9ish months does not = over it.

'kay so I've been quiet on the whole personal, emotional front, mostly because I've been going through a lot and I haven't had the time or the brainpower to get it all down the way I wanted to. To catch us all up, here's where we're at: I've got some lingerling postpartum depression/anxiety issues, perhaps dealing with some PTSD. I'm taking an anti-depressant for all those things, trying to find holistic ways to do it so I don't always have to be on the drug. I've always been down on anti-depressants, but it's kind of a necessary thing at this time, and I don't want to go back to the nightmares and the anxiety attacks. A bonus is that my thyroid is kind of jacked up, which just makes all of the above a fun carnival ride of awesomeness.

I don't mean to paint a bleak picture - the day-to-day is really kind of awesome a lot of the time, and I'm enjoying being home with A. Just sometimes there are days like today where I read a story about another mom's horrendous C-section experience and I end up a little shaky and a whole lot weepy. Thankfully I have people to call when that happens and then I jump headfirst into my journal, and try to make some time to paint.

But gosh, it's hard sometimes. I want to be so awesome at everything and right now I feel like I am just scraping by.

This all feels a whole lot like when my life was almost literally falling down around me in my early teenage years. This time I've decided to look at the dark places a little bit differently - instead of trying to swallow everything and pretend like it's fine, just fine, thanks - and use them to fuel my creativity. Grief is a powerful force and already it's drawn me back to who I am and who I want to be creatively.

Even that is a double-edged sword - I still have to write down lists of things that I need to get done each day to feel accomplished and not have a whole day go by before I realize what time it is. 

The taking care of and loving on the cutest baby in all the land is the easy part. I say easy because it's not like there's a choice involved there - she will grow up happy, healthy, and probably more than a little sarcastic. Parenting is no joke - it's exhausting, it's frustrating, and it stretches me and makes me grow so much it hurts on a daily basis. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else but here. 

Well okay, probably I'd go for a beach right about now, but you know what I mean.

I'm going to have to find a name more appetizing than "The Purple Poopinator"

But first, an update on m'beans. Sadly, I was a bad steward of my black beans.

A few days ago, Tuesday maybe, I was all excited because I had soaked my beans and was going to cook them on the stove on low for a couple hours and then my daughter had to wake up from her nap prematurely and be all snuggly, so we ended up snoozing together in bed, and I just about burned the house down. 

So, I soaked more beans and cooked them in the crock pot and then after I turned them off got so sidetracked by groceries and dinner that I FORGOT to do anything with them. Ugh. I suck.

In other news, I'm down 12 pounds on the raw vegan goodness and feeling GREAT! I'm going to cite this new way of eating and Stroller Strides for all this. Yow I feel good. A friend asked for a sample menu - the girl I'm working with does individualized plans based on people's social and medical history so really everyone gets a different diet when working with her but here are some of my favorites (taken from different days)

breakfast: fruit smoothie (my fave is strawberry banana)

snack: watermelon

lunch: some kind of ridiculously awesome salad (usually spinach, red peppers, cucumber, sprouts, etc) and an equally amazing dressing

snack: raspberry, blackberry, goji berries and almond milk, eaten like cereal

dinner: stuffed red peppers using cauliflower as "rice" with garlic, green onions, and tamari

snack: mango and blackberries with some macerated blackberries drizzled over it

In the veggie vein, we've been cutting WAY back on meat in the house, and Kyle's been a rock star at coming up with new delicious recipes. The other day he made this awesome beet curry which you should definitely try. JUST BE WARNED that if you eat a lot of it, the next morning you will freak out and think you're hemmhoraging but not to worry, it's just the beets. And I can't believe I'm saying this but pooping purple for part of a day is totes worth it because the recipe is AMAZING.

So Mellifluous

I was thinking about starting a Tumblr account, when I discovered that somellifluous was already taken. And then I found this site, which is kinda awesome in its own little way.

more on the beans

okay - I went a little nutty at the store today and went around checking out the price per pound of beans. A couple different prepackaged bags in the "Mexican" aisle were 7.4 cents and 12 cents per pound respectively and then I went to Whole Foods bulk section and pretty much every kind of bean there was like, .1 cent per pound. FOR DRY BEANS! Still working through last week's hummus but we're introducing baby A to black beans and avocados this week so it is on like donkey kong with the dry beanage. I don't think I'll ever go back. Who thought that something that requires forethought, planning, and money saving would be my new favorite thing.

DIY hummus - for the sake of your cashola.

My sweet foodie friend just recently wrote about making your own staples that you usually buy at the grocery store, and then my hubs sent me this article, which I thought put a great perspective in how we're spending our money when we buy canned beans. My abuela made all kinds of beans from scratch - I LOVED showing up at her house for the weekend and inevitably she'd have this huge pot of beans brewing on the stove that smelled like heaven. 

So, whilst out shopping this weekend I bought a bag of dried garbanzo beans, which was $4.35. Of course I threw the bag away so I have no idea how much was in it. But I do know this - I am obSESSED with Sabra's roasted garlic hummus, which can be anywhere between $3 and $4 per 10oz.

