So I wanted to make nice, personalized gifts for baby rampy's grandparents and great-grandparents. Last year mr rampy's sister gave us all ornaments with pictures of her son in them, so I didn't want to copy that exactly, but I wanted to give them some special piece of baby rampy on this, her first Christmas.

Actually, what happened was that in the course of ordering necessary baby stuff we got on the mailing lists for a zillion baby companies who now send us reams of catalogs for unnecessary--but alluring--baby stuff. Including ornaments made out of a plaster of paris baby handprint. How hard could that be?

I should have remembered that right after baby rampy was born the hospital nurses refused (kindly) to print her hands in her baby book and just did her feet. And that was before she had the dexterity to constantly jam her fingers in her mouth. I did think ahead enough to know that I would need mr rampy's help, so we plunged into our little arts & crafts project together on Sunday.

The plan was to nurse her to sleep and then jam her hand in the mold while she was out cold (the bottom side of the mold has a design with a Christmas tree and some holiday saying or something; the handprint goes on the reverse side). But there was a whole timing element of mixing the plaster and having it ready and not too wet or too dry. In the end she was pretty worked up by the time we had the first bag of plaster poured in its mold, even though mr rampy was rocking her in his arms. I pulled her hand into the plaster, and she immediately tried to pull it out. I think the coldness freaked her out. The plaster blooped up with her hand, and we were left with no imprint and plaster coating her entire hand up to the wrist.

He washed her hand while I jiggled the mold to smooth the surface. And here's where things went wrong. I argued that we should wait for the plaster to set a little harder before trying again. He argued that plaster has some property that causes it to stick more the more it dries and that we had already missed our window of opportunity to make a clean impression (because I had been sitting there for five minutes already painstakingly popping air bubbles with a toothpick and then shaking the mold to resmooth the surface).

I am so used to mr rampy coming in to save the day with his immense powers of competence that the very few times he is just as lost as I am, I tend to fall to pieces. If I had been thinking straight, I would have realized that he was wrong, or at least argued that we might as well wait for it to dry, because otherwise it was a lost cause anyway. But I was crazy arts & crafts-obsessed mother, so instead I said "Well, we're getting a print of SOMETHING!" and jammed her foot in the mold. And it actually did make somewhat of a footprint impression, or at least a vaguely triangular shape with some peaks and blobs at the top that might be toes.

He washed her foot and we both took a breather (we had two more of these suckers to do). We decided that before we tried this again, we needed to make sure she was well and truly asleep. Since she had just come out of a nurse and nap, I didn't think she was ready for another one, so I went to take a shower. And while I was in there, she fell asleep in her Kick 'n' Play, which never happens.

So then I was scrambling trying to get dried off and dressed, and mr rampy was mixing up a second batch of plaster and pouring it in the mold, and I hadn't yet realized he was wrong about the time-frame of when to make the print, so we were rushing the wet plaster over to her like it was a set of heart defibrillator paddles and she was going into cardiac arrest or something, and then we were both crouching by her in our tiny bathroom, trying to ease her hand into the mold without waking her, all the while she was still in the Kick 'n' Play.

And of course the plaster splashed out even more this time because it was even wetter, and we got it all over her and the Kick 'n' Play seat. And she woke up. So once again we were washing plaster off of her (and various other things) and trying to keep her from sucking it off of her fingers.

So then we regrouped and were sitting on the couch, and I was like "Zillions of parents and teachers do this every day. It cannot be this hard." A Googlesearch later, I'd determined that not only should we indeed wait until the plaster was harder before trying to make an impression, but we should also leave her hand in there for 20 seconds. We still had the second batch mold ready, so we tried one more time...and everything was going much better until baby rampy clenched her fingers on the way out. So we had an impression, but it was sort of...swirly...in places.

We had one more kit left because I'd been planning to give one of these ornaments to mr rampy's parents, one to my parents, and keep the third for us. But neither of us could face mixing up the plaster and going through the process a third time (by this point there were specks...and chunks...of dusty white plaster on the bathroom floor, the kitchen sink, the dining room side table and floor, and the living room coffee table, sofa, and floor). We were pretty sure we knew what we were doing finally, but baby rampy was too unpredictable.

