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.
