A Harry Potter Halloween

.......or alternately, No. He's Not Yoda.

We had a pretty epic Halloween this year, the main event being Chris's admission to the ER for a respiratory infection which left me alone to take all the kids out trick-or-treating.  Luckily I had my lovely neighbors with me to make sure none of my brood met their demise running into the street in a sugar fueled craze.

Not that anyone would ever describe one of my children as crazed........

The big boys both wanted to be Harry Potter this year and since Aunt Courtney graciously offered to finance Halloween they got their wish with some really cute robes and real broomsticks I found on Etsy that I think will get a lot of use in the future.

Of course the fighting over who exactly would be Harry Potter began pretty much immediately and my cries that they could just both be Harry Potter fell on deaf ears.  Clearly two Harry Potters was a ridiculous solution. Henry thought David should be Ron Weasley because--red hair.  But David countered with the argument that Henry should be Ron because David's the oldest which obviously makes him the boss of everyone.

I'm not sure if that debate was ever resolved.  I guess once the candy started pouring in it didn't seem as important anymore.

And since we were doing Harry Potter costumes I got to dress up John like Dobby the house elf which was perfect because he likes to wear hats and also doesn't have enough words to argue with me on who he'd rather be for Halloween or whether or not he wants to be seen running around the neighborhood in a pillow case :)

Not everyone "got" John's costume though--a lot of folks thought he was supposed to be Yoda.  I thought the dirty pillowcase would clearly define him as a house elf--and also the fact that his hat was not green--but apparently I was mistaken.

We were not amused.

Well maybe a little amused.

The big surprise of the evening was that John turned out to be a very serious trick-or-treater.  He even outlasted Henry in his desire to acquire all the candy.  

And not to be left out, we also had a little Hedwig with us but she spent most of her time just sleeping and looking precious--apparently two week olds are pretty apathetic when it comes to Halloween :)

All in all I think the evening was a success.  Exorbitant amounts of candy were collected, Chris was released from the ER and is doing just fine and almost all of the children promptly went to bed, hopefully to sleep well into the morning hours and not notice that a good bit of their best candy is missing........

Happy Halloween!

Baby Pictures and Big Brothers

It's been hard to get a good picture of the little miss, but there has been some grumbling on the lack of baby cuteness so I now give you grumpy with a bow on top.........

.....and bored and trying to eat her hand, again with a bow on top.........

The boys all love her and just keep telling me about how cute she is and how much they love her tiny feet.  Henry did also said that we should have named her "Mary Poppins Margaret Angela Darling" and my argument that it might be a little long didn't seem to take the edge off of his disappointment although he did throw out "Princess Leia"as a shorter option.    I guess we'll just have to save that one for the next baby.

We were most worried about John's reaction but surprisingly (so far anyway) he just loves the baby.  He keeps coming up to her and kissing her head and pointing and smiling and saying "new baby!" in the sweetest way you can imagine.

Hopefully all of this sweetness lasts even once Margaret's big enough to steal their toys and they can't do anything about it because you can't make your little sister cry.

The Big Arrival

Little Margaret Anne arrived October 15 at 1:49 in the morning.  8 lbs 13 oz and 22 inches long.

I'll be back with a birth story and more pictures once I wrap my mind around the fact that we now have four children and one of them is a girl :)  

Ready

Okay, I've finished the crib skirt and it turned out super cute if I do say so myself.  I would have made it much more gathered and ruffle-y had I had more white fabric but alas, I'm on the very last remnants of aunt Elizabeth and uncle Nick's old duvet cover that they gave us along with their king sized bed ever so many years ago and I really wanted to just use things I had lying around the house--except for that pink pom pom fringe of course, I got that especially for the occasion :)

I used this tutorial for an adjustable crib skirt--which basically involves making three rectangular panels and attaching them to whatever is under your crib mattress (in our case a wire grid).  She suggested paper clip clamps but I sewed on some leftover bias tape as a ribbon substitute like this tutorial suggested to tie the skirt on instead.  I also made the process even more complicated by lining the panels with an old sheet since they seemed a little thin and see-through without it.....and let's face it, the point of the skirt is to hide all the things I want to stuff under the crib so it needs to be thick!

