We are continually shocked at how quickly dinner for four became dinner for six and a table for eight when we eat with friends. The meal was oven fried chicken, baked sweet potato fries, wilted spinach with bacon, and fallen chocolate cakes with strawberry sauce. Definitely not low-fat!

The effort to prepare a meal is nothing compared to time spent with friends enjoying it. Well, that and getting the highest compliment a toddler can give; their daughter actually picked up her dessert plate and licked it when her cake was gone.

I was hoping to have a great picture of the meal, the empty plates, or even the dirty dishes to share, but I neglected to take any of those shots. Instead I sat down with some needles and yarn to start on yet another baby hat. Hopefully I can share it soon.

A somewhat scary and little known fact about me is that my hair has not been cut in about two and a half years, since a bit before my first son was born. I know; that's just plain wrong. Not good for my hair, my whole self, my looks. I should take better care of myself, right?

Well, it's just not that simple. First there's the matter of not being able to find the time to go. It's hard enough to get to the dentist and eye doctor when I need to. Then there's the fact that the girl who used to cut my hair quit cutting hair and went back to advertising. Finally there's the fact that I had a second baby and opted out of bottles.

I meant to get my hair cut before the second baby arrived, but I didn't know where to go or who to get an appointment with. And it really wasn't that big of a deal. Yeah, it was long and had a few split ends, but it still looked okay. And I keep it pulled back most of the time anyway.

And then the postpartum shed started. I'm having to comb it out in the shower with conditioner. And then I have to comb it out again with a leave-in conditioner. I wind up with two golf ball sized clumps of hair after every shower. The shedding is normal, but the length of my hair combined with the split ends... Well, if you've ever had long hair, you can imagine the frustration. Of course, if it continues to fall out at this rate much longer I won't have anything to worry about. ;)

I must also share that we do not style the baby's hair like that. It does that all on it's own. And we always know when he's due for a bath; his hair starts to lie down flat!

"Are you two?'

"Nope. G not two."

Well, there you have it. He is two; so he's definitely NOT two. And he's full of funny things that would have qualified him for the Bill Cosby show Kids say the Darndest Things.

The first words out of his mouth one morning last week when I went in to get him up were, "Mama, take off toes!" as he pulled on his toes.

"You want me to take you're toes off?"

"Yes!"

"Are they in your way?"

"Yes!"

"I can't, sweetie. They're attached to your foot."

After a minute to think he declares, "Mama, go get scissors."

Oh the connections he makes, and the ones he doesn't make...

I've started on the second sweater sleeve, but I haven't gotten very far. I took a short break from toddler sweater knitting to finish a block for a giant (big in size) surprise for hubby. I really don't think it's much of a surprise anymore, but I'm still gonna play along and not tell you what it is.

In my head I'm also planning an organic cotton cardigan for the baby, a newborn hat for my cousin who's having a girl in November, a winter hat for the toddler, and something (truthfully, I'm not sure what...) for Linda's next little boy, due in December. I think to get all that done, I'm going to have to find more than a few minutes of knitting time each day!

There's also another SimpleMom give away going on. It's her birthday, so drop by and wish her a Happy Birthday and enter to win some fabulous prizes while you're at it.

Yep, that's the hood of hubby's car. It seems to attract road debris; its sustained much damage through simply being at the wrong spot at the wrong time. There was a section of tire tread on I-35 about 40 miles out of town that did a number on it. I was driving then too. Tire tread flying through the air and smacking your hood, then windshield, while you travel 70 plus MPH on the highway is kind of scary. And expensive. This time it was a rock that flew off a truck less than a mile from our house. I had just turned out of our neighborhood and onto a street where the speed limit is 35. I was shocked to be hit by flying debris, and even more shocked when I saw the damage. I don't hit things; they hit me.

I did mention yesterday that I'm crazy, right? We left a week ago on a moments notice to drive two hours out of town for a ten minute family portrait photo shoot. You can see a photo on the photographer's blog here. We're the first family pictured. If you look closely, you can see me trying to make a dent here too. I was asked to pretend to pop the couch with my knitting needle. And, yep, that's a sleeve for the toddler's sweater. It's finished now, the sleeve, not the sweater.

