v.2

We’re fortunate enough to have a car and the opportunity to go to vast amounts of playgrounds in Brooklyn.  I believe we take full advantage of that! Within the last month, we’ve gone to at least 9 different playgrounds! They all have relatively different layouts, different play structures and different people with pros and some cons for all of them. During the summer, we went over to Bay Ridge a lot and went to 3 different ones over there with Owls Head being our favorite. You can close off the area and there’s always a good amount of kids there (not too little and not too many). The sprinklers are in a separate section and the bathrooms are new and clean. The one at 83rd and Colonial is right behind my alma mater, Fort Hamilton High School. The last time we went there (to meet Layla and Rawya), the marching band was practicing. It sent chills up and down my spine hearing the band play. (I played the flute in the HS band.) I found myself looking for the teacher to see if it’s the same one even though it was over 15 years ago (it wasn’t). I think the sprinklers in this playground are Sienna’s favorite because she usually goes right into them.

Rawya and Sienna

Swings and raspberries at 79th street.

Here’s a cute video of Sienna and Yves at Owl’s Head (comment or e-mail me for password)

“I don’t want to” from Lisa on Vimeo.

Now that summer is officially over and the cold weather is coming, I wanted to go to the local playgrounds more often. My least favorite one is the East 14th Street one because there are always old men there smoking cigarettes (and it’s small). YUCK. We only go there if we have errands to do around there. The Bedford one isn’t bad but there are also old people hanging out there as well. So far no smokers among them at least! And recently, we’ve been going to the East 36th street one to meet up with local mom Jana and her 2 little girls Emma (2.5) and Leah (11 months). I like that one even tho the first time I went, there was a lot of garbage around and the bathrooms aren’t very close.

stay clear of the smokers!

she can go up and down this slide all day!

East 36th

We also go to the Bay Parkway one when we have to go to Caesar’s Bay for errands. I didn’t like it at first because it’s pretty big and there were lots of older kids there running around. The second time we went (Saturday), it was better.

This wooden walkway became a slide for Sienna!

Comments(1)

We finally headed over to Brooklyn Bridge Park so I can check out the waterfalls art exhibit. There has been some controversy surrounding it. It seems the salt water splashing up from the ocean is killing all the greenery and turning it brown. I still wanted to check it out before they shut it down. What can I say, I have a thing for waterfalls. Well, it wasn’t on! I was a little bummed as I just wanted to see it even though Yves thinks it’s a farce. Oh well. We headed over to the playground! We don’t come down this way too often as it is a little bit of a trek but I do love this area. The Brooklyn Bridge is my favorite bridge so any shot with it in the background, I love! Like this one!

And to be fair, here’s a shot with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. I think Sienna liked the sounds of the train as she kept looking up and pointing to it whenever the trains came by and saying some semblance of the word ‘train’.

We decided to go to Bubby’s for lunch. The good thing about having lunch at around 11ish, there isn’t a wait! By the time we came out, there was a little bit of a wait for a table. I give it a A+ for the super kid friendly atmosphere (they even gave Sienna water in a plastic cup with a lid and a straw! This was given with our water for the table!) and the fact that the men’s room also had a diaper changing station! And they get another A+ for great food! I got a turkey blt and Yves got a grilled ham and cheese. My turkey blt was awesome! Yves’ was good but a little bit on the salty side (from the mustard and the pickles, not from the ham!) But the fries were fabulous! Needs no ketchup fabulous! And for Sienna we got a side of french toast and apple cider. She ate more than I thought she would!

I also want to document something that happened last Friday, the 12th.  Something I call the ‘poop incident.’  Normally Yves does the bathing duties during the week but he was working late that night (as well as Wednesday and on Saturday!) So I’m bathing Sienna, everything is going as it usually does when I smell a foul odor. Sienna farts. No biggie, not the first time. I joked with her that I didn’t see any bubbles! Then next thing I know, I hear a plop. Then another plop and Sienna is standing there looking back toward her butt. She’s taking a poop in the bath!! I was so dumbfounded I just did not know what to do! This has never happened before nor have I even read about something like this in all the motherhood stuff that I read! I was frozen in shock. I didn’t know whether to laugh or freak out (I did both!) I went with my first instinct and got some toilet tissue and scooped it up. Yes, I know, not a very smart move as the tissue fell apart once it hit the water. Oh well. I just proceeded to pick it all up with the tissue anyway and threw it in the toilet. Thankfully it wasn’t a mushy poop! I drained all the water out and basically re-bathed her. What a memory!

Comments(1)

I finally finished the star-ghan I was crocheting for Sienna! Took me 2 months! I could have kept going with it and Yves wanted me to make it bigger but I think it’s a good size.It fits the crib well for now!

I also made this coffee cup:

Can you guess what it’s hiding?

har har har! The pattern is here.