And now that all my sewing projects are complete I am officially ready for this baby to get here.

I'm starting to panic a little about her potentially taking her sweet time arriving--the boys all came within a day or two of their due dates so it didn't occur to me that she could be early or late when we were making our moving plans.  If she comes on or within two days of her due date I'll still have a good two weeks to recuperate before the movers arrive.  If not....yikes....



.....I might not have been in the best frame of mind when I insisted that we move to Virginia as soon as possible and just assumed that everything would simply work out.  I blame Chris.  Who asks crazy pregnant women for opinions on things that important anyway?

Finished Pillow

Sorry for the bad lighting and the pillow bragging, but there has to be someone out there that appreciates baby crafting more than my husband who thinks this came out "good" and is just glad I finally took his advice and made something square as opposed to intricately scalloped.

I made the back out of a thrifted pillow case which I am now kicking myself for not buying the rest of the set of because I totally would have made nursery curtains out of it.  Oh well.

Now if I can just whip up the crib skirt this weekend I'll be officially ready for the little miss to arrive.  Not that she has an actual nursery as of yet but I'm thinking I probably won't have much time for sewing between the newborn and the moving.......

One of Those Mornings

This was thrust at me this morning along with a calendar detailing which day next week David will be officially quitting the family.....all because I had the audacity to make him finish his math work. 

Moms, we're just so lame.  

Translation:  "David sticking his tongue out at mom."

On the bright side, he did know better than to actually stick his tongue out at me.  I'm still trying to decide if I should go totally mean mom and make him correct his spelling and punctuation errors :)

The Finished Quilt and Thoughts on Having a Daughter

So I finally finished the most time consuming baby quilt in the history of baby quilts, but the final product was so worth it!  Don't mind my quilt model.....he's just really annoyed I was holding up our park trip for ridiculous things like blog photography.

The whole thing took a good ten weeks from start to finish but apparently I haven't had my fill because I just started a matching pillow for the rocker which I can hopefully finish up before the baby arrives....and also the crib skirt that I have all the materials for (including pom pom fringe!) but haven't actually begun.

I still have two whole weeks so I should totally be good.......

I decided to go ahead and bind each individual hexagon which was just as difficult as the quilt shop lady said it would be and did involve a lot of hand sewn repair work from where I didn't get my scallops quite right on the back side with the sewing machine but it turned out even better than I expected and, let's face it, it was going to have that certain special homemade look about it no matter what I did.......

It's even cuter now that I've washed it up and it's gone all crinkly.  And yes, yes that is my gigantic baby belly there.

And here's David, excited because he thinks the photo shoot is over.......

........and then more than a little put out when he realizes that it is not.

It's so much more fun crafting for a girl than for boys.  I feel like a whole new world of options has just opened up for me--not that the boys didn't appreciate all the things I made them but it was definitely harder to find projects to do in general and once we moved to Florida and they really didn't need anything knit for them I was pretty much reduced solely to cardboard creations.  With a daughter I can make all sorts of things--with lace!--or any fancy trim I want :)

The idea of having a daughter is also a little terrifying though.  With the boys there was a sense that I could just do my best at mothering until they get big enough to be handed off to dad for all the how-to-be-a-man lessons.  With a girl (and she definitely is a girl--I had the midwife double check last week when she busted out the ultrasound machine for a head-down check!) all the responsibility for teaching her how to be a woman falls to me.  I'm the one who will be responsible for all "the talks" and I'm who she'll be looking to as an example for, oh, everything....so no pressure there.  It's probably a good thing I started with boys because I am a much better woman now than I was at twenty-five.  And hopefully by the time she's a teenager I'll have grown into someone really worth emulating.