When I'd been comparing kits before purchasing ours, I'd seen one kit where you made a handprint for your wall by pressing baby's hand in clay. So I had a brilliant thought: I'd mix up play clay and we could shape it in the third mold and then pop that out and bake it. The clay would be much less messy and more forgiving if we needed a do-over or ten.

So I was digging through all the baby activity books I have to find a good recipe (I have at my fingertips literally 10-15 recipes for different kinds of clay, some involving coffee grounds or sawdust). I finally found one that could be mixed from materials we had at hand and then baked to a state of permanence.

As I had expected, it was much easier to press her hand into the clay. I carefully peeled the first impression out of the mold (after consulting with mr rampy about whether it would be okay to put the plastic mold in the 250 degree oven...he thought not, so clearly his disaster-dar had switched back on after the plaster hiccup) and then made two more. Then I lined all three up on a clean cookie sheet (even thinking to put down parchment paper first) and slid them in the oven for two hours.

I had moved so quickly ahead with the new clay project because I was hell-bent on making sure we had something to show for our efforts of the past hour. But as I sat there smelling the (pleasant) aroma of baking ornaments, I realized that I could have been much smarter about how I'd used the clay. I'd stuffed it in the mold, which was at least 2/3 of an inch thick, because I wanted to have the design on the reverse side of the handprint. But the flour/salt/water dough didn't pick up details as finely as the plaster would, plus that was the side baking against the sheet and slowly flattening in the heat. Furthermore, the recipe instructions suggested rolling the dough out to only 1/4 of an inch, so my new "ornaments" weren't going to cook thoroughly after only two hours. And since there was no point to using the mold anyway, I might as well have just rolled out the dough evenly and cut some nice ovals and done the handprints on them.

But bygones. Here is where we stand now:

• a plaster ornament with a caved-in looking impression of baby rampy's foot
  
• a plaster ornament with a swirly impression of baby rampy's hand
  
• three gorgeous impressions of her hand in baked flour clay, but the lumps of clay on which the impressions were made are really more paperweight-size than ornament size (clay is heavier than plaster; we could probably take a tree down with one of these, and not just a sad Charlie Brown tree either); plus they need to be sealed with varnish to "finish" them
  
• one undone bag of plaster, which I guess we will save until next Christmas; I'm sure she'll be less messy with her hands then (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA)
  
• three kits we didn't even get to where you're supposed to coat baby's hand with non-toxic gold ink and then press it on pretty pieces of paper that say "Grandchild's First Christmas." Then you frame the paper.

I can't even begin to fathom how messy the ink thing would be, so the plan now is that we're keeping the plaster "foot" and "hand" print ornaments for ourselves and getting two more of the ink/paper kits. I'm going to make ink/paper ornaments for our three sets of grandparents (baby rampy's great-grandparents) and then our two sets of parents. And instead of inking a handprint, I'm going to print out and glue down copies of this cute photo we have of baby rampy in her fur-trimmed capelet and a Santa hat. THAT WILL BE JUST AS GOOD AS A HANDPRINT.

I may or may not give our parents the clay handprint ornaments. They're cute, but they are also just the tip of the iceberg of a lifetime of kiddie clutter (drawings, macaroni pictures, etc.) that will undoubtedly come from baby rampy. I don't want our parents to feel burdened. I mean, I think they're adorable, but I'm her mother (and not a bad mother like Lynette on Desperate Housewives who was judging the crafts her kids made for her and ashamed they were so crappily executed; of course, in this case the crappy execution is courtesy of me...and baby rampy's grabby fingers).

The whole time we were working I just kept remembering on the first season of The Mole when the task was that teams had to construct a fake modern artwork and put it in a museum and hope that the "expert" didn't pick theirs out among the real exhbits. Of course he did, and Anderson Cooper was like "Well, this is a loss for you, but a victory for Art." Art definitely had it out for us this day.

And thank God I never got one of those kits with the nesting tins where you're supposed to make an impression of your kid's hand every year. That would have ended with us disbanding and joining other families and vowing never to speak of plaster again.