First, a sleep update: Bean woke up twice last night, but settled fast both times.  Not quite as miraculous as Friday night, but still a vast improvement over the status quo. I’ve been cleaning the house and I found a lot of mold, so I called the experts from mold remediation houston to get rid of it.

We (mostly Sugar) are doing some home improvement this weekend, including hanging some more kid-friendly art in the Bean’s room.  Poor dear has mostly been making due with the things relegated to that room when it was the office: things I didn’t want dinner guests staring directly at (i.e., naked pictures of me) and things I didn’t want to look at while falling asleep (i.e., work that is overtly about death).  And, over his crib, a very nice print of a cheerful looking photographer, smoking. If you are looking to do some improvements to your home, consider getting a floor remodeling from https://carpettogo.com/2018/04/how-to-clean-your-area-rug-in-seven-simple-steps/!

Everybody’s got to go to therapy about something; I want the Bean to get his money’s worth.

Some of that is still up — don’t want him to be disoriented — but we’ve added:

An Eric Carle fold-out book of tails above the door, in place of the print Sugar’s dad made, of the woman waiting at the door to death.

A scissor-tailed flycatcher painted by Sugar, in place of the smoking photographer.

Here’s a clearer version:

Over the changing table, in place of the map of our park the Bean has now ripped down, some letter cards Sugar has been making:

A closer look:

The handy thing about those is that they are digital files (made partly from scanned drawings Sugar made by hand, partly with photoshop), so when he tears them down we can just print anew.  For a while there, his changing table said “O.G.,” which I rather loved.

By the way, when she’s got a whole alphabet of these, Sugar plans to put it up as a PDF on Etsy, suitable for printing at home on photo paper.  The next letter will be R (to complete the Bean’s initials), but if you’d be interested in buying a single letter or set of initials, let us know and she could do those letters next.

Meanwhile, I made hot pepper jelly for a brunch today (that we will get to eventually, except the Bean suddenly needed a nap and then wouldn’t fall asleep and then needed a diaper change and then, as soon as we gave up and dressed him for the party, clearly wanted to sleep first….).  It didn’t turn out very hot, even after I doubled the hot peppers, and I ignored my own notes on the recipe (based on comments on the site I got it from) and forgot about doubling the pectin, then promptly ran out of pectin (which is stupidly hard to find in stores here), so that required making the jelly and then reprocessing it after cooking it down to just shy of rock candy.  Plus I couldn’t properly can it because I forgot that our stock pot I used for that croaked, but ANYWAY:

And Sugar made a patch for the threadbare section of our couch cover (which we also made, but not recently).  I rather like it: