misadventures. 
#1.The baby and I were upstairs last week and a funny, toxic smell wafted up. I called down to Alex who was cooking breakfast:
"Alex, there is a weird smell up here~ do you smell that?"
"No, I am just cooking bacon... Oh #@^(%%!#@! the heater is on fire!"
I peered over the railing to see flames leaping out of our propane heater and Alex pulling off the grate and hitting the fire with a towel. He quickly got the fire out, but the house was filled with tiny floating black specks and a terrible plastic smell. All that was left of the fire's culprit was a sticky pile of melted plastic at the bottom of the heater. It was a mess.
It turns out that
Lili had slipped her plastic harmonica through the heater grate while it was not hot, and then the heater turned on~ setting the harmonica on fire.
oh dear.
#2. Barf in the
car seat.
Alex told me last week that he thinks my signing us up for the 9:15
Kindermusik class was possibly one of my biggest blunders in life. Even before the baby, it was a struggle to get
Lili and myself out the door by 8:30 to make it in time... And now with the baby it is doubly, if not
tripley, hard. This past Tuesday was one of my first solo town days with both kids. And we managed to make it out the door with just enough time to make it to
Kindermusik (I really need to post about
Lilikoi's awesome music class one of these days~ soon...). I was feeling pretty good about getting out of the house and feeling hopeful about the six stops/errands that the kids and I were were embarking upon that day (
Kindermusik, 2 grocery stores, the P.O., the thrift store to find an
Easter basket, and the library.)
But we live 12 miles down a VERY curvy, hairpin
turney, type of road~ and just after we crossed over the Eastern Continental Divide, I heard a weird noise coming from the backseat. I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see
Lili throwing up everywhere.
I won't go into details, but I will say that it colored and effected the smell of the rest of the day. We forged on though, and
successfully made it home in tact.
#3.Yesterday was my
sister's birthday, and we went to a lovely dinner party at her house. The second h
alf of my day was wonderful, and the first half was trying. I don't know if I could call it a misadventures since nothing in particular happened, but I cried at the end of it.
Eliseo was fussy and wanting to be held every second. And
Lili was especially needy and kept repeating "Hey Mama!?" over and over over. She would say "Hey Mama!?" and I would say "Yes,
Lili?" or "What?" and she would reply "Hey Mama!?". On the fourth or fifth go round she would get to what she wanted to say. I counted her saying the word Mama over 30 times in a half hour period. Then
the baby would be crying on top of
Lili's questions~ and my head would be spinning. At the peak of my inability to deal
Seo was crying and
Lili was talking, and all of a sudden I hear this
psssssssss noise. And
Lili says
"Mama! Mama, I am peeing!" (She has had a regression since
Seo was born)
And I said
"I know Lili. I know." And I closed my eyes, and bit my
tongue, and heard the pee as it seeped through the floorboards and started
dripping onto a pile of magazines downstairs...
Now that I am writing it down it sounds pretty lame that this brought me to tears ~ All I know is that I have been asked many times how life with two is going, and mostly my response has been
"better than I thought i would be" but yesterday morning's response would have been
"I am LOSING it." When I started to cry right along with Eliseo
Lili came up right up to my face and said
"Mama? You sad Mama?"And I said
"Yes, I feel sad. Mama's having a hard day."Lili said
"Oh..." very thoughtfully.
Then she got all up in my face,
put her palms on my cheeks, and gave me a giant slobbery kiss and a great big hug.
to our former bath-house where our composting toilet and our washing machine lived up until this week. We and the Carmona's both built indoor bathrooms to house our own personal composting toilets this past month, and David and Alex just moved our washing machine into the Carmona's new utility room. I started moving all of my tubs of untouched art supplies into the new space on Friday. It was exhilarating to open and unearth all of my treasures that have been packed away in storage. Some of them have been boxed up for years, and some only since I moved out of my temporary studio space I had last summer. We moved my art desk out of our crowded upstairs which also opened up a play area for Lili in our house. The bath-house (should I find a new name for it~ Esp. since ironically we never bathed in there???) is the cutest little building. It was the first thing David and Ema built when they moved onto this piece of land~ in fact it was the first thing either of them had EVER built. It is 8 feet by 8 feet, is full of windows, and has nice hardwood flooring.
A box of mica chips:
Printmaking stuff:
A bunch of old artwork and half written letters:
Encaustic/wax supplies:
And wooden letter type:
