First off, the construction of the babies' mobile has begun. In 2002, we spent 6 months folding 1000 paper cranes with our family to bring us happiness and prosperity in our marriage. We actually folded ~1200 to be on the safe side. Here are two of them, sitting on our wedding cake:
Most of the cranes went home with wedding guests -- prosperity should be shared -- and we still often see them in people's houses when we visit. Of course, 1200 cranes is a lot of origami. We and our parents still have boxes of cranes, which mostly serve as Christmas tree decorations.
The first step was re-learning cranes. I made a few hundred of the 1200 wedding cranes (I think only my dad made more). In the months leading up to my wedding, I saw after images of the paper when I closed my eyes and dreamed about creasing the folds. The process should have been permanently imprinted in my brain. But yesterday, it took me more than an hour with two sets of instructions to figure out how to make one crane. The muscle memory of making the folds was there waiting to be uncovered, though. As soon as I'd made one crane my hands made three more before my brain caught up. Then Dane joined in the fun, and we attempted to make our first non-crane pattern, a hawk. It was more difficult than we expected, but the two of us each managed to produce one in about half an hour:
After that, Dane got ambitious and tried to make a jungle cat. I promised not to share a photo of the jungle cat attempt on the internet -- but I can show you the house cat he made to vent his frustration afterward:
The other project we've been working on is knitting baby clothes. (I knit, Dane kindly serves as a human skein winder and distracts the cats.) I finally got around to starting the first Aran sweater this week, using some of the un-dyed merino I wrote about earlier. This is the second time I've knitted the same basic cable pattern, and I'm making faster progress than before. I'm a little conflicted about the color, though. The natural wool is a brighter white than I expected. It may not be the best choice for a little boy just starting to toddle around and get into trouble. For the next Aran sweater, I might be ambitious and try dying a hank of wool before I begin. Hopefully that project won't go the way of the jungle cat.
Other than folding paper and knitting, we've been spending a lot of our free hours at home cooking. Dane is the main cook at our house. He's always looking for new recipes, and for new ways to make inexpensive healthy meals. In the last couple of months, he's been doing one simple vegetarian meal per week. This is part of an effort to reduce the amount of organic, free-range, grass-fed, hand-petted-by-beautiful-women meat that we buy at Whole Foods. The results have been really tasty. We've particularly enjoyed a new lentil soup recipe, combined with very buttery whole wheat biscuits.
Of course, the main projects at our house aren't crafts and meals. I'm writing a lot of code; Dane is doing a lot of technical writing and editing. And then there's the all consuming process of actually growing the babies. Here's the obligatory weekly shot of me looking ENORMOUS.
Believe it or not, that's all baby. My ribs still show on my back, and my constant mission is to eat more buttery biscuits. It's a hard life, but I'm managing. :-)
(I'm laughing in the picture because Dane was telling me about a bizarre dream he had in which he was filming a movie about Hitler and Stalin driving around the New Mexico desert in a blue pickup. Apparently, Stalin was there for the comic relief. Never a dull minute in our house! )
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