My wonderful parents agreed to watch Griffin yesterday while Jag and I went out on our first grownup date since March 16, in celebration of Jag’s birthday. We went to Firebirds for dinner and had a great, relaxing meal.

I checked my phone for messages as we made our way back to Wake Forest. There was a recent missed call and voice mail from my dad, saying that Griff had refused both bottles I’d left and had been crying on and off for the past hour and a half. EEEEEK! We rushed back so I could rescue my poor parents and nurse Griff. We all chalked it up to teething pain; since he had been fine earlier that day, I hadn’t packed his Oragel, Tylenol, teething tablets, teething rings, etc etc in the diaper bag, so my parents hadn’t been able to try to make him feel better with any of those methods. Griff hadn’t had a bottle in a few weeks, but that didn’t seem to be enough time to have caused a problem.

Today we decided to have Jag give him a bottle to keep him in practice, and we bought a pack of Medela medium-flow nipples to see if that would help, since we suspected he might be unhappy with the old low-flow newborn nipples.

Nope. Griff flat-out refuses to take a bottle now. This is the kid who took his first bottle at less than 4 weeks old, who took periodic bottles all during my maternity leave, who drank every bottle he was given in day care without a peep of protest, who drank bottle after bottle of thawed stash milk with no problems when he stayed with my parents for over 24 hours while I was in the hospital back in May.

We’ll start experimenting with cup feeding and other tricks now, but I’m kind of worried that the 200+ ounces of milk in the freezer may be useless at this point. 🙁

I used to bake a lot more, but in recent years my yeast usage has been limited to pizza dough and the occasional batch of cinnamon buns or dinner rolls. This week I got the urge to make something that required kneading, so I picked a recipe for cheddar-parmesan bread from the King Arthur Baker’s Companion that I thought would go well with tonight’s dinner (tortellini).

Oh my, this is some intensely cheesy bread! I can’t wait to mop up some spaghetti sauce with it. The leftovers may make some truly insane grilled cheese sammiches tomorrow.

As unbelievable as it may seem, someone is FIVE MONTHS OLD today!!!

Griff has had a very rough couple of days (and nights, oh lordy) due to teething pain. Last night he slept much better than we were expecting, and today I had my happy little guy back.

You’ll just have to take our word for the teeth. If you hold Griff down and put him in a straightjacket and use two hands to push his tongue aside and shine a Maglite in his mouth, you should be able see them poking up about an eighth of an inch through his gums. (However, if you let him chomp down on your hand, you will be in no doubt whatsoever of their existence.)

Griff is sitting up pretty well these days, almost unassisted. If he gets distracted or reaches for something too far away, he tips over, bumps his head on the floor, and starts screaming. He always falls in the direction of the pointiest/hardest/most fragile object in the vicinity.

He certainly seems to enjoy being upright.

Could he look any more like Jag?

After he falls over, he usually ends up on his tummy. Luckily, he’s much happier on his tummy these days than he used to be. Recently he’s been showing a terrifying tendency to creep/hump along the floor.

Also, he’s still obsessed with the measuring cups/spoons I gave him to play with.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m two rows and some borders from being done with a Thousand Pyramids quilt top! I had originally had big plans for this thing involving carefully arranged color gradations, but now that Griff is here, I’ve realized that finished is better than high-concept. Although I used to be strictly in the hand-quilting camp, I’ll probably use some kind of sturdy cotton duck or canvas for the backing and tie this one, maybe for use as a picnic blanket.

Meet Griff’s newest playmates!!!!

This is Wilhelmina the Gnome.

Wilhelmina enjoys reading classic literature.

She also has a side business reading tarot. Uh-oh, looks like someone drew the Death card!

This is Willie the Gnome. Willie lives on the back of Wilhelmina’s head, kind of like Voldemort did on Professor Quirrell’s head. You could also think of this as a Ladyhawke kind of thing, except completely different.

Willie is named for Willie Nelson, because he definitely has that Willie braid action going on when Wilhelmina flips her hair back. Let’s hope we don’t catch Willie smoking weed on the White House roof, like his namesake!

Willie’s hobbies include reading about his favorite Gnome heroes…

…as well as developing unusual cocktail blends as part of his mixology studies.

