Miss Hazel Mae is three years old today – until I ask her to walk up the porch steps because my arms are full of work stuff and shed outer layers and chinese takeout (her bday dinner request).

E: “Come on, you’re THREE! You can definitely walk up these steps.”
H: “NO! HOLD me! I’m TWO!”

Photos of yesterday’s festivities forthcoming – there were several talented cameras floating around her party, so I took about seven pictures. BUT… this evening I did photograph all of the fun handmades for her dollhouse. It’s kind of a problem, the making of these Tiny Little Things. Jamie, Sarah and I went to town on the itty-bitty.

Jamie and Sarah created an amazing array: dining room hutch with Fiestaware and other goodies, craft cabinet, YARN STASH and knitting needles, a cabinet filled with (scrabble tile!) books with actual tiny covers of books that H has memorized, a clothesline (swoon) and crocheted basket of tiny clothespins, a pot of flowers, a trunk, and afghans. Whew. I knitted a tiny blanket, made various sizes of flower pots, a toybox with blocks, balls, and a tiny train (I didn’t make this – scavenged it from tiny xmas decorations!), Peanuts comic strip wall art, interchangable on velcro backing, and tiny paper bunting. We’re all brimming with ideas for more, more, more tiny things.

Happy Birthday, Hazel Mae!

Natalie posted a slideshow! I keep watching it and crying – the Rosie Thomas song is perfection. Natalie has / is such a gift!

Other news of the day: I am two yardsticks closer to having a finished coffee table, thanks to the generous and encouraging Cheryl. (Hazel is also two pretty sunflowers richer, thanks to my neighbor!)

(I’d be very excited if the “Lowe Brothers” are Lowe’s. I do not, however, have the mental capacity to research this right now – it “feels like” 102 degrees and I’m on round three of a headache that just won’t stay away.)

First tomatoes! They will have ripe siblings soon, I hope.

Vintage yardsticks gifted from my grandpa…

+

…thrifing find…and some casters…

=

a coffee table.

YUM. You know I can’t wait to decide what gets to live inside all those little magical drawers and make LABELS for each and every one. I have spent more time over the past few weeks contemplating the labels – library cards? typewriter font stamps? just get my typewriter working so it’s authentic? fsjdfkasd – than I have spent trying to locate more vintage yardsticks. They are of a particular thickness, you know. A quarter inch, and most I’m finding are for advertising and have a phone number sans exchange (I finally went through two pages of ebay listings last night.) I’ve yet to purchase any more, but if I wait for enough of them to show up at yard sales and goodwill, it could be years. I’ve been watching, but not buying. I’ll get there. Hazel clearly doesn’t mind that the top is unfinished, anyway. It still serves as a good platform for putting Snoopy to bed with a book, standing to declare things to the kitchen, to “cook”, etc.

(Eventually it will live in front of the couch like all good coffee tables do. But for now… it’s heavy.)

After an all-day workshop on suicide prevention, this happy thrifting find cheered me up 50%. Other 50% will be found someday when I locate its sugar-mate, I hope.

Baby plants become unbearably cute with the addition of “cute ‘spouts, Mama! Baby ‘pants! Yook Mama, gettin’ big!”

There’s almost nothing that is more satisfying than successfully navigating witching hour with an activity so distracting that Miss Hazel Mae hasn’t even noticed that 6:00 has come and gone with not a single ounce of Whine. This particular evening – scraps of felt and wooden beads & buttons, chosen individually and handed to Mama for stringing… 40 minutes straight until she declared it Done…

…which is, of course, perfect.

After more than two years of mothering, this is among my top 5 favorite things: watching her begin to very mindfully, rather than experimentally, make art. The girl is a fan of glitter, big paper, stickers, and the color white.

Hazel has been hard at work on her valentine’s day projects – at 27 months she is taking them very seriously and knows who she wants to give them to. The ideas are mama’s, but the execution is (mostly) hers (she doesn’t bake yet, after all.)

She picked out a bunch of internet-found coloring sheets and we made them into a coloring book for “Wookie-Wou”.

What is the noun of assemblage for many robots? And a pound of glitter all over the kitchen? We have those things, along with 24-hour-later chatter of “eye glue” still lingering.

When we made our last batch of cookies, she quickly listed her desired recipients. We ended up putting too many cookies in our bellies and not enough in the mail (although half did end up elsewhere!)… so we made more.

With all of the mama-assisted projects going on, still more in the works, and an entire week spent SICK and cutting FOUR molars at once and not sleeping longer than 40 minutes at a time (oof), her own gift is probably not going to be off of the needles in time. She spent much run-down movie time on the couch rubbing a ball of this yarn against her face and muttering “soffffft”, and holding it for cuddly comfort. What else was I supposed to do with it? Six stripes in, might not get done in time, but at least it looks like a future-blanket. Maybe it’ll be done by the end of March.

…but I do not always like to sew. Or, more accurately, I do not always have the time, should be doing other things instead, have a toddler who is not occupied enough to allow a hot iron anywhere in her immediate radius, etc. On those days, no-sew fabric projects are where it’s at!

$3.00 vintage folding chair – a little WD-40, some added padding, and fresh new fabric (and a fifty-cent apple tablecloth of perfection – thank you goodwill.)

Various scrap fabric, leftovers, and a vintage shirt popped into “circles” (much to Hazel’s delight) and arranged on the wall. I think I’ll be adding to this – delicious color combo!

Perfect for spraypainting. Right now I’m daydreaming about way back in November, because sweet sufferin’ Jesus, is it cold outside today. Sixteen is good for a lot of things (Molly Ringwald and Ryan Adams come to mind), but sixteen degrees? No thank you. I think it was also this cold when I wrestled two tiny tables from the dumpster by my cousin’s old apartment into my car. That was last year. I finally painted them a few weeks ago. Red and robin’s egg blue – boingboingboing!!!

(and then I pilfered some photo frames from my parents’ basement.)

Hazel’s current loves, because why not? This book – every.single.night. This album – she runs to her bedroom to start it over every time it ends. Peanut butter toast. Harvesting ornaments from the Christmas tree for her own use (I found a bunch crammed among a silo full of crayons when I cleaned up her toys last night.) Sparkly pipe cleaners. The Floppinberg family. Snowglobes – she calls them “heavies”, but it comes out “harveys”, so if she’s asking you desperately for a “harvey”, she wants a snowglobe…and she wants it to play music. She has two, and she by far prefers the Morgantown snowglobe that plays Country Roads :) And the current love of her life… the focus of her songs and daydreaming… her hopeful request when she knows she’s about to be allowed to watch a cartoon… her alpha, her omega, her one and only… the one who keeps showing up in thrifted books, the Target dollar bins, Christmas stickers at the grocery store, in the form of awesome chunky chipboard pieces in the scrapbooking aisle at Michael’s…

“Snoopy dog?? Snoopy dog?? Pease Mama, Snoopy dog?? Chayey Bwown???”

I still have not recovered from the trauma of the last time I saw snow. BUT…………

Hazel Mae.

Luca Andres.

Knitting scarves for kids before handmade scarves become uncool: priceless
New snow shovel: $9.95