Random Tuesday

I haven't been blogging much because I've been busy. So this is a random catch-up post.

One thing I've been busy with is driving almost an hour each way to take Molly to camp. This camp is called Lose the Training Wheels, and it's remarkable.



For as long as I can remember, therapists have been trying to get Molly to pedal. Apparently this is an important way to practice motor planning, something that Molly doesn't do well (which is why, she has always sucked at pedaling).

I wanted to get her into this camp last year but it filled up before I could find the money. (FAST). This year we got in to the *last* slot. 2 weeks ago, Molly could barely ride a trike or bike with training wheels. She could only go a few feet, then she'd get stuck and frustrated, and get off. She just wasn't coordinated enough.

They started them out on those bikes (above) with the roller wheel. There are 8 different rollers that allow the bike to tilt more or less, depending on where they were at. By the end of the first day, somehow, Molly was riding that thing around the rink and grinning like crazy.

By Thursday, she was doing this:


Poor Courtney who was her assistant had to run with her around that parking lot in 90-94F heat. (She ran a marathon earlier this year, I am dully impressed. She needed the training for this.)

By the last day, she was riding her *own* new (PINK) bike, with no handle. And I got to run along beside her (I am so not in enough shape for that- wow, it was hot).

I am so impressed with this program, and so proud of Molly. That was HARD work.

Other random things:

Today I tagged all my WIPs in ravelry for WIP wrestling in July. I have a LOT. (I think 11 that I tagged, and a couple more that I didn't even bother) Here's one:


Yes, that's Noro Kureyon sock yarn. Yes I know it's not superwash and can felt. Yes I love it anyway. If you don't like it- fine, don't wear it, but stop telling me about it!

I've also been finishing some things:



Yarn is Hedwig (mine). Pattern is Pulsation. LOVE them. Tons.




I finished this today. Pattern is the Honeymoon Cami from Knitty, altered a lot. Yarn is Eden Mardil (bamboo). I love it too, love the color and the drape. It's splitty though, but worth it. Ironically now that it's done, the temperatures here have dropped 25 degrees. High of 68 and rainy tomorrow.

These are for my friend Tammany's baby, that is due soon (and not soon enough for her!)


Those bloomers are a pattern I'm working on. That's another thing that's keeping me busy. It's late in the test knitting phase and I hope to have it available for you very soon.

Oh and speaking of wheels



That there is my friend Peg's wheel, a Reeves. It is beautiful. She thinks I'm borrowing it. I don't think I'm going to give it back. Wheel? What wheel?

It is such a wonderful time-suck. It's also one of the only things I can do with my kids around, surprisngly enough. And so there is lots of this:





Lots of it. I am having so much fun.

Sock Summit meltdown

I have been ruminating over Sock Summit for months.

When I first found out about it I really wanted to be a vendor. REALLY wanted to. I thought, what better way to get my name out than at the ultimate sock event? I kept trying to figure out how the hell I would get my gobs of yarn out to Portland (WHY did they have it in Portland, anyway?).

After months of thinking and wishing I had to admit it wasn't really practical right now. Maybe Sock Summit II will be in the middle, or on the Eastern side of the country. Something I could drive to.

Then I pondered whether I could go. The class list and teachers were nothing short of awe inspiring. I wanted to go SO bad. I coveted it. I wished. I talked to husband about it, but he asked me how much it would cost, I estimated. I thought it might be a pipe dream. Also it's the week before school starts. I didn't think he could get the time off.

I am certain that I said (more than once) "I can't go... can I? I really want to go." To which he replied "yeah, I don't see how" and "probably not".

Today we had the following conversation on chat:

Me: registration for sock summit is going on
it's so not fair
Him: I saw.
Me: I want to go SO bad
Him: What would it take?
Me: um, well someone to watch the kids
and, like $7-800 at least
and I would have needed to register half an hour ago
Him: When is it?
Me: August 6-9
Him: Did it fill that quick?
Me: it's half sold out now, yes, it did
are you seriously telling me I should go?
because, I've been SAYING I wanted to go for like 6 fucking months
Him: I know and I haven't been saying you shouldn't...
Me: GAH!
I have no idea what that means
Him: I'm checking to see if anyone is taking time off then...
You're going nuts at home...
Maybe you need a break.


