amelia studio

Fancy Feet

This past week has been pretty stressful around here, and I finally feel like we're starting to get back to normal. One of my daughters was in the hospital because she developed a platelet disorder, but she is on the mend and we're all trying to relax a bit. Little things like my fancy new-to-me gold shoes brighten things up a bit. The girls are pretty tickled with my vintage eBay version of these too-expensive shoes, and so am I. How do you not smile when you see gold shoes? Gold feet! Fancy!

I haven't been doing as much pottery while all this has been going on -- just getting things fired and wrapping up loose ends like attaching mug handles. Later I'll post some pics of some fun drippy-dot pots I'm working on.

We're also starting our Halloween prep here. I think we're going to have a fairy princess, a Dorothy and either a bee, a princess or a Tinkerbell, depending on what sort of information I can get out of my littlest girl. I'll just be the lady in the gold shoes.

Akorn This Way

We have survived the first illness of the season! Oh my, that wasn't a fun one. I'm finally starting to feel like a human with ambitions beyond getting a shower or guarding my box of lotion tissues. (Lotion tissues: wonderful invention, says my delicate little nose.)

Here's a shot of my oldest daughter helping the squirrels with their acorn harvest. A leaf plate AND a sign. Spoiled squirrels.

The acorns were collected on my mom's driveway the last time we ventured out of the house. We celebrated my middle daughter's birthday outside on the driveway, both to enjoy the beautiful fall day and to prevent my mom's house from being completely contaminated with our germs. We did take our germs over to Red Barn Farm, where we picked the last remaining apples and inhaled lots of gravel and hay dust. Since then, we've been in our PJs, coughing and crying and watching television.

So it's been a couple weeks since I've had a Parent's Day Out day or a work night. I've been spraying a number of pots in an attempt to keep them from drying out. Maybe they will get trimmed tonight! It's good to be alive again.

Short!

I finally, finally made a hair appointment. I need a cut so badly. It's not good.

I have been finding myself drawn to cuts like this one for about a year and a half (the one on top). But I know my hair would do no such thing. Many a time did a teenage Amy bring some photo of a stick-straight hairstyle to the salon and force some poor stylist to do a cut she knew was just not going to happen. They all tried to tell me. I'm stubborn. I know better now though. So I've been looking for curly-girl versions of that cut.

I've had short hair before, and liked it, but I am a little nervous. I've gained a little weight since my '90s pixie cut days, so I don't know how short hair will look. Elise says I will look like a boy. I'm thinking we can do some sort of combo of these two styles. Maybe?

Like a more modern Liz? A bit shorter on the sides and longer on the top? Yeah? Yeah?

(Wasn't Elizabeth Taylor pretty?)

Today

I can't believe I haven't been in this space for four months. It was a rough spring for the H clan, and a busy summer. As most of you who know my family in person know, we lost a young member of our family this spring, our nephew, Chris's sister's little boy. For a long time, all the things I normally blog about -- the little bits of our day -- seemed trivial and not worth the time it took to write about them. But I knew that was just one of many expressions of grief, and that the need to single-mindedly cling to those most vital would ease, and simple pleasures would return. And to some degree they have. Not every day, but many days. These things may fall away in times of crisis, but they make up the remainder of our days, and so, our lives.

Today's little things:

• sleeping through the alarm and rushing schoolday tasks
• finding something orange (hairclips) for E's orange day at school
• the smell of zucchini muffins baking
• the ritual of making a latte (and drinking it)
• C asking again (and again) when her birthday will be (September)
• dishes and laundry (always)
• vacuum lines on the living room rug
• windows fogged with humidity
• M bestowing unsolicited hugs on our grumpy doggy visitor, Casey
• the happy prospect of my Tuesday work night (back to the clay, at last)

It's been a quiet, peaceful day. I wish you the same.

Good Morning, Sunshine

I am having trouble waking up today, despite this beautiful sunshine streaming into my office though the leaded glass window. We're still getting back into our schedule after Spring Break.

We've been spending a lot of time in the yard lately, cleaning up the gardens after a long winter. I have had swingsets and playhouses on the brain, as I do every spring. This playhouse is very cool and way too expensive. It's just five boards! I'm wondering if I could build it. (Chris is cringing, I'm sure.) And look at this cool one. Why are there no plans online for a small, modern, outdoor playhouse? I have searched high and low. All traditional.