I also joined a swap on swap-bot. I haven’t swapped in a long time but since it was an amigurumi swap, I knew it wouldn’t be a problem to fulfill. It was hard to settle on something to make for my partner, since she likes everything, so when I came across this jellyfish pattern, it reminded me of the jellyfish shot from the NY Aquarium a couple of weeks ago. I hope she likes it! I made another one to send to Zack since Tammy thought it was super cute too.

Comments(0)

Last Sunday, the 7th, we went to Coney Island. Not because it was Astroland’s official last day forever but because that was where the electronics recycling was being held. We had an old pc and a couple of printers to get rid of. We decided to take a walk along the boardwalk anyway since it was so nice out and I remembered today being the demise of Astroland. (Now there are talks about the city keeping it open, I’m not sure!) There was a few news crews there but we were gone before the crowd came and Astroland opened for the day.

I tried to get a group shot of us with the Cyclone in the back but she was getting cranky by that time. She’s still adjusting to the midday nap. This is the best one I got.

Comments(0)

Last Saturday we took Sienna to Sunset Park. She hadn’t been there since last September! How she’s grown since then! The playground area is really spacious with shade so we will definitely come back to this one! I was surprised by how many people were there as we were there pretty early, mabye by 9:30? (And yes, we did go for bahn mi afterwards!) It was also nice to go in the park area with such beautiful views of the city!

Yves dressed Sienna that morning and I copied her! Yves had on khaki shorts too but he didn’t have a lime green shirt.

Sometime Sienna needs convincing or help to slide down the slide!

The sound of her laughing really makes my heart soar!

Comments(1)

I finally got motivated to try the EZ Screen Print this weekend that I bought in January 2007 – yes! I bought the kit back in January of 2007! I think I was saving it for something really special plus I just got plain lazy. I finally thought of something special and I got off my ass! HA! Sienna loves Bob the Builder! At first I thought she kept saying Bob simply because it was so easy to say. She points to the TV and says Bob! She points to her books during bedtime stories and says Bob! But I guess she does like Bob because when we do put it on, she gives that little excited giggle of hers. So cute! The idea is not very original but I thought was still cute all the same. Remember those popular ‘Jesus is my homeboy’ and WWJD t-shirts a few years back? Well, now I gave it a little kiddie twist! Here is the transparency print I made:

The names on the bottom are for the test strip to make sure the sheets in the kit are still ok. Apparently you should keep the sheets in the refrigerator so they last longer! HA! And since this kit is over a year and a half old, I had to prepare myself for unusable sheets, with no one to blame but myself!  Exposure time is only 50 seconds with transparencies, then you soak it in tap water for at least 15 minutes. I did this Monday morning and went out for a couple of hours and left it in the water all that time. After rinsing and letting it dry, it looked great!

I still had my bag full of mixed inks from the silkscreening class I took at Pratt in 2004. I wasn’t sure how the inks would be but the blue ink was still usable while the orange one was all dried up. I donned my too clean craft apron and was prepared to get messy!

Since this was just a test strip, I didn’t care that her name was so close to the edges. And I just used regular masking tape to secure it. I once again used some old sheets. This old sheet was my tester for making the shopping cart cover.

So of course since there wasn’t too much border for the tape, the screen came out while I was pulling the squeegee over it. And the combination of too much ink and the image too close to the edge, ink went in under the stencil. That was ok too. I was just happy it came out so it proved that the sheets were still usable!  I decided to go ahead with the Bob stencils!

Well, it didn’t come out quite as I had hoped. The WWBD side barely shows up and the homeboy side needed some working with a stiff brush. I’m not quite sure why the right side didn’t come out so well. Looking at the transparency, I did see that the right side image isn’t as black as the left side image. I got these Bob images off the web and was thinking of working them over to make sure they were truly black but was afraid that if I worked too long on them, I would never get this project going. Live and learn! But I’m still baffled about why the WWBD didn’t come out as I know that was really black. Maybe because it’s just an outline and not a lot of solid? This is how the print looks:

I re-inked it again which is why the bottom line printed twice and out of registration. I really want to try this again as I really want to make these shirts for her before she loses interest in Bob! The sheets I got are the hi-res ones and I’m not sure why I got the hi-res ones since the site says the regular ones are fine for doing t-shirts. I might buy a pack of the regular ones and give them a try and re-work the image too.

Comments(0)

After seeing crafter girlpopcorn in this video on Threadbanger, I was inspired and got myself an embroidery & darning foot for my singer and some water soluble stabilizer. It came at the end of last week and decided to give it a quick try since the weekend was here. I am posting this in the hopes that once I get better with this, I can look back at this and see how far I’ve come. HA! At first I couldn’t figure out how to put the darn thing on! Once I realized that I would have to unscrew the shank that is on there now, I got a little nervous. I don’t like to unscrew things that I’m not familiar with! My manual also said I had to put the feed dogs down to do embroidery/free motion. I didn’t even know they went down! I didn’t know they were called feed dogs! LOL. Well, I still don’t really know if I put it on correctly as there is so much space between the foot and the sewing plate. I guess you need that much space in order to move the fabric around.

that’s a lot of space, dontcha think?

