Penultimate Pea

Happy new year!

One advantage of having a baby is that Christmas presents for the grandparents (and great-grandparents) will be easy this year—pretty much anything related to Emmett will probably be welcome. And while I could've gone with "I LOVE MY GRANDPA" mugs and sweatshirts emblazoned with "WORLD'S #1 GRANDMA" in puff paint, I decided to take a somewhat classier approach (with no disrespect to all the #1 Grandmas out there).

I'm hoping this will be the start of an annual tradition—I think it'll be nice to see the progression of these over the years (well, for the first few years at least…I don't know that there's much difference in the profile of a fourteen and fifteen year old!).

This was a relatively simple project, and went pretty quickly (the hardest part was getting Emmett to sit still enough to get a good photo).

1. Take a good profile picture. Good lighting and a solid colored background are important (I used a white background, but a dark one might work as well or better).
2. Crop the photo if necessary and resize to the desired size in your favorite photo editing program. You should set the resolution to your computer's screen resolution (100ppi in my case).
3. Lay a piece of white paper (thin computer paper is ideal) against the screen and lightly trace the outline of your profile. It helps if the room is dark when you're doing this.
4. Cut out around the outline, lay the resulting stencil (wrong side down) on a piece of black paper, and trace around it.
5. Cut out the silhouette from the black paper, being sure to cut inside the line you traced. You may need to improvise a bit around small details and sharp corners, as using a stencil tends to round corners a bit.
6. Cut a piece of nice white paper the correct size for your frame. Use spray adhesive to lightly coat the wrong side of your black paper silhouette. Center on the white paper and smooth down. Sign and date if desired, put it in your frame, and voila!

I took over 300 photos of Emmett today, trying to get a photo for holiday cards. This one cracks me up.

We got a surprise package in the mail yesterday from my aunt Maureen, filled with all sorts of goodies for Emmett. I absolutely love getting personal mail (even if it's not technically for me), and Maureen, who's an artist, always picks out such fun, creative gifts. I'm especially excited about the quilt she sent—I've really been wanting a handmade quilt for Emmett and had almost convinced myself that I was going to make one for him (oh yeah, I'm totally gonna teach myself to quilt in all of my abundant free time), but now I don't have to! It's the perfect colors too. Yay!

Emmett enjoying some of the bounty:

I've been fighting off a cold for the past two days, and just trying to get lots of rest. Emmett helped out yesterday by taking two loooong naps. He is so sweet when he sleeps; I love it when he smiles—or even laughs—in his sleep.

He's still not rolling over, but seems to really be hitting a new physical stride over the past two days—he's "swimming" on his belly a lot, really lifting up on his arms, and has started to rotate himself around when he's on his stomach.

In art news, I'm starting to hit an awkward blogging point where I have tons of projects going and lots that I want to share…but recipients of said projects may be reading, so I can't really say too much. Sigh. I'll have to find a way to share little peeks here and there so I'm not totally silent for the next month.

Well, we got all of the wood stacked! We still have a small pile of bark/kindling to get cleaned up, but it's nice to be finished with the majority of it. In the past, we've sometimes gone weeks before getting all of it away, so it's kind of amazing that we got it done in one day. I've noticed this with my art too — somehow having a kid makes us more productive (knock on wood, hardy har har); I guess something about having less free time means we're that much more careful to use it wisely.

I collected a little pile of birch bark during the stacking, I'm thinking of maybe using it for a collage of some sort. I have this habit of picking up these beautiful little nature remnants — pieces of moss, branches, river rocks, seaweed — but I haven't been good about finding a way to use them in my art or figuring out a pretty way to display them. Maybe this will be the year that I do!

Emmett had his four month check-up today and weighs a whopping 20lb 2oz, making him bigger than over 95% of other babies his age. We've got one pound and fourteen ounces to go before he's officially out of the weight range for his car seat, and all the 6-12mo clothes that I so cleverly got him when he was two months old, thinking they'd last through the winter, are becoming comically small. I have hatched a behemoth.

