The chickie dress

I finally finished Em's Easter dress. Allie says that she wants a skirt (she picked out purple bunny fabric) and Anna is being completely indecisive (Anna being Anna) so I decided to start with the dress just in case Allie and Anna change their minds.

There are little chicks along with Easter eggs on the fabric.

The weather has been wacky here so who knows what it will be like in 3 weeks but she most likely will have to wear a shirt of some sort under the dress. I'm not even going to deal with that right now.

The back. I should have straightened out the edges of the overdress but you get the idea.

Once I start I project, I obsess until I finish it. I always think that this dress isn't that bad to sew but it is. Last night, I told Rich that I had about two hours left. I can laugh at that statement now. I didn't finish until two o'clock this afternoon. Granted, I wasn't just sewing but it still took way more than two hours.

Emily freaking loves this dress. She was running around with it on and I even brought her outside for a mini photo shoot, which was a fail because she was running in and out of the shade and spinning around. She wiped out in the grass so I brought her in and asked her to change so I could hang the dress up. We were getting ready to leave the house anyway. Oh, the tears. She told me that she wanted to wear it for the rest of the day. I told her that after Easter, she can wear it whenever she wants to.

Silly faces.

(This is the feliz dress pattern from the book Sewing Clothes Kids Love - which can be found on Amazon. It is somewhat difficult so be warned if you are new to sewing.)

When I grow up

One of the lines on Allie's Star of the Day poster for her to fill in was "When I grow up, I want to be ________________. She told me to write the following:

1. A gymnastics girl on tv
2. A teacher
3. In shows
4. A mommy

For the past six months or so Anna has said that she wants to be a big sister, one who is not a twin or triplet. I'm not sure if she means with the Big Brother/Big Sister organization or what but sure, Anna, you can be a big sister. To someone. Well, technically she is already a big sister to Emily. By about 40 seconds or so. She had me fill that in on her Star of the Day sheet too.

Emily's class hasn't participated in the Star of the Day program but Em's list consists of being a doctor, a dentist, a teacher and a mommy. Although, after we've been around a crying baby, she leaves the mommy off of her list because crying babies are too loud. Tell me about, Em. Tell me about it.

Rich and I have both had some pretty crappy work experiences in our careers and if it has taught us anything, it's to allow our children to pursue their dreams and be happy. Now, this doesn't mean living off of Mommy and Daddy and hanging out with your friends. It means that maybe they don't end up with typical office jobs. Maybe they don't end up working for the man.

I would imagine that their generation is going to be more demanding of employers anyway. Change has begun and presumably will continue. Although, I can only hope that the entitlement issue that's occurring with some of these young kids (those in their 20s for those of us who aren't) will go away. When I first started working, I had to bust my butt and prove myself in order to move up. Everyone did (mostly.) Some have a different attitude regarding what working hard means these days.

The world is yours, little loves. Maybe one of you will be a fashion designer or a runner or a gymnast or an actress or an author or a ballerina.

GONE SEWING

As usual, I have much to blog about but a mini absence is necessary as I fervently create Easter outfit #1 because Easter is just over 3 weeks away. ACK! I made some progress today but Rich and I have both realized that when the girls are in school, you really only have 2 hours to yourself at the house. You have another 15-20 minutes to yourself in the car and believe me, I use that time to listen to MY music.

I was a teenager in the '80s and I clearly remember people older than myself who insisted on listening to music from the '60s or the '70s and I just couldn't understand them. Why do you want to listen to that when we have this totally awesome new music? Like New Kids on the Block! Do you know how you can tell when you are old? When you turn on the radio and you have no idea what you're listening to and you really don't care to even find out.

So, yeah, today I listened to a nice selection from 1994 to 2000.

Okay, I want to post a quick running update. I am up to 1.5 miles - that's per run, not in total. When I ran Wednesday night, I didn't realize that Rich had left the treadmill on a slight incline until about a half mile into my run. It was definitely more difficult to run like that but I left it because I knew I was getting a better workout. I now feel a little bit of an ache in my right knee, which could be from the weather or from pretending to be Growly, the angry dog or from running on an incline. I might drop back down to 1.25 tomorrow to see how it feels.

