This little punk is in the thick of the eight-month sleep regression. Basically, her brain and body are in overdrive, learning and perfecting new skills like waving hello,

crawling,

pulling herself up,

and standing.

Not to mention all the teething that’s been going on.

Clementines make good teethers. Also limes.

With a nod to Jen.

Her two top teeth and two more on the bottom are working on poking through her gums, too. They haven’t popped through yet but we’ve been able to feel how swollen her gums have been in those spots.

And then of course there’s the fact that we just got home from three weeks in California and Oregon, which means she’s three time zones off schedule. And we’re back at home with our cats (exciting!) and all the toys that she hasn’t seen for ages (whee!) and all this familiar furniture she’s apparently been dying to pull herself up on for ages because as soon as we set her on the floor that’s what she immediately does every time (ZOMG being vertical is AWESOME!1!!).

There are many, many reasons for her to be having trouble sleeping easily and peacefully right now, is what I’m saying. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to live through.

Last night, after three hours of me and Troy taking turns trying to gently parent Elliora to sleep—rocking, back-patting, nursing, walking, singing, etc.—we gave up and brought her out to the living room to play happily with her toys while we watched TV, exhausted. She went to bed with us an hour later.

Tonight she took a one-hour nap at 8 o’clock, fooling us into thinking maybe she was going to sleep better. Hahahaha, what suckers we are. She woke up at 9. Around 11 we brought her out to the living room to play while we caught up on White Collar. (Do you watch? We love that show. It seems to get better every season, doesn’t it?) She managed to keep herself awake and relatively happy till 1:30am. That would be 10:30pm PDT, which would still be at least two hours later than she ever stayed up when we were on vacation.

Babies, man. They’re so unpredictable. At least my babies are when it comes to sleep. Oh well. It won’t be too much longer and she’ll be sleeping peacefully again, I’m sure. By then I’ll probably be spending my days chasing her around and cursing our lack of child-proofing, wishing she were still trying to figure out how to stand up.

My friend Bonnie decided on her birthday this year that she would take a picture every day of something that made her happy, to remind herself in the midst of a difficult time to Find the Happy. She decided to create a Flickr group so her friends could share the happy too.

Finding a bit of Happy each day.

The rules:

1. Find some Happy and photograph it each day. You could choose to do it less often if that works better for your life but my theory is that the more often you look for the Happy, the more the Happy helps.
2. Do it for a year. Or less. Or more. Or as needed.
3. No Unhappy allowed. That also includes self-abuse if you miss a day or lots of days. Hippie voice: Go with the flow, man. Everything is as it should be.
4. Rules are for breaking. Except Number 3, it’s best not to upset Hippie Voice.

My heart has been heavy lately, thinking about Samantha. So I’m reminding myself of some happy things.

I don’t know about you, but homemade black-and-white cookies make me very happy.

So does the cool way the sun was reflecting off this dotty coffee mug. Like little bubbles of sunlight!

I happened to glance at Annalie’s calendar a day or two before Troy’s birthday and was tickled to realize that she had drawn a miniature portrait of our family on that date, complete with him in a party hat.

I love it when I get a teeny painting of a harried-looking coffee-drinking cat in the mail. Thanks, Brenda!

French toast with powdered sugar on a sunshiny dottery plate.

Keeping a baby alive and homeschooling a 7-year-old are both time-consuming pursuits (duh), but while I barely have time to shower and I don’t seem to have time for housework, I manage to cook dinner almost every night and write emails and blog posts (sort of) and I’ve been crocheting a lot. So I guess it’s true that you do make time for what you love. And crocheting makes me happy.

I’m sure that in a year or so I’ll be hearing many cries of “Mo-ooom, make her stop touching my stuff!” So I try extra hard to enjoy the sweet moments like this, when it’s clear how much Annalie loves her little sister.

On one of Troy’s Navy deployments years ago, he happened to go to a wine festival in Cyprus, and he brought back two of these little glasses. They’re the perfect size for a shot of juice or taking a packet of Emergen-C, and it makes me smile each time I use one. It’s such a random thing to have in my cupboard, small wineglasses from a Cypriot wine festival, yet there they are.

I went to high school and college with Rainbow Rowell. (I know, awesome name!) She wasn’t someone I hung out with, but we knew each other. We had mutual friends, and when we went to the same university we occasionally ate lunch together. I’ve been reading Rainbow’s writing for two decades now, mostly in newspaper-column or blog-post form, but now I’ve read something way more exciting: Rainbow’s very first novel, a romantic comedy called Attachments. The night I started reading it, I actually got out of bed at 3:30am, feeling compelled to send Rainbow a message to let her know I was loving her book and was genuninely happy for and proud of her. (I’ll be interviewing Rainbow soon and doing a giveaway of her book in a blog post, so stay tuned for that!)

