Big family Thanksgiving, with fourteen adults, one toddler, and one baby, successfully pulled off by my mother.

Yet somehow the best part of the day was not talking with friends and family at the shindig, nor eating a lot of very good food. It was sitting in a skychair in my backyard this afternoon, hand-sewing binding on a quilt, watching my three-year-old chase a butterfly, calling out "Butterfly! Come back!"

Jazzy has, at the age of two months, become a lot more interactive. When he's on his playmat, he will deliberately reach up and hit/kick the dangling toys that set off the lights and music. More fun for me, though, is that I can flirt with/tease him by going ooh or aah or nnn and smiling, and he'll smile and talk back.

Babies developing are so wonderful. ^_^

ETA: Wonderful Husband does the same thing with Jazzy, but does the Chamberlain Skeksis "hmmm?" noise instead . ^_^;;;

Whee! Going through all our CDs, half of which have been boxed up since Squiddle reached the "stand and pull things off shelves" stage. Culling out things we no longer love, or have duplicates of. Wonderful Husband and I have found a surprising number of "is this one yours? no? it's not mine either. who IS this artist and why do we even HAVE this CD?" albums. Slightly disconcerting.

After the cull, the CDs are all going back on the shelves, and we're determined to buy a door to go on the shelves before Jazzy reaches that same stage of stand-and-pull.

During this process, we are also reclaiming the office! We bought Squiddle a toybox at CostCo the other night (he had the choice of Paw Patrol or Frozen and picked Paw Patrol) and are culling and transferring his toys into that. Some are getting pulled out and set aside for Jazzy when he's a bit older. The box itself is going to be located in the corner of the living room where formerly the boxes of CDs were. Thus making a massive jump in available office floorspace.

Well, enough break time. Back to work!

Most of the normal places we get Halloween pumpkins were out by the time we went to purchase them, but in the end we prevailed and got two. Wonderful Husband did a blocky face and I, after asking Squiddle what kind of pumpkin face he wanted ("scary") did one with pointy teeth. We also made up a couple tomato cage ghosts, which were fun and will probably be dragged out again next year.

All that, and we got a grand total of 29 trick-or-treaters. Which is less than half of last year's number! So we have leftover candy, and I have no willpower. *sigh* But after the first couple groups of kids came to our door, Squiddle announced that he also wanted to do trick-or-treating, which he was clearly equating with "dress up in costume and be given candy by my parents" rather than "dress up in costume and go door-to-door." ^_^ So Wonderful Husband helped him into his Toothless costume, and he got to have two small Tootsie Rolls over the course of the evening.

Squiddle and I got our flu shots today. Hooray! Me on the arm, him on the thigh. He was none too happy about it, but stopped crying within ten seconds of it being done.

I've been chugging along on the current quilting project as time allows. I'm a little over 10/25ths done with the center squares. I'd be further along but last night I hit one of those "if I was making this now, I'd know so much better" moments. Namely, I had fused some hearts on and then topstitched them down. Great. Brilliant. Except the fusible web I used gives my machine fits trying to quilt through what is essentially a layer of glue. So eventually I sighed, ripped out the three hearts' worth of quilting I'd argued, wrangled, and forced my way through, and will be redoing the square this evening, quilting around the hearts instead of on top of them.

Up at 3am pumping milk to try and stay on top of this bout of mastitis. Touch wood, I think I'm winning - my temperature spiked to 101.9 then dropped back down to a more normal 98.1. Unfortunately, I'm still up at 3, draining out all the milk Jazzy didn't get to. :(

He loves miso soup but I can't get him to try chicken soup. He won't eat blackberries or raspberries, but loves pomengranate seeds (and strawberries and blueberries). Likes cheddar, the sharper the better, but good luck getting him to try a BabyBel cheese....

And somehow (I think Wonderful Husband started it), we refer to his changing table as the "alchemy table." Which Squiddle shortens to "alc table."

Yesterday we went to a (slightly belated) birthday party for Connor, who is two days younger than Squiddle. His mom is one of those people who is highly into scrapbooking and throws amazing kids' parties. This year's was Thomas the Tank Engine themed. It makes me kind of envious, but... Squiddle is three. And we are quiet people. A small dinner-at-Nana-and-Grandpa's party seems about right to me. As it was, a dozen or so kids plus their parents plus sundry relatives was enough to make me happily retreat to a quiet bedroom when Jazzy needed nursies. And this wasn't even my party!

There was one moment, though, that sticks in my mind. There was a pinata. (Thomas, of course.) And though he was not the smallest of the children there, Squiddle was clearly the only one who did not quite get the "bash the pinata with the baseball bat" thing. This is due to deliberate choice on our part. While his peers were being taught to be the next Nolan Ryan at age one (and I am NOT kidding on some of my fellow parents' ambitions in that direction), we decided (a) Squiddle didn't need that pressure, and (b) we didn't want to teach him to hit things, and (c) he could wait to learn to play T-ball/softball/baseball until he was old enough to understand things like rules of the game, that a bat is not a weapon, and that you don't swing it at anything but the ball.

So on one hand I'm sad that what we've chosen to teach and not teach him means he just kind of confusedly bopped the pinata a few times.

On the other hand, I am not at all repentant about raising a gentle child.

I'm staying well away from politics and their debates because I already know who I intend to vote for, and it's not the candidate who will send us back to the political stone age. And, honestly, my policy of not watching television is affirmed by what I see the times some comes across my radar. The cafe Wonderful Husband and I grabbed lunch at today was showing court TV. Ugh. I'm sure there is good, interesting viewing material out there. I just don't feel any need to have to search for it.

Which is not to say that my own life is so interesting at the moment, or ever has been. Big things going on: as of yesterday, Jazzy now has a bellybutton! And today we went to his first session of Mommy Matters, a group that I took Squiddle to for two years, until he aged out. While we were there, I shopped for maternity bras at the attached store. They did have some of my favored style (the Bravado Supreme, which has been discontinued) in stock... but none in my size. Sigh. I did find a working alternative, however, and bought three.

I also contacted Mother's Milk Bank today to get re-registered to donate milk to them again. I have been pumping and freezing some already, but since I'm on antibiotics at the moment, those particular bags are earmarked for Jazzy for times I need to be away from him.

I'm poking away on various quilting projects, but it's too hot this week (a high of 105 the other day!) to do more than piecing. And I'm vaguely dreading Wonderful Husband going back to work on Monday. I'll be fine, I'll do fine, I know that... it just means I'll need to stop relying on him so much for help with Jazzy in the middle of the night.