I also made a dent in the top down house clean up going on around here. I cleaned up my half of our joint closet and sorted out the pile of clothing in our bedroom that resulted from changing size so rapidly while having little time to unpack or pack up clothing as I outgrew and then shrank back through sizes. I'm happy to say that I have only 10 pounds to go to get back to my pre-pregnant size and 20 to my "ideal" weight, and I am officially back in *my* jeans!

This afternoon hubby and I sent the toddler out to see his grandparents and we made a huge dent in the bathroom remodel going on upstairs. Finishing that job is part of the top down clean up. Today we finished grouting the tile around the shower/tub. We still have a ton of work to do, but I think we have it down to some manageable chunks. It was too dark to take photos of the tile tonight, but I'll get it done soon.

Ok, so I didn't make A dent; I made several of them.

Here's my six:
1. We are officially debt free except for our house as of this morning!!!! Woooo-Hoooo!!!

2. I don't wear makeup. I don't think I even own any makeup anymore. When my brother in law got married a couple of years ago and I was expected to be made-up for the wedding, I had to dig and borrow to get ready!

3. I do my best to eat all natural foods and use all natural hygiene and home care products.

4. I bought a loom just over two years ago and have never used it. My husband (jokingly) tried to sell it to Linda last night. I love my loom, but just haven't found time to get it up and running with the kids. I'm thrilled to have a weaving buddy; maybe it will even get me motivated...

5. I'm crazy. The kind of crazy that chooses to have two kids in less than two years. The kind of crazy that reads about this on the chicken and actually thinks "I should try that...". And the kind of crazy that is environmentally minded, yet still drives a huge gas-guzzling truck. It's mostly the good kind of crazy if you ask me...

6. I will always be a Texan at heart, and will always miss my home state, but not necessarily the place I grew up. "You can take the girl out of Texas..."

The toddler is having nap time issues. This is really not new for him. He was a classic short napper as a baby, and he fought naps much harder than he did bedtime. He would go to bed at night awake, but would not go down for a nap unless he was out cold. Eventually he had to cry it out. It broke my heart.

Now? We've graduated from crying to playing. He'll spend 2 plus hours playing before falling asleep sometimes. Other days I eventually have to go and get him without an actual nap because it gets too late for him to take one. Most days he does sleep for an hour or so still, but getting there means spending three hours in bed, two of them singing and yelling. He's so loud that sometimes he wakes the baby.

I try to stay as quiet as possible while he's "falling asleep" so as to not disturb the delicate nap process, but I'm finding that hard to do. My kitchen is right outside his room and nap time is typically when I put away dishes and prep for dinner.

The baby on the other hand would really like to sleep all day. He's taking a good three, sometimes four, naps a day and fits the mold of how a baby should sleep. If he wakes after only an hour of his afternoon nap, all I have to do is go rock and bounce for a while and put him back down. Some days I have to wake him for every feeding! We're still up at night for one or two feedings, but they are relatively quick and he goes right back to bed.

I'm certain that my toddler is normal, but that doesn't make listening to him for hours any less frustrating. Especially when I want to take a nap; how's a mama suppose to sleep with all that racket?

I've had the Dixie Chicks song of the same title in my head for some of the evening this evening. It's been one of those days where if I wasn't holding one kiddo, I was the other. Both of them seemed to just have a high need for touch today. The toddler's been extra whiny to go along with it. I could use some wide open space myself tonight.

Frankly, I'm stealing this time. The baby is down for a late nap and hubby has the toddler in the bath right now. I'll go down for bedtime stories and to finish making the adult dinner. Most night we eat as a family, but hubby got home too late tonight for that. I waited for him; if timing works the way I think it will, we'll get to eat dinner just the two of us!

I took the boys to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art today to see the Chakaia Booker exhibit. The toddler kept calling the sculptures made of recycled rubber, mostly tires, "pretty".

We made a Kemper afternoon of it and also went to the Kemper Memorial Garden. It was unseasonably cool here, only in the upper 70s, today. And the garden is walled, so I don't have to stay quite so close to the toddler as I do some of the other places we go to play. I was really impressed, the fountains are great, the flowers were beautiful, and there were tons of them. I didn't lug a camera with two kids in tow, but I wish that I had.

Now, if I can just squeeze in some time to create something tonight. Or maybe I should take a shower instead... ;)

It's amazing to me how different something can look in a picture. I took that photo of a baby praying mantis last week while we were playing out back. At the time, I wasn't even positive what kind of insect it was. After I got the pics into my computer, I confirmed my hunch. He was no bigger than an inch long and quite fascinating to watch. It was one of those times that I was sad the boys were really too little to appreciate him.

