What I’m Into: November 2014

Well, my main project this month was bringing this guy into the world:

As most of you know by now, Felix Victor was born last week (November 19) here at home.

Everyone is doing really great. So far, Felix is a pretty happy guy and a great eater, though he’s really dramatic when he needs something. I am about eighteen times more relaxed about everything this time around which really helps. Lydia is adjusting to the changes astonishingly well (but it helps that she’s been staying with grandparents a lot). She looooooves to cuddle her new brother, except when she “doesn’t like babies.” Fair enough.

And if I’m honest, here is the number one reason I wanted a second baby from the start:

Oh my melting mama heart.

I just wanted so badly for Lydia to have a sibling — someone to share her childhood with. I am so grateful God heard my prayers and baby Felix finally arrived safe and sound. We are so happy to have him join our family.

As for the name, if you’re interested . . . I fell in love with it way back while studying Latin in university — it means happy or fortunate. I like for my babies’ names to be linguistically consistent (both of Lydia’s names are Greek), so we gave him a Latin middle name — meaning victorious. Lots of happy words there.

So obviously my world has pretty much revolved around the family since his arrival, but here are a couple of things I’ve been into:

Books

I’ve wanted to read Wendell Berry forever.  If you’re not familiar with him, Berry is one of the most prominent voices connecting the Christian faith and ecology. He’s a poet, novelist, essayist, and — importantly — a farmer. I finally got my hands on this book (What are People For?) and dug in — I kept it in my purse (hence its ragged state) and read it in the waiting room of the chiropractor and during Lydia’s swimming lessons.

SO MUCH GOOD STUFF. It’s a collection of essays exploring a range of topics that circle around our (broken) relationship with the land. It highlights the bleakness of our relationship to the earth but is infused with hope that change is possible.

Admittedly, Part 2 is a little academic, mostly exploring ecology and sustainability in relation to literary subjects; but Part 3 is a lot more accessible, and I found it very moving.

Television

After we ploughed through Season One of Veronica Mars on Netflix last month, we jumped right into Season Two. SO SO GOOD!!! Ben and I just loved it. Riveting plot, interesting characters, fantastic story-telling.

Again, it deals with really heavy stuff like child abuse, rape, murder, and suicide, yet I find it doesn’t fill my soul with blackness the way a lot of shows today (ahem — Walking Dead and Breaking Bad) do. (Note: I have not watched a significant amount of either; I’ve just seen enough scenes and heard enough synopses to determine tell they were not for me. Too many rotting/melting corpses.) Once again, we watched an episode almost every night until we finished the season.

Hoping Season 3 doesn’t disappoint!

Craftyness

I don’t usually make much time for crafting. I’m usually too busy in the kitchen, honestly. But reading The Nesting Place last month must have had a greater impact on me, subconsciously, than I realized. Suddenly, I wanted to make All The Home Decor. I started getting really excited to make wreaths and sunburst mirrors and I got a little carried away.

So here goes. I did all of these things while watching Veronica Mars with Ben.

Also: not a SINGLE one of these ideas is original to me (except the last one). Someone else came up with them. I just followed tutorials I found on Pinterest. I am not the creative mastermind behind them.

First I made this sunburst mirror out of poster board, following the tutorial on the Nesting Place blog. I paid $6 for the mirror at Michael’s, and another $1.50 for the cardstock. (So that’s $7.50 total.) It’s big, too — about three feet across. It’s going up over the new mantle Ben built for our gas fireplace — he just has to mount it.

Then I started getting crazy with book pages. All of the paper you see in the items below come from the same old copy of Don Quixote. Thanks, Cervantes! I never read your book but it looks awesome on my walls!

I got the instructions for this book page wreath from Vintage Paint and More. Since I already had the book, it cost me about a dollar in hot glue and took me three hours to make. It hangs above Lydia’s care of self table (which I talk about here). I’ve wanted something there for a year now, and I realized that what was missing from the room was something with texture. Here’s how it looks in its new surroundings:

(Full disclosure: I totally kicked things out of the way for this picture. It was not this tidy twenty seconds ago.)

Delighted with the results (Yay texture! Yay free decor!), I then went ahead and made a slightly different book page wreath for the space going down the stairs into the basement.

The tutorial for this one comes from The Shabby Creek Cottage. It also cost me about a dollar in hot glue.

Finally, while I was browsing Michael’s, I spotted the very thing to go on the walls beside our alphabet poster: paper-maché deer heads. I immediately knew I wanted to cover them in torn up book pages to match the wreath on the opposite wall. Here’s the finished result:

As you can see, I’m almost done with the second one. It might be a while until my hands are free during Veronica Mars to finish it, though. We’ll see.

And that’s what I’ve been into!

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Linking up with the lovely Leigh Kramer!