The sun was shining into Annalie’s room just right one afternoon so that her bright fuchsia sheets were reflecting a pink glow onto everything else in the room. A few days later, Annalie picked this bouquet of wildflowers, leaves of grass, and a wild strawberry from our yard for me and arranged them in an old vanilla bottle.

The first Saturday that Sonja was here, Karyl & her girls came up to spend the day with us, which was super fun. We started with brunch—aebleskiver and home-fried potatoes and bacon and fruit—which made me very happy because I love brunch. Also, I made the aebleskiver with almond milk and coconut oil and maple syrup (in place of cow’s milk and butter and granulated sugar) so Sonja could eat them, and they were totally as delicious as usual. It was a Very Happy Thing indeed: brunch everyone could eat!

Sonja-safe brownies, made with coconut oil instead of butter and honey instead of sugar. And they tasted good! Yay! I had fun meeting the challenge of cooking without ingredients I usually rely on while Sonja was here.

I love it when naps end like this, with Elliora waking up in the Ergo and smiling when she sees me.

If I have to put up with hot and humid summer weather, at least I get to eat perfectly summery meals like this: grilled mini burgers, strawberries, and marinated cucumber salad. Yum.

After seeing Lauren’s Doctor Who necklace on Flickr, I stalked this Etsy shop until she listed more so I could buy one for myself. I like how the high-top sneaker is a reference to the Chucks habitually worn by both the Tenth Doctor and Chuck Bartowski.

We often make popcorn with the very air-popper that I used when I was a kid, and eat it out of the exact stainless-steel bowl I used to eat popcorn from. (My mom was getting rid of the air popper and asked if I wanted it; I basically swiped the bowl because I loved it so much. Both these things are 30+ years old.)

Trader Joe’s dark chocolate bar with caramel bar and black sea salt. Enough said.

We live near a good bakery and stop there on a regular basis for treats. Every time, Annalie carefully surveys the variety of lovely, fancy cookies and pastries…and then requests a plain butter cookie. I love that.

I believe we’ve mentioned before that our neighbors across the street actually own a bounce house? They put it up for birthdays and parties and random weekends just for fun. And they are happy to share it with the neighborhood kids.

Rain always makes me happy.

Neon aquamarine polish, and bare feet outside, and green grass, and bits of sidewalk chalk. Basically, summer’s here!

We gotta go to the crappy town where I’m a hero! (4:29)

If you are a Browncoat and you have not seen this video of Adam Baldwin singing Hero of Canton, do yourself a favor and watch it now. I’ll wait for you to come back.

In case you have not figured it out by now, this mug is part of my Geek Dottery series.

So is this mug I painted for Jen from Following the Road a while back, at her request. The pineapple is a Chuck reference. Big surprise, right? You can watch this video and this video to get in on the joke.

Guys, I know kung fu. Even though there have been a lot of great moments in Seasons 3 and 4, sometimes I think back to the sheer awesomeness of Season 2 ending with that line, and wish that it had all stopped there and any further adventures of Chuck and Team Bartowski had been left up to my imagination.

I tried an experiment, painting that tiny pineapple, and wasn’t sure how it would turn out. I was so happy when it worked just like I wanted it to.

Madge requested that I paint another geeky mug for Fish’s birthday, this one an X-Files/Big Bang Theory mash-up. I tried to make the colors of the mug match the greens and dark blues and purples that I associate with X-Files.

This last mug isn’t geek dottery, except in that I painted it as a gift for my friend Elaine, whose blog’s brilliant tagline is “where geek meets granola.” She wrote this heartfelt post for her daughters about how she wants them to know that they owe kindness to everyone, first and foremost, but that it’s not okay for anyone to take advantage of that kindness to abuse or hurt them or treat them with disrespect. Hence, the inside of the mug:

Ahem. I’d like to point out that this is a direct quote from Elaine’s blog, which I used on a mug with her permission. (Man, I’m such a square. I can’t even cuss in a photo covered with asterisks on my own blog without feeling totally embarrassed about it.)

I didn’t make it to the monthly Ladies’ Night at my usual pottery studio this month, and I really missed it. I’ve been feeling fairly stressed out lately thanks to Troy working long hours leading up to a deadline and a pulled muscle in my neck and blah blah family blah homeschooling blah blah life in general. Nothing is wrong, exactly; it’s just one of those times when life is a little extra challenging, you know? On Saturday Troy told me to get out of the house for a couple of hours, so I went to paint at a local studio. I sat all by myself with paint and a Coke Zero and dotted to my heart’s content for 90 minutes. When I went home I felt much calmer.

Thank you to all of you who keep supporting my painting habit by asking me to paint you mugs and bowls and things! It helps keep me sane.

p.s. The Firefly mug at the top of this post is up for grabs! If anyone out there wants to buy it, let me know and I can stick it in my Etsy shop as a reserved order.