The day before the conference we were very busy together: moving furniture around, cleaning, cooking a few days worth of food for Dave and Annabelle to eat while I was gone, and hanging pictures. (I purged an entire car load of garage sale items too!) But the most important was working to convert our fireplace into a play area for Annabelle.
Our town has very strict burn laws that renders our fireplace unusable for 350 days a year. So I screwed together some plywood, covered it in batting and used a staple gun to upholster a little wall to cover the firebox and create a space for her kitchen/house activities. The wall is strong enough to support a couple little hooks and small shelves that I attached for her brooms and housewares. I hung a silk from the ceiling to hold the space of the area above.
There were a few long noisy stretches of working and the pace of the day was very fast. The drill was loud, I was loud, music was playing, and the overall mood was "Get the job done!"
Annabelle :: I wish I was back in your tummy, like when I was zero.
(Zero is the age Annabelle applies to any infant younger than one.)
Me ::
Annabelle ::
It works well! We need to find a darker rug, but for now the softer colors will work. When I asked Annabelle to pose in her new kitchen play area so that I could take a picture, she ran to her room to first change her clothes. Then she climbed up on the table and "posed".
The walls in Annabelle's bedroom have a tendency to be chilly, so I sewed a curtain to frame her headboard and placed another padded board alongside her bed. In recent weeks she has asked me to push her bed against the wall because she evidently has anxiety about falling out of bed, even though that has only happened three times in her whole life. She loves this arrangement and curls up in the top corner of her bed for most of the night.
This picture is among the more unusual on my blog, just for the sake that it is an imperfect snapshot of normal life. Annabelle is so small to me here, sleeping in Aunt Kate's childhood bed, covered with a seersucker spread from Oma that I dyed a coral color and a quilt I sewed for her in the last weeks of my pregnancy. The open wall space so evident in the picture is actually a tiny amount compared to the reality of entirely empty walls... but art will come for the walls soon enough. In the meantime the space invites her and she feels the confidence of knowing it is her corner of the world.
It is beginning to feel like home.
