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Move over Gumball, now there’s something plumpier!
I threw caution to the wind, blew off work and painting to make a stuffed dog today! I don’t know what hit me. I was working on the eternal couch cover project (I’m always altering it, one of these days it will be perfect and then it will be so brittle from the sun constantly beating on it, it will fall to shreds and I’ll have to start all over again) and I just got this crazy hair-brained idea that I should make Baby Bug a stuffed dog. You know, since I’m on this seemingly endless dog kick these days.
Before you go complimenting my sewing, let me just say that I am not a very good seamstress. I am horrid, in fact. Part of it is my sewing machine and the other part of it is that I am just a hack job artist with no attention span to be a perfectionist. If you look close, you will find puckers and gathers and back-tacking where there shouldn’t be back-tacking, knots where there shouldn’t be knots… It’s a big mess. My Aunt Keren, the seamstress, will not be allowed to examine it closely. This, like most of my sewing projects, will put her many years of kind teaching to shame. I’m sorry Aunt Keren.
It’s not all my fault though. My sewing machine doesn’t like me very much. I know this because it makes rats nests with the bobbin thread on a regular basis. This might be because I keep my sewing machine in this canvas tote and every time I haul it in and out of the closet, I think I break it. The tension is whacky. I don’t know what the numbers mean so I don’t even know how to fix it.
The little spool thing that holds the thread is busted off. I have to stick a skewer in the hole, where it used to be, and let my spool of thread wobble around on the skewer unbalanced. It’s really amazing that I bother to sew at all.
All that said, I had a blast making this little stuffed puppy. I used to make these sorts of things all the time when I was a kid and I used to visit my Aunt’s sewing room. And then there’s the Lumpy Cat Ranch of course. I think imperfect sewing is my thing. I know Baby Bug is too young to really appreciate the fun of this but I think someday we are going to really have a ball. Or a puppy or a doll or a kitten… or a truck.
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Chuck E. Cheese: a rite of passage
It’s 4:30 in the morning (when I wrote this, posted later) on the day of Baby Bug’s big Pinkkkkity First Birthday Party and I can’t sleep. Why? Because I have 200 pictures in my camera that need to get out and be posted. So many pictures! If I don’t, I know all these memories will just be lost because after the birthday party I’ll probably have 200 more pictures and by then I’ll be too tired to go back and blog about something as old as going to Chuck E Cheese’s on Friday night.
Chuck E. Cheese, remember him? Man, I haven’t been since I was twelve. Not counting that one birthday party I went to for a friend’s kid’s birthday. I didn’t have kids then so it was not the same at all. When you have kids, or you are a kid, Chuck E. Cheese’s is the best place EVER. Well, except the noise and the pizza that you’re worried is not going to be all that great because it was cooked by the same sweaty pimply teenager who was just up on stage teaching all the five year old’s how to Macarena.
Anyway, Chuck E. Cheese did not disappoint. It was a blastola. Baby Bug loved every minute of it. I don’t think she cried once. I thought sure she’d be afraid of the big furry mouse who’s hands move mechanically and maybe his one arm is broken because sometimes it gets stuck in mid air awkwardly. But no, she LOVED the broken Chuckie. She wanted to get up on stage and climb all over his furry feet. “Kkkkkkkkittty,” she says reaching towards him over and over. Silly kid.
My niece, Rapunzel, played skeeball and some other popcorn game all night and scored us a bunch of tickets. Then my sister-in-law, being the experienced mom that she is, divided all the tickets evenly between the three kids. So that meant Baby Bug got to have a prize from the prize counter too. So many prizes! I felt like I was twelve again, forced to do math so I could win something good. We ended up with a soft squishy ball (it was the only really baby proof thing there) and Baby Bug immediately grabbed it and would not let go. She fell asleep in her car seat on the way home, clasping her new ball tightly to her chest.
Isn’t this what being a mom is all about? Taking your kids to Chuck E. Cheese so they can exhaust themselves by having too much fun? It was great. She slept the whole night and didn’t wake up once.