I found another great (old school) running song on my old running mix CDs. Shimmer by Fuel.

Let's talk about vocabulary. Although the girls can't read just yet, they quite often use big words. For example, last night Anna used transform. "And now this is going to transform into a boat."

I asked her for the definition of transform and she told me that it meant to turn into something else. Today, she was using the word object and gave me the correct definition of "a thing."

I wanted to test her even further. Back in November, Anna learned what a cornucopia was at school. We haven't discussed this in months. I asked her today what cornucopia meant. Here is her exact answer. (Exact because I sat down and typed it out after she said it.)

"A horn shaped basket that you put stuff you are thankful for in."

Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow with a finished dress. Tonight, Rich spotted the back piece of the dress, which is full of ruffles, laying on the ironing board and said, "Oh, that's going to be cute." It's going to be totally awesome!

More little kid stuff

* The scene - I'm sitting at my desk at work. Bob, an analyst, is standing in my cubicle as we discuss a work related matter. My cell phone rings. It's the school nurse. I excuse myself to take the call.

Here's my side of the conversation as heard by Bob:

"Yes. Hi."

"Yes."

"Yes. Back at the end of last year."

"No. I think she may be nervous about being back to school after vacation."

"She may also have to poop. She could be confusing the feelings."

"Okay. That's sounds fine."

"Okay. Thank you."

Bob has an infant son. My advice to Bob - "This is what you have to look forward to."

* The girls are close to being able to read. We work on sounding out letters and sometimes I spell out a simple word and help them sound it out.

Mommy - "Allie, what does B-A-T spell? Sound it out."

Allie - "B-ah. B-ah. Ahh. Ahhh."

Mommy - "That's a good start, Allie. Now the T. B-A-T."

Allie - "T-ah. Tah. Bah. Ah. Tah."

Mommy - "Yay, Allie! You are so close. What does it spell? Keep sounding it out."

Allie - "TRUCK!"

Okay, so we're still working on it.

What really matters

Anna finally had her twice rescheduled renal ultrasound and urology appointment last week. If you aren't familiar with big city hospitals, allow me to explain our usual experience. Appointment slots are double booked so we end up waiting and waiting and waiting some more and then Rich and I start sweating it out because we need to go to work and now it's an hour past when we said that we would be there. And then it starts getting close to lunch time for the little ones so you keep feeding them crackers and hope that you don't run out of snacks.

Amazingly, this was the smoothest set of appointments we've ever had, which figures since it was my day off from work. We had only been in the waiting room for about five minutes when they called us early for Anna's ultrasound. I was nervous. Really nervous. You never know when a problem is going to be discovered. That's why she has these ultrasounds.

The ultrasound started off well. The technician was young and kind. She easily found Anna's right kidney and began to record the images. She was comforting and told Anna how great she was doing. And then she moved over to the left kidney. It seemed to me, the non-medical professional, that she was having some difficulty and the images looked different to me.

Anna followed her requests to move, didn't fuss and was very well behaved for what was a slightly scary thing for her but the tech stopped telling her how well she was doing. After what seemed like forever, she finally moved to Anna's bladder and then took images of the kidneys from Anna's back. The first round had been from her sides.

We know the routine. When the tech finishes, she leaves the room to check with a doctor, who decides if the images are adequate. If there is a problem, the doctor returns with the tech to take more images. When the tech left, she said, "I'll be right back," which to me implied that she would be returning with a doctor. I held my breath.

But no. She returned to tell us we could head up to see the urologist. I felt a little queasy.

We were about 25 minutes early for our appointment but yet, we were called in to see the urologist a few minutes after we arrived. Unfortunately, we believe that he is close to retiring, which doesn't make me happy at all. I sincerely trust this man. He pulled up the ultrasound images and pointed to the first one. "See this kidney. This is a beautiful right kidney."

And then he pulled up another image. More breath holding. Afterwards, Rich told me that he was expecting the doctor to say that something wasn't right with Anna's left kidney. That he was setting up a comparison.

But no. Both kidneys looked great! Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Little peanut was weighed (for an increase in her ditropan dosage) and she's up to 29.8 pounds.

So we are going to keep on keeping on. (We have a referral for another GI specialist.)

What really matters.