Emmett also got some shots today and he tends to get pretty upset a few hours after getting poked, so it's been a quiet day with lots of snuggling and nursing and napping (and some crying). Days like today remind me of how generally awesome and "easy" a baby he is: he really never cries and is just so happy and talkative and calm, and I'm actually able to get a good amount done around the house or on projects as he's content to watch me or play with whatever toy he's trying to figure out how to eat. We are so, so lucky.

Speaking of the awesome kid, why is it that all the pictures of him and Ryan look like this:

and all the pictures of him and me look like this???

laundry's always more fun with a folding partner…

just make sure your partner doesn't eat the socks!

After a mostly lazy day yesterday, I got a little crazy with cooking. I made bratwurst with creamy apple compote and green beans for dinner. And then I made butternut squash gratin with goat cheese and hazelnuts to have for lunch today. And, I finally cooked the hen that had been in the freezer for…um, six months? There's a good story behind this hen:

At the last restaurant where I worked, there was a very sweet middle-aged woman from El Salvador named Mirna. Often she and I were the only people in the restaurant in the very early morning. It was cold in there before the ovens got going (one time the water in the toilet froze!), and quiet, and though Mirna's English is fairly limited, we did manage to bond in those calm morning hours. She would tell me about the city where she grew up, about her family, about the kind of things they cooked in El Salvador, and I would try to answer in my halting high school Spanish. I remember one morning when I was still newly pregnant, long before I'd told anyone at work, and was feeling sick, Mirna shared one of the tamales she'd brought from home; it was sweet and creamy and the warm mix of bananas and cinnamon was just the thing I needed to settle my stomach.

Mirna was very excited about my pregnancy, and sweetly maternalistic. She was always right behind me if I started to lift something she considered too heavy and would take over before I even had time to protest. I would bring in ultrasound pictures and she marveled over them; sonography wasn't around when she'd had her own children. When Mirna found out I was having a boy she was very pleased and thought that it was very good fortune. She said in her country, if you have a boy, you're given a hen. If you have a girl, well, you get nothing. So, she gave me a hen! She said I should make soup with it, and though it took me a really long time to get around to it, that's what I did.

I simmered the hen with the tops of three leeks, a handful of carrots, an onion cut in half (skin and all), a few cloves of garlic, two ribs of celery, a few sprigs of sage, a handful of fresh parsley, and some dried thyme. I strained the broth, picked the meat from the bird and added it back in, along with some fresh carrots, onion & celery, a little parsley, and a few handfuls of little star-shaped pastini. I think it might be the tastiest soup I've ever had.

And then, it being 11:30 at night, I figured why the hell not? and made some pumpkin maple pots de creme. I could've kept going but thought I should probably try to get a little sleep.

Today all the grandparents came over; Ryan's parents helped us rake while my parents watched the boy, and then we all had lunch together. After lunch, Ry and I took the babe into Northampton to look at some open houses (both overpriced and didn't really match our needs), then we visited some friends who have a two month old daughter. Phew! A pretty perfect weekend, tiring but wonderful; hope yours was great too.

Emmett and I took a long walk around the pond this morning, joined only by squirrels rustling through the crackly canopy of not-yet-fallen leaves. I'm thankful for this fall weather—crisp, but not too cold to be outside yet. Emmett's been sleeping since we got back (I actually had to wake him up to eat), which should mean some good uniterrupted time for me to get some creative work done, but instead I've been lazy, reading blogs, looking through old photos.

I'm feeling at a creative impasse, noticing the dichotomy between the spare, earthy style that I admire in others' work and the cartoony style that ends up coming out when I try to do something. I'm not sure lately what direction to take…I want to make work that I love, but am not sure that I know how.

Aaanyway.

My neighbor just left four neat piles of leaves at the perimeter of our property—perhaps a not-so-subtle hint that it's time for us to rake? Which I'd be happy to do, but I've got this warm, sleepy baby to watch over…

Last night was awesome…homemade barbecue chicken and fries with a cold beer, watching The Office and 30 Rock with Ry, getting some more work done on sculpture:

Tonight I was cranky, was too lazy to cook, and burned the shit out of my arm making curtains that I ended up not even liking.