My lovely daughter, Manda age 17, has been home with a combinaton of pneumonia, asthma, school vacation, snow/ice/rain day, more pneumonia and a couple of days of rest prescribed by her doctor. This has added up to nearly a month of sick baby girl. (I don't care if she's bigger than I am, when they're sick, they revert to babyhood. Ditto for husbands) I am a sucker for those guys when they are sick,and when combined with Manda's needing new summer clothes, she has been able to play me for items that would have had me snorting "Get a Job!" back in December.
One such item was a tee shirt with little clouds on it, which was $20 even after the 25% off coupon. Do not laugh. Even though I can no longer leave the house to scour for bargains, I manage to dress my kid as well as all the other seventeeen year old fashion obsessed (but not really) girls at school for one heck of a lot less than $20 a shirt. She was coughing and sighing and playing up the thing for all it was worth, and if she were healthy, I would have never been so sentimental. But she has been sick, and is a skinny little pale thing who has lost a lot of weight and looks bony and sad... you get the drift - I bought the shirt.
Instantly better, she happily pointed out that if I bought the shirt, the second was half off. (Yes, this still means all the shirts were
25% off, and she knows it. We both pretended that we didn't recognize the whole scam) I spotted a shirt with little pastel dinosaurs on it. I pointed it out to a less than enthused Manda."You had sheets with the same print on them when you were a baby!" I gurgled, lost in a time when my baby was tiny, bald, and was so darned cute when she slept that I took pictures. "Do you remember them?" I said, like a mush head.
Instant silence descended as my remark echoed. Only I would remember seventeen year old sheets from Sears with pastel dinosaurs that I bought when I didn't know that Manda wouldn't be a Christopher. I made that room gender-neutral, even though it killed me, I wanted to know so badly and go buck wild with little frills and dollies or happy fire trucks. Must have been the hormones.
If it was, they didn't last long. I know that I was the only mother alive to try and teach her two year old to say "sphygnomanometer" when she got her set of Fisher Price "Doctor Tools" from the Easter Bunny. I had to settle for "blood pressure thing" and "doctor scope" for stethoscope. Can you tell that Easter has my favorite Manda video tapes? That tape has a tiny Manda putting the doctor scope against my back and saying, "Breeve. Again. Breeve some more. You breeve good, Mama" (Um. wonder how she knew that?)
It was either a hot flash or some remnants of that long ago time, but Manda smelled opportunity like a lioness spotting a limping antelope across the savannah.
She got four shirts.
Kathy N-V (and yes, one of them had tiny dinosaurs on them)
Obligatory Bead Content: I have found that the quickest, most attractive for my time ending for a beaded spiral of any kind is a cone finding. Normally these are used to hide the ends of multiple strands of a strung piece, but they work as well or better to hide the fits and starts of a complex spiral, before I get into a rhythm, as well as all the fussy increases and decreases. I jam a head pin shaped like a J into the spiral, maybe a row or two from the end. The wire gets twisted into a P, with the long end of the P going into the cone. (I put a little bead adhesive into the cone if my daughter will be anywhere near the finished product). Pull the end of the wire through the hole in the cone and finesse the spiral so you don't see the ends of it peeking out of the cone. Make a wrapped loop with the bit of excess wire, then add clasps as you wish.
Takes a lot less time to do it than it did to read the directions, and looks very professional and clean.