Night Fairies and Imps

Remember that contest I won? We just got the painting! It is so awesome! I am really impressed with the detail in this thing-- it's only 5x7 but there are so many little touches to all of the different elements. My favorite feature is the long eyelashes on the flower fairy faces.

Here's a link to a picture of the painting on Penny Pickles' blog.

Oh, I just love it! I love the way the colors pop, and the fact that it's a night time scene, and that all the details make it so fun to look at. I have to confess that seeing a picture of the painting isn't nearly as good as seeing the painting in real life. The paint has this awesome texture that makes it really interesting to look at and that doesn't show hardly at all in the picture.

We haven't decided where to hang it in R's room yet. The walls in this house are kind of tough to nail anything into so we've really had a hard time hanging things up. I'll post pictures when we finally do get it up, though.

I won!

I'm so excited! Remember way back when I mentioned liking this website --Penny Pickles Art? She paints little canvas squares with initials inside each square. They are so so so cute.

Well.

The woman who runs the site, Annie (she's also the one who does all the paintings) posted a contest on her blog. The contest was to suggest a new theme for her to put up on her site, and if your theme was chosen, she would send you the canvas she painted, with your choice of an initial on it.

I suggested five different themes, and she picked one of them!!!!

I am so excited! The theme is a girl one, night fairies and imps, so we are getting it for R. It will be totally awesome.

Parenting Advice contest

I'm entering this contest to win a $250 shopping spree of Speesees organic cotton clothes at Nature's Child, a really really cute online boutique... and they're asking that you share your favorite parenting advice and post a link to the contest on your blog or discussion forum-- click here to go to the contest link.

For my first entry, I wrote this:

My favorite piece of advice came from my mother, shortly after our daughter was born. She said, "This is the only time of your life when they let you just hold them and love on them." That advice really helped carry me through those 3 a.m. feedings in the very early weeks when she wouldn't (or didn't) fall right back asleep. I would just sit in the rocking chair and hold her and really try to savor that moment, despite how tired I was.

The second piece of parenting advice that I like best is something that my friend M, whose daughter H is exactly the same age as R, told me. Basically, when we would have our regular chat sessions about all things baby-related, we would often discuss what the two girls were doing-- oh, R is doing this; H is doing that; how do you handle X? Is R or H doing Y? And we would share strategies, ideas, suggestions. It was amazing. But the best piece of advice she passed on to me, something she got from a fellow mom whose daughter is about 7 months older than H and R, was simply this:

Almost everything a little baby does is a stage. When you talk to other moms who seem like they've got it all figured out, it's really just because their baby is near the end of a particular stage. Pretty soon, something else will happen and they'll be figuring things out all over again. So when someone says, "oh, my baby sleeps all through the night," in two weeks, that baby may start teething, or standing up in the crib, or something else. Similarly, when you're going through a rough patch, you will get things figured out, and things will change.