The lazy woman's blog post

Gratuitious sleeping baby photo

My goal has been to blog regularly for my new crafty blog at The Papercraft Lab. This week I blogged every weekday, so yay!  That means this blog has been sadly neglected. So I'm going to take the Friday Night Easy Way Out and point you to some of my posts over there.  I'm trying to write about easy ways to capture family memories, so they're not all crazy-crafty "Ain't nobody got time for that" kinds of activities.  

Here's what I wrote over there this week:

Scaling an Artisan Business - super exciting news about The Papercraft Lab featured in Fast Company!

How to Find a Family Photographer - updated from a post here last year

How to Have a Successful Photo Shoot - recycled and renewed from an old post here last year

No More Wasted Space - a scrapbook layout and coming to terms with whitespace in design

Photo Lab Friday - a new series on how to (quickly) edit your photos to make them shine

I'd appreciate if you could subscribe to the new blog - there are convenient links in the sidebar over there to add to Feedly or your reader of choice.  Especially if you've been coming here to read about craftiness, scrapbooking or easy photography tips.

In my ideal world, I'd like to post here on weekends, and there on weekdays, since that Lab is my new business venture and the closest I'm going to get to "work" these days. But I make no promises.  This weekend is the girls' birthday party (hooray for siblings born with birthdays 12 days apart!) and hopefully a fun trip to the zoo if the weather pseudo-cooperates.

What's going on with you?  Are you still out there? I haven't abandoned you, I promise.  :)

Proud to be an American

American flag made out of recyclable plastic by artbikemike on Flickr.  Love this.

Seeing the flurry of patriotic statements about "never forgetting" and the associated flag-filled images on Facebook gave me that same uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach that I felt in 2001. So I wrote this as my status:

12 years later, I'm still uncomfortable when I see all the 9/11-related patriotism and statements. Yes, it was a horrible act of violence. But I will also never forget being viewed by my fellow Americans with distrust just for being brown and looking "like them".

I'm sure, in my 900+ Facebook "friends" there were those who thought this was inappropriate to post, or thought it was reasonable collateral damage for what "they" did to us.  Thankfully they kept their thoughts to themselves.  (I've unfriended some already for making offensive comments about Lunar New Year, racial slurs against our president, and general assholery after the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin verdict.)

Yesterday a friend told me that the new Miss America is Indian-American. I was stunned, and even though I think beauty pageants are stupid, sexist and outdated, I was just a little bit thrilled.  I've written before about how I feel invisible in popular culture.

As it turns out, the "article" he linked was actually a collection of really ignorant and racist tweets posted after Nina Davuluri's win was announced.  You know, the usual stuff calling her a terrorist, foreigner, blah blah blah.

I'd love to say I was surprised to see them, but I'm not.  You see, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania in the 80s. It was mostly white and Catholic, neither diverse nor liberal, and the polar opposite of where I live now.  As a child I was taunted for the color of my skin, my parents' religion, my "weird" name, told to go back to my country (uh, born in Pittsburgh, thanks), called "camel jockey", etc.

My experience is sadly not unique, as my friend N wrote so eloquently yesterday. While I can thankfully say that I really don't encounter racism anymore, many still do.

I'm rolling my eyes at CNN and other news media picking up the racism/ignorance angle and being so shocked about it.  I mean really, are there people who think this stuff doesn't exist in our "enlightened" times?

But another part of me is thrilled that (at least some) mainstream media is calling it out as unacceptable and defending Nina Davuluri's "right" to be chosen as Miss America.  (As stupid as I think the whole idea of Miss America really is.)

So maybe the times, they are a-changin'.  Just a little.

So, I have this other blog...

I started another blog for my crafty pursuits, in support of a new business I'll (eventually) launch.  For now, I'd love it if you'd clickety-clack on over there, and maybe add it to your reader if you like the crafty stuff.

I'll still blog here about our regular life, but if you're wondering why I've become scarce and less crafty, it's because I'm posting those things over at

The Papercraft Lab Notebook

If you'd like to subscribe to it, I'd appreciate it greatly!

Here's the feed link to copy-paste into your reader of choice:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/papercraftlab   

(Apparently Feedly thinks it's hiding.)

Hope to see you there, my Internet friends and "friends".

This too shall pass

On our way to school!

Today I dropped T off for her first day of her second full year of preschool. I'm not very sentimental about it, since she's been in preschool since she was 2.5, and she still has *another* entire year of preschool before she's eligible for kindergarten in our state.  Never mind that she's academically ready for K now.  Sigh.

I'm somewhat amused that she'll have almost as much preschool as I had college, and more time than it took me to get my Master's degree.  But she loves her school, and (mostly) so do I. 

I realized something this morning when she was getting ready for school.  When she was 2 and still sleeping in her crib, I lamented the fact that as soon as she woke up, I had to go get her, change her and get her breakfast. My day started when hers did, and it was often long before I would choose to wake.  If I had my choice, I'd sleep until the kingly hour of 9am at least.

Last year, I brought her a complete outfit into the bathroom, she'd get dressed by herself and come upstairs for breakfast. I was pretty excited about that.  This summer, she's been getting up herself, choosing her own outfit and coming upstairs completely dressed *without my intervention*.  Holy crap!  How did we get here? 

Now, obviously, Baby M runs my schedule, and when she's up, I'm up.  But (and I'm sure I'm jinxing it here), for the last week, more often than not, she's been SLEEPING THROUGH THE ENTIRE NIGHT, y'all. Like 7pm to 6:30am. No milk at 11pm or 2am, or both.  No perplexing screaming for hours at 3am.

When I wrote about being resigned to cosleeping back in March, I couldn't even imagine this. We transitioned BabyM to sleeping in her crib in May, and that was a rough couple of weeks.  She regularly woke up twice a night, which is astronomically harder for me than once a night, for some reason.  And then, she slowly started waking only once, and usually it was *before* our bedtime - how courteous.

So far in such a short time. I forget how all these daily parenting annoyances fade away in weeks. Sure, they are replaced by others, but it's a hard job with ever changing requirements, so I expect that.  It seems like the annoying habit or extra work will last FOREVER, but it doesn't.  

It's only taken me two kids and four years to realize this! 

Wordless Wednesday: He Says He's Not A Photographer