Sewing!

I've been sewing for basically my whole life. At church, there's a "quilting group" that meets once a month, and I finally went a couple of weeks ago. My only experience with quilting was making a few quilt squares for our class quilt in 5th grade. I've discovered that it's not quite my cup of tea. It's WAY too precise. In my sewing I tend to remake old clothes into something cooler.

So, after an hour or so of worrying about whether or not my seams were exactly 1/4 in and lining up the fabric exactly right, I had an itch for my normal type of sewing. I saw a tutorial on pinterest awhile back (http://thisismeinspired.blogspot.com/2011/09/his-work-shirt-to-her-school-dress.html) to make a men's button-up shirt into a cute dress for a little girl! I dug through my Goodwill pile and found this.

It's one of my old shirts (bought at a thrift store of course, but then I decided I didn't like the color, but it would work for an experimental dress), but I figured I would still have plenty of fabric, because Cecily's not very big yet. Of course, I didn't feel motivated enough to actually look at the tutorial, so I just got one of the dresses she already has and used it as a basic pattern. It was fun! I gathered wherever I felt like, I chopped away at fabric without measuring, and I just went with the flow. This is what I came up with when I actually tried it on her.

Yeah, not so cute. I left the original bottom hem of the shirt, and it made it look awful. And the buttons did a weird gappy thing. Back to the drawing board! I found this bag of adorable eyelet trim at a thrift store a few months ago for $1, so I got that out to find something to fix the dress. After some more sewing and cutting, and putting a little snap in to fix the gap problem, voila!

I'm still not super in love with the color, but I do love it with the white trim! (It's hard to notice, but it's also got trim around the bottom.) And with those tights!! Anyway, I got tons of compliments on it at church on Sunday, so I guess it was a success!!

The Good Samaritan.

Tonight, I was watching this video of the parable of the good Samaritan that my church recently released. It's really fantastic and I am loving these Bible videos!

It got me thinking about a study I learned about in school. I looked it up to make sure I had my facts straight, because it was a few years ago. Darley and Batson did an experiment at Princeton University on undergrad divinity students. The students were told that they would have to walk to a different building and present an impromptu speech. There were a couple of variables: (1) they were told to either give a speech on employment opportunities after graduation, or the parable of the good Samaritan, and (2) they were told they were either late, had just enough time, or had a few extra minutes to get there. The kicker is, on their way to give the speech, they had to pass a man slumped over in an alleyway and clearly in need of assistance, and the study was set up to measure who actually stopped to help. Sadly, the thing that had the biggest impact on whether or not they stopped wasn't the speech topic, but the amount of time they had. One would hope that those students who are pondering on the good Samaritan would channel that charitable vibe and risk being a little late to their meeting in order to put the values taught in the parable into action. But, that's not human nature, I suppose.

And of course, all of this thinking has led to some introspection. Who am I not reaching out to in my life because I think I'm "too busy" or assume that they don't really need my help? How often am I focused so much on my petty life problems to not notice someone around me who is truly suffering and in need of a good friend? Perhaps it is human nature to hurry through life and care only about ourselves, but I really need to work harder to overcome that and reach out to other people and be more Christ-like.

Valentine's Day!

I don't really celebrate Valentine's Day. I mean, it's a nice day to remind people how much we love them, but it kind of bothers me that it's so forced. Husbands get in trouble for not bringing home flowers, but they didn't bring home flowers yesterday, and you didn't care then. Why should you care today, just because the calendar says so? I think that instead of a set holiday, we should all reach out every day to those we love, and do random things for our spouses (boyfriends, girlfriends, fiances, etc) at random times to let them know how much we love them! But, honestly, I'm not going to swoon because you stopped by a grocery store on your way home from work and bought me chocolates and flowers because you felt obligated. Though, I'm not really a flowers and chocolates kind of girl.. Last year Jonathan saw a waffle maker that makes heart-shaped waffles, then realized while checking out that it was a V-day thing, so he made me heart-shaped waffles for breakfast. But, he also does that on random occasions, too. And, I've always made him a cute little card and written mushy stuff in it, but he has a whole shoebox full of love notes from me. My mom says I "expect too much" or that I'm a grinch for not liking V-day. Maybe I do expect too much. Oh well.

So, I leave you all with a challenge! Pick a random wonderful thing to do for your significant other every week (at least). Have a date night and get all dressed up and go to a fancy restaurant, just because. Be spontaneous in your relationship and don't go by a calendar!

But, Jonathan, don't you dare ever forget my birthday. (Yes, my mom pointed out that this makes me a "hypocrite". But, seriously, birthdays are different. Right?)

What a mess!!!

Every now and again, whatever food I make happens to be REALLY messy. And when I'm in a fun mood, I just let Cecily go at it. Today was one of those days! One of Jonathan's favorite things about me is the ridiculous facial expressions I make sometimes... I guess it's safe to say that she is definitely my daughter!

Potty time!

A few weeks ago, I bought a toddler potty for Cecily and put it in her bathroom. She was only 13 months old, and not ready for potty training, but I just wanted her to get used to it being around and be comfortable with it. I explained to her what it was (though, how much she understood is impossible to tell...). I put her on it a few times last week to reinforce what the point is, but she wasn't showing much interest, so I stopped.

Well, tonight after we brushed her teeth, she started pointing to it. I ignored it at first because, well, the kid points at everything. Then she walked over to it and tried taking her pants off. I figured, "what the heck?", and took off her diaper and helped her sit down. About 5 seconds later, I hear a little tinkle, and her face lights up with the biggest grin! So, of course I clapped and gave her hugs and kisses and lots of praise. She was so proud of herself!! And I was so proud, too!

(disclaimer. Obviously, I know this doesn't mean she's potty trained, or anywhere near that. But, it was exciting!)

And, she's still doing the giant mouthed smile thing. And it's still adorable. :)

Goofy baby

(This is mostly for Jonathan, since he's not here for all of this, and we don't get to talk as much as we'd like.)

Cecily has been in such a weird phase lately! She went a week barely sleeping at night and not taking any longer than a 30 minute nap during the day. That was a pretty bad week.

Then randomly one night she went back to sleeping 12 hours at night. Hallelujah!! But ever since, she has had the goofiest personality! She makes really funny faces at people, she flirts mercilessly with every guy she sees (and actually started blushing when one cashier looked at her and said hi), and she has started showing off for people. She loves Gideon and Hayden! We were over at mom's yesterday and she was doing something silly in the hallway, but kept looking back to make sure Hayden was still watching.

She's also started making jokes. She'll babble something to everyone, then start cracking up and look confused when no one else is laughing. We were in the produce department recently, and she looks at the apples, gives me this really mischievous look, then points to the apples and says, "mommy!!" and started cracking up. And every time I tried to get her to call me "mommy" (which she normally does) she would laugh hysterically and call the apples "mommy". It was ridiculous, but she (along with some old guys that were standing near us) thought it was hilarious.

And today, I was trying to take a picture of us to text to Jonathan and every time I told her to smile, she would open her mouth as wide as it will go. So now I have like 6 pictures of Cecily "smiling".

At dinner the other day, she put her foot on the table (one of her favorite things to do), and I firmly told her to take it down. She gave me her mischevious look, then wriggled her body into this super awkward position in order to put BOTH feet on the table.

And this is her chillin' on the couch position. She loves doing this while we watch Wheel of Fortune every night. :)