*Sings entire songs on key. Her toddler songs, her Bible class songs, the lullabies I sing her at night. She is really good at the ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle, Brahm’s Lullaby, Moon Moon Moon, The B-I-B-L-E, and Ally Bally. She has the sweetest little voice.

*Counts to 10, though she often skips 4 and 5.

*Knows most of her colors – wed, yewwow, bwown, peek, geen, bue, gay, aw-en (orange), pupple, and white.

*Speaks in sentences. That’s a new one this week. Today when Frank left for work, she fussed a little, and when he walked out the door, she said, “I no want Daddy go.” She recently learned “I no want to”, and now she says “I no want _____.” Hooray. She also says things like “All done nuh-see [nursing]” and “All gone no-mee [oatmeal]“. “I Mommy’s water” [I have Mommy's water], “Daddy’s shoes!”, “Mommy, medewede cracker, please?” [Mommy, may I have a cracker, please?], and “Daddy pee-pee ah poddy?” are current faves. Also, “Hat on!” and “Shoes on!” which sound like “hadon!” and “shooson!”

*Constantly cracks us up. I give Buttercup countdowns to nap time. “Buttercup, you have ten minutes till nappy time.” “Five minutes till nappy time.” Two minutes, one minute, you get the picture. So today, I said, “Buttercup, you have two minutes till nappy time.” Then “Buttercup, you have one minute till nappy time.” And she looked at me and said, “Two minutes.” Hahahahahaha. I didn’t even know she could say “minutes”. But she says pretty much all the words, tries to repeat everything you say. Shows you things and either says, “Es dat?” or identifies them and nods her head confidently, looking for your agreement that she has identified them correctly.

*Loves spicy food and anything pickled. She gets that from me.

*Makes me smile.

During a break from the movie, I folded a basket of baby laundry that’s been sitting in my bedroom for a few days. Buttercup “helped” until she came across a mattress pad for her bed. It’s white and fluffy, so naturally, she wanted me to put it around her shoulders like a shawl. And then… she said, “Muh!” I didn’t know what that meant until she walked over to my closet mirror and said, “Preee!” Yep, she already has a word for “mirror” and thinks she’s pretty. I have no idea where she got that.

After she bored of being pretty, she noticed two baby books on my floor. It’s starting to sound like my bedroom floor is a dumping ground for lots of things, isn’t it? Hmm. She brought me a book called Hush, Little Baby. She said, “Huh,” and handed it to me and turned the pages while I read it to her. Then she handed me Goodnight Moon and said, “Nigh-nigh.” I was amazed! She’s learning the names of the books we read her. Probably because we read to her a lot, and Frank always reads the title page to her, including author name.

When we were getting ready for lunch, Buttercup sat on the kitchen floor and entertained herself. Eventually she stood up, and I thought she would run off to find a new toy. Instead she held her hand out to me. “Dere go!” This means “there you go”, so I knew she wanted to give me something. Indeed she did. She was giving me an ant she found marching around the floor. I guess spring is on the way.

I’m going a little stir crazy being stuck inside all day, but I could have worse company.

First, the inspiration…

Cutest gnome ever

Now the card…

It's a ball

You can’t tell from the photo, but the gnome is flat, and the football pops up on a foam sticker. I love how the football is bigger than the gnome. Just like in real life!

I CASEd this beautiful card for layout.

(inside)

Buttercup likes to sing.

Thanks for sticking around, even though I’m spotty with posting. All 50 of you. Unless that’s just you, Mom. But thanks even if it is just you, Mom.

I stink at snail mail.

But this year, I got really into stamping and cardmaking. Add that to the scrapbooking, and it turns out that I LOVE papercrafting. So much.

Around the 2nd week in December, I decided to do it. Just do it, SarahK. And I did. I took really crappy pictures of all the cards I made, and I’ll post them later. I made about 80 cards in 2 weeks.

I had my cards ready, Christmas letter typed, and address labels printed on December 21. Whatever, by that point, I’d been working through every naptime and from the time baby went to bed until after midnight to just get the silly things done. So they were going out, and I didn’t care if I mailed them on December 26. They were going out. Frank was on board with this, too. He knew I’d been working hard.