NOW he tells me! PANIC!

Nothing like trying to figure out what classes you want to take of the classes that are still open, when you haven't prepared at all, or looked at the email with instructions on how to register because you didn't think you could go, while classes are literally disappearing while you look at the screens, and when you're already having a really bad and indecisive day when you can't even decide whether to have cereal or toast for breakfast (and are so wishy washy you have neither).

My friend Janet talked me through my panic attack, and helped me figure out that I could register for whatever I could get now, even if I wasn't sure if I could go. The most I'm out is $10 a class. So, I did.

I ended up getting a class with Amy Singer (Making the Next Monkey) and Meg Swansen (Elizabeth Zimmermann's Wearable Art Stockings), and also apparently registering twice for Spindle Spinning Basics (with Abby Franquemont, who's son and my daughter are having a fiber fair romance). Just when I was giving up on getting anything, the Amy Singer class reappeared (sweet!). Same with Abby Franquemont.

So, I guess I'm going to Sock Summit!

I think.

Hear Me Roar

So, you may recall my post from a few days ago, when my Pi shawl looked like this:

I'd decided that spring was here and it needed a gentle wash and re-blocking. Things were going great until a thread broke in the border. I believe Caitie actually broke it by jabbing the blocking wires into it too hard (no, that's not why she's in trouble).

After I'd finished the shawl last year I had an entire ball left (plus a few yards, which I can't find). So I'd passed it on to my friend Janet, who brought it over to me Friday afternoon so I could perform a little emergency surgery:

I pinned it all out first, to get a good look at the damage. Good light and steady hands are required.

One tiny broken thread, on a stretched out lace border. Really it could have been worse. It's merino, and single ply, so there's a fuzz to it, and it doesn't like to run to terribly far.

These pins are color coded. The ones in the top are marking the path of yarn in a place that isn't broken. The ones in the bottom are there for me to use as a guide to re-create the stitches that unraveled. First I wove the end of the new yarn in a good ways so it couldn't come loose. Then I started following the path that it was supposed to take, over this loop, under that one.

Behold!

I am awesome. I just performed miracle knitting surgery. Dude I rock.

That is unblocked, too. It's so good now I can't even find the spot where it was.

And now my shawl is all blocked and wonderful again. I am so amazed with my own ingenuity. Really.

Funny pictures to embarass my kids

A contraption Molly has created to reach leaves in trees. She was climbing our fence to get to the neighbor's leaves (because she ran out of leaves in our yard), but after getting in trouble for that enough times, she made this. She drags it around the yard (which isn't small)



Sean making pickle faces.



And Caitie cutting the grass. With scissors.

She is 11. And in really big trouble. The reel mower misses some grass, so it's getting out of hand. I'm making her cut it by hand.

Fuck.

Wrapping up the week

So Thursday wasn't awful, although I was frazzled from the rest of the week which sucked. There was a lot of jostling of schedules and driving and kids. Rob working late and Caitie having dance class. I talked my mom into taking the girls to dance while I took Sean to knitting. Molly apparently had a freak out for no particular reason. Then when we all converged on the parking lot while the knitters were switching from Borders to Cheesecake Factory (a big improvement I might add - Asian Pear Martini's and blueberry white chocolate cheesecake is an excellent way to wash a bad week off of you), Sean slipped in the car and split his head open pretty good. It bled for a long time (as heads tend to do), and it almost needed a stitch, but the doctor said since it was in his hair it wouldn't be worth the trauma. Liquid band aid stuff to the rescue.

BUT- there was the shawl, and that was GOOD.

Pattern is Sweet Honeysuckle Wrap Yarn is Baby Twist. Pictures and words cannot fully represent the awesomeness of this stole.











