My sweet Fiona turned three this week. Kris always takes their birthday off and for Meredith we have done things like gone to Saltspring Island, but the weather isn’t nearly as predictable in March. She originally said she wanted to ride a pony, but there are no places that have pony rides that we could find that are open. So we gave her a “rain check” for a pony ride that we will do in April one weekend. A few of her choices just weren’t open for the season yet so we ended up at gymnastics, and later she went to Meredith’s music class with her and the teacher let her stay after and play with and explore all the instruments, which she was thrilled about too.

It is hard to believe my baby is three. She is such a fun kid and I love the stage she is in. She has gone through some huge developmental leaps in the past couple of months and can count to 12, spell and write her name, recognizes Meredith’s name, has a huge vocabulary and loves to use it, and so much more. She is incredibly thoughtful and sweet, and one of her very favourite phrases seems to be “I have a good idea!” as she attempts to come up with solutions for any problem that may come up. She is, generally, quick to share with others and loves to make other people happy. She also loves to stress her independence and definitely has a cheeky side to her personality. She loves babies and is really excited to be a big sister soon. She also really loves dolls, so her main gifts this year involved a doll I made for her, a high chair Kris made, and a dress, diaper, wipes, and doll blanket made by me, Meredith, and her nana (my mom).

The doll and high chair made by Kris and I. She loved them and they have been played with almost nonstop by both girls since her birthday.

The blanket made by my mom that matches her own baby blanket (also made by my mom), and the diaper and wipes made by Meredith. She even did the cutting of the pattern/fabric, ironing, and everything. She did ask for help going around the curves of the diaper.

We will likely make a few more diapers and some outfits for the doll, as Fiona loves to dress them up and changes this ones diaper a lot. I think I didn’t use a big enough seam allowance so she’s wider than she probably should be, so maybe some knit clothes next time.

Like all of my kids’ birthdays, it was a bittersweet day. So neat watching them grow and move on to new stages, and sad to know they’ve left old ones behind. But I always seem to like the next ones even more than the last, so I am looking forward to seeing what comes.

Lately we’ve been doing lots of sewing. Fiona brought me some fabric from my stash and asked if I would make a mei tai for her, so of course I did. I used this tutorial though I changed the measurements somewhat since she is still pretty tiny.

Meredith really wanted to learn how to sew, so I showed her hot to make baby wipes and she took to sewing quite quickly. She has made quite a few on her own now, many with me in another room cooking or helping Fiona, and not needing much help.

I have also made a doll for Fiona’s birthday this week, along with some clothes and diapers, and Meredith made some small wipes for her. Kris made a little doll high chair for her too. I will post pictures of those and more details after her birthday though.

I made a super easy twirly dress for Meredith using a thrift store t-shirt and this tutorial. She loves it! I just zigzagged the bottom hem for now. One day I’ll hem it properly, maybe. I do plan to make more before summer though. She loves twirly dresses.

I’ve said this many times before, but there are so many things I want to document and remember, that I really want to start blogging regularly again. I’m going to try and make some time weekly to write something about our week and what we have done and our plans and just generally how life is progressing. Both girls are going through some pretty neat developmental jumps, and we have been going on walks and meeting friends and doing science experiments and building and sewing and just generally doing all sorts of things I’d love to look back on one day with them! We will see if I can manage to actually stick to it this time.

So that’s what I did tonight instead of making an advent calendar. I kind of followed this pattern, but also used some of the directions from some larger mei tai tutorials and the dimensions are different. I also had some charm squares and wanted to experiment with making a bit of a patchwork design.

I’m mostly really happy with how it turned out. I will give it to her for Christmas so I don’t know how it will fit (I think it will be really big, but oh well). The straps are much wider than on Meredith’s. I also put the shoulder straps at way too big of an angle sideways, but didn’t really realize it until most of it was sewn together. Next time, I would put the straps much more upwards. I have more material, maybe I’ll have to make another.

It’s reversible. On the other side is another fabric that goes with the blue. It doesn’t match the charm pack at all but I figured since only one side would be showing at a time that wouldn’t matter.

