Scheming: New and improved!

So at the suggestion of a commentor on a previous post, I decided to try my hand at opening a SpreadShop at spreadshirt.com. You can see what I've got so far -- which admittedly isn't much yet -- by visiting Leonine Designs and purchasing one of every item listed. :-D

I've so far got three targets in mind: My sisters -- or women like them -- who could make any t-shirt look good (and by the way, girls, might there be any interest in a Likes Me Pink shirt?); a group of women on a private message board for moms whom I've become quite close to in the last year; and people who want to support organ and tissue donation (though there's no scheming there -- any profit I make from green ribbon apparel I'll donate to UNOS in honor of my best friend Kathryn).

The shop is open for business, but don't despair at the sparse offerings so far. I've only been at this since last night at around 1AM. I'll put more thought into it, work on some real designs, and make Leonine Designs the coolest custom apparel shop you've ever seen. Watch out, suckas! ;-)

In the meantime, though, please feel free to run up your credit cards at my shop.


~RCH~

[PS - Spreadshirt doesn't offer stationary products, so if you're looking for a handsome black and white journal, you can still help supplement my grocery budget and feed my children by purchasing this one at the Cafe Press site.]

Visitors and opposable thumbs

I'm falling down on the blogging job, and will probably continue to this month. Right now we're entertaining visitors -- I'm cooking more than usual (on a good day, you're lucky to weasel dinner out of me; now I'm making all 3 meals), schlepping kids to area attractions, and refereeing nearly constant fights between the toddler and her 7-year-old cousin.

Oh, and let me tell you: I am just sick to death of cartoons. If we never see another one, I will be thrilled. And the Doodlebops! 7yo changed the channel from my beloved and very educational Sesame Street this morning to force my toddler to watch the Doodlebops! Grrrrrrr. Doodlebops are the devil. Being the gracious host, I said nothing, but ... sheesh.

Anyway.

So we're entertaining right now, will have a week off, and then the girls and I are headed to see my family for the duration of the month. I'll blog if the mood strikes, but I anticipate having too much fun to bother. :-)

In medical news, I burned my thumb Saturday morning while scrambling eggs for our guests. My special talent -- my super power, as it were -- is making a huge mess in the kitchen. (DH insists I could make a mess simply boiling water, and I imagine he's right.) As I scrambled the eggs in the pan, some fell out over the side. I reached over to get it out of the way and touched the burner directly instead of the eggs.

OUCH!

I dunked my thumb in ice water the rest of the morning, and covered it with aloe vera gel thereafter. It blistered up on Saturday, the blister popped and peeled on Sunday, and as of last night it still hurt pretty much all the time. Not merely when the burned spot (which is actually fairly small) touched something, but constantly.

I kept showing it to DH. "Is this okay? Is it supposed to still hurt?"

Yes, he'd tell me. It's fine. You did the right thing with the ice water and aloe; there's nothing much to do for it now.

"But it's red and the skin is broken and it hurts. What if it's infected? Can you look at my thumb to make sure it's not infected?"

It's fine, he'd say.

"What if there's an infection and it gets necrotic, turns black, and falls off? What if they have to amputate and I'm left without an opposable thumb on my dominant hand? That happened to a girl from church, you know; not her thumb, but she had lupus and her toe got infected and before she knew it her whole foot turned black and now she wears a prosthetic leg from the knee down! (Not that you'd know it from looking at her; she's gorgeous and walks with nary a limp.) But back to me: What if it's infected? How will I function without an opposable thumb? How will I take care of the girls?"

He'd roll his eyes, look again, and tell me my thumb was fine -- healing according to schedule -- stop worrying.

It still hurts today, but less than it did yesterday. So I guess he's right, lol. I expect to resume full use of my thumb within the next few days. Yay.


~RCH~

Happy Birthday

Today is the baby's first birthday. Can I still call her a baby? She doesn't walk yet, so she's not a toddler, right? No toddling going on here (from her, anyway).

First birthdays are more for the mom than the baby, I'm convinced. For me, it's the biggest emotional milestone of her life so far; she, on the other hand, is a blank slate with no expectations of balloons or cake or more stuffed animals to add to the heap. I can't stop thinking about what I was doing at this precise moment a year ago; she just wonders when it's going to be lunch time.

A year ago today I was just getting to know her. She was so small, her face so pink and round, her fingers so long and languid.

I feel like there's plenty to say on this subject, but I don't want to say it. Maybe later. Right now I feel like Mary: I will take these things and ponder them in my heart.




~RCH~

Thanks for the medicine, medicine guy!

It's a good thing I married the DH I did, because I know so little about medical issues it's scary.

