There are two things that people always seem to think of me that are untrue. Well, I'm sure there are more things, but these are two that I know of ;).

1) 'How smart that you have a webshop and work from home, you must be able to do so much work while your kids play around you and during naps.'

Well, untrue.

2) 'Oh, your kids must be so lucky, having such a creative mom. I bet you are doing such fun and creative crafts together all the time.'

Untrue again, I'm afraid. I'm not going to deny that there's a certain creative side to me, but I could only wish that I were the kind of mom who creates the funniest masks out of some scraps of paper and yarn, the niftiest robots out of some old tins or the most versatile playhouses out of some big cardboard boxes. I love seeing that kind of creativity, but I guess I'm not very good at it. Something with a lack of handy skills and an even bigger lack of spatial ability I suppose.

So we usually do some very average crafting here. Lots of drawing on the chalkboard wall, some cutting and pasting, playing with clay and paint, baking cookies...

There's still a lot for me to learn when crafting with Rosa. I tend to be way too result-driven: like when we bake cookies I expect Rosa to make cookies instead of eating all the dough ;). And when we paint, I often worry more about the paint that's ending up all over the place than that I enjoy that enthusiastic happy face with paint all over it. I wish I could always be the mom that enjoys all the mud and the sand and the stains that come with kids having lots of fun, but apparently I haven't reached that point yet... Yeah, lots of things to learn as a mom!

Lately Rosa has been showing an increasing interest in drawing, painting and other creative stuff, so that's plenty of learning opportunities for me to become that laid back crafty mom... I'm already studying  fiercely on the idea of creating a full-scale Eiffel tower out of toilet paper rolls ;).

I'm not even that old, but I have one photo album of, like, the first two or three years of my life. With the amount of pictures I take of my children I could often fill an album every week... Yes, it has a lot to do with the possibilities of digital photography, and of course it has a lot to do with my love for taking pictures. Sometimes I wonder what it'll be like when my children grow up, to look back at a youth so well documented. Will my kids be happy with this huge archive of thousands of pictures? Or would just one book about the first few years of their lives, with a picture or two of each highlight, be more than enough for them?

The silly thing is that I'm terrible at documenting those highlights: the birthdays, the holidays, the special trips... I always forget to take pictures or to bring my camera at all. Before I had kids I used to bring my camera on a lot of trips, but now I'm already happy when I manage to take both kids and all their stuff with me, let alone that heavy camera ;). 

Daily life inside the house on the other hand ends up being highly -I guess overly- documented, so I guess when my children look back at all these pictures later it seems like we never left the house... Well there's some truth to that, but we in fact do manage to leave the house every so often ;).

It has already come this far that at least once a day Rosa sits down on the sofa, asks me to put Julie next to her and then orders: 'Mama, take a picture!' Well, if she ever dares to complain about that huge archive of 'sitting-on-the-sofa'-pics that she has to work through when she's older, I can blame it all on her!

I was looking for a new kind of pastime. Something creative, something just for me, something that could offer me a quick and simple hideaway from the non-stop mothering. But well... also something that I could combine with a baby that does all her naps till about 9 in the evening in the baby carrier. Yes, again... I like my bed but somehow my babies don't ;).

So knitting it is: freestyle, for the time being all-mistakes-are-allowed knitting. No thoughts, no patterns, just a lot of colors and every so often a change of thread. So nice!

Though I don't really expect I'll become any good at knitting, I can't help but already be quite fanatical. I use any stolen moments to work on my freestyle patch that is slowly but surely growing into a scarf, I've already ordered some better yarn than this simple cheap stuff and mostly I dream about being able to make all the gorgeous children's patterns that I've been collecting (though currently reading them still feels like reading Chinese).

Knitting while carrying a baby of almost eight kilograms by the way isn't such a good idea, ergonomically spoken, but when it's so fun to do it's hard to stop. So this is how I walk around the house these days... 

My sister Olga always brings the best things for Rosa and Julie. Yesterday she not only brought Julie a gorgeous crochet Mina dress, but more important she brings the amazing skill with her of always making my girls feel so happy and at ease. Rosa runs through the house yelling with excitement as soon as she sees her aunt Olga, and she lets her do things that I as her mother am not even allowed to mention, such as putting these lovely little pigtails in her hair...

Isn't it bizarre to all of a sudden be the mother of a big girl with pigtails? She was still a wee baby the last time I blinked my eyes!

As you can see, our little 'photo moments' always happen spontaneously, without a plan. That's why there's always someone with pajamas, a just-out-of-bed hairdo or totally unmatching socks in the picture ;). Ah well, they are quite an accurate representation of actual daily life this way!

It's hard not to feel this constant hurry chasing me these days. Julie started at daycare for the first time today, but instead of contemplating that a bit -Baby! Growing! End of an era...- I have a to-do-list this long that it makes me scared, excited and exhausted at the same time. Ah well, let's start with this little blog post to ignore that list just a wee bit longer... ;)

I've been looking at this poster a lot these days, it says 'Why all the hurry, do you know when your work is done?'. Each time I felt stressed about all the work that was piling up while I was 'just mothering', I looked at the poster and realized that these to-do-lists only exist in your head. Well, though the 'not-yet-done' part of the list also shows in your house a bit! ;)

So... good luck to me, let's get started!

Having a new baby and getting to know her makes you realize how fast a personality grows... Julie still is this little creature unfolding, I can't yet say that I know her, we have no idea about the person she's going to be yet. And then Rosa, two years further along the way...

This blog is still driving me nuts, it doesn't have any of the functionalities that I'm looking for and the system keeps making weird changes in the layout of the blog that I haven't asked for, so blogging here is a frustrating thing. But I don't feel I have the time and energy right now to start working on a whole new blog either, so for now it must do...

It keeps disappointing me that with all this breastfeeding and reading about all the wonderful things that it does for the immune system of your kids, my babies still get sick ;). Yesterday Rosa came home from daycare with a glowing face: a heavy fever. And Julie has been struggling with a severe cold for days (well, particularly nights!): at night we hardly get any sleep because she keeps waking up from all the caughing and snoring. These definitely are the heavy days (well, and particularly nights) as parents of two kids... I keep wondering how the parents of three, four or five kids do this!

When we heard we'd have another girl I jokingly said to Helmut -who was so sure that this time we'd have a boy- that if we would have been part of some sort of indigenous tribe, they'd probably have called him 'Father Who Can Only Make Daughters' or something like that ;). We're becoming quite a feminine household here, with lots of dolls and lots of dresses, and to be honest I don't really mind.

And yes, it's a little guilty pleasure to dress them similarly on occasion... In this case it happened a bit by coincidence: Julie's jumpsuit once was one of my favorite floral dresses, but when a few holes appeared in it after years of intensive wear I used the good remnants of the fabric for one of Julie's first outfits. Later I realized that I had once bought Rosa a dress of the same fabric, it was a bigger size so I'd forgotten that we had it, but when I took it out of a box it turned out to be the perfect fit for Rosa now.

Their first portrait together wasn't such a success yet: though Rosa generally is surprisingly sweet and caring in her approach towards Julie, she doesn't yet seem to grasp the concept of holding a baby, which in return was a bit uncomfortable for Julie...

Oh and this: a crying baby really makes me stress out (I find it so bizarre that people can ignore their crying baby, I don't want to do that but even if I'd want it I just couldn't), but nothing's more relaxing than a sleeping baby on your chest!