am i really all nose??

so, we've had this picture up as our computer desktop for forever and i actually really like it because i think the boy looks dee-lish (sorry...should have warned you that comment was coming BEFORE it came.)

unfortunately, you can see right up my nose. not so dee-lish. so, on our desktop, i kept discreetly covering my nostril with one of the computer icons. and the boy kept moving it back into its proper place without realizing that it was actually serving a new purpose now (dang you organization freaks!)

i finally couldn't take looking up my own nose every time i turned the computer on anymore, so i changed the picture. the boy came home and asked why i changed it.

"weren't you tired of staring at my nostril?" i asked him.

"umm.... have you not seen this picture?" was his response. of course i'd seen the picture! i chose it to replace miss big nose! i walked around behind him to take another look. of all the pictures we have, this is the one i chose.

and then a sad truth hit me - i guess i really do subconsciously like looking up my own nose.

reaping the fruits of my labor

might i remind you of my mini garden that we started at the beginning of the summer?

i'm very proud to say that we've actually seen some veggies grow in our garden this year! allow me to introduce some of the players:

the lovely mrs. tomato (we've had a lot of mr. tomatoes too, but trust me, they all look the same. no offense tomatoes)

mr bell pepper, the old so-and-so


and, of course, the sultry miss jalepeno


you might notice that our garden had a theme this year. only veggies that are red were allowed to grow. all other colors immediately died.

another theme that might not be so immediately obvious (but makes sense given the mini garden they came out of) is that they all look like this compared to a regular sized apple:


what in the?? i keep telling the boy that we should open a stand at the farmer's market next year called the mini flagg farmlet. we only sell mini veggies. i really think it's what people are looking for.

on the one hand, you can't deny how cute those little guys are! on the other hand, i'm starting to really worry about what in the world kind of baby i'm capable of cooking up...

sew, very old one. sew like the wind!

there's a little something called "pregnancy brain" where you get forgetful and spacey during your pregnancy for unknown reasons. well, i've gone completely beyond pregnancy brain and have just plain lost my sense of logic.

(interjection: i know you're worried about my blog turning into nothing but posts about my baby, but don't fret. it'll actually be posts about ME dealing with my baby...)

it all happened when i made the mistake of looking at baby shoes on etsy (i seriously almost started crying they were so cute). i knew then i was going to be in trouble. so, my solution to not spending millions of dollars on baby clothes? why, make them myself, of course!

this might seem like a fairly reasonable thing to do for some people, but ask me when was the last time i even picked up (or wanted to pick up) a needle... i do have vague memories (i've repressed most of them) of making a quilt in high school for a church project, and that was not fun... but, what better time than now to stretch my sewing wings?? my grandma would be so proud of me.

so, i bought a lousy used sewing machine online and spent days, literally days - trying to figure the dumb thing out. finally, i decided to visit our old friend will drake to see what he could do for me. our conversation went something like this:

wd: this sewing machine is crap. it's never gonna work right and i ain't gonna even try to fix it
cf: oh
wd: sewing machines just aren't made like they used ta be. they're all crap. now i got this one here that'll last you hundreds of years and you can do anything to it. you can throw it on the ground and jump on it if you want and it'll still sew like new. it's for $589 but i'll give it to you for $210 because of the economy....

he then started going off on how he's been trying to get his competitor's information out of the yellow pages, and then he started vacuuming his counter, and then he talked to his granddaughter on the phone for a little while about how school was... i love that man.

so, $210 later, i have an apparently accident-proof sewing machine. which i think is good for me. plus, it guilts me in to actually learning to sew!!

i started with what anybody would start with for simplicity.. a baby blanket. and look how cute:


just ignore the fact that the seams are ridiculously uneven,


i had no idea how to "finish" the ends,


and i just noticed while i was taking this picture that i got a pin permanently stuck in the side of the blanket... totally baby-proof.


so, since i had clearly mastered the art of blanket-making, i moved on to pants. halfway through my pants project, the boy very gently noted to me, "you better hope she gets your dad's long legs..."


and then, not only did i realize that i didn't want my baby to dress like a skater at quite such a young age, but it also occurred to me that i had sewn the back of the pants to the front of the pants anyway, so that project got scrapped.

by now, my stubbornness had set in and i HAD to conquer this sewing thing! so, i built my confidence up by trying some more little yoga pants (the boy's not convinced that our child will be doing yoga by 3-6 months). and they actually turned out!

so with confidence in check (sort-of), i moved on to an actual pattern to make a dress, that i thought was marked "easy" but i realized after the fact that it never actually says that anywhere... have you ever realized how sewing is a foreign language? seriously. how am i supposed to translate this:

"turn back edge to INSIDE along outer fold line, forming interfacing; press. baste close to inner edge."

uh... what?? who knew you used a turkey baster in sewing... (p.s. turns out you don't).

so, i threw the directions away and decided i'd just make up my own directions knowing the end result in mind. it's called "hacking."

but guess what? it actually turned out really really cute! (i wish i had a baby model to show it off for you) and the seams are straight(ish) and there are no pins hanging out of it. granted, i had a few extra pieces of fabric from the pattern that i still have no idea where they were supposed to go... but the baby's going to love it and she'll probably have a special cry that means "i want to wear that dress you made for me."