The toddler, ricocheting around the room like a pinball, knocked the baby really hard in the forehead last Saturday -- hard enough to give her a dent. A dent, not a bump. I freaked out and paged DH, who was on call and very busy.

Me: The baby has a dent. Is that bad?

DH: Um.... Is she acting normal?

Me: Well, yeah. She cried when it happened, but she's okay now.

DH: Put some ice on it if you're worried.

Me: But it's a dent. Not a bump. Doesn't that sound like a bad thing? Isn't a dent worse than a bump?

DH: Babies have soft heads. I'm sure she's fine and I'm sure the dent will, well, pop out. Just keep an eye on her.

After dinner that same night, I noticed she seemed warm. I took her temperature with the ear thermometer (which I don't entirely trust because her ears are too small for it to fit well) and got 100.2F. I took it with the forehead strip (which DH doesn't trust because it looks like a gumball machine prize) and got 101F. I took it under her arm and got 101.3F. I figured I could average the three results and avoid taking it rectally. (I have so far avoided taking anybody's temperature rectally, and I hope to maintain that streak.)

I paged him again.

Me: I know you're busy, so I'll make it quick. Can a concussion cause a fever?

DH: What? First put the crack pipe down, then tell me what's going on.

Me: The baby has a fever of 101. Could it be from the dent in her head?

DH: No. It's not from the dent in her head.

Me: Maybe her teeth? She has two on the bottom breaking through.

DH: That's a more likely possibility, though 101 sounds high for teething. [*Big audible sigh*] Give me a few minutes; I think I can break away. I'll come home and take a look at her.

He did and determined she had an ear infection, poor thing. He prescribed some Cephalexin, on the off chance it was bacterial. I piled the girls in the car to go pick it up from the drug store's drive-thru pharmacy. My toddler, being the very big helper that she is, repeated everything I said to the little squawk box and then after we got the stuff, as I was rolling up the window and about to drive off, she yelled, "Thanks for the medicine, medicine guy! We love you very much!"

LOL.

The baby took the Cephaluphogus reasonably well until yesterday, when a faint rash began to develop. At first I wasn't sure that's what it was -- it could have been the bad lighting in the room playing tricks on my bad eyes, or marks on her skin from being pressed against me while she nursed. But by 5pm, the rash had grown darker and spread all over her belly and back and, more faintly, onto her face.

I woke up my exhausted, post-call DH so he could look at it. He thought it looked like a drug reaction, but having been awake for nearly 36 hours and asleep for only 3, he decided we should go up to the after-hours clinic and have one of his more clear-headed colleagues check it out. Of course, that's what it turned out to be: My baby is allergic to an entire class of antibiotics. Great.

*Sigh!*

She's fine now. The dent popped back out and blossomed into a small but lovely purple bruise; she hasn't had a fever since Sunday; her bottom teeth have made it through the gum line; she's on a new antibiotic for her ear and the rash is almost completely gone. We're lucky her reaction wasn't worse.

What a crazy few days.

I have to laugh at my own ignorance -- can a concussion cause a fever? -- but really, it's such a relief to have DH around. Can you imagine me trying to take care of these girls without him? Lol. What a mess we'd be. ;-)


~RCH~

Another false start

We went through a pack of Easy Ups this week, but are no closer to potty training the toddler than we were in February when I bought her the Winnie the Pooh toilet ("Oh boy! Pooh and Pligget!").

I thought she was ready. I thought she's been ready for months, but I've been too preoccupied or lazy or daunted to follow through: She's extremely verbal; she has words to describe her various bodily functions and has (sporadically) anticipated them before they happened. She understands and can follow directions. We all know she knows how to take off her clothes.

We've had a few false starts since the introduction of her personal potty. She lost interest in the thing a few days after I brought it home, and I didn't want to push her. She'd only just barely turned 2.

Later in the spring I bought a few packs of real underwear -- pink and purple cotton panties with hearts and balloons -- sure that she'd be thrilled to leave her diapers for these. Turns out she didn't really care, and I had little interest in changing wet panties (or worse) several times a day.

Summer, people told me, is the perfect time to potty train because they can run around the house naked all day. Frankly, since I live in a house equipped with both heat and air conditioning, I'm not sure why the season matters -- but I felt grateful for an excuse to put it off again.

And now here it is, with summer half over and the toddler closer to 3 than to 2 (by like a week, lol, but still) and I feel like I'm completely derelict in my potty training duty. We need to figure this out.

