The world's most helpful children...

Look at what Mimi was up to this morning:

Cleaning out her daddy's fly-tying cabinet. She looks positively guilty, no? And like any good mom, I ran and grabbed the camera before I reprimanded her. She doesn't really care if I reprimand her anyway. She continued to crawl back to his cabinet no less than ten times before I finally moved her upstairs.

That is when I noticed that JackJack had been using her head as his own personal canvas. I honestly don't know which I find more disconcerting, how close he came to her eye with a sharp object or the fact that she held still and let him draw all over her face. Either way, they are both naughty...

A little math lesson: 30+30+30 does NOT equal 60. If you reduce by 2, it is 88, not 58. It looks like I can't knit a sock to save my life! I got a good way down the leg of a new basic sock and I kept saying to myself "this seems really big, I can't understand why it looks so big." **Note to me: When I say it looks big every row for fifty rows, it IS too big, in the future, stop knitting BEFORE you have to pull out a days progress. How many times have I done that? Don't answer that.** Katja has been reduced to Monday night 24 knitting, seeing how it is so stinking cold that I have no desire to knit anything sleeveless. I've been working and reworking socks while I read Harry Potter #4 and camp out on the chair with my leg elevated.

I have been layed up with a bum ankle for the past few days, and mind you, when I put my foot up on Tuesday night, the house was pretty darn clean. I have alternated hobbling around wafting a trail of IcyHot behind me and icing my ankle with a bag of frozen peas while knitting and reading. My kids have been running wild like feral monkeys.

See??

He looks positively tuckered out doesn't he?

It takes a lot of energy to do this to a perfectly spotless toy room...

Oh well, back to the peas...I'll take care of that later.

"Let the Wild Rumpus Start..."

My mom had a great idea last year, which was to dress Jack as Max from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak for Halloween. I had a left over clown outfit that I had actually sewn with my own two hands that I dressed him in instead. In retrospect, he does seem more wolf-y than clown-y, as evidenced by these pictures.

The poor kid looks utterly humiliated, and he was not happy about the hat. So, next year he can be Max and have a wolf suit and threaten to bite me and run away to where the wild things are...

But today, it is his sister who is behaving like a wild thing. She has so far, in less than an hour, fallen off of two chairs. She has slapped my coffee out of my hands, thrown all her food off her high chair tray, destroyed Jack and Ben's Lego creation and has screamed bloody murder every time I put her down... On days like today, it is best to just let the house fall apart and take care of the babies till nap time. No knitting, no reading, no sitting with coffee and a devotional. Just let the kids crawl all over me while I attempt to blend into the endless pile of playthings and pray for patience and joy and understanding. I am glad I went to Pilates this morning, because it may be till bedtime before I have a moment to breathe....

Why not me?

I am sitting here at the computer in complete silence. Mimi is fast asleep, and Jack is playing at the neighbors. The vacuuming and dishes are done, clothes are spinning in the dryer, I still have a room to clean (my own) but I am just sitting here listening to nothing. Glorious silence. It doesn't happen very often in this house. And it can't last. So I will quickly update you on my life before I go on and do some more laundry:

Katja is coming along. I have made and connected both cups (though, for a small baby, I hesitated to call them "cups", maybe there is a better term out there, I'll be thinking of one) and have about eight rows into the body. Not speedy knitting by any means, but it is being knit in the loll between projects that I am excited about. I also loathe knitting acrylic on bamboo, it catches and it feels like I am knitting on fly paper or something. But it should be done pretty soon.

I also stabbed myself in the foot with a size zero sock needle yesterday. Or should I say pierced? I am fairly certain that it made exit from another hole before I jerked my foot out and cursed like a sailor. Ow. Not pretty.

Saturday, I tried something new and something that I swore I wouldn't ever do. I ran with my neighbor. And I didn't hate it. Weird. For the last fifteen or so years, I've told myself and anyone who would listen that I couldn't run. That I was not a runner and that I would only run when something was chasing me (never). But then my friend took up marathon running and she said something to me that made me think. She said she had always said she couldn't run either, and then she got this letter asking her to train for a marathon, and she said "not me..." after some thought, she said "Why not me?" and it changed the way she felt about her self. Well, I am not exactly going for marathon training, but it makes me realize how self-defeating my thought process can be. Why not me? Because I never gave myself a chance, that's why. J, don't look for me at the runners nest or what ever it is, but the fact is, I'm thirty now. I have to make up for some of the fun that I had in my twenties...none of it healthy... And I really do want to do something that I never thought I could do. 1/2 mile today, tomorrow, the world! Or 3/4 of a mile, anyway.

One other positively exciting thing, I am going to visit Chicago with a friend this summer for a few days! Yippeee. I've never been there and I can't wait!

