Little Boys' Dreams

I don't know about Jack and Aiden, but William has dreams all the time. They're mostly about eating, apparently, but as I've mentioned before, he'll also have these horrible nightmares and freak out in his sleep. Tonight though, we got the flip side of the coin. I wish I knew what he was dreaming about, but as I was holding him after he'd eaten and passed right out, he giggled in his sleep and then smiled for a good 2-3 minutes. He's such a sweetheart. I much prefer seeing him have sweet dreams rather than nightmares. :) now if I can only get him to smile that much continuously while he's awake!

Well the past couple of days have been pretty nice. Especially last night. William slept really well. He went to sleep at 11 and slept a solid 7 hours! Woohoo! Then he got up, ate, and went back to sleep for another three. I am feeling great. William is two months old now and had his checkup and shots yesterday too, which he handled like a champ. He cried for a few seconds and then got over it very quickly. The nurse was impressed. After his shots yesterday he slept for several hours too, and I got a lot of work done. All the boning channels are sewn in the corset now, and I'll finish trimming the bones and start the binding around the edges today. With any luck I'll have it finished by early next week and be able to start on the dress itself. Anyways. William weighted in at a chunky 13 pounds, which puts him in the 90th% for weight, and at 23 3/4" he's the 75th% for height.

Shoes!

So William, Mr. Parrot, and I have been busy the past few days. The leather paint and things arrived for my shoes! So we've spent the past couple days working on them and I'm really happy with how they turned out.



First I had to strip the finish off the leather. It smelled like nail polish and William wasn't thrilled that he had to sit in the other room while I worked. Happily with a window open, the fumes weren't bad at all and the smell cleared up within 5 minutes or so of finishing.



Then came the painting!



It took 5 or 6 layers to really make it a nice solid color without any visible streaks or paintbrushes, and waiting for the layers to dry was really what took the most time.



But we let the last layer dry overnight and put the matte gloss finish over top it this morning! TaDa! A beautiful, bold, blueberry blue. :) The fabric they're sitting on is going to be the main fabric of the dress.



And I aaaalmost caught William grinning! The camera just wasn't fast enough on the shutter to catch it!

Sometimes I feel like an idiot...

So last summer our AC wasn't working and we got a little unit instead of trying to fix or replace our current system since we didn't have the money to do anything like that. Well it just couldn't keep up with a horrendous heatwave and up and died on the hottest day of the summer. We spent the rest of the summer living in the basement and sleeping in the guest room, abandoning the sweltering upstairs of the house to the heat.

Well this year we started looking at what we were going to do about the heat. With William we can't really afford to just suffer with fans and I haven't been too enthusiastic about dropping hundreds of dollars on a new window unit that won't be able to cool the entire house anyways and would probably die on the hottest day again. So I started calling around to AC repair places to see if someone couldn't come out and give us an estimate to fix it. Well apparently no one does free estimates. The cheapest I found to get someone out to the house- not even to do anything!- was $75. Ouch. Especially if they just went and told us it was completely shot and then tried to push us to spend thousands on a new system. I just didn't want to risk wasting the money.

So going to the font of all wisdom and knowledge (Google) to see if I couldn't at least narrow down the problem or figure out of there was some complicated way to switch from the gas heating to the AC I found... all I had to do was flick a switch on the thermostat from Heat to Cool. *facepalm*

In my defense, the thermostat does have a cover over all the buttons except the temperature controls and it doesn't really look like it should come off. I had to pry it off to get to the switch. But still... I could have been comfortable last summer, dangit!

18th Century Costuming with William

I hadn't planned to make any costumes for Balticon considering that William will only be three months old when it rolls around and I didn't think I'd drop enough of my baby weight fast enough to make it worth my while to make something for me. Howeeever, I did and I've been missing sewing costumes for the months and months I was a whale anyways! So I'm doing it and William gets to dress up with me! His costume was easypeasy to whip up when I found a website that had free 18th century baby clothes patterns already researched and there for the sewing. I did it all in two days. It would have been one, but William got fussy so I wound up finishing his ruffly hat the next day.

Anyways... I'm sure I'll get a bunch of 'oh what a cute girl!' comments at the con, but historically infants of both gender were dressed the exact same way. Even when they were toddlers, young boys wore dresses same as the girls until only very recently. You can find old photographs with young boys in dresses actually.





He wasn't particularly thrilled with my little photoshoot, but he tolerated my whimsy so long as I wound up and let him stare at his monkey mobile. :)

The costume consists of a short sleeve shirt, a 'petticoat' (It ties around the chest and holds the shirt closed as well as having a long skirt), a bedgown (an open robe with long sleeves), a diaper cover (skipping the historically accurate diaper that went beneath it! I'll take nice easy disposables, thank you), and his ruffly hat.

This week!

This week has been a busy one! William has been growing and (mostly) a perpetually happy, bubbly guy. He's started to babble and experiment with sounds, listen and enjoy music, and- my favorite of all- give me the biggest grins ever.


Last weekend we spent Saturday with our friends celebrating Jake's birthday. William and Ari hung out, mostly resulting in William trying to roll over and slobber poor Ari. Ari's 5 days younger than William- a leap day baby! I admit I'm slightly jealous. XD But I hope they grow up as best friends. Our other friends (who hosted the party) Dave and Shannon have a 6 month old named Sophie so getting together with them and Jake and Earta is quite the adventure but having so many babies all at once is actually easier and less awkward than if it was just William. When they start to mobilize it'll get trickier!




After the party we went up to Pennsylvania to visit Grandma and Grandpa Pease! We were going to go last week, but Seth's sisters were in town and their kids were puking all over the place apparently. So the trip got bumped to last weekend and it was really nice! William slept the full three hour drive up and William had a ton of fun playing with Grandma and Grandpa!

Wednesday William had a new 'First' too! He went to his first concert and absolutely loved it. Dave (of the above mentioned 'Dave and Shannon') plays the French Horn in the US Air Force Band so I went up to support him. Unfortunately Seth didn't get off work in time to come, but I had a lot of fun and William was really well behaved. He slept through the first half of the concert and then woke up for a snack and to rock out to the traditional military songs they played in the latter half of the program. Seriously though, he was grinning and waving his arms around excitedly. I think he wants to be a conductor. Sophie on the other hand is going to be a singer. The Singing Sergeants (An AF choir) were there too and she started singing along until Shannon cut off her impromptu performance with some milk.

And this morning while we were getting ready for church he was being a bit grumpy until Seth put some music on. (Incidently, the people who covered this video game theme song and made the video are from BYU) And he just started grinning like a madman and bouncing his bouncer up and down as hard as he could. I'm really happy that he loves music. :)

I love my boys.

Aren't they adorable? Also, meet Mr. Parrot! I think William is attached already.