Recent Crafts

I've recently discovered that having a "project" each day makes our lives a lot smoother. Especially since Berit's been opting to stay home instead of go out lately, it helps to give her something interesting and new to do, and the individual attention doesn't hurt.

Here I took her to the craft store and let her pick out beads and pipe cleaners. I got this craft from Secret Agent Josephine, and it worked like a charm for the most part for letting me get the dishwasher unloaded. She just threaded the beads and I secured them to make jewelry. The ends of the pipe cleaners were a little sharp but so far no mishaps.

Our street is covered in gorgeous leaves. I love raking leaves but I love even more when we leave them on the ground and just walk through them. The neighborhood looks magical and golden right now, and I'm a teensy bit glad our house hasn't sold yet just so we can enjoy another fall here. We took a bucket out and found leaves that looked extra special. (This sounds lovely but really she wasn't too into it. It was more me pretending to get really excited about the leaves and she shrugging and saying, "Put it in the bucket.") We let them dry overnight and then measured her head, picked a paper (one for the doll, too, of course -- the doll's name is Saw-Saw, or Saucy for short) and I taped the paper together with packing tape. Probably could have used staples or glue but this was handy and I could easily tape the leaves she chose right onto the crown. It was a fun project but she doesn't like how the crown bends and kind of scratches her in certain places. Surely this could be remedied with a creative solution but personally I'm over the project so I'm not coming up with one. 

In other news, we're having a bit of a struggle with nursing. I tend to do pretty well in the nursing department. After about a week of sore nipples, I'm a regular Niagara Falls of sustenance for my babies. And especially after 10 months of nursing (not to mention the previous 18 months of nursing with Berit, that ended precariously close to the commencement of Marta's nursing) I should be a pro -- but over the past couple of days, Marta has started tripping me up. As soon as she latches on, she starts wiggling so that she's kind of laying on her stomach. Then she begins yelling (while latched on, so it's sort of mumbling really loud) at the breast instead of nursing to bring on the flow. My let-down is just not responding to such treatment, and therefore she gets more and more mad, and louder and wigglier, and as you can imagine it goes on for quite a while until my instincts kick in and finally a survival-only amount of milk comes out and appeases her for a few seconds before she pulls off and tries to turn around to the other side, assuming, I think, that there's more milk there. This goes on and on until finally the flow is flowing and life is normal again. 

I'm being told that I'm Aunt Andrea, Saw-Saw is Uncle Nick and Mosey is Uncle David, so I must comply.