A Different Side of Our Little Darling

Just about all the pictures of Charlotte I post are of her beaming from ear to ear. She is a very happy baby but she does have her moments. She can be a rather "clingy" baby and loves attention. I hate to say this, but so far she's a mommy's girl. If she sees me walk out of the room, she'll have a breakdown...even when Chris is home and is holding her. Other times she'll just start crying because she wants our attention or wants us to play with her. It's a little ridiculous! And I don't want you to think that we've made her like this or indulge her...we usually don't since we want her to learn to play by herself! So here are some photos of a side of Charlotte you haven't seen...during one of her many "I want some attention" breakdowns. :-)

Once a Wiggle Worm...

When I went to get Charlotte out of her crib the other morning, I found her like this:


I still can't figure out how she managed to wiggle her arm out of her pajamas without unfastening any of her buttons!

Another Old T-Shirt Dress

I told you I'd be making more of these! To see the first one I made, click here. I need to remember to take "before" pics of the t-shirts so that you can better see the before and after. Before making it into a dress for Charlotte, it was a baby doll t-shirt from Gap. I added front ruffles, which took off some of the length. So instead of a dress, it's more like a long t-shirt. Ah, it's so nice to have such a cute model!

My First Mother's Day

When Charlotte was first born, the hospital gave us a bottle of sparkling grape juice with a special label on it. The hospital was the name of the vineyard, Chris and I were the producers of the juice, and they used Charlotte's birth information for the juice's name, bottling date, and volume. It was so creative and such a cute gift from the hospital. Well seven months later, Chris and I finally got around to drinking it!

Yesterday at church, Chaplain Hall gave the mothers a carnation and had us all stand in the front of the chapel while he prayed for us. [On a side note, it was really weird to be apart of Mother's Day this year and not just be a "gift giver"] So we had the carnation and an empty bottle of sparkling grape juice, and guess what my creative husband did? I walked into our dining room last night and there in the empty bottle was my Mother's Day carnation! I loooove him!

7 Months

Charlotte turns 7 months old tomorrow. Since tomorrow's going to be a busy day, I decided to take her pictures this morning. The clothes she's wearing in the photos are 12-18 months. I figured she might fit into those outfits by the summer, but I definitely wasn't expecting her to fit into them now. The bubble dress fits perfectly, which is really sad since it's so cute. I think I'm going to try and copy that dress into a larger size...a hard task since I'm a novice sewer, but try I will.

Charlotte is super close to crawling. For the past few months, she's been rolling completely around, but just within the past week, she's started to get up on her hands and knees and move her legs a bit. It wouldn't surprise me if she's crawling within the next couple of weeks. Here is a video of her trying to crawl:



And here are Charlotte's 7-month photos. One of these days I'm going to get a new camera, and it's going to be fantastic. Until then, I'll keep playing with photoshop to appease myself. At the very least, I wish I could figure out what happened to my attachment flash. I really hate all the shadows behind Charlotte. OK, I'll quit complaining. Here's the pics of Charlotte:

I Bet You Didn't Know This About Me....

I don't know that many people know this about me, but I love auctions. I mean love them. I get so caught up in the excitement, the emotions, and the fun that goes along with them. Chris gets into them, too, so it's something we enjoy doing together. Out here in Bahrain, there aren't many auctions to be had, but today we got to go to one! Woohoo! The D.O.D. (Department of Defense) school had an Asian-themed auction to help raise money for the senior class. They shipped in a ton of items from China and Japan for people to bid on. All of the profit will go towards their graduation ceremony. I guess it's not cheap to rent places in Bahrain, and the seniors apparently think the school is either too small or not cool enough to host a graduation ceremony. So even if the cause wasn't what I'd consider "worthy", it was still fun and a great excuse to BID! :-) :-) :-) And boy did we bid. We came home with way more than we bargained for.

