Monday:

We started the week our favorite way

We even made it to (outside) Stroller Strides at Ft. Shantok Park

It was nice enough for some good quality swinging too

Tuesday:

I saw this. I bought this. It was disappointing. I need some regular egg nog.

Wednesday:

I got an amazing box in the mail. My friend Jen (from high school!) made me these for Baby Sandy. Are they adorable or what?!

Thursday:

We went to Stroller Strides (again!) and after class Baby Evan played on the Richard Scarry ride. He is skeptical of Lowly Worm.

My new (non-deffective) rocker came in at Babies R Us. Little Evan thought we also needed a new exersaucer.

Friday:

My BFF Erin came up with her son and I practiced pushing two around the grocery store. For the record, this cart SUCKS.

And then we left the babies (with E) to go pick up wine at our local vineyard. Sadly, all the wine was for my friends and not me.

Hey look! Amy from A Good Life was nice enough to make the linky code for me, so now it’s a hop! That means if you put this code in your post (on the HTML page) everyone’s links show up for everyone so it’s easy to check them all out. Please link up if you did a week in iPhone (or camera phone or whatever) photos! (p.s. I am shockingly internet clueless, so you might have to actually go over to Amy’s to get the code. I…don’t really know. Am not smart.)

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Emily who had the most adorable daughter ever in the whole wide world. Because her kid was too cute for normal baby clothes, Emily started sewing her custom dresses, bibs, and hair clippies. (Also: WANDS!) When the public saw these adorable handmade goods, they demanded Emily make them available to the rest of us…and thus, Uff Da Designs was born. Now Uff Da has grown to include vintage baby and toddler clothes – something Emily knows quite a bit about, having owned her own vintage shop for several years pre-baby.

I’ve been internet friends with Emily – first on her blog and then on The Twitter – for a long long time now. Her daughter, Poppy, is only a few weeks (days?) younger than Little Evan. I could write a whole novel about how Emily is the best person on the internet, but I’ll try to keep this to a reasonable length. She’s super cool, super nice and super super talented.

Check out this baby dress:

FOR BEBEH GIRL! Plus one of Uff Da's trademark poppy clips!

And I’m not even gonna lie – I totally bought one of those poppy clips for my own self, waaaaaay before I was pregnant with #2. Hey, mamas like to be pretty too!

Recently, Emily sent me one of her baby bandanna bibs for Little Evan:

Isn't that orange and blue plaid PERFECT for him?

It’s a bib! It’s a bandanna! It’s functional! It’s a fashion accessory! It’s great for drool! Or milk! Or water! Or just to make your already super cute baby even cuter!

And um………..just in case your baby is a dog:

Please forgive me Emily. I promise never to do it again. Although Brutus thinks he looks super stylish in the bandanna.

If your kid isn’t a ginger like mine, there are tons of non-orange options too. Emily has an amaaaazing eye for vintage-y type fabrics and colors.

I love them all.

And today, Emily is going to give one of my lucky readers a free bandanna bib in your choice of fabric!

All you have to do to enter is visit Uff Da Designs and leave a comment telling me what your favorite item is. So easy! Well, except for the choosing your favorite item part – they’re all amazing. (Did I mention Emily’s totally internet famous now, since Girl’s Gone Child bought one of her clippies? INTERNET. FAMOUS.)

You can also read Emily’s blog, follow her on Twitter or like Uff Da on Facebook, but it’s not required.

Giveaway will be open until November 2nd, winner will be chosen using Random.org and notified via email, so make sure you use a real email address when you comment. Emily said she’s willing to ship anywhere so feel free to enter, my dear Canadian friends!

Giveaway is now closed!

Disclaimer bit: Emily sent me a bib to photograph and review for this post, but I bought the dress & two clippies from her with my own moolah. No additional compensation was received. And she really is the best person on the internet. No one can buy a title like that.

Day 1 is open until November 1st! Enter to win from Allora Handmade here

I read a lot of blogs. A LOT. I probably read yours, especially because you have a really cute kid/interesting life/beautiful house/great taste in…whatever and you commented here once. I currently subscribe to 151 blogs in my reader and add at least one a day.

Wow, do I sound awesomely cool or what? I swear sometimes I do other things besides the internet. Although that probably explains the sink full of dishes and the baby currently entertaining himself with a McDonald’s cup full of ice. I wish I was joking.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is that I look at SO many blogs on a regular basis I sometimes forget to look at my own. And then when I do look at my own I’m always depressed. My blog is not elegant or beautiful or inspiring in any way. When I switched over to self-hosted WordPress I just picked a free theme and went with it, so the design is all Atahualpa and my itty bitty bit of HTML skill. I’ve considered changing it about, oh, a BAZILLION times but I hate to lose the parts I do like – I love the rotating photo, I love the blue & orange, I love my tag line – and I’m too cheap to spend $500 on a custom design when I don’t know EXACTLY what I want. Or really, I’m too cheap to spend $500 EVER. I already have one expensive hobby (hello yarn addiction!) I don’t need another.

So here’s today’s question: Name one thing you LOVE to see on blogs and one thing you HATE. You can say whatever, it doesn’t have to be specifically about my blog right now, but don’t feel like you can’t be honest. You can say you hate my rotating photo or my ads or the font or whatever. I won’t take it personally. Feel free to plug your own blog/blog designer/blog design business and leave me lots of links.

p.s. Don’t bother saying you hate blogs that auto-play music. That’s like saying you hate Nazis or lutefisk. EVERYONE hates blogs that auto-play music.

p.p.s. If you think maybe I DON’T read your blog, let me know. I promise I will. I like you.

