was rainy today so I knew we would both get cabin fever, but I had no energy to take him to the open gym because there’s no place to sit. I have to sit these days.

Within five minutes I had an offer for a play date. Unfortunately it was an offer for me to take her kid for a play date, but that didn’t really matter. I was all over the offer. Anything to keep Erik out of my hair for a couple of hours! There are kids that I wouldn’t have over when I’m in my fat, lazy, painful, pregnant state, but this kid is very self-sufficient and nice so I knew it would be ok.

Even better, I dropped Erik off at the kid’s house, ran to my doctor’s appointment, then picked both boys up afterwards. Win-win for everyone!

I don’t like taking Erik to the doctor’s appointments, but I don’t like paying a babysitter either. I only pay the sitter when I know my hoo-haw is going to be exposed.

My appointment went really well. I was one minute late (whoops!) and didn’t even have time to sit in the lobby. I was literally out the door nine minutes later. We had a bit of a scare at first when the doctor couldn’t find the heart beat, but I knew she was ok because she had just been beating the heck out of me. Turns out she is no longer transverse–she shifted herself into a breech position. Once again, I’m glad I was already in a c-section mindset.

Once we got home the boys had a lot of fun playing and I got to do a lot of crafty stuff while they ran wild. It was so nice to have a kid over that knows how to play well with others, share, and do simple things like throw his own trash away and pick up his toys. He has two older sisters so I don’t think there is much babying going on at his house.

They started to get grouchy with each other after a couple of hours so I did my magic trick and gave them food. It helped, but by that time the boy was ready to go home. He asked me to call his mom because he was ready to go. No muss, no fuss. If only all play dates were so easy!

While we were waiting outside, the neighbor came out on her porch. I’m really glad she was able and willing to clean my house for a reasonable price, but we need to set up some boundaries. She suddenly thinks I’m going to hire her to come over to clean two times a week for the rest of my natural born life. If I had that much money we wouldn’t be living here! A one time thorough cleaning is all we can afford. Possibly I could hire her once a month over the summer, but after that I have to get my butt in gear and clean my own house. I hope this doesn’t become a big problem.

In other news, I was getting my crafty on this afternoon. I feel extremely guilty about some of my crafting. I received six huge bags of baby clothes from a friend. A lot of them had big formula stains down the front. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand to dress a child in stained clothes if there are any other options. Just can’t do it. And at this point I have plenty of other options.

I did my best to salvage them with judicious use of hot water, borax, detergent, stain lifter and oxy-clean. Some of them came out ok, but several of them were beyond the scope of my laundry skills. I don’t have experience removing red formula spit-up stains, so I don’t know if there was something else I should have tried.

Anyway, since we are cloth diapering I figured out that buying wipes makes no sense. We are doing a ton of laundry anyway. If we used disposable wipes we’d have to have a garbage can for them. Cloth wipes make more sense. So what do you use for cloth wipes? Basically anything, from what I understand. So I got out my pinking shears and cut the stained baby clothes into a bunch of cloth wipes. My friend said I should sew them with a zig-zag stitch around the edges to prevent fraying, but I am hoping the pinking shears will be enough. We didn’t discuss the pinking shears when we were discussing how to make wipes. I really have no desire to do a bunch of sewing on poop rags.

I still feel guilty, though! Baby clothes! Cut into rags! What have I done? I won’t freecycle stuff that I think is beyond use so let’s hope my little green heart can be content with making something useful out of something stained.

I also tried to bind the charity quilt that I’ve been working on. They directions for binding are different from any I’ve ever seen before and I don’t think they are all that great. I was going to follow it, though, because they are the directions. I am nothing if not a rule follower. Basically you just flip the backing to the front and then use a zig-zag stitch to hold it down. Very ugly. Very, very ugly. I don’t think it will hold up all that well, either. For some reason I could not make my zig-zag stitching work. The front is ok, but the back is a tangled up mess. Tomorrow I’m going to make real binding and do it my way. I won’t hand sew the binding on, but I am not going to have this silly looking flipped over baking. It seems like it would wear out in about three days. Maybe, just maybe, that quilt will be ready to ship out by this weekend. It would be nice to get it out the door. I want to take pictures of crafty things! But who wants to see a picture of a postpartum pad or poop rag? I know I don’t.

Ok, off to bed. It’s way past my bedtime. I had to stay up to watch LOST. Bah. It was supposed to be a really exciting episode, but I could barely stay awake. Booooooring. We don’t have time for boring at this late stage.