So I mailed them. And two days later, I got a stack of them returned to me. “Non-machinable.” Since an actual human had to actually touch them, I had to add 20 cents postage to each of them. I cried. I texted Frank and told him I might have a breakdown (DRAMA ALERT!). I was also out of budgeted money for sending cards, so I wasn’t sure where that two dollars was going to come from. Of course, as soon as Frank got my texts, he texted back. “They have to go out. You worked so hard on them. I’ll pay for the extra postage out of my allowance. Whatever it takes.” He’s a sweetie pie.

I only got about 10 of the cards back, so I had no idea what happened with the rest of them. I took the returned ones to the post office and saw a person and got them in the mail. Nevermind that an actual person had to touch them the first time to tell me they were non-machinable and then an actual person had to drive them all the way to my house and touch them again, and oh, I could go on, but we’d just end up in a place where I’m ranting about the government’s inability to run anything efficiently, and why do I want them running my retirement account and health insurance again? So I won’t go on.

I got more back a day or two later. This time, I went to the post office and used the little automated postage thing to buy the extra postage, and oh yeah, I got a little passive aggressive and paid with my debit card but had the machine run it as credit. You know, so they had to pay the credit card fee. Small, petty victories and all.

Oh, I also found out that while most of the cards made it to their destinations safely, at least one that wasn’t returned to me arrived postage due. Hi, Caltechgirl, Merry Christmas, here’s your card that you have to pay for. I hope she put the 20 cents in her mailbox in pennies.

Had I not spent two weeks cranking out cards and felt an enormous sense of relief over their completion only to have my calm diminished (ha, you thought I was going to say shattered because of the drama factor), I might try the same thing again this year. Popping them out all at once and all. But I decided to actually get started early this year. Like this week.

I’ve made three cards already, and I joined the Christmas Cards Challenge over at Splitcoaststampers to keep me accountable. My goal is 10 per month.

Here is my 3rd card:

Baby, it's cold outside

I did this for Sketch Challenge #368 at Splitcoast and added the twine for Technique Lovers Challenge #360.

Recipe:
Card base: Bazzill Basics (card size is 4.25 x 5.5)
Cardstock: White (some value cardstock from Jo-Ann), light green (The Paper Studio)
Patterned paper: Holiday Dots (The Paper Studio)
Stamps: The snowman is Studio G, the snowflake is one of my favorites, from Winter Snowmen by Stampabilities
Inks: Stazon jet black (snowman), Stampin’ Up! lucky limeade (sponging around edges), Versamark (for embossing the snowflakes)
Markers: Tombow brush pens (N15, 847, 925)
Embossing folder: Victoria (Cuttlebug)
Embossing powder: ZING! red (glitter finish)
Twine: Martha Stewart baker’s twine
Rhinestones: Studio G
Christmas tree punch: Fiskars
Cuts: Sentiment tags cut w/ Cricut using SCAL & 09 KutUps font

But I’m telling you, it’s a revelation of a sandwich.

Tomato
Fresh basil
Goat cheese
Honey
Fresh-baked french bread (made with coconut oil, which makes an amazing flavor difference)
Sriracha, as needed

You try it and tell me it wasn’t blogworthy.

So yesterday he was about to leave to go back to work after lunch, and I told him I’d see him later.

“Okay, Babe.”

That got my attention. My gut reaction was to immediately make fun of him. “Babe?” I smiled a little incredulously.

“Yeah. Babe.” He could barely keep from smiling himself, but he tried to play it cool and serious, like, “Hey, Babe, I’m the man. I am masculine and aloof, and I now call you ‘Babe’.”

Not that he’s ever had any problems with low testosterone levels or anything like that — he’s definitely the man of the house. All kinds of masculine up in here. But still. He was over-aloofing things, and it was soooo cute. Possibly sexy. Definitely sexy.

“Okay… If you say so.”

Tonight I was laughing about it atwith him, and he told me where this Babe phenomenon came from.

It turns out that Devon on Chuck calls Ellie “Babe”, and that’s why I have gained a new nickname.

I have a feeling he thinks I’m going to start calling him Captain Awesome.

I can’t think of a better way to start my day.