tiny bridges

I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d like to have one day a week when I always post something, and that I should keep track of some of the things Fiona says and does. So, Fiona Fridays. Let’s try it.

We’ve all had colds this week and on Wednesday Fiona kept asking me where my “tickler” was. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about until she woke up from her nap and said “I have a tickler, too.” Some how she decided that it means a runny nose or a cough, so all her animals and things have had “ticklers”.

The sleep strike is still cycling. Yesterday she didn’t nap and by 7 I was pretty much done, and she was saying “I’m not tired! I’m not sleepy!” So I asked her if she’d like to sit in bed and read to herself (hoping she might just conk out). I gave her about 50 books and didn’t hear another peep. Then, an hour or so later “mama, I read them, can I have some more?”. I finally had to turn out the light and stay with her for about 30 seconds before she was out.

For some reason, she’s also decided that she wants to not just sit on my lap, but get into my sweater. Apparently this makes her “a baby in your tummy”, but it is driving me crazy.

Well, it’s been an exciting few weeks. Fiona decided to stop sleeping for a while there, so I haven’t really been very productive. In spite of that, I do have a set of knitting projects to share, and will try to do it tomorrow. In the meantime, we have been busy in the kitchen. I think it’s part of the whole winter mindset. It’s more of a production to go outdoors, and when we do we want something nice and hot when we come back in.

Given our current family schedule, and my lack of enthusiasm for making diner, I hit on the plan of making a big pot of something for the nights when it’s just Fiona and I and having “regular” dinners when we’re all cooking, eating and (most importantly) cleaning all together. It’s so very easy to do a big stew, soup or curry in this cold weather and, happily, I am the kind of person who can eat the same thing every day of the week. We add some kind of bread, maybe a side vegetable or some fruit and yogurt for desert and we’re all set. I checked Love Soup by Anna Thomas out of the library and have been working my way through the most appealing winter recipes. I have to admit that in my cooking ineptitude I have managed to make mistakes in all the recipes I’ve tried, but the beauty of soup is that it’s so very difficult to ruin. Even the soup which called for toasted and ground cumin seeds. I was so impressed with how easy it was to toast the seeds (something I’d never attempted before) that I forgot to get out the mortar and pestle and threw them in whole. Crunchy. Then, I discovered that the veg stock I’d taken out of the freezer was actually chicken soup. It’s a learning process. The first soup I tried, a green soup, took so long to chop for that I ended up having something else for dinner and making it the next day, and now I know that there simply isn’t enough time after Fiona’s nap and before dinner, so I start the day before. Also, I’m labeling everything that goes in the freezer.

For one of our all-together meals lately, I had the chance to make one of my favorite internet recipes. Homemade hamburger buns from Culinary in the Desert. These buns are so light and delicious and so easy to make. The only change I make to the recipe is to substitute 1-2 cups of white whole wheat flour for the apf, which doesn’t change the taste much but gives them an even more beautiful appearance. It’s possible that we mainly like these for their looks. The egg wash just before baking gives them the most beautiful golden color and sheen. I make a full batch and freeze half and the leftovers defrost beautifully.

In other bread news, the pair behind Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day came out with a new book “Healthy Breads in” well, you get the picture. They do have their master recipe for this book online, and I have ordered the new book from the library, but then I calculated that I won’t get it until April, and then only for 3 weeks. So I tried the master dough, and was less than 100% impressed. It was alright, but when I tried to shape a sandwich loaf I couldn’t seem to get the center properly done. And I really wanted bread with seeds and things in it. Then I realized I could make one up and so I did. I baked the first batch yesterday and I think we’ll use it up by the end of today (which is generally a really good sign around here) so I think I’ll try it once or twice more an then try typing it up to share here.

We’re all fighting colds so I made up a batch of cough drops from this Instructables. I used peppermint tea and a combination of honey and sugar and they are really, really good (Fiona keeps asking where I put the candy). They aren’t overly sweet or overly peppermint, but they do have a slightly medicinal taste (which I like) and do clear out my sinuses a bit, while soothing my throat. It was also much, much easier than I imagined it would be and I’m dreaming of trying some other combination. But, since I have a big box of these right now, I don’t think it will happen soon.

Finally, a few other recipes that I really like (and frankly, I can’t believe I haven’t posted about cooking on tiny bridges at all before). I love granola bars, but store bought brands are generally expensive and/or unhealthy. This recipe isn’t perfect, but I’ve been tinkering with it (actually, it may be perfect but I can’t bring myself to buy expensive rice syrup, and I don’t have the size pan called for here, so I’ve never tried the recipe as written. Anyone surprised?) and I think it will be there soon. This recipe for lemon cake may, in fact, be perfect. I think I ate most of the first loaf myself. Oh, and I’m slightly obsessed with scones right now. These are particularly good, and I like chopped, dried apricots for filling. That’s all for now, as I found some whole wheat pastry flour recently, and I think we may need some scones with our soup tonight.

I’ve been meaning to post one of these for some time, just the funny things Fiona’s been saying lately.

One day we were walking in Target and she suddenly said “Rocket Cool!” I asked her what she meant and she replied “when you see something really, really cool you say ‘Rocket Cool’” and did her “cool” pose with two thumbs up. I really need to get a picture of that pose, it’s very funny, and she does it when she dances to “cool music” like “Speed Turtle” or anything on her favorite radio station. (Seriously, she somehow found this station, figured out how to program it to a pre-set button and turns it on whenever she’s bored with what I’m listening to.)

After reading one of our favorite books at bed time I said “good-night, sweet potato” and she immediately said “good-night, smashed apato” and I laughed so now we say it almost every night.