Believe it or not, I followed the pattern pretty much.

I did 36 repeats instead of 40 (if I had done 40 it would have definitely required an extra ball of yarn). I didn't do a gauge swatch, since it's a stole and all, and my gauge is usually pretty average. This is quite a bit bigger than the pattern measurements call for (which is quite alright with me, it's the perfect size), and I added an extra eyelet to the border (yo, k2tog). That's it (that's practically nothing, right?)

Cutting it close

So I know it sounded like that last post was my Friday the 13th, but actually, it was just Tuesday.

The rest of the week sucked too, but not as bad as Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday the kids had half days, and it got cold again (below freezing) after a few days of light jacket weather. I hate when that happens. It is clearly just mother nature faking you out.

Also, on Wednesday I found nits in my hair. Ugh. Molly sometimes uses my towel after taking a bath, so I assume that happened sometime over the weekend. And I really wrenched my back nit-combing Molly. So now I got to do it to myself too. Fun times. Also apparently lice treatment makes my hair curly.

Someone in the comments wanted to know if anyone in Molly's class had lice. No, not that we know of. The nurse checks the whole class. Basically no one we know has had lice but us. It must be something not here though. I can't understand it.

I got basically nothing done work wise. There was massive amounts of laundry. Really massive. And even when it was warm and lovely I couldn't hang it on the clothesline because it's the heat from the dryer that kills the eggs. There was whining and screaming and normal kid behavior, but more of it than normal because they were home instead of school.

Oh, and my favorite was when one of my friends told me that it was time to give the girls short hair cuts. I pointed out that it doesn't matter how long your hair is, and she said it's easier to keep it clean when it's short. I said it doesn't matter how *clean* it is. She keeps going on about "clean". Molly's hair is clean. MY hair is clean. Sheesh. She might as well have just said me and my kids are filthy slobs. Thanks. I kept trying to give her ways out of it and she kept making it worse. I swear, it doesn't matter how often you wash your hair. You can't wash lice out of your hair.

The only thing keeping me going for 2 days was the purple shawl.

I'd been working on it (almost) monogamously for about a week, and it should have been done on Tuesday.

I saw the sample of this stole at the Alpaca with a Twist open house last fall and fell in love with it. It's a Sharon Winsauer pattern called Sweet Honeysuckle Wrap. And was lovely. Soft, and drapy and wonderful.

So I was down the the second half of the border, and damn if I wasn't going to finish that thing. It was going to be the one good thing in my day.

When I had 1 long side left I started to become deeply concerned about the amount of yarn I had left. It should have been enough, because the pattern calls for 7 skeins of yarn, and 40 repeats of the lace pattern. I stopped at 36 repeats because it was already quite long.

When I got half way through the side I looked at my ball again and got really worried. I weighed the ball. 18g. I knit 1 point, and weighed the ball again. 17g. 17 points left. I knit 2 more points. 15g. ooo this is going to be close. I started to sweat it quite a lot. Also, I had a bit of beer (the border pattern is easy). I started knitting tighter. Trying to will the yarn to go further.

12:20 AM I made it. I had this much yarn left:


Damn that was close.

I had to stay up late to block it because I was determined to wear that baby to Thursday knit night. Sean woke up and came and snuggled with me for a bit before we went back to bed. He came out as I was finishing blocking. His comment: "Wow, Mommy, that sure is a skinny blanket."

Oh come ON

Tuesday morning I drove Caitie across town for a doctor's appointment. It went fine, except that they were out of varicella so I will have to bring her back again. But things were still good. It was nice even, Rob was working the late shift this week so we got to go to the doctor without Sean.

Came home, Rob left. I did some housework, looked over my list of things to do this week, took Sean to school at 11:45. All pretty normal.

At 12:30 I get a call from school that Molly has lice. Again. For those of you who haven't been lucky enough to meet Molly, she's a very tall, very strong, usually sweet autistic 9 year old girl, who will scream bloody murder if you even think about brushing her hair. Nit combing is a nightmare. One I can't