I think my confusion was all about perspective. When I first looked at him, I had a bird's eye view. It made him look like some kind of weird scorpion. It wasn't until I was more on his level that I could identify with him. Yep, there's an analogy in there. When I taught, I used to get down on the same level with my kids when I helped them individually. I squatted, sat in another chair at their table, what ever I could to really try and see things from their point of view. It helped that I was teaching art, but I also think it helped my kids relate to me. I think sometimes when I am most frustrated with my own kids it's because I haven't gotten down on their level yet.

I also decided last week that enough was enough. It is time to get a handle on all the cleaning and stuff around here. I really let things go just before the baby was born when I go told to "take it easy", and I haven't gotten things picked back up yet. It seems to me that working from the top down, the way my mother taught me to clean, is the way to go. That means that I'll start upstairs with the nursery and our room; places no one really sees much but us. Then I'll work my way to the more public areas of the house, finally rewarding myself with a good deep cleaning of my studio. By then I should be all set to get back to work down there.

I'll try to keep you posted about my progress, but I'm certain that it will be slow going!

I'm currently on a dairy free diet. I love milk and cheese, but the baby had just awful gas when I had dairy. The toddler was this way too when he was little, so I've done this before. While I don't really like it, I know that it's just for a few months, and I know that I can do this. It's really hard though, and it reminds me how difficult life must be for people who are truly allergic to milk. No milk chocolate, no cake unless I made both the cake and the frosting with soy milk, no pancakes for breakfast. You get the idea.

I'm finding that I have the need to spoil myself with food in other ways. I know that I should still be on my healthy, sugar-free diet, but I just need something to make up for the lack of pizza and grilled cheese in my life.So I'm baking. A lot.

While I can substitute soy milk in some recipes, I've found that it just isn't the same, and I prefer to just make things that don't have milk in them to begin with. In my quest to find dairy free treats, I'm digging out recipes that I haven't made in a long time. This is one of them; it's the Chocolate Crinkle cookies my mom used to make. I don't know why I almost never make them; they were my favorite growing up. I even remember drawing a picture of them with a white crayon on brown paper for my grandparents the last time they came to visit us when I was about 5.

I'll post the recipe in the near future. It's been one of those crazy days where things just didn't go as planned. I started this post at 7 this morning; it's now just after 10 pm.

Just in case you're wondering, I am knitting. Remember this? I didn't get it finished in time for Christmas last year! Now, I'm most of the way through the first sleeve. And it looks like it might be a perfect fit for the toddler this year. It will still take me a bit to finish it; there's quite a bit of seaming and a neck band to knit, but I'm certain I can get it finished in time for colder weather.

When we headed out for a family drive just over a week ago, I decided not to take the Hoover blanket with us. It was just plain too hot to have that mass of cotton yarn in my lap.

I grabbed some random baby blue yarn from my stash. I'm certain that it came home with me from the yarn swap I went to a while back. If you happen to have been there and know what this is, well, please comment. And cast on for a hat. After one day of knitting in the car and 30 minutes of finishing work at home, this is what I had.

It seems to be a good fit now that it is summer, so hopefully the baby's head won't grow too much before winter. Or, hopefully there's enough give for it to still fit when it's really needed in January.

I still have a hole days worth of work ahead of me today, so I better get after it.

As a stay/work from home mama, I frequently find that 8 or 9 am rolls around and I am still in my PJ's. Both the boys are dressed, everyone has had breakfast, yet mama hasn't had time to even change clothes. Some mornings I realize this practically as hubby is walking out the door. The result is me asking him to watch the boys for a minute while I throw on my uniform, jeans or shorts and a T-shirt. I love my jammies, but I've never been a spend-the-whole-day-in-my-PJ's kind of person. And this post is not even about that kind of jammies.

Last week the berries at our house did triple duty in two days. I started with two pounds of strawberries and a pint of blueberries. I washed and dried all of them, and I quartered the strawberries. The addition of one freshly squeezed lime and some honey made a berry salad that I served to friends as an afternoon snack at our place and then walked out the door, berries in hand, to a dinner at my in laws. The left overs came home and went in the fridge. The next day I added three oranges, 1 cup of sugar and another half cup of honey to what was left. After cooking with 2 T butter to prevent foam and a pouch of Certo, I jarred and processed the three jars of jam you see up there.

