creativity and such grand plans

When Sophie turns four I want to give her an amazing birthday. I want to make her things that she will remember fondly all of her life. I want her to look back on the days she spent playing with these things and smile. I want her to give them to her children (when she finally has them when she's in her mid to late 20s and has a good career and a good man. Or woman. As long as she's happy!)

I am going to start crocheting all sorts of food sets, as well as dishes, pans, and other kitchen things. She loves playing with her toy food and the sets I plan on making are going to be much more involved than the plastic garbage she has now. (I got her a set of about 100 play food pieces from WalMart for five dollars last year-obviously not the greatest quality) I also want to sew some stuffed animals and food items like the things this woman makes. She's such an inspiration.


I also want to build her a kitchen that can grow as she does. Something that is much sturdier and more realistic than the big plastic ones that are way more expensive than they're worth. Sort of like this:

I'm even thinking of using real fixtures and knobs to make it more realistic. And maybe even putting actual lights in... and eventually a place for something like an easy bake oven. Which I never had so I need to make sure that Sophie and I play with hers all the time! I plan on learning to cook as she does!

Another thing I've got in the works in another story idea. I had a really cool/weird dream the other night that I woke up and immediately wrote the whole thing down. Why is it that I'm always more creative when I'm asleep?? I am honestly really excited about this idea and both Jen and Shawn say there's something there. It's weird because I know that it's my brain coming up with the weird things I dream about but it still feels like getting ideas from dreams is stealing them... like I didn't actually come up with it-it came to me. It still needs a lot of paring down and cleaning out the random weird dream elements but it really was a very cool dream.

Well, it's time for me to get started on crocheting. I'm going to be using other patterns online for inspiration and if it turns out that I can't make these things by guessing it out, then I'll buy the pattern, but if I can do it myself then there's really no sense in paying six dollars a pattern. If I paid for all of them, Sophie's birthday next year would be insanely expensive. 


Oh, one more thing: I wish I lived in an area where I could open up the walls of my house like they do in My Neighbor Totoro. So cool. Too bad I have such a fear of moths because I could never actually handle that.