I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of one of the things that has kept me really busy and away from blogging though. Woodworking! I made Meredith a bed. I used this plan. It really wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it might be and she loves it. I think it looks really nice in her room, though it still needs to be sanded and finished. Once that’s done, we’re going to move it into the smaller den area of her room and turn the bigger room into her play/living space.

Long term, if it holds up well, we’ll likely turn it into the top part of a bunk bed (hence the footboard and headboard being the same height). I also made this which we will hang above the bed once it’s in the smaller room so she can have books readily accessible.

I would like to finish all three of these, though I’m not sure what a realistic goal is. I can finish a spread in one session of working if I get a good chunk of time, but that doesn’t happen a lot. A full double spread a week is probably realistic, which means over a year to finish what’s left on all three of them. Anyway, here are some of the ones I’ve been working on recently for Fiona’s (click for bigger images).

I might change some of the backgrounds and/or paper still, but I’m just glad to be getting something done! I am using this “My Sweet Baby” collection to do the book and bought a cute scrapbook I’ll eventually put the pages into.

I’m pretty happy with the way the doll turned out. I just used scraps I had laying around, so it’s not a “true” Waldorf doll using only natural materials. But it is stuffed with wool and it is soft and cuddly. As soon as Fiona realized it was a doll (as I was getting the head sewn on), she wanted to play with it, so I rushed getting the head sewn on a little bit and it ended up a tad crooked, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with it. I don’t have a long needle for embroidery so the face was a bit tough to do, but I’m happy with how she turned out. Stuffing the head wasn’t as hard as I imagined it might be (though this one is only one layer of “skin” so I didn’t get to try making a nose) and the entire thing start to finish only took me about an hour.

Fiona was so enamored by it that I didn’t get any good pictures, so this side ways, fuzzy one will have to do. She took possession of it as soon as I’d finished sewing on the head (I barely got the needle out of it!) and before I had a chance to do the waist tie, and even nursed to sleep holding tightly to her. Meredith asked if I could make her one, but specifically requested a bigger one. Good thing that is the plan for Christmas! The tricky part will be finding time to make them with no kids around. She also has a handmade doll from her aunt that she used to play with a lot that I think I may dig up again.

Then I heard about a craft event nearby, where you pay $1 for tickets and go around to booths where volunteers help you make crafts. We waited until Fiona was tired, Kris put her in the Beco, and Meredith and I headed out to see what kind of crafts there were.

I forgot to bring my camera with us, but it was actually a great little event. There were tables set up and basically we walked around and chose crafts to try. I let Meredith pick what she was interested in, meaning we ended up with a bit of an eclectic mix.

I let her do most of the work that she could do, so she chose colours, painted, picked beads, etc. I basically just put things together. One of the stations was a cookie making station, where she got chocolate chips, silver balls, and other assorted things to stick into shaped cookie dough and then they baked it for us. But that got eaten before this picture was taken. (And you can probably see that most of the gingerbread house candy has already been worked on too!)

I really like the salt dough ornaments, and we have since started more to give out as gifts to grandparents and aunts and uncles. It seems like a good snowy day activity.

My favourite though (and Meredith’s favourite as well) is this reindeer. The line for it was long, but she waited very patiently for her turn and was very particular in picking out the perfect head, body, antlers, eyes, nose, etc. She wants to keep him, so I think he’ll go on our mantle in the new house.

I may use this picture instead (though in a sepia tone, not stark black and white, I just have to get it off the disk):

Then here is the next page. I may switch around the order of some of the pictures, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.

I haven’t left room for margins. I won’t be printing them as a book, I’ll have individual 12×12 pages printed and then put them in an album that way, I just like how that looks better for some reason. I’ve heard that way a lot less ends up cropped off the edges, so I hope that’s true. I’m trying to find some place that would let me print out one or two as samples to check, but with shipping it often ends up being pretty expensive to just print out one or two pages. I guess it would be cheaper than printing out an entire album and discovering I don’t like something about it though!