I pulled out some scrap sheets that I saved just for these practicing purposes. I decided to try and do Sienna’s name. I was so anxious, I spelled it wrong! HA!

I fiddled with the tension and realized the higher tension was not the way to go. I think this was somewhere between 5 and 7:

So I moved it lower to a 2. Yves’ name came out the best.

I thought it only fitting that I do Sienna’s name again but spelled correctly!

I certainly need a lot of practice with this and I’m guessing (hoping) the stabilizer will help. Hopefully my next post on this will be more successful!

Comments(0)

So, ever since vacation at the shore, we’ve been trying to figure out Sienna’s nap schedule. For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been trying to do away with her morning nap. I’ve been trying all these different times for the afternoon nap and this week have decided to try to get her down by 12:45 with limited success.  Actually on Monday, she was the one that wanted to go down at 12:45 by being a super cranky miss but at least she slept a good 2.5 hours. I tried to follow suit the rest of the week. We would do our errands or go to the park in the morning, get home and have a bottle and lunch and then I would put her down.  Most times she would fall asleep on the way back home, anyway between 11:15 and noon. Once she wakes up from this, she seems full of energy again as if 15 minutes was all she needed. I was thinking of pushing up her nap to between 11 and 11:30 (another mom also suggested this) but I don’t know if that schedule would work for us. Would I give her lunch before? Or lunch after? Sigh…I was wondering if I was overthinking this so today decided to go with the flow. She seemed tired this morning so I put her down a little before 9. I had a doctor’s appt. at 9:30 so when I left, I told my parents if she’s still awake by 9:40, take her out and go to the park or something. (The last few times I relented and put her down for a morning nap, she didn’t want to take an afternoon nap-I know that makes it 1 nap a day but I rather her sleep in the afternoon!) Well it turns out she did not stay down this morning. When I came back, we had lunch and so far, she is quiet in her room and I’m assuming she is sleeping at 1pm. Cross fingers!

On another note, here is a cute video I took of Sienna eating a nectarine. She’s really digging in! (I usually cut up the fruit into bite sized pieces for her)

Eating a nectarine from Lisa on Vimeo.

Comments(1)

August marks the 4 year anniversary of the CD mix of the month group and we celebrated it in the daylight at Coney Island this past Saturday. What fun! Me, Robyn, Brenda, Alison, Carrie, Nuno, Alan and Gio were the attendees. Me and Robyn were the only ones brave enough to ride the Cyclone (Nuno was running late so he rode later). The Wonder Wheel was super (swingy) fun, the Freak show was goofy and not really so freaky (or maybe I’m just jaded?), the bumper cars were fun but I was disappointed Nuno couldn’t get on (the car he was in didn’t work and then all the cars filled up). There are more pics in my flickr here as I am too lazy to repost them here. I admit I was feeling a bit achy on the home later that afternoon but I would still do it again!

Comments(1)

Today and Monday Sienna had a playdate with Nico. No pictures from today so these are from Monday.

This sequence cracked me up. There was an Elmo doll on the bench and we put them on the bench so we can take pictures of them. Top left: Sienna finds Elmo. Top right: Sienna shares Elmo with Nico. Bottom left: Sienna is chagrined, why did she give up Elmo? Bottom right: Oh Elmo, I’m sorry I left you! Nico: I’m outta here!

Sienna goes into the sprinklers. She never went into the sprinklers before, she usually would stand right outside the sprinklers and look at it. This time she went in. Starr said that Nico normally doesn’t get as wet as he did on Monday. We think they influenced each other. Notice in the next pictures that Sienna is wearing different bottoms. I thought she was done getting wet when I changed her. Clearly she wasn’t! At least I put her in water shoes.

Monday was also the 2nd day we tried the one nap a day schedule. It seemed to work out ok. After being at the playground almost 2 hours, Sienna was tired and fell asleep on the way home. Once home, we had lunch and then I put her down where she proceeded to stay awake for an hour before finally falling asleep and slept for 2 hours. Tuesday she surprised me by basically telling me she wanted a nap a little before 10am (she motioned up and then put her head on my shoulder, pointed and said go) Wednesday was also a 2 nap day. Today was a one nap day and showed signs of weariness by noon. I put her down after lunch around 12:45, checked on her half an hour later to see she was still awake (but quiet!) I told her nap time and I guess she fell asleep shortly after. So I guess I’ll just take each day as it comes.

Comments(2)