Skip to main content

Working while in the middle of ---life


When my oldest was a pre schooler someone had given her a beautiful book called The Napping House.  In that book, all of the various occupants of the house first fall asleep and then wake up. The tagline of the book was "This is the napping house where everyone is sleeping." When my youngest is home from college and my husband is int he middle of his busy season, unlike The Napping House, at any moment of the 24-hour cycle, someone is sleeping, someone is awake and someone is eating.

With so much eating going on we had turned into a version of Mother Hubbard's kitchen. To stock our empty larders, we went to Costco. We went home with a taxi trunk filled with food. 
I loved the twilight views from the back seat of our cab.


Our trip was delayed for a long time by a fender bender that luckily took place right in front of the emergency room of Metropolitan Hospital. We waited behind the excitement until it all got sorted out and then we were safely delivered home and our pantry and freezer are once again, full.


I realized that the hat I had made for my great-niece to be was nice, but needed something else to make it a truly wonderful hat.

The missing element was a pair of eyes. it took me several days to figure out the best way to go about creating eyes for this hat. Buttons are easy but are a potential choking danger to a baby.

I wanted to create eyes that were washable because anything that touches a baby is bound to get dirty.After pondering a variety of options I decided to make the eyes out of embroidered velveteen.

I drew a pair of eyes on the reverse of a scrap of cotton velveteen using a Sharpie. I then stitched over the drawn lines using my sewing machine. I stitched each iris using a mix of machine and hand stitching.

This is the result.
 Living with a newborn can be difficult.

A silly hat can help make up for some of the misery of sleepless nights.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...
2 comments
Read more