Five good things, August 10

1. Eric has been making us happy by clapping and playing peek-a-boo. "Where's Eric?" we say when we see him holding a blanket or a towel over his face. Lots of giggling behind the blanket. "Where's Eric?" Then -- ta-da! -- he yanks off the blanket and we say "There he is!" He gets a huge smile on his face.

I saw him practicing clapping his hands together quietly by himself last Friday and I was delighted. He didn't know I was watching and he got an embarrassed smile when he looked up and saw me. Since then he's doing it more and more, now that he realizes we all get excited when he claps.

I don't think any of the other boys clapped as a baby. When they were older and clapping was run-of-the-mill, sure, but we've never had a baby who claps his hands.

2. Eric is growing beautiful golden curls. Since he's our fourth, I felt like I could take a pretty good guess at his stats before he was born. I guessed he'd be born on September 25th, weigh 9 or 10 pounds, and have blonde hair and blue eyes. I was right. Ho hum. So now I am tickled that he surprised me by being the only one of the kids to have curly hair.

3. My sister-in-law treated us to a girl's night out at the fair last week. We watched the quilt show, played bingo, got our picture taken together, and had fair food. Cheese curds, pretzel dogs, and fried Oreos. It was a lot of fun.

4. Our insurance company replaced our car seats after the accident. I filled out a claim for Julian's car seat but decided not to fill one out for Eric's car seat. He had outgrown his infant seat and in fact, for a couple of weeks before the crash I'd been intending to do a car seat shuffle and put Eric in Julian's old car seat and switch Julian over to another hand-me-down seat we had. So I couldn't stand the thought of getting a brand new infant seat, it seemed so wasteful when I wasn't even going to use it anymore. The claim representative sent me a message to make sure I only needed one car seat replaced and when I explained, she said she would be able to use the credit to get me the next size up for Eric. So both Eric and Julian got nice new Graco car seats in the mail. I was thankful for that.

In my mind, Julian's old car seat was our nice seat because Christopher and I bought it brand new at Walmart for $180, a big purchase for us, especially back then. But we'd bought it for baby Silas so that was seven years ago. I guess it was actually starting to get old in car seat years. When I dragged it in from the car I could see for the first time that it was looking shabby. There were stains from countless snacks that would never quite wash out of the padding.

The messiest snack ever eaten in that car seat was a chocolate cupcake that Micah got at a Christmas bazaar bake sale when he was little. His auntie bought it for him. Good memories!

5. I've been trying to start crocheting again. I've done a little bit in the past, not very well, but have dreamed for years of becoming a master crocheter like my mom.

I had hooks and one partial skein of sparkle white yarn up on my closet shelf and that seemed like enough to at least start off with. I used the white yarn to learn to crochet roses from a YouTube video. In the end my white yarn made exactly 5 roses and it was great practice for me to brush up on the basics.

=> Roses

The rose on the left in this photo is the first one I made. For the second one, on the right, I switched to a smaller hook and thought it was a big improvement.

Last Saturday I found some more sparkle yarn at Walmart in beautiful soft pinks and grays and I used it to make a cowl scarf from a free pattern on the Lion Yarn website.

=> Cowl scarf

It was so much fun to make these little projects. I'm not sure yet what to use the roses for. They are too bulky to embellish blankets, which was my original thought. My youngest niece enjoys being fancy and I could see one of the roses adorning a winter hat for her, or something like that.