The End

How to tell if you have embraced your inner hausfrau:

1.) You start making your own reusable covers for your beloved Swiffer duster thingy with the telescoping handle. (I used this tutorial.)

2.) That’s all I got, sorry. Except to rant that a 10-pack of the Swiffer refills costs $10! A buck each?!?! For something that you use to snag a few dust webs and then toss? You have got to be kidding me.

Griffin was totally fascinated by the fake Swiffer cover and giggled uproariously every time I waved it at him. (He refused to take his afternoon nap today, so we’ll assume that he was just punchy from lack of sleep. )

I had to do some emergency culling of my frozen milk stash this evening, as the lack of freezer space had reached crisis proportions and we were running out of room for actual food. I ended up tossing everything older than 3 months, since the freezer is attached to the fridge and isn’t a “deep freeze”, it’s opened at least a couple times a day, and we’ve already defrosted a batch that had gotten weird in storage. Even after getting rid of the questionable older stuff, I still have 264 ounces in there! I’ll consider donating the excess once Griff is weaned, but since I have an occasional beer/glass of wine, I think I’m automatically excluded. :-/

Because some days, you wake up and just decide to sew a 6-foot-long terrycloth snake for your kid. It must be the sleep deprivation.

This thing was an unholy pain in the butt to stuff. At one point I seriously considered hooking this sucker up to the sausage-stuffing attachment on my KitchenAid, but ended up proceeding instead with the blunt end of my largest knitting needle and a lot of tedious poking. I managed to get it all sewn up and finished before lunchtime, and Griff has been enjoying gnawing on it, as well as using it as a pillow.

(Those white measuring cups in the second photo are his favorite toy ever. Go figure.)

A few weeks back, Jag and I listened to an episode of the always-great Radiolab podcast that featured a new science-for-kids album from They Might Be Giants. One of the songs they featured, “Why Does the Sun Shine?” is STILL stuck in my head.

During the podcast, it’s revealed that TMBG got some of the science wrong in the above song: the sun consists of plasma, not gas. So they wrote a rebuttal song to their own song, correcting the terminology. 😀

The episode of Radiolab in question can be found here. Radiolab is probably the most consistently fascinating podcast I listen to; give it a try!

(I’d also like to note here that I’m still bitter that TMBG’s “Particle Man” was not voted class song for my high school graduating class. I think some Boyz II Men schlock won instead.)

OK, I made another hooded towel for Griff this morning. This is entirely too much fun. I totally ad-hoc’ed this one, too, and I’m really really happy with how it turned out. For the cost of a $3 towel and a $1 washcloth (and a little thread and felt), I got to have a little creative “me” time, and make something useful for Griff, too.

The eyes were pure serendipity: I didn’t have a deep purple thread to use to zigzag the centers of the eyes, but the lighter purple gives the illusion of pale irises and darker pupils, which is so neat-looking. The horns and teeth are double layers of felt stitched together for sturdiness. I love felt! It’s my new favorite thing, especially the way it stands up to wear. The duckie towel I made on Thursday came through the wash with flying colors.

Some pics of Griff modeling his new towel:

And a closeup:

I’m out of towels, but Jag has suggested an Owlbear as my next project, so I may be headed back to Roses next week. 🙂

Today Griff and I went on an expedition to Roses, aka “The Store That Makes Big Lots Look Classy”. We needed a cheapo wall phone for our new land-line, and I picked up a few inexpensive bath towels and washcloths to make into hooded towels.

Here’s my first attempt. It’s supposed to be a duck. 🙂 I had so much fun doing this, and I have big plans for the next one. Griff napped and played in the craft room while I threw this together.

The towel:

And a closeup of the “face”:

And a few shots of Griffin chilling out in his Bumbo chair (he was a very good-natured model):

And actually using his towel, after his bath tonight:

It’s the little things that make me happy! Jag watched Griff for a while so I could go get a Durham County library card, and I checked out a slew of cool knitting and baby books, plus a few picture books to “read” to Griff. Jag also moved a bookshelf out of the craft room/study to make room to put the pack ‘n’ play up there. This means I can get some sewing done now and then during the day, with Griff able to play safely away from all the dropped pins on the floor and other pointy stuff. And I’m about to make some Hungarian goulash and homemade Spaetzle for dinner. Yay!