They had the auction split up into two parts: a silent auction and public auction. Everything we ended up bringing home was from the silent auction. We bid on a handful of things in the public auction, but well, that didn't work out as I'll explain soon. It wasn't the best ran auction I've ever been to. Students were the auctioneers and didn't have a clue what they were doing. They were moving way too s l o w and giving people too much time to decide if they wanted to bid more or at all. Unfortunately, there were also some high rollers who weren't letting anyone else in on the fun, even though it was supposed to be a friendly high school fundraiser and not a Christie's auction. It's frustrating that a couple people decided to ruin the fun for everyone else and might even have discouraged people from wanting to come next year. Not me, though. I'm resilient! :-)

I'm pretty sure one guy was a vendor who was planning to resale what he won, and another guy was just an annoying Bahraini who we later found out is part of the royal family. They had these amazing Tiffany-type lamps that I was in love with. The royal family guy bid on almost all of them and wouldn't let anyone else win. He kept his paddle up until the competition gave up. Why did he have to ruin everyone else's fun when he can buy a genuine Tiffany lamp anytime he wants? He's probably just going to put them in some storage bin with every other nonsensical purchase he's ever made. He reminded me of some rich, preppy high schooler who likes to flaunt his wealth to all his classmates through the name brand clothes and car that his daddy's money bought him. He did nothing to earn the money; he was just lucky enough to be born into it. This guy's arrogance made me so frustrated. I know there's high rollers at most auctions. I just wasn't expecting one at a friendly high school fundraiser auction. But oh how I love auctions - even when dumb stuff like that happens.

We had good time overall and were able to get some cool things through the silent auction. We definitely came home with more than we anticipated and our house has been totally "Asianfied"!

Here's some photos of our purchases:

A rice box. Apparently this box is meant to hold rice, but I'm assuming this one was just painted for decorative purposes.

This is something Chris really wanted. They are some sort of hand exercise weights from China. Why he wanted them, I'll never know, but to each their own.

Chris surprised me by bidding on this during the silent auction. I have a thing for pearls, so he thought I might like this multi-strand necklace. I do!

This is a Japanese vase that has different paintings all around it. If anyone can read Japanese, could you let me know what it says? Hopefully not something like, "He who buys this is a sucker."

These are terra cotta solider statues. When I first heard the story about the terra cotta soldiers, I was really intrigued by it, so when I saw these today, I immediately bid on them!

This is a beautiful vase that is much more gorgeous in person. It has really pretty paintings on it with a really nice finish. It's really big...probably 3 feet tall or so.

This is a jewelry box I won. I bid on a beautiful one during the public auction but it went higher than I was willing to pay. Imagine my delight when I won this one in the silent auction!

A smallish chest I won in the silent auction. I also have a thing for chests so I was drawn to a lot of them at the auction. I think this one looks more like a chest you'd see inside a cottage than one you'd see in Asia, but I liked it nonetheless.

Now this is awesome. This is a motorcyle rocking horse. This thing is solid. It is quite heavy and I don't think it would be possible for Charlotte to break this thing. It will be so cute when she's old enough to ride it! It will be her first introduction to a motorcycle! Haha!

This was a bargain chest I decided to get last minute. No one bid on it during the silent auction, so they discounted the starting bid by 75%. I wouldn't have paid the initial bid price, but I figured it was worth what I ended up paying for it.

I'm sorry I have no Tiffany lamps to share...annoying Bahraini! Hopefully next year! :-)

Thrifty and Cute!

Today I was looking at JJ Heller's blog (one of my favorite singers), and I fell in love with something she made for her daughter, Lucy. It had to do with old t-shirts, which I have way too many of. A lot of my t-shirts in women's sizes are too short for my long torso and it's been a long time since I've worn them. I just haven't let them go because I love them so much! Well, JJ loves sewing as much as I do, and when I saw that she made her old t-shirts into baby dresses, I couldn't help but give it a try. Really, I'm being very modest. As soon as I saw what she did, I got so excited and immediately started making one. It only took an hour and a half, and I plan to make many, many more. The first attempt is a little big, so Charlotte will definitely be able to wear it for awhile. I kept the original neck hole of the t-shirt, but perhaps next time I won't since it looks so big on Charlotte! If you want to know how these are made, check out this blog post, where JJ Heller got the idea. If you want to see the dresses JJ made, go here and here. I think the next t-shirt dress I make will have the rosettes and ruffles, because they are so CUTE! Here's some pics from my first attempt:

Unfortunately, I didn't think to get a picture of the t-shirt before I transformed it into a dress. Here is the after.

This is what the shirt says...can you see why it's one of my favorites?! You've gotta love Paul Frank.

Charlotte wearing her new t-shirt dress.

Charlotte and mommy. I think she's in mid-yawn in this picture! Haha.