I owe a major apology to everyone I made fun of or rolled my eyes at when they started talking about BlogHer’10 AGAIN. Like, GOD, come ON, it’s just ONE WEEKEND out of your life, WHY do you need to KEEP talking about it ALL THE TIME? I now realize the error of my ways. Going places and doing things is fun, even if you do spend the entire week before waking up at 5 am in a panic that you will forget your camera or the hotel will have lost your reservation or that every single person you meet will give you the “pregnant or fat” once over and decide “no, just fat”. It’s exhausting and totally thought-consuming and I am smack dab in the middle of it.

Right now I am probably hauling my pregnant butt through an airport somewhere, pinching myself and trying to comprehend just what it was that fooled ANYONE into thinking I deserved to attend a conference as cool as The Creative Connection. I will be making sparkly things and listening to some of the most amazing women speak and sweating through my shirt with nervousness and generally having a totally amazing time. I may even get up the courage to hand out a business card or two, although it’s probably better if none of the super-talented, cool, artsy people ever find there way over HERE.

It would have been even better if I didn’t put the word “crap” on my business cards.

Or the words “bodily fluids”. But hey, hindsight is 20/20 right?

And just because my mom asked me to post it, here’s the 250 word essay that won me my scholarship:

How will attending the Creative Connection Event impact your creativity and/or creative business?

Creativity has always been something I thought was innate. Either you were a creative person or you weren’t – and I definitely wasn’t. I can’t draw to save my life, my poetry sounds like “There once was a man from Nantucket”, my paintings look like they were done by a first grader and as far as style goes…let’s just say I fall somewhere between a 5 -year-old and my grandmother.

But then I did create something, the most amazing something ever, the kind of something that changes your whole life from the second you see those two pink lines. After my son was born in April 2009 I realized creativity isn’t about talent, it’s about the love of making things, whether those things are stories or clothes or art or music or feelings. I stopped being afraid to create and took up knitting and photography and cooking and writing and loved every second of my triumphs and laughed over my mistakes. I learned when you create things you also create joy.

Attending the Creative Connections Conference would be an amazing opportunity to expand my creativity and learn new ways to be joyful. The chance to network with so many amazing and talented women would be a great opportunity for me as a blogger and as a person learning more about her creative side, as untalented as that side might be.

Mommy Blogger – I wouldn’t have any problem with this term if it was purely descriptive. I am a mommy who is a blogger. A mommy blogger. But almost never in the history of mommy blogging has someone said it without the undertone of snide disdain as if writing on the internet about your kids is somehow less deserving of respect than writing on the internet about your dog or cooking or celebrities or fashion. Newspapers use the term to imply the entire genre is moms blogging about potty training and visits to the farm who will stoop to anything for freebies and sponsors and a new vacuum cleaner. (One article in particular springs to mind.) If that’s all “mommy blogger” means these days, we need a new term for the eight zillion mom blogs that DON’T fit the category.

Lactivist – A couple weeks ago a friend Tweeted a link with a comment to the effect that she thought her “lactivist friends” should check out. I am 99.9% sure all she meant by that statement was “this article is about a breastfeeding advocate and thus those of you who also breastfeed would probably find it interesting”. Of course, that’s way too long for Twitter, so lactivist was good shorthand. Unfortunately, I broke the First Rule of the Interwebs (NEVER READ THE COMMENTS) and read the comments, where the word lactivist was equated to “breastfeeding Nazi” “judgmental” and “moms who should mind their own business”. I fear “lactivist” is falling into the same pattern as “feminist” where even those who actually ARE lactivists are hesitant to use the word for themselves, simply because of the negative connotation. Until lactivist can be reclaimed, I’d rather use “breastfeeding supporter” or even just “mom who breastfed and can offer you advice if you want it.”

Awesomesauce – No offense Twitter, it’s just a stupid word. It may have been clever the first five (hundred) times but now it’s annoying. As is all other kinds of -sauce: coolsauce, lamesauce, niftysauce, awfulsauce. The only kind of sauce I want to hear about is a nice Bearnaise sauce for my eggs or a spicy red clam sauce for my pasta. Mmmmmm….sauce. See, this is what happens with food slang and pregnant women.

Tar-jay – Dude, it’s called TARGET. Their logo is a giant TARGET. They’re headquartered in Minneapolis, which may be as far away from France as you can get. If you need to change the name to make it sound fancy a more accurate accent would be the Swedish Chef, which is actually less fancy than just saying TARGET.

FML – It stands for “f*ck my life” and is usually used in such awful circumstances as “I’m out of organic Greek yogurt for breakfast! FML!” and “My kid ripped up my Vogue magazine! FML!” and “I lost a ton of weight on this all-chocolate and wine diet and none of my clothes fit! FML!” PERSPECTIVE, PEOPLE!! Even when you have a flat tire or the baby cries all night or your job sucks it’s not really worth such a dramatic statement. I may be turning into my mother, but every time I see FML I feel like saying “There are starving children in Africa who would kill for your life and your non-organic yogurt!”

And the one I love…

Douche-canoe – Copyright The Bloggess (as far as I know – maybe SHE’S the douche-canoe and totally stole it from someone else). Accurately describes everyone from the guy driving 55 in the left lane to the idiot on the internet who says stuff like “I would NEVER feed my kid Goldfish crackers, we only eat bread made from wheat we grow and grind ourselves” to your second cousin’s brother-in-law who makes unnecessary inflammatory political comments during family dinners. Douche-canoe.