Runaway October

Step One: Choose an accept­able shirt — such as the long-sleeved one hid­ing in the back of your hus­bands dresser that you’ve seen worn once for 5 min­utes. Even then it was obvi­ous that the sleeves were much too short. Make sure it’s stretchy and warm — knits and fleece are great for this.

Step Two: Mea­sure your child’s, or your own, head. Take two mea­sure­ments — One around the biggest part of the head, where the brim of a hat nor­mally sits. The sec­ond mea­sure­ment is taken from between the eyes over the head to the base of the skull. Don’t worry about being exact, we mainly are mak­ing sure that we make it big enough to fit prop­erly on the nog­gin and isn’t too small.

Then add an inch for seam allowances to both mea­sure­ments. If you are going to reuse the seam along the bot­tom of the T-Shirt these are your final mea­sure­ments. If you need to add your own hem, add an extra 1″ to the eye to nape measurement.

For exam­ple:

Reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8″.

Not reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Then I add an addi­tional inch to the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment which is now 21″ x 17″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8.5″.

Step Three: Lay out the shirt you found and cut two rec­tan­gles using the size we deter­mined above. If you don’t have the child around to mea­sure, Declan has a pretty stan­dard sized 2yo head. I like to iron the shirt out flat and cut the two pieces at the same time using a rotary cut­ter. Make sure to feign inno­cence when your hus­band finds you shred­ding his old “paint­balling shirt”. You’ve never seen him go paint­balling anyway.

Step Four: With wrong sides together, sew together one long side of the rec­tan­gle. Now grab a ruler and make a mark 3/4″ in on the unsewn long side of the rec­tan­gle. Make another mark 1/4″ in at the top. Con­nect the marks using a ruler to deter­mine your seams for the short sides of the rec­tan­gle. This, along with the stan­dard 1/4″ seam, will ensure that the skully will fit around the head with­out gap­ping. Sew up the seams you just drew.

Now your skully should start to take shape.

Step Five: Fold the open­ing up by 1/4″ or what­ever you would like. Press and sew to form the bot­tom hem. Turn right side out. Viola! It’s seri­ously as sim­ple as that.

To make the lit­tle ears, cut some strips from what­ever fab­ric — I like to use strips of the knit T-Shirt because it will stop unrav­el­ing if you stretch it out — and tie them at the cor­ners using a square knot. The size of the ear deter­mines the final shape of the skully, though they all look the same while being worn.

Lit­tle adorn­ments are easy to make if you hap­pen to have some HeatNBond lay­ing around. Basi­cally just cut out your shape from a coör­di­nat­ing fab­ric, iron the HeatNBond to the wrong side, peel the back­ing and iron it onto the Skully in the desired loca­tion. I then go around the edges with a Zigzag stitch just to make sure it stays on and give it a cute lit­tle flair.

You can also use one long rec­tan­gle and fold it in half so there is no seam in the top.

Today was one of those days that are gone too fast, but when you look back you real­ize it’s been a long day indeed.

My lit­tle bro was here and made me/us break­fast. I’m try­ing to cut out all dairy because of Rowan’s colic and he made sure to ask what was okay. He’s a good kid. We demoed a few new games on the xBox 360 — Jeri­cho looks pretty good.

Then I tried to sew up some quick cot­ton throw­ing balls for the boys. I had the great idea to use the stuff­ing out of some old stuffed ani­mals since I didn’t have any on hand. Ya know, the whole “reuse, reduce, recy­cle” and be thrifty idea. All was well until my mom pointed out that it would be like gut­ting and killing them. Thanks mom. I didn’t have the heart. On top of that, the lower ten­sion on my sewing machine is sud­denly out of whack again, it’s much too loose. I have no idea how to fix it and have had to take it in to the shop for this before. I have no man­ual as it was a “gift” from a friend. He never used it and I was always bor­row­ing it. So the sewing machine is dead and so is the cam­era; Great.

The grand finale of the evening was Declan dump­ing out the whole $16 bot­tle of Rowan’s Myli­con drops. When he has the time to do these things I don’t know. There were 4 adults in the house at the time. There are only 4 rooms he can access if he kitchen gate is up.

Le sigh. Time to try and get myself and Rowan to sleep. Wish me luck. And maybe I can find some bat­ting for pic­tures on the balls tomor­row. Despite every­thing they’re pretty cute.

