Lots of sparkles and baby B.O.

Last night I left a wide awake Anne (naturally, this was the night she chose not to fall asleep at 7) in Mike's capable hands to hurry to the dance studio and pick up my new costume. And it is TO.DIE.FOR. It's totally worth not getting a single other gift for Christmas. :)

I could pick whatever I wanted this time, since this was solely for me to do solos in. Thus, no constraints on color choice (our instructor always lets us pick whatever style we're comfortable with) like in our group costume. I chose one that is turquoise blue. I tried to find a costume in which I liked both the style and the color, since sending in color requests is a bit of an adventure with our Egyptian costume maker. :) Certainly, he does worlds better with English than I could ever do in Arabic, but there's definitely a language thing going on there. Purple often becomes blue, and sometimes purple becomes pink. And hues of specific colors are even more elusive. ("what is this 'lavender'?") I don't like to leave anything to chance (you know this about me by now...) and so I went with the colors on the sample.

It is *magnificent*. It's a gorgeous deep turquoise with a sparkly silver hip wrap and inlaid silver panels that flare out when I dance. The beads and sequins are all deep blue and silver. I absolutely love it.

Naturally, the instant I got it home, I put it on. Luckily, Anne was sleeping by that time. The top needs some work, but the skirt is Fabulous. He never takes any kind of measurements for bust. Why, you ask? This is an excellent question, and all we can discern is "that's just the way he does it." Are all Egyptian womens' breasts the same size? I just don't get it. But all cups are created equal over there. And the shoulder and back straps have clasps on them that I just frown at each time. Because there's no way I could ever possibly use them given that the straps are the length of two of me. Perhaps there are sumo wrestling belly dancers out there that these straps are based on? But at any rate, they're WAY too long. So I have to solicit the assistance of my sewing mother-in-law to sew some snaps in for me.

The skirt seems to be staying put nicely, which is a real concern with these costumes. Beads, as you can imagine, are *heavy*, and let's just say that "slippage" is a costume malfunction that we all fear. I had to ask my mother-in-law to sew sticky stuff into the top of my green group costume skirt because it had developed a nasty habit of migrating downward when I dance. Spandex does stretch too, and I wore that costume twice while pregnant. This one I think will be ok, thankfully it fits a little better, since it's even *heavier* than my green skirt by a mile. I'm going to be doing lots of practicing in it over the course of the next few days.

So anyway, I swirled downstairs in it to show Mike, who approved. I'm going for alterations with my mother-in-law tonight. :) The hafla is Saturday, so my sparkly butt has to get in gear.

So, Anne. There are always cute stories with regard to her. Last night, I dressed her in a fleecy sleeper like always, and noted when she promptly spit up pureed squash onto the shoulder. I cleaned her up, but you know, if we changed her outfit every time she spit up we'd run out of clothes in hours. I also noticed that she was drooling, a common occurrence these days. But I didn't think too much of it.

During the night when I went in to nurse her, I noticed a funny smell. My nose twitched like a bunny. What was that? Her room is right next to the bathroom of the Henry pee-pee incident, could it be that again? Since it was about 2 in the morning, I figured I'd worry about it later.

But come morning, the issue would not be ignored. And pretty quickly I figured out the cause of the smell:

My daughter.

Yes, delicate little Anne. As Mike put it, she smelled like a locker room.

"What is that awful B.O smell? Oh, good Lord, it's Anne."

We went through this entire awakening process with Henry too (you'd think we'd never done this newfangled "parenting" thing before, apparently our brain cells are affected more and more with each kid) when the little blanket lovey that he slept with in his crib nearly caused Mike to pass out from bad smell asphyxiation. It seems that their teething drool just ferments into fabric over time and causes this overpowering odor. I could barely nurse her without wanting to strip her naked. The instant she was done nursing we popped her into the bathtub.

Unfortunately, when I went into her room as Mike bathed her, I caught another whiff. As if it's not bad enough that our house suffers from these 2 little smelly people, but somehow the stink just sinks its tentacles in and finds life in ways that we never anticipate. Not only did the corner with her laundry basket in it smell from the offending sleeper, but her entire crib sheet reeked and had to be immediately stripped. And the mattress Febrezed.

Good heavens.