Somehow I think improvisational carpentry on my part might result in an unstable backyard shanty -- like the one I built in the empty lot next to our house in sixth grade. I'll have to dig up a photo of that thing.

The Auction, Probably the First of Many

I finished working on my first preschool auction a little over a week ago. In addition to the fish decorations I made, I also worked on some larger cardboard pieces like these, helped with general set-up, and helped with food prep. My mom and Lloyd were nice enough to come watch the girls while we went to the auction. We came home with a basket of fitness supplies (I lost my yoga mat in the flood), and I won the auction for the close parking spot. You know how much I love winter, so that spot was the best item there, in my opinion!

I'm still not sure how I feel about school auctions in general. I understand the community-building aspect, but this seems like a weird way to go about it. As far as the financial aspect goes, I don't understand why our society puts education so low on the funding ladder. I talked to my mom about this, and she doesn't remember parents having to beg and grovel so much for school funding. It seems like the fund-raising never ends. Why not just make education a priority in the first place and fund it accordingly?

It's Friday, Right?

It seems like this has been a very long week. The weather has been strange -- we went from this crazy, thick, all-day fog one day to warmth and wind the next. And yet, there are still piles of snow while we're running around in short sleeves. It's like we've changed seasons all in one week.

I'm sure we'll be back to regular February programming soon enough, but I certainly enjoyed today's warmth. M has been running around saying "outside? outside? boots? boots?" Today E said, "It's so nice out, it's like we're free!" Poor C is forcing herself to play outside even though she's sick with a cold. Our backyard is strewn with tissues.

We are not a winter people.

On a totally unrelated note, I've started maintaining a Pinterest page for marking things that I find interesting online. I avoided signing up for a while because I didn't want yet another account to maintain. Facebook. Twitter. Flickr. Google Reader. My Fitness Pal. Four e-mail accounts. Yes, four. But Pinterest has been fun, and it really hasn't taken any extra time, since I was bookmarking things anyway. This is just more organized. One of these days I will actually start looking at other people's pinboards to see if I'm even doing this right.

Blizzard

So here's the view out of our front window. (I know this view probably gets boring, but I'm not going out there when I know my camera is just going to freeze up anyway.) There are the results of the blizzard: a little less than a foot of snow. And we maintained power through the whole thing. Not bad at all! We are all going a little stir crazy in here, but we're fine. On the agenda: Play-Doh, shoveling, and possibly a batch of cookies. We only have one stick of butter, so I'm trying to decide if half SmartBalance cookies would be gross. What am I talking about? It would be hard to make a chocolate-chip cookie gross.

(And yes, I realize it is odd to be posting about cookies the day after I posted about my food habits. I can handle it!)

The Necklace as a Cold Remedy

I was kind of on a roll with keeping the blog updated there for a bit! But this week I've been pretty sick. I've tried to maintain business as usual around here: lots of cooking and putting together of projects for E's "Marvelous Me" week in kindergarten (she's the special student this week). I keep waiting for this cold to turn; you know -- the day when you don't feel worse than the day before. It hasn't come yet, so today I thought I could force myself to feel better by wearing actual clothes and jewelry and lipstick for my grand outing to gymnastics class. Yeah, that didn't really help. Well, maybe a little. It did give the baby a nice toy around my neck while we were rocking at nap time.

So I think I'm going to go put my jammies back on. Next time I check in, I promise I'll be less annoyingly whiny. I just wanted to pop in and say "hello." I hope you are staying warm wherever you are!

Snow Day

We've had snow days the past two days here. My two older girls are old enough now that they can stay out there for quite a long time, knocking snow off shrubs, and making snow angels, bunny paths and snowmen. The baby just stands in one spot, occasionally bending over as best she can in her puffy snowsuit to pick up little handfuls of fluff. She lasted long enough for me to shovel the driveway and then she was ready to come in for a sippy of hot chocolate and a handful of mini marshmallows. My entryway is now piled with soggy snow gear. It always feels nice to come inside at take off all the layers, shedding bits of melting snow along with them.

And this is the last time this season you'll hear me wax poetic about the snow. One per winter. That's it.