It seems my youngest may have colic or some sort of reflux. Poor lit­tle guy. All of us here are run­ning on lit­tle sleep and even less money, which causes great stress. To lis­ten to a new­born wail and sob for hours at a time is enough to make my cheese slide right of the cracker. We’re try­ing some reme­dies to see if it’s really colic or if it’s some kind of 24 hour upset. Of course, it never fails that Declan chooses to be two right as Rowan has fallen asleep.

I just want to gush over my new lit­tle day­care guy. He has Down Syn­drome and is just the cutest lit­tle guy ever. Appar­ently his par­ents had had a hard time try­ing to find a care­giver for him because he’s spe­cial needs. And here I am expe­ri­enced and every­thing. I already know all the sign lan­guage he does and we have great teach­ing aids to help us help him. He sticks up for him­self when the dog or other kids get in his face which makes every­thing so much eas­ier. I don’t have to police the dog’s every move.

I spoke with an old friend tonight again. She has 3 girls, which is awe­some because who would I be able to make these awe­some things for:

• Patch­work Cir­cle Skirt
• No Sew Tutu
• Faery Wings
• And such girl-like things…

Din­ner tonight was del­ish — Chicken Que­sadil­las with Carmelized Onions, though the pre­sen­ta­tion was lack­ing cause Rowan was fuss­ing. Break­fast was a mod­i­fied pan­cake of sorts — 1/2c peanut­but­ter, 2 eggs and some honey fried up like pan­cakes. They’re great because it’s pretty nutri­tion dense and sweet enough to not need syrup, so lit­tle hands can just pick them up. Plan­ning on mak­ing some Peanut­But­ter Choco­late Chip cook­ies tomor­row. Yay! No pic­tures though, unless I can find my moms camera.

Not much hap­pened today. We had a nice mel­low day with one of my new day­care kids. He got along per­fectly with us and loved the dog so much that he was tuck­ered out enough to doze in the high chair at lunch. His mom is friendly and per­son­able as well.

On a less cheer­ful note , my cam­era has offi­cially died. It started act­ing funny a few days ago and would give me “Lens Error” if I zoomed in too close. Now the lens is per­ma­nently stuck, makes a shiver-inducing grind­ing noise and refuses to work. That’s what I get for buy­ing a cam­era because it was a good deal. I’m gonna take it in when we get the money and com­pare the cost of fix­ing it to the cost of buy­ing a new one. If I could, I’d buy this beauty, I’ve been drool­ing over it for months now (And it’s on sale too!), but I wouldn’t com­plain if this fell from the sky.

Check out some of the awe­some stuff I’ve found lately:

• 5 dan­ger­ous things you should let your kids do
• The 70 best life­hacks of 2007
• The pre­cious gift of parental neglect
• Cus­tom Watermarks
• Pear Crisps with vanilla brown but­ter — CANNOT wait until pears are in sea­son again.

Din­ner was Spinach and Ricotta Cheese Ravoli with a light Parmesan/tomato sauce. Yum!

I spent a bit of my super early morn­ing nurs­ing and read­ing oth­ers res­o­lu­tions, cour­tesy of decor8. Bad idea. Now I have 6 mil­lion I would like to add to my own list and whit­tling it down is hard. So here it goes.

1…) Stop cussing, com­pletely. No “shoot”, no “Christ on a pony”, no “son of a bis­cuiteater”. The sen­ti­ment is the same, so tech­ni­cally it is swear­ing, just not using the actual word. This is going to be a super tough one.

2…) Smile more. I have one of those faces that in it’s nor­mal state can be mis­taken for a scowl, which in turn makes peo­ple think that I’m surly. Really, I’m not. Also a smile can make a per­sons day.

3…) Spend more indi­vid­ual time with Declan and treat him like an adult. This was great inspi­ra­tion for that and it truly makes sense. If we want our chil­dren to grow up as respect­ful adults, we need to model that behav­ior always. Some days I go to bed and can­not think of a time that I sat down and played with Declan, or did more than fill a sim­ple request for a glass of water. Poor lit­tle man.

4…) Cre­ate and add some items to my Etsy shop. It’s been open for almost 2 years now and I’ve never put a sin­gle item up for sale.

5…) Along with num­ber 4 goes do more craft projects — for myself and with the kids. Declan is get­ting big enough that a lit­tle struc­tured craft time would be fun for both of us. Also, send­ing home neat lit­tle crafts with my day­care kids would give me a great sense of satisfaction.

Of course there’s the manda­tory ones — Lose weight, make more money, get orga­nized, buy a house, get rid of debt.… blah blah blah.

So, that’s the long and short of it.

Good Luck on your res­o­lu­tions and have a Happy 2008!