artsy fartsy,  Bug,  Slow News Day

Arsty Fartsy Stay Inside Day

These pictures were not taken today. Today it is raining. These are from Saturday’s walk to the farmer’s market. How perfect is my life? I get to walk to the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings. It would be more perfect if my night owl husband walked to the farmer’s market with me but that’s just crazy talk. The only reason Toby might be up on a Saturday morning is because he hadn’t gone to bed yet since Friday. Ah. Me. But I love him.

Today it is raining and I am cooking up a craft project. That’s just crazy talk too. When am I going to get a chance to drag out my sewing machine and sew up something between feeding the baby, changing the baby, playing with the baby and walking around the house for hours on end with the baby draped over my shoulder?

On a side note: Baby Bug loves my shoulder. I wish I could invent a shoulder harness and give my arms a rest. The minute I even start to take her down from my shoulder she opens her mouth with a big ol’ cry. Sometimes she falls asleep up there and then I trick her into letting mommy have a rest by lying down on the couch and going to sleep myself. She thinks she’s still up on my shoulder, but really she’s horizontal. Tricky. Tricky grasshopper.

So anyway, here is my craft project. Isn’t it fun! Don’t you just want to rush out and buy a bag of beans so you can make one yourself? Maybe not. Maybe my sketch doesn’t even make sense. It’s a doorstop with a handle! It’s simply a pillow filled with sand or beans (so it’s heavy on the bottom) with a handle attached to the top. A fabric purse handle would work fine. I also thought it would be fun to sew buttons on for eyes and maybe stitch up a mouth. You could even loobylou it up.

Where did I get this crazy I idea you wonder (or as Toby would say, “a wild hair up my ass”)? Remember how I was talking about our complicated system of keeping the doors from being busted wide open by our cats who like to make grand entrances? We usually just prop the door with a slipper or a shoe. I hate this because sometimes I want to wear my slipper or sometimes I’m just tired of my shoes being all over the house. I think it would be really cool if we had door stoppers with handles that we could just put on the door handle when we weren’t using them.

If only Baby Bug’s Grandma would come over and hold her all day long so I could do this crazy project… and the laundry and mop the floor and answer all my emails and fix my broken web pages and… sigh… I’m a mom now. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

13 Comments

  • laura

    I’m thinking the craft-challenged like me could just dig a cute, abandoned purse out of the wilds of the back of the closet, fill it with beans, and hang it on the door. Hmm?

  • Lola

    Hey, I’m sure you have one, but I thought I’d suggest it anyway. What about a Baby Bjorn? I have friends who spent months carrying their babies around that way. It at least let’s you keep your hands free!

  • josephine

    I do have one… and that works some of the time. We take it on walks. But when at home, BB prefers to be perched high up on my shoulder so she can look around. The Bjorn cramps her style.

  • Kristina

    What a great idea! Our doors used to stay open of their own accord, but Mein dear Hublein decided that he would grease ’em all up, and now we have to resort to the slipper or shoe-propping if we don’t want to be woken in the middle of the night by the scratching, meowing kitties. And by “we” I mean “he,” because I sleep like a rock. Somehow, though, it’s always MY shoes and slippers that are selected for the propping, which hardly seems fair. :)

  • Nila

    A shoulder harness would be genius. I remember that both of my boys loved that position. You’d make lots of money if you could design one.

  • phoeber

    No-sew wrap! Check out mamatoto for the instructions, and you can hike BB onto your back/shoulder with ease, the better to observe All Things Elevated. It only took me a couple of tries to get to feeling pretty good at getting DD into position, and she loved seeing things from her new perch.

    The wrap is just 5 yards (that can make for a lot of extra so 3-4 might work better depending on your/baby’s size) of cotton gauze (Indian cotton, I imagine, like those boho skirts what are so popular now and again) that you wrap and tie, and DC is snug as a (Baby) bug in a rug.

    More adjustable and comfy than the Bjorn, too, imo, and waaaaay cheaper. Three bucks a yard is hard to beat, no?

  • Amanda

    What a great idea – the door propper open thing! My parent’s used to stick a cork in the door frame part so that someone couldn’t close the door and leave kitty downstairs – but I think that’s a much fancier idea!

    I have been lurking for a while now – and I just wanted to say I think you’re very creative!

  • Aunt Jaynette

    We use the every organic….Rock. Our cat hates a closed door. Her routine in the morning is to follow just far enough behind me that I get the bathroom door closed and my pants down.Then she scratches and open the door goes when I can’t get up to close it. And if I do wait for her to follow me in, she does a tour of the loo and hooks a hand under the door and lets herself out. Again I’m not in a position to close it.

  • Jamie

    Love the door stopper! You must post pictures of the finished product. My second baby wanted to be carried the first few months. I mastered the art of carrying her around with my left arm while I puttered around the house. I’m surprised my left arm is not twice as big as my right! Will Baby Bug watch a Baby Einstein video from a bouncy seat for a few minutes while you do a few things? Those were lifesavers for me. She is adorable, by the way.