My Valentine Gift

I may have hinted that I would love a clothesline for Valentine's Day. :-) [To those of you who think this is horrible, John brought me lilies, too!]

*delight.*

Things Gemma Can Do

Some of these photos are a couple of weeks old. I've just been too busy taking care of somebody to blog much . . .

wear a bow in her hair

ride in the Moby wrap

(She takes most of her day-time naps there, to Mama's delight! In fact, she's sleeping there right now, which is why I'm blogging!)

put her hand in her mouth
(usually when she's being changed, if you can tell!)

root for Duke!

and generally look adorable . . .
even when she's just had a poo-explosion. Mama had to snap a quick photo at church mid-change before putting her back in her pajamas.

Making Squirt Squirt

When I married John, I had cleaning products galore . . . some that were his, some that were left in the house by the previous owners, and some that were gifts. I think I still have three partial cans of Comet around! Oh, and then last April John helped one of his buddies move, and inherited all his left-behind cleaning products. It's been pretty nice. :-)

I'm [finally] just about through all the all-purpose stuff that we had, so I knew it was time to call Mom and get the recipe for "Squirt Squirt." It came to us from another friend at church, I believe, under the title "Glass Cleaner that cleans just about anything." Sweet, but a bit long for those of us who like to name things either after their looks or the sounds they make. ;-) I bought the necessary ingredients and made up my first batch last week. Here's that recipe:

"Squirt Squirt"

1/2 cup sudsy ammonia
1 pint rubbing alcohol
1 tsp. dish soap

Combine in plastic milk jug and fill with water to make 1 gallon.

I think it works great, and since a pint of rubbing alcohol is about 50 cents and a big jug of ammonia is around a dollar, it's quite cheap as well. :-) I filled up an empty squirt bottle from one of the products I finished up and still have the better part of a gallon of solution under my sink.

Another thing I inherited when I married John was a Swiffer WetJet. I learned to mop by watching my mother on her hands and knees with a rag, so it's not something I would have purchased for myself. But since we have it, I may as well use it, right? I used it until I ran out of the disposable pads, then bought more pads since there was still liquid, then bought more liquid since there were still pads . . . repeat this cycle. It's a trap! I finally decided that enough is enough. It certainly is convenient (especially when I was pregnant and really tired!), but it doesn't even mop that well.

So, I determined to fill the bottle with squirt squirt, despite the warning on the back, "do not attempt to refill . . . " I think they just want us to keep buying $5 refills! But, it's well nigh impossible to take the cap off those things. I tried using a plastic syringe to go through the rubbery top, but that didn't work, either. Enter John with a hack saw. He cut open the bottle, filled it up and attempted to reseal it with duct tape. Did it work? Nope.

So, John googles something about refilling Swiffer WetJet bottles and runs to the kitchen before I can pour the boiling water off the pasta I'm making him for lunch. Someone has shared that immersing the top of the bottle in boiling water for about a minute enables you to screw it right off. We save the pasta water, try it, and it works!

That bottle is ruined, thanks to the hack saw. But another $5 later, I think I'll try again . . .

P.S. I'm sure there are lots of recipes for homemade cleaning products! Anyone have one to share?

How Our Baby Got Her Name

wearing one of our outfits from Miss Sarah!

We love Gemma's name, and thought you might like to know where it came from. :-)

I've loved the name Grace since college. Oddly, more than one person there got my name wrong and called me Grace instead; apparently there was a Grace Reidy who graduated shortly before I came, and my maiden name is Gretchen Reid. :-) I liked it, painted it as my nickname on my intramural basketball shirt (go flying squirrels!), and mentally filed it away as a favorite baby name for someday. And what better thing to to name a child after than God's beautiful, abundant, saving grace in Christ, which He lavished on even me?

Then, I re-met and married John, and now I have a dear mom-in-law whose middle name is Grace! We both liked that we'd be naming our daughter after her, too.

One of my best friends in college was a foreign exchange student from Northern Ireland. Of course she missed home and the person she most often spoke of missing was her sister, Gemma. Gemma was the only other Christian in her family, and the one who had led her to Christ. I was endeared to Gemma through Jenni, and when my brother and I visited Northern Ireland about a year later, we learned first-hand that she's just the sweet, godly woman we expected to find.

I love the name because it's not strange but not common and because it's more common in the UK than it is here (and I love, love Northern Ireland!). Our little daughter now has two godly women for her name-sakes, and how earnestly I pray that she will early receive the grace of her grandmother and the grace of Gemma from Ireland.

We Made Soap

A few months back, Mom and a friend and I made this soap. Its high oil content makes it beautiful for cleaning wood. :-)


And when we were visiting family for Christmas, Mom, a different friend and I made this soap. It's pure white and natural and perfectly lovely to bathe with!

If you ask nicely, Mom will probably share some soap with you. :-) She has a big vat of coconut oil in the basement and bigger dreams about what to do with it all . . .

Cloth Diapering - The Adventure Begins!

you're putting me in what?