Well, the dryer just stopped, and that means that I have to get going. Enjoy your Monday...

Steppin'Out

Here we see miss Mimi doing her signature one step wonder. She has made as many as three steps in a row, but she is still working on it. She is taking her dogs (or are they sheep??) for a walk. Notice the pink high heel at her feet? She is determined to wear those little shoes and it is a source of frustration and joy for her each time she gets them on. She will work for half an hour to get them both on and then she will try to stand in them, only to have them fall off the second that she moves her foot. She is ambitious though, I'll give her that. I've been walking with some success for over thirty years and I still can't walk in heels!

And here she is helping make dinner. She did that all her self, clever girl.

Here is Jack Jack showing his excellent sense of style, he dressed himself, see? What is it with the footwear in this family?? This photo is the stuff that high school blackmail is made of...And just to show that all my kids are as cute as I think they are, here is B making his "crazy-tasty" face. He poses for the camera, so I have to act like I'm not taking his picture to get a natural shot:

He is such a great looking kid, check out those eyelashes! Of course, he had his mouth full in this picture, but it doesn't take away from his cuteness.

In knitting news, I started Katja from last springs Knitty for Mimi. I have some Red Heart laying around, and I figured that if I couldn't make my socks work, it would be less painful to just work on something small and less complicated. I know that I was crying about not wanting to use cheap yarn, but since it is all I have, and there is a certain amount of pain involved in watching a crawling baby drag her cotton/merino sweater all over every floor and having to hand wash scarves and hats that have been made for the boys, I just sucked it up and cast on. I made Katja last summer when Mimi was a wee little bit who had no control over her neck muscles and I just didn't like the way it was on an infant. I decided to make some alterations, namely making it longer and attaching the straps to the back so not to make it a halter top, and I am definitely layering it over a tee-shirt. It is so cute on the pattern, I think that it may work better this time around...

It is snowing again, and I refuse to get freaked out about this. What can I do? Knit and read, that is what. One thing about this weather is that it makes me want to hold wool and get all snugly with books. Yup, looking on the bright side...definitely not freaking out....

My Fears Realized

The past forty eight or so hours have been nothing short of tragic. It has not reached temperatures over 25 degrees. It has been misty and freezing rain has made everything droop with ice and it is simply depressing. There was a red robin, the harbinger of spring, sitting on the sidewalk huddled into himself this morning because it was too cold to fly. Does this mean that all the baby birds are going to freeze like all the delicate buds of trees and the daffodils and tulips that were opening up to meet spring? I could almost hear the cries of all the new grass as it froze to death.

The other fear that has been realized is that I have to really evaluate my knitting habit, can I really even call this a knitting blog these days? Probably not technically. But The Thing is that I can't really afford yarn right now. I am not talking about the kind of yarn diet that some knitters go on where they can still buy things like the occasional skein of sock yarn. No, this is a full-on yarn famine. I can't afford the yarn that I would like to buy, and I don't want to be a yarn snob, but I don't want to shop red heart either. Not for what I want to make. I need quality yarn to make the things that I want to make. I need wool for felting, I need denim for the hat that I want to make. I need things that I can not afford. What is a knitter to do? Should I get a job? I can't really justify putting the kids in day care so I can knit, and when would I find time to knit if I work? It is ugly, and yes, kind of tragic. It is what I love to do. I can't do it. That is sad.

I have very little knitting news, as usual. I cast on the green socks again, and again I screwed them up. Why do I keep trying? As I write, the felting of B's slippers is at hand. I just have to clear out the washer of a load of towels, and in they go. Yeah, I know that I was supposed to felt them when I was in Durango, but I underestimated the amount of energy that it takes to supervise small children in a house that is not child proof. I also visited a great friend that I haven't seen since Jack was a smallish-type baby, and we had a family get together on Saturday where the teal and purple slippers were presented to my grandmother. (she loved them, and they fit her.) And we had a trip to the emergency room (if anyone is counting, that is the second in as many months) that ate up about a day of my life. So, there was no felting then.

Jack turned three yesterday, which was bittersweet for me. It seems so fast that he is already past toddler-hood and onto the next stage. We had a little Thomas The Tank Engine party...well, we had Thomas napkins and cups at any rate. He was pleased. It was fun, he got toys and ate ice-cream cake. Good times were had by all.

My Useful little Engine having his birthday dinner.

Miss Mimi took her first step this morning, and then she went and did it again. Won't be but a few more weeks and we will have a new toddler running around the house. We really are surprised at how long it took her to start this walking stuff, considering she crawled at six months. Well, it is probably just as well, since a walking baby opens up a whole other kind of trouble!

Frozen egg hunt!
Jack was more interesed in eating snow off his sword than hunting for eggs!

Happy Easter! Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!