The next page will be all the professional pregnancy pictures we had done, and then I’ll work on the labour and delivery page. I still haven’t finished Meredith’s scrapbook either, but hers is all paper scrapbooking and it’s so much harder to just spend 20 minutes at a time working on it because I have to get everything out and then put it away again. I have a big 6 foot craft table upstairs now though that has all my sewing stuff on it. I think I may clear off the sewing stuff and use it to try to finish Meredith’s book (and, uh, my wedding album lol).

We had a busy Thanksgiving weekend here. My twin sisters came to visit from Calgary. One of them has only visited once, and it was four or five years ago. The other has never been out here. So it was really neat to see them. I really haven’t spent much time alone with them in a long time. When I moved away from home, they were only thirteen. They are twenty-one now. Even though intellectually I know that they’re older and more mature, they’re still my baby sisters. It was neat to see just how mature and, well, adult, they are. We had a ton of fun. Meredith called them Bob or Baba (Melissa) and Kaw-wee (Kayley). She can be a bit shy and quiet around people she doesn’t know well, but she adored them from about two minutes after they got here.

My sisters have a friend who was in town just for the weekend who is spending the semester in Bamfield. She brought someone with her from Bamfield, and one of their friends flew up from Calgary to visit her. Since they had no where to go for Thanksgiving dinner, we invited them over, along with a good friend of ours who moved out here with me eight years ago and has no family here. All in all, we had eight people for Thanksgiving. I’ve never really cooked for more than four or five. (I grew up in a family of six, but I made one mistake once while cooking for them and after that my mom decided I was a terrible cook and I never had to cook for the whole family again, besides helping out with stuff they were doing.)

I was a bit nervous, but did a lot of prep work Saturday and made what I could ahead of time. So Saturday I made stock, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, and cranberry relish. I also cut up what veggies I wasn’t worried about going brown overnight and prepped a few other dishes.

Sunday morning my sisters arrived, and they were a huge help in tidying, prepping, and cooking. Everything ended up working out really well and was timed almost perfectly. The turkey ended up being done early, but we just turned the oven down and continued basting it a lot and it was fine. I forgot about the buns while they were rising, so they rose a little too long but still tasted delicious. My two crockpots came in really handy.

In the end, we had buns, green salad, avocado and asparagus salad, garlic herb turkey, stuffing, ham, apple sauce, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, broccoli and cauliflower in cheese sauce, scalloped potatoes, and yam and apple casserole. There weren’t as many left overs as I’d expected there might be. Most of the side dishes were gone that night or the next day for lunch. I actually had a lot of fun, and can definitely see myself doing something like that again in the future.

Unfortunately, though I got pictures of some of the prep and the centerpiece my sister put together out of stuff from my garden, I forgot to take pictures of us actually enjoying the food! Oh well, I did remember to get pictures of everyone afterwards.

For supper the next day, we mashed up the rest of the scalloped potatoes, made some glazed carrots, and used the rest of the stuffing, some turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy to make a Thanksgiving shepherd’s pie. That was really delicious too and something we’ll keep in mind for next time too.

I’ll likely post some of these recipes in the next little while, as some were from a magazine borrowed from a friend, and others were found on the internet, and I want to be able to find them again later.

• 12-14oz canned salmon, not drained or deboned (unsalted is best)
• 1 1/2 cup of flour
• 1 tsp garlic
• 2 eggs
• a pinch to a small handful of parmesan (optional)

Either dump it all in a food processor and blend it up well, or just use a fork and add the ingredients one at a time and mash them up well each time. Flatten it out on a baking tray. The texture shouldn’t be runny at all, so I used a baking sheet bigger than I really needed and just flattened it to the thickness I wanted.

Bake at 350° for about 15 minutes, but keep an eye out on it as if you bake it too long it could get crunchy. You basically just want the egg to cook enough to hold it all together well. Use a pizza cutter to cut pieces to the size you want to use, and voila! They’re really stinky, so don’t do this when you’re expecting guests over.

These got a big thumbs up from Sorcha, Sebastian, and Meredith. Yes, Meredith loves these. I give her ones without bones but I can’t get one out for the dog or cat without handing one (or more!) to Meredith as well. Who knew?