I soaked the beans overnight and then some, and they soaked up ALL the water in the bowl. I drained them and set them on a low simmer for a couple hours until they were the right kind of tender. I then went to town, adding olive oil, garlic, cumin, paprika, lemon juice, salt, red pepper flakes, and sometimes a few pieces of Hatch chiles (which were a whopping $.39/lb this past week at Whole Foods!) and came up with this:

3 jars, 16 oz of hummus apiece. For a WHOLE lot less than what you pay at the store PLUS you have more control over how much oil & fattiness goes into it AND you can play with different seasonal flavors from your garden! Viva la DIY!

Lady Jane

Once upon a time I lived in Spain and then London for a summer. It was in the English countryside that we came upon this cute little town where I bought a pink shirt with white flowers on it.

Well, I am long-waisted and the shirt was very short-waisted (hence the white tank underneath), and then every time I washed the shirt I had to iron the flowers down. Needless to say it didn't last very long in my wardrobe rotation. I saved the flowers though, for just such an occassion, and every time I see them I am rocketed right back to that English summer and my wonderful housemates Jane & Jim.

This is the first official item that is going up on my Etsy shop! Hooray!

mellifluous. music. monday.

The other thing I've decided to focus on is who I am as a musician. I have guitars, a ukulele, a djembe, a mandolin, a piano, and a clarinet all in my house, along with a bunch of auxiliary percussion instruments. As a music therapist, I'd become kind of Jane-of-all-musics-master-of-few so what I want to dedicate my Monday blog posts to is music. Maybe it's the playing of, the listening to, or the attending of. My undergraduate degree concentrated in ethnomusicology, which is the study of world music, and what it means about me is that I want to know everything about every kind of music I can get my ears on - where it originated and by whom, the cultural significance, and the historical impact of it and how that style impacted the world at the time (and/or continues to). 

If you want to get super geeky, you can check out my bilingual music therapy blog, which will dive deeper in to the cultural and neurolinguistics of music and why music therapy in general is just so very awesome.

But here, on Mondays at least, we're going to just talk about music.

Claire

I have a LOT of leftover Ikea fabric from my guest shower curtain that I made a few years ago. It is a home decor weight fabric that is fun to look at, and I love making bags and wallets from this material. Yesterday we celebrated the birthday of a dear friend who I knew loved my shower curtain so I whipped her up a tote bag. Henceforth, anything with that outer fabric and red lining shall be under the "Claire" line.

I am attempting to make a matching wallet but so far I keep screwing it up...I'll post as soon as I figure that one out.

*update: I gave up on the wallet completely after dozens of ripped seams. Seems the interfacing I bought was too stiff for it and I just could not get it to turn out or top stitch and then my attempts at adding a bias tape around the outside totally was not the way to go. Back to the drawing board!

epic stashbusting

Admitting you have a problem is the first step, right? So here's me admitting to my dirty little crafting secret: I, Christina, am a fabric hoarder. I am obsessed with pretty fabrics and designs and new patterns, but it seems that when I get the fabric home and washed and halfway stitched, another pretty piece of fabric and pattern calls to me softly and I'm off again, pursuing some other sewing endeavor. What's more is that when I do finish a project, I can't bring myself to just discard the leftover strips and such. Oh no. What that leaves me with is what you see above, what happened when I dumped out a huge box of fabric. I got to thinking about what I wanted to do with it.

There are a ton of unfinished projects in here, and since I am no longer working and we're operating under a new budget, I have decided to tear through my stash before I get or start anything new. So, I grabbed a box of freezer bags and a sharpie and started organizing my pile of stuff into projects:

This way, when I get the odd blessed hour or so for nap time, I can pull out a bag, work on a project, and put it back without the eventual destruction of my craft room.

I have a bunch of gift projects that I'm working on, but I also have a whole lot of fabric that isn't purposed for anything in particular. That fabric I stored by color or texture so that when I want to make a blanket or a baby girl dress or wallets or applique some onesies, I know where to reach. 

I have been overwhelmed lately, feeling like all I do is vacuum, change diapers, feed people, and haven't had the time or the energy to be creative, which is a HUGE part of what makes me who I am. In the interest of preserving my sanity and staving off the dark clouds that gather above me when I am sans creativeness, I scheduled some lovely ladies to come clean my house to help me keep on top of the deep cleaning stuff that let's face it, is just not my forte. Because I function largely from the right half of my brain, I am prone to this overwhelmed-ness when there is no order to the chaos, and I HAVE to put structure around myself or else I'll end up a frazzled grumpy pumpkin or as K likes to call me, "a super hot mess."

What this also means is that I'm going to open up an Etsy shop because I get lots of requests from friends who want the stuff that I make. This, too, will help me get through my stash and help me work out some kinks on designs that I have as I figure out what I want to specialize in. I am going to take this stash busting opportunity to build up some inventory.

Stay tuned - this is going to be fun!