The middle child turns three

Yesterday, our middle child - James - turned a big 3.

 

He's the one in the front.

Here he is at a few months old. Now don't be fooled by that big grin, he was a miserable baby and cried for the first 6 months. He wouldn't take a bottle or a dummy and boy, did I have some challenging times.

Life changed at 6 months when I weaned him, started solids and he began taking the dummy. He became incredibly easy and happy baby,. Well, up until about 6 months ago when the mega tantrums began.

For his birthday, James graduated to a 'big' big bed. It currently has no rail, so we pull the trundle out each night just in case he falls out.

I also made him a backpack for pre-school.

He was far more interested in the toy inside.

What a happy customer!

As with all the kiddie birthdays here, I made him a cake from the Australian Woman's Weekly Cake Book. This one is from the book that I poured over as a kid (this one). There was plenty of negotiation with this cake. We have three cake books, and had been reading them before bed for a few weeks in the lead up to this birthday and James chose none of the designs. He wanted a Bozz Lightyear cake, which I really didn't want to make. We settled on a Bozz Lightyear train, just like in Toy Story 3. Basically a train with a few lego figurines on it.

Parties are always exhausting!

Now back to the bag. I used  the Made by Rae Toddler Backpack pattern and some Echino fabric that I mentioned way back here. While the bag came together well, I did not enjoy making it. I like seeing fast progress with the things that I make and it took quite a while to figure out how to cut the Echino fabric to maximise the designs, to look for piping, to look up how to make piping, to choose fabric for piping, to buy piping cord, to decide to interface, to bind the seams and then all the other details on the bag.

The results though, are pretty good and I am happy with how it turned out.

The changes to the pattern include:
 - Interfacing the sides and top, to provide a little more rigidity to the bag.
 - binding the inner seams, which I also think make the bag sit a little nicer.
 - lining the bottom of the bag, on the inside with really stiff denim to help the bag structure.
 - adding a small side pocket for treasures.

He does love the bag and I'm in the finals stages of Ollie's one too.

Tis all for now. Happy Monday :)