Baby August  was born on August 31, 2008 at 2:21 a.m. He was 9 pounds, 12 ounces and 21 inches long.

Yes, we make giganto babies in my family!

Things are going pretty well so far. Augie is a great eater and he caught on much more quickly to nursing than Wyatt did. We’ve all been adjusting to being a family of four. Wyatt is having a little bit of a hard time, but over all he seems pretty happy to be a big brother. I think he would just prefer that Augie didn’t take so much of Mom and Dad’s attention.

This was a short week at preschool because their summer vacation starts on Friday.

Monday night, I finally made some home made blueberry muffins. I subbed in whole wheat flour for a quarter of the flour called for in the recipe and they came out sooooooo good. So of course Wyatt got a mini-muffin in his lunch on Tuesday. I also sent a rice ball, turkey roll-ups and a bunch of grapes.

Wednesday I sent crackers (hidden under the salami), salami, strawberries and another muffin.

Thursday’s lunch was super fruity. I sent some fresh peach chunks, a bunch of strawberries and a strawberry jam sandwich cut into a little man shape. I was going to send PB&J, but when I pulled out the peanut butter jar, Wyatt announced that he doesn’t eat peanut butter any more. Great.

I’m probably not going to be posting any bento photos for the next couple of weeks because Wyatt won’t be going to preschool, but I do have a couple of bento related posts I’m hoping to pull together during that time that illustrate some answers to questions I get asked a lot. Stay tuned!

Seeing as I am eight plus months pregnant, you can imagine that I am nesting just a little bit. Through a circuitous chain of events, this nesting instinct  caused me to spend a few hours this morning making cloth napkins. Here’s how it happened:

1. I’ve been feeling the need to stock-pile frozen dinners so we can easily fix food when the baby is born.
2. Since our regular freezer is pretty full already, I decided we needed our deep freeze back so we have a place to put the dinners I’m going to make.
3. Erin and Bryan helped us move our deep freeze from their house to ours yesterday. We decided to put it in the storage room downstairs.
4. To get the freezer into the storage room, we had to move a shelf with a bunch of boxes of stored crap on it.
5. Once I saw all the boxes of stored crap, my nesting instinct kicked in and I wanted to get rid of it all.
6. I made Zach carry a bunch of the boxes upstairs so I could go through it and post stuff to Freecycle.
7. One of the boxes was labeled “Quilting Fabric”. I figured it would be funky stuff that I’d never use because it wasn’t packed in with my regular fabric stash. But to my surprise, it was all awesome-ness manifested in cloth from top to bottom.
8. Seeing all that awesome-ness made me want to make something right away and I decided that cloth napkins were the way to go.

Because if there’s one thing that will make life easier once a newborn is in the house, it’s cloth napkins.

Anywhoo, this is how I made them:

Step 1: Cut four 16 1/2 inch squares from each of two coordinating fabrics.

Step 2: Line up two squares of fabric, right sides together.

Step 3: Sew the two pieces of fabric together with a 1/4 inch seam allowance. This particular picture was a bad choice because one of my squares wasn’t exactly square and so I couldn’t match the edges up precisely. (You will probably be more careful than I was though and your edges will all match up.) No matter, I just sewed a 1/4 inch from the inner edge of the smaller piece and it all worked out OK.

Important! Don’t sew the seams all around the edges.  You will need to leave a 2-3 inch gap on one side so that you can turn the napkins right side out.

Step 4: OK, now turn the napkins right side out by pulling them through the gap you left. Try to make the corners as sharp and pointy as you can. I clipped a little of the excess fabric of the corners of mine and that helped.

Step 5: Once you have a nice square of pretty fabric turned right side out, iron the seams flat. You will also want to turn under the edges of the fabric at the gap and iron it as flat as you can with a nice sharp crease.

Step 6: Sew a neat hem about 1/8 inch from the seam. Be especially careful as you go over the gap. If you stay 1/8 inch from the edge, that will close the hole up and your napkin will look real pretty there.

Step 7: Sit back and admire your lovely new napkins. Attractive, environmentally friendly and perfect for use when there is a new baby in the house!

My latest craft project was to make a bunch of swaddling blankets for the new baby. When Wyatt was teeny-tiny, the only way he would sleep was if he was being held, and even then he never slept more than three hours at a time.  I’m all for attachment parenting and co-sleeping, but sitting up in bed all night holding a baby is not exactly conducive to getting a good night’s sleep. Swaddling saved me from going insane. The very first time I swaddled Wyatt properly, he slept for five hours straight in his co-sleeper which meant that I slept for five hours straight lying down in bed. When I woke up, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was the most sleep I’d had in a month. I was so energized, I felt like I could run a marathon.

Hmmmm…OK…maybe not a marathon.

I felt like I could walk around the block.

Anyway, I wanted to be sure we had a good supply of swaddling blankets for the new baby, so the other day I went over to the new fabric store by our house and I bought three 42 inch squares of flannel. I know I could have just washed the fabric and used the blankets without doing anything to them, but I wanted a finished edge to keep the cloth from fraying.

I didn’t do anything complicated at all to finish up the edges. I just finger folded each edge over by a quarter of an inch and stitched along all four sides. Then I folded each edge over again and did another pass over them with the sewing machine. Easy peasy.

I’ve been collecting some good links lately and thought I would share them with you, Internet.

Craft Blog — I feel pretty neutral about Craft magazine — don’t love it, don’t hate it — but I looooove their blog. They always have great, interesting, amusing projects and post a bunch every day.

Bembo’s Zoo — Great site for kids. Animals and letters combine in a cool visual tool.

This Tom Selleck Cake — I’d like a hunk of cake like this!

Where the Hell is Matt — his videos rock. I find it very difficult to watch these without tearing up at the thought of how amazing this world is. And we’re going to vacation in Vallejo this summer….

Japanese Paper Dioramas — I keep telling myself, “I don’t have time for another hobby. I don’t have time for another hobby.” So far I’ve resisted.

The Big Picture — amazing photos updated every few days.

Classic Photos recreated in Legos — click through to the photo page to get links to the originals.

Here’s what I sent for Wyatt’s lunches last week:

Apricots, apple bar, strawberries and a half a leftover burrito. This lunch went over very well. I wasn’t sure if he would eat the burrito because I packed it cold, but he ate everything except the apricots.

Watermelon (it was a very hot day), salami, the last of the blueberry muffins from the freezer and a few Triscuits.

Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, gold fish crackers, apple wedges and a couple of grape tomatoes for color.

Peaches, chunks of white bread, rolled up slices of deli ham and a cheese stick.