A little over a week ago, we were just about to run out of the disposables given to us at our baby showers last fall, so I bravely announced to facebook that we were starting cloth! And that meant I had to actually do it. :-)

The truth is, there was still one box of pampers in our closet which I had tried to let myself forget about. But it was still there, just in case. The rest of our stash consists of a ton of used diaper service-quality prefolds and covers given to us by a friend of a friend (J), three new FuzziBunz OneSize which were a gift from my CDing (i.e. cloth-diapering) sister-in-law (C), and a few random used pieces from the same sister-in-law. I also have a few knitted wool soakers.


Here's a bit of a journal of how our first few CDing days went.

Thursday: We start off the day in a prefold and cover. I folded the prefold in thirds and placed it inside. A few weeks ago, I tried to pin one on Gemma just for fun, but I couldn't get the pins to go through those thick things! She wet through it before I even gave up. Am I that weak? Well, I'm pretty sure the diapers I used to see Mom pinning onto little brother were thinner, possibly the Gerber kind you can find at the store. But until I find some other way of fastening them sans cover, the wool soakers will have to wait. Note to self: buy a snappi.

In the meantime, I brought the diaper pail into the bathroom per Mom's recommendation, lined it with a plastic garbage bag per J's recommendation, and filled it partway with water and Borax, per Mom's recommendation. I also figure out where to adjust the elastic on the FuzziBunz to fit my 11.5ish pound sweetie pie and adjust all three of them.

Halfway through the day, I've discovered that my favorite cover is actually one from C. It fits better and seems to breathe better than the covers from J, and it's pink. :-) It seems like I'm constantly changing diapers, though! They get wet so quickly! I think back to my cousin, Lizzy's comment, "Pampers hold more pee . . . " I pull the box of Pampers down from her closet, rip it open, and look longingly inside. They have baby Elmo's and Ernie's on them. They're so cute, and so easy . . . I reconcile myself to using them tonight, to help with the transition, and put them back.

The wet prefolds also smell like ammonia, which I read on a website is a result of detergent residue. Apparently when I attempted to "strip" them in the summer with a plain hot water wash, I should have repeated the process a time or two.

Friday: In the morning, my sweet husband takes our fed-but-awake baby for a little while so I can sleep some more and brings her back in one of her FuzziBunz. Go Dad! They're cute and comfy, and we love them so far!

Today is the day I'm determined to buy a snappi. I've heard that the birth center near us has a boutique and sells cloth diapers, so it seems very likely that they carry snappis there.

Indeed they do. They have lots of different cloth diapers and it's fun to see in person all these brands I've only heard about or seen pictures of online. But we've been so blessed with gifts that I stick with the snappi three-pack. [I intend to stop at the post office and the grocery store, too, but by the time we get there, the post office will be closed and Gemma is getting hungry and fussy. Life with baby is quite different from life pre-baby!]

This evening is our first experiment with CDing on the go. John and I take Gemma to the gym with us and she sleeps long enough for me to spend about 10 minutes on the elliptical. The rest of the time, we nurse and change her in the bathroom. It's easy just to pop her wet things in the wet bag and redress her in cloth. Redress, hee hee. (I received a Munchkin brand bag from Target as a shower gift.)

At home later, I decide to try out the snappi, but I have a hard time getting the little prefolds I've been using to go around her like that, so I pull out one of the larger ones stashed away and seriously fold it down. Maybe it's just too big, or maybe I need lessons, but I'm not terribly pleased with the results. Still. I want to try out the soaker sack I knitted in the summer. She's not in it long, though, before she gets fussy and John realizes she's wet. It's back into 'sposies for the night.

Saturday: Hooray for washing our first load of dirty diapers! I drag the very heavy diaper pail downstairs to the laundry area but have to leave it there for some reason. When I get back to it, it's empty!

"Where are the diapers?" I ask John.

"I threw them out," he replies.

"But they're the cloth ones!"

"That's why they were so heavy!"

It's not his fault, really; I had set the pail in the same area where I often stick a bag of trash on its way out to the big bin. And they were awfully heavy. I'm surprised that the plastic liner didn't break with all that water and wet stuff in it! I decide to forgo the plastic bag in the future. Yay for being even more green. :-)

I washed my diapers with only a little bit of powdered detergent from Trader Joe's. It received 4 out of 5 stars for cloth diapers on this website: http://www.pinstripesandpolkadots.com/detergentchoices.htm. It's easy for me to get and not a bad price! It's difficult to describe the measure of satisfaction which swept over me when I laid those rectangular prefolds out in the sun to bleach afterward. Ah, this. This is what I've been waiting to do all my life. :-)

On Saturday night, little Gemma was back into 'sposies, and I almost regretted putting her in them again on Sunday morning. Yes, they're easier. But they're blue inside. That can't be natural. Ironically, the only nursery worker who changed her last week was a CDing mom herself. When we arrived home in the afternoon, I was almost anxious to put her back in cloth. How one does change. :-)