So these first pictures were taken at the Summit County Fair, where I shared a booth with some friends of mine, and I sold slings. I only sold one, but Heather's boyfriend Will wore the green one around with a baby doll in it, to try to drum up interest in my product! People thought it was a real baby! The next day Jayson discovered a new use for slings, as he bicycled my dressform back to the store after I had used it at the fair. I accidentally uploaded these pictures twice and I can't remove them. Oh well, they're funny so it's worth a second look. Slightly out of order are the next pictures, taken at Dad's Michigan house, we were playing in the lake, but it was pretty chilly and cloudy. Then there's Suzi swimming with her friend Sadie, and a picture of Suzi, Ada, and Stella all piled into her big green chair. The last pictures were taken at Hale Farm and Villiage at the fall harvest day, where we rode a horse-drawn wagon and ate fresh apple butter. Beautiful day! Sorry this post is so short, I have to go make dinner.

Summer 09

Suzi and Ada holding hands. Below, me jamming with some ragtime pickers

The Shivering Timbers first show. It looks like a basement because it is a basement!

The store display I put together for my slings

Suzi at her first music festival where Jayson played, they had a kids section and she loved the ball pit the best.

First ice cream cone

First pigtails


A Grand Poodle that we met in Cleveland, Suzi threw his ball for him.

Laundry day

Lakeside Hoover Auditorium from the stage

Suzi and I had our first girls-only road trip of the summer. We drove about 1.5 or 2 hours away to a gated villiage called Lakeside, Ohio, where I played a gig with Hey Mavis. The town put us up in their very historic, beautiful lakeside hotel for two nights, fed us, paid us, and had us play on a beautiful stage called Hoover Auditorium, I think it used to be an airplane hangar. Suzi and I had a lot of fun playing on the beach, even though the weather was pretty windy with scattered showers. Gail came on the second day to keep Suzi while I was busy with rehersal and soundcheck, and that night at the concert Suzi wore her new dress that mom made, and she got just as much attention as we did at our merchandise booth. We really learned a lot performing there, they videotaped the show and we watched it when we came home and noticed a lot of non-musical things that need addressing since we were on such a large stage and so removed from the audience, so that was helpful.
Jayson and I played our first couple of gigs together as The Shivering Timbers. The band consists of just the two of us for now, but Suzi (her stage name is Pennywhistle) will join us as soon as possible. In fact, we just finished recording a song that has no vocal part, it's just banjo, bass, and percussion, but we brought Suzi to the studio and recorded her just wandering around banging on drums and talking and we tickled her and got some great giggles right at the perfect spot in the song. So she finished the song in a way we couldn't have come up with on our own, I'm excited to hear the final version, I will be getting the master copy in the next few days. The shows went well, we got really good feedback, and people we didn't know told us they loved it, which was good, a relief even. I'm really putting my heart and soul out there when I play these songs so it would hurt pretty bad if it were rejected.
I'm spending a lot of time sewing baby slings these days, mainly because I'm getting ready for this Friday where I'll be set up in a booth at the Summit County Fair. My neighbor is also my insurance agent, and his company has a space there for a week and wanted to give local people like myself a chance to sell their wares without having to pay the high cost of renting a booth at the fair. So me and two of my girlfriends were given Friday as our day to sell the things we make. So I am obviously selling my slings, which means I have to have as many ready by Friday as I can. That is tricky since I've only known about this for a week, and also I can only sew when Suzi is asleep. I still sell them at The Market Path, the store around the corner from my house. I included a couple of pictures I took on my phone of the display at the store.
Suzi has been picking up the signs really well lately, so I checked out a book of ASL from the library and I'm trying to learn as much as I can so we can communicate better. She's learning a couple new signs every week, it is a lot of fun!
Also, I taught her how to pull her pull-ups down, and she signaled to me that she needed to potty, so I helped her get them down and sit on her potty chair. She went and I was so proud! I know it's just the first step on a long road but she understands the concepts, now we just have to put them all together and keep practicing. We're patient with this, I am not pushing potty training at all, I'm just following her speed.
It's been a cool, rainy summer. In fact, it's been chilly some days, in the 60s daytime and low 50s at night. I would really like to take Suzi swimming outdoors but we have only had one opportunity.
We did camp with her for the first time, though! We set up the tent in Jack and Gail's back yard, had a campfire, roasted marshmallows and sang songs and she went to sleep in the tent surprisingly easily. It was a little chilly but we were prepared with wool socks and cozy blankets. They live next to a large pond, and behind the house is a forrested area, so we really felt like we were in the woods, except for the distant sounds of sirens and loud motorcycles. Once the traffic sounds died down we were serenaded by a large chorus of frogs, lulling us to sleep.

Blog plus some old photos that I don't know if anyone ever saw...

Hilton Head in March







Sheep farm

Carrying her baby in her sling
sleepy

winter was fun, we got a blow-up sled and sledded down the front lawn, which slopes



It was a nice mothers day this year, although hectic! I wanted to rearrange the living room for my mothers day present, so that's what we did. It looks better. You no longer walk in the door and see a huge stack of stuff all the way to the ceiling (our bookshelf was so full of books they were double-stacked). We had to get rid of a lot of stuff and put some books in the basement.

Suzi's cut has healed. For those who don't know, she fell about a month ago and whacked her forehead against the edge of a chair, cutting it open pretty deep. She recieved 8 stitches (although I just heard about a little boy with a dog bite who got 200 stitches and I no longer feel that 8 is a lot.) and you can barely tell there's a scar. It's a bit pink but I think when she's an adult it'll just be a tiny unnoticeable blip. The fall happened at The Chapel, so fortunately their insurance is covering the medical bills (its amazing how much it costs to close a cut). And there was a follow-up visit with a neurologist, where Suzi danced, made friends, and "read" aloud from a book about the ocean, so it was pretty obvious there was no serious damage. Whew!

Jayson and I had our debut as The Shivering Timbers last week, at a friend's birthday party. We've only recorded one song but you can hear it on myspace. The song we have posted is a nursery rhyme called See-Saw Sacradown, and has two other friends joining us on vocals. For anyone who doesn't know, The Shivering Timbers is mine and Jayson's band (it's just the two of us for now, though we hope Suzi will soon be able to join us and perhaps we'll get a drummer). We do a mixture of nursery rhymes to which one of us writes some music on either guitar or banjo, and also some original songs that we write about Suzi or for Suzi.

She's learned to say the word "no" and sometimes walks around shaking her head saying it. Her hair is getting a bit longer and curls tightly in the back when it dries after a bath. Her feet are size 5 , her clothes 18-24 months usually, sometimes bigger because of her rotund belly and cloth diapers, pants and shorts being no less than 2T or 3T. She seems to be obsessed with balls and spends time every day "practicing" her ball skills in the kitchen, throwing and rebounding off the fridge and cabinets. She's learning to catch a little and has an impressive throwing arm. Also tractors at hardware stores seem to really excite her. So yesterday at Target I showed her the little ballet unitards and tutus, which she actually seemed to like, so hopefully she won't be a total tomboy!
We are making plans to attend this year's Rolan Family Reunion in October, Jayson, Suzi and I will all be there. I am looking forward to seeing my extended family again, it has been almost ten years since I went to one. If only Jason could come home for it.
I'll post more later.