This was really an experiment on many levels. Don't get me wrong, I wanted jam, but I needed to know if I could make jam with two kids. Awake. Turns out, I can. And I needed to know if I could pull off a small batch with no recipe. Yep, I can do that too.

That probably leaves you wondering why this information is important. Well, I read a post from the Chicken a while back (like more than a year ago?) about an article in one of her local papers. The article was about small batch preserving to save what you don't eat from your CSA membership. We've never done a CSA because hubby doesn't eat much produce, and I could never eat it all by myself. But I want to join a CSA; it's such a good thing for us health wise, for local growers, and for the environment in general. And there's always the added bonus of really awesome, good tasting produce all season long.

I had planned on finding one to join for this season, but I was really worried that an infant at home would make the preserving I needed to do almost impossible. And it very well may have for the first few weeks or even months, but now, well, I think we're ready. And come this winter, I'll be hunting for a good, reasonable, organic CSA near where I live.

BTW, strawberry, orange, blueberry jam is good. Especially fresh and warm on whole wheat graham crackers.

Somehow last week my maternity leave ended and I went back to work. I didn't even plan it. All I know is that at the end of the week I had several things that I had made and plans for several more.

One of the things I completed is the terry cloth, tagged teether you see up there for the baby. And he loves it! It was a very simple project that should have taken only a few minutes to make, but errors on my part and shopping "help" from a toddler at JoAnn's made the whole thing take longer than I expected.

I started with a couple of squares of hand-dyed terry cloth and a similar sized piece of cotton batting. I choose several washable ribbons and cut two or three 3 inch lengths of each. Then I pinned the ribbons, folded in half, to the right side of one piece of terry cloth. Next I stacked the other terry cloth piece on this and topped it all with the batting. I sewed this leaving a gap for turning. Finally, I turned, top stitched and quilted the whole thing.

And I still haven't cleaned my studio. At least I'm back at work...

It should measure around 40 by 36 inches. I used Blue Sky's Organic Cotton on size 9 needles. The blanket sucked up 10 skeins of yarn and several months of knitting time. I really enjoyed this pattern, and while it was not a quick knit, it was a relatively easy one. Don't let the double knit scare you; it was much easier in this pattern than I thought it would be. I feel prepared to take on more difficult double knitting at some point now.

I'm thrilled to have it finished! And it is done just in time for some very important photos...

We did something totally crazy yesterday. We played outback. We've had triple digit heat indexes for a few days now. It's just plain hot and sticky here, but at 10:45 or so in the morning I just couldn't stand the thought of keeping the toddler cooped up in the house any longer. So I pulled out the Happy Trails bug spray and we headed out with water in hand.

It was well worth the sweat and bug bites I got. I guess I should put that stuff on me too, huh? There was much running around, mowing with the bubble mower, and laughing at the dog. I have no idea why, but everything she does is still funny to him, and I am very glad for it.

Yesterday also brought the realization that the current antibiotic might not be doing the trick; after a week, my throat was still sore. I spent an hour this morning at the doctor's. They're doing another culture from my throat. And, thankfully, my tonsils have not grown back. I'm feeling much better today, so I hope we've just about nailed it this time. I think it may be the warm salt water gargles that have helped the most.

We took a drive on Saturday as a family to scope out a specific place for a family portrait we have scheduled soon. In an effort to minimize my sweating in the car I chose not to bring the Hoover blanket along. I just couldn't stand the thought of having that mass of cotton yarn in my lap in the heat. I hope to unveil my one-day project soon. And the Hoover blanket measured a whopping 32 inches last night. I finished two more stripes before we went to bed, so I should be able to finish the double knit portion of the blanket tonight. That means I might be able to knock out the garter stitch border and finish the whole blanket before this weekend! This time I'm sweating with anticipation.

I am feeling a bit better. I think choosing rest over laundry and dishes for the last couple of week may end up helping, but it's been hard on everyone. Clean clothes are hard to come by and we ran out of knives at one point.

Simple mom did a great interview with Amanda Soule of SouleMama fame. Amanda has a new book out called The Creative Family that you could win if you act fast (like, tonight!). Get the details here.

I was thrilled to read that Amanda is not perfect. Her blog and business frequently make me feel as though I could be doing better. I know that's not her intention, and, truthfully, I could be doing better. Always can, right?