Lovelihood

The temperature may never have risen much above freezing today. But from the living room, where I did my pre-run stretches with the sun warming my face, it very much felt like spring.

Last night's wintry mix left a satisfying cover of snow this morning. Enough to motivate The Boy to finish his breakfast without the usual nagging and cajolery, and as soon as I showered we took ourselves out back to stomp around and complain about the cold. Most exciting, to me at least, are the bits of green poking out, like these blades, likely the first emissaries from bulbs planted not by us in the planter boxes left behind for us on the deck. I'm not usually excited for Spring, but there's something very promising, this year, about watching all those buds develop at the tips of tree branches.

Noone's tendered an explanation for why, screwed into the half-wall at the top of the stairs, there is an old-timey schoolhouse pencil sharpener. A more nervous sort of parent might fear a toddler's pencil-thin finger finding it's way into one of those holes while her brother mischeviously rotors the handle on the other end. I'm just grateful for the two minutes of entertainment it gives a preschooler, upon bringing home a Valentine-themed pencil, an honest-to-goodness wood and no. #2 graphite. And I try not to worry about how damned sharp the tip of that pencil gets.

This little revelation makes me a bad Seattleite: the only coffee we keep in the house is of the instant variety. Sure, I indulge in the occasional coffee-house micro-roasted, fairly-traded cup. But twice a day, once in the morning and then again after the kids are down and I'm ready to sit down with my camera cable, or a crossword puzzle, I stir up my reconstituted brew and settle in to a warm cup of homey comfort.

The number one reason I don't have more pictures of Bear at this stage is that she's a wild, flailing dingbat of a camera-grabber. With the most fantastically smudgy fingers ever.

After a day filled with pancake-making, birthday-party-attending, Bear-sleeping (or not)-in-a-newly-converted-toddler-bed, and curry-simmering, it was nice to sit down and stitch a few plastic rings onto the curtain that is getting tantalizingly close to done. This step is particularly low-tech, with its needle-and-thread simplicity, and tape-measure distance-halving.

I don't buy too many craft books these days. Between our awesome local library system (hello, iPhone app), and the interwebs, there just isn't much in the craft books that I deem purchaseable. And maybe I've become a bit of a skinflint (well, not really). But even when my coworker, a pretty amazing person, released a pretty amazing book, I didn't even buy that. But I had some time to kill yesterday, and found myself at the bookstore in front of this book written by the drafter of super adorable patterns for wee ones. One of which was the hood that I adapted for Bear's Little Red Riding Hood costume last Halloween. And what's included in the book? A full-on sugar-and-spice sweet pattern for a red riding hood cape, tucked in among the most classic-cute designs I've ever seen. So, yeah, I bought it.