10 posts tagged “mathilda”
Love that kid!
This letter is going in the mail Monday morning. I sure hope he replies or we'll have a disappointed 5 year old on our hands.
<conversation>
Mathilda: "What kind of phone is this?" asking about her friend Sam's toy cell phone.
Me: "Cell phone, I guess."
Mathilda: "Oh. So you use it to sell things."
</conversation>
Today was her 4 month birthday and 4 month checkup. It was no surprise to learn that she's perfectly healthy. She smiled at everybody and was declared a "happy baby" by the pediatrician, Dr. Lee.
She is such a sweet baby. Very smiley and charming. She has a way of smiling at people and them looking away like she's bashful. It's adorable. Sometimes she looks at me with an expression like we are sharing some sort of inside joke. I can't help but smile at her whenever I look at her. Lately I've been giving her lots of raspberries on her belly. That definitely makes her giggle. Speaking of which she had graduated to really cracking up. Mathilda in particular can really make her laugh. Watching the two of them together is heartwarming. Mathilda is a sweet and wonderful big sister. She has seemed entirely comfortable with the whole baby thing but she has just recently started sucking her thumb, which is something she never really did before. We're not telling her to stop. I'm assuming it will pass.
She said that her teachers had told the kids that if they didn't take their naps that the leopard-caun was going to tell the Easter Bunny not to come. Pretty weak. It sounds like something I might say in one of my weaker moments.
This is a hat pattern I came up with when faced with needing to ravage my stash rather than buy more yarn. I had seen a similar hat in a window in a yarn in Vienna and had fully intended to get into that shop and get the scoop but didn't manage to make it happen. So, instead I was able to incorporate two trips into one hat. The yarn I used for this hat is basic sport weight yarn in two shades of purple that I bought for close to pennies in Buenos Aires, Argentina almost 2 years ago. It took a couple attempts to get this hat right. I also knit an adult sized one in moss green w/ burgundy stripes. My favorite detail is the little "stem" on the top. I'll try to get a photo of the adult one (ideally w/ both Mathilda and Nick or me wearing the matching hats) up soon.
Oh and this is Mathilda's first time on skis!!
To the photos at hand, this costume was a big hit and fairly easy to make. I bought the black hooded jacket (though Mathilda was refusing to wear hats or hoods at the time so that part is not so important though you could glue cute eyeballs on it if you had a different kid), a couple pairs of black tights and black gloves, black pants and a black turtleneck. The pants and turtleneck aren't important but add to the blackness of the outfit. Anyway, cut the legs and feet off the tights and sew the gloves to one end of the tights. Stuff with something not too heavy but that will fill the tights and gloves out. I used newspaper. Sew other end of tights to the sides of the jacket or sweater of whatever you're using. Then the clever part is attaching the extra arms to the actual arm of the jacket. You have to leave a lot of slack between the arms. If you do this right (see attached photo for crappy but successful implementation) when the child raises his/her arms, the other arms also rise. We got a few "That's the best costume I've seen all night," when we were out trick-or-treating, which of course made me feel triumphant. Particularly because Nick had had a different strategy altogether on how to do this (involving hanger wires in the arms, etc.) which I vetoed.
Ahhh victory!
It's a cute little bear and conveniently fits into her lunchbox. You can see this little bear in the top photo where she is proudly displaying it on her head and in the lower photo where she's dancing with it. I don't think this bear has a name but if you asked Mathilda she might say its name was either "Blue" or "Flaki" her two favorite names for dolls and stuffed animals.
I'm grateful to Nick for humoring me and taking Mathilda to the party. Wednesday is her "daddy day" and she doesn't go to school. They usually go to swimming class and then do whatever they do the rest of the day. Most likely horsing around, lollygagging and goofing off. From the photos it looks like it was a sweet little party and I'm glad Nick let me pressure him into taking Mathilda. At one point he said, "Why don't you take her," to which I replied, "I've got a job."
Therein lies one of my biggest internal struggles right now - working vs. spending time w/ Mathilda. I could have taken the day off but I had worked from home a couple Wednesdays in January since Nick had trade shows to go to and there is a lot of flux at work right now. Specifically the issue of my working remotely seems to be in question to some degree. The new guy running the company is a bit old school and the owner is definitely traditional in that one sense...he likes to see live bodies working in the office. Hmph.
Oh and that's Mathilda's best school friend with her in the middle picture. She loves Lucas who is sadly moving away. Poor Tida. She'll be bummed. I'm sure she'll recruit another boy to be her best friend.
See here a small selection of the 40+ homemade valentines cards that I have been making "with" Mathilda. Frankly, I'm disappointed in her. She completely flaked out on me on this project. She left me hanging about 3 cards in.
Her preschool is having a Teddy Bear Tea Party on Wednesday (Valentine's Day) and the kids would be passing out their Valentine's cards. Her teachers distributed a little "newsletter" for February that is really just poorly disguised propoganda. In this so-called newsletter is a list of all 34 students' names plus the 12 teachers names, each of which will be horribly disappointed if they don't get a Valentine's card from your child.
I had a few moments of silent glee when I considered that Mathilda isn't in school on Wednesdays and we would thus be off the hook. But I got sucked into the cuteness of a Teddy Bear Teaparty and couldn't "bear" (get it?) to face Mathilda on Thursday when all the other kids are talking about how fun the teaparty was. Anyhow, refusing to shell out even a few dollars for some crappy Cinderella valentine's cards, I decided that making handmade cards would be a fun mother/daughter project. I should have counted the names before I launched into this project. I also should NOT have counted on Mathilda to have any sort of stick-to-it-iveness...she's only 2 'n three quarters. So now it's Monday night and I am short like 10 cards and I have not a single ounce of inspiration to do anything more than to reluctantly buy those damn hideous branded cards and scrawl some names on them. I lost my battle with the Man. But, hey, aren't the cards "we" made adorable?
This is Mathilda, my charming daughter, posing in her new (second hand) blue camo stretch pants. Underneath the pink jacket is her new favorite Spiderman t-shirt that is too big and not really cute at all. We got it for a buck at Chloe's Closet, a great little consignment store for kid's clothes in Bernal Heights, San Francisco.
For some reason,
The funny thing is that I don't know how she learned about Spidey...preschool? She does seem to hang with the boys more than the girls. Notice also the blue running shoes. The topper on this outfit is the horrible flight jacket that DH bought for her at the airport aeronautical store or whatever the hell that store is at SFO. We were just at the San Francisco Zoo today and while Mathilda and her friends, Max & Quinn, were running around the playground, I silently envied the parents of the girls dressed in real dresses with tights and cute rainboots. There was even one who had a little puffy tutu on over her pants. How proud those parents must be of their feminine, lovely daughters... But I didn't see any of those girls leaping off the 3 foot high platform into the sand! Yeah! Go Mathilda! You rock!