All along Fiona has wanted us to act out little scenes with her, but they are getting more and more intricate. One favorite is “Fiona and the tooth-fairy”. It starts with me as Fiona, going to bed and Fiona, as Mama. There’s a whole series of required dialogue, asking for a bed-time story and so on. Then I go to sleep, the tooth fairy sneaks in and puts a coin under my pillow, I wake up and call for Mama, then we switch and do the whole thing with the roles reversed. I doubt she’ll still be happy with a penny when she gets old enough to actually loose a tooth.

The other game is a bit more varied. The basic plot is that Fiona finds something, like a basket of toys, and comes to the door as the toy-man. I have to say “Now, who could that be?” before I answer and then we discuss who she is and what she’s doing. I start to close the door, then say, “oh, I almost forgot” and give her something back. Sometimes she rides her “bike” up to the door, sometimes she’s a cat, a kid (for that she puts on a hoodie and sneakers, nothing else) or a girl named Haylee.

That’s something else new, characters and animals have actual names. For a long time her animals were “tiger”, “kitty”, “lion” and so on. But the big dog we got her for her birthday is Jase (after Jason and the Argonauts) and last night she gave a series of made up names to all the animals we took to our slumber party. I couldn’t even remember them all then, so there is no hope now, but it was something like “Coco the rabbit”, so the kind of animal is still quite important.

She’s also been telling me “I have a new friend. Her name is Deepa and she’s a little girl, too.” or “This is my friend Skeeta. He’s a little boy.” The names are always changing, and they aren’t classic imaginary friends, she doesn’t talk to them or play with them, she just introduces them to me and tells me about them.

Fiona is a prodigious story teller, and I’ll try to get a story down on paper soon.

Grumpy Princess:

Happy Princess:

We made a video, so we’ll see if I can embed it.

When we had finally finished the holidays around here (seriously, it lasts from Fiona’s birthday in November until the second week of January, which gets a bit exhausting) I started in on my stack of mending, as part of my effort to clean up and reorganize. There were several not very interesting, but good to have done projects like Liam’s pajama pants and fixing the sleeve of Fiona’s black and white dress, but there was also a pair of her brown tights with a hole that I had saved, even though I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I had forgotten that I had them, but I had read Disney’s tutorials for knee socks and a bubble skirt, and now I knew just what to do:

The instructions made it really easy and the whole thing was finished before breakfast. (The beads in the picture were Fiona’s addition). (Also, I love the face in that photo. I said “stand next to your kitchen and I’ll take your picture” “Like this?” So funny.)

Of course one new skirt is never enough.

This was made a few days later, after something had spilled all over the first and a replacement was needed. The request was to use that bright pink floral fabric and “lots of bows”. The top part is from an old pair of pajama pants (the bottoms were already made into summer pants for her) and the whole thing was improvised as I went along, but I like the way it turned out. Sorry the photo isn’t great. She was preoccupied with playing “The toy man”, a version of a game we play frequently around here.

Oh, and for anyone interested, I was able to salvage the ER jimjams! Yay!

Racing stripe!

Okay, it’s almost two months since Fiona’s birthday, and that means it’s time to post about her birthday dress.

This was one of the secret projects I was working on, and things just got too crazy with the holidays to post about it. I used the tutorial here as a rough guideline to start (as a side note, I really love vegbee’s tutorials and patterns. This is not the first I’ve used.). Of course, somewhere in the process of figuring out my measurements I halved everything (as one would do to make a symmetrical pattern, another idea I was toying around with at the time), so that as I gazed proudly on my “finished” skirt piece I thought it looked a little small. In spite of that, the skirt was really fun to make and I think I’ll do another one for summer.

It’s very twirly! (But hard to photograph in action).

The bodice is a made-up pattern of my own design. I really wanted it to fasten over her shoulders so I used a few purchased patterns and some of her dresses to figure out what I wanted to do. Of course then, for reasons no one can fathom, I added two inches to the width, making it much too wide for her. To fix that, I added pin tucks to the front, but I don’t seem to have any decent pictures of it. If I can get one I’ll add it later. Here’s one that shows how it was too big:

I also put a lining under the skirt, so that all the threads and seams wouldn’t be right next to her skin. It’s also helpful for twirling. You can see it a bit in this video.

I’ve been busy making her more things since we’ve been back, so I’ll post those soon.

There is a park across the street and we went to play in the early evening. But just after we arrived I saw a flash of movement across the football field. I saw a deer, then two, then four, then five. We agreed to cross over to them, quietly and slowly so we wouldn’t scare them. Together we made our way over half the field. We were watching them, they were watching us. I think we were lucky to be downwind, or we never would have made it so close. It was getting dark quickly, and harder to see the deer against the woods. They were getting wary, as well, and I thought we should let them finish their dinner in peace. So we quietly turned back. By the time we reached the parking lot I couldn’t tell if the deer were there at all.

So mystery project #1 was a birthday dress for Fiona. Due to technical difficulties (namely, I decided that I should add a few extra inches here and there “just in case”) there are no pictures yet, but I’ll do a full birthday work up for next week.

Happy leftover day!

Top secret projects in the works

It was too late, we were too tired. I’d just spent about a half an hour scrambling to get the house moderately clean while trying to find some substance (other than candy or cookies) that would be an acceptable dinner choice. Finally I was brushing my teeth and she was sitting in Tiny Bed reading to herself.

“Come here, I want to read you this book”

And so I sat next to her listening to her “read” “Pat the Bunny” (My two favorite parts were the lines “this is Judy and and and and and Paul, that’s right, Paul” and “How big is bunny? Very big.”). She smelled like the fruit she ate for diner. We both were both finally relaxed.

And then I stood up and realized I had been sitting in a small puddle on the middle of the bed. And so it began again.