I made a chart last Sunday -- crayon on cardstock; nothing fancy -- and told her she could put a Sesame Street sticker on it any time she went wet or poopy in her toilet. On Monday we broke out the Easy Ups, the training pants with the style of underwear and the ease of a diaper! I tried to force Koolaid on her all day long, an unheard of treat for a girl who's only allowed milk and water, but she didn't want any. We made frequent trips to the bathroom but nothing happened. Or rather, things happened, but they happened in her Easy Ups in between the trips to practice on the toilet. (And let me tell you, when it's poop, Easy Ups are absolutely not as easy as diapers. Blegh.) Whether deliberately or by accident, our timing was always off.

Wednesday afternoon, already frustrated with the direction of this little experiment and eager to inspire her, I let her put an Elmo sticker on the chart for passing gas in the vicinity of the Pooh potty. Hey, it was something.

It's now late Friday night and Elmo is all alone, smiling his happy vacant smile, waiting in vain for other stickers to join him.

The Easy Ups ran out today and we bought diapers to replace them.

*SIGH!*

I thought she was ready, but now I'm not sure: She doesn't seem to have any particular interest in staying fresh and clean; she doesn't mind walking around with her pants full of poop. I've read that being able to dress herself is a potty training prerequisite, and while she can tear those clothes off like a champ, she has a lot of trouble putting them on. I can work with her on that, but in the meantime.... Is it worth the stress this is causing between us? Can we take a break and try again later?

Oh! And speaking of stress! She has to be coerced into sitting on the toilet most of the day, but tell her it's time for a nap (or time to clean up, or time for *insert undesirable activity here*) and suddenly she has an urgent need. An urgent need that -- as evidenced by the emptiness of the chart -- never seems to pan out. Miiiiighty suspicious, I say. But what am I supposed to tell her? "No, you may not use the potty!" Argh.

What am I supposed to do? Soldier on despite her complete lack of interest? Put it off again until later? I worry that these starts and stops sap whatever potty credibility I had to start with (and I worry that I'm now the sort of person who writes long treatises discussing "potty credibility").

I want this to be a positive learning experience for her, but as the week wore on I found myself snapping at the slightest provocation: "Don't you touch that handle! You don't get to flush unless you actually get something in the toilet. Hands off. HANDS OFF." (Picture her with an evil grin, her hand hovering over the flusher, flinching occasionally to goad me.) If we try again later, when she's ready -- when she wants to learn -- won't it be more positive for all of us?

But she's 2-1/2 already; it's getting late. Please, someone, reassure me that she won't still be in diapers at age 15.


~RCH~

Scheming

I keep trying to find a good money-making scheme I can do from home to supplement the grocery budget. I've considered eBay, but I don't have much of my own crap to sell and I'm not convinced I could find decent enough thrift store items around here to net me a profit if resold.

They had a sidewalk clearance sale at the mall last weekend -- I saw dresses with original price tags of $125 going for $10. They were beautiful special occasion dresses; I'm sure I could have made my $10 back and then some, but I didn't have $10 at the time (or $20 or $30 or $40 to buy a few) so I missed that boat. Dangit.

Then on Sunday night, I stumbled across CafePress.com. What a perfect opportunity! They have a catalog of blank products to sell; you use your design and computer skills to whip something up and open a store on their site. They charge a base price for each item (say, $5 for product X) and you set your store's price somewhere above that ($7, maybe). When someone buys product X, CafePress prints, processes, and ships the order, keeps the $5, and sends you the $2. Opening a basic store is free; your only responsibility is to create the products and market them to paying customers.

"Hey!" I thought. "I can totally do that!" Sure, I don't have any actual design training or talent, but I do have Photoshop, lol. So I decided to try it out.

Problem is, with the basic (free) store, you're only allowed one design per product. You can't, for instance, make one onesie design in girly colors and have another of the same design for boys. You get one shot at the onesie, one for a t-shirt, one for a tote bag, one for a journal, bla bla bla.... Hmmph. So now I'm a little soured on the idea. I could pay them some money, of course, to get more variety in my store, Leonine Designs -- but I'm not willing to do that yet when money is so tight and I'm really only testing the waters.

Still. What can it hurt? All it costs me is time and I seem to have plenty of that in the middle of the night while my insomniac baby plays. So I made a journal pimping out the toddler's gorgeous lashes.

Consider this my effort at marketing.

You get a fairly decent idea of the product on the CafePress site, but their close-up pic is a low resolution version of the original that doesn't do it justice. So on the off-chance you'd like to buy this oh-so attractive journal for yourself or for a loved one (it makes a great gift!), here's a better view of what you'd be getting:




~RCH~

More music recommendations

Driving around with the girls and listening to the college station this afternoon, I heard "Welcome to Confusion" from the new album On Sleep Lab by The Stairs.

Anyone who loves me and knows my address can feel free to buy the CD for my birthday.

Another odd, but oddly lovable song off the college station: "Devil Town" by Daniel Johnston. How is it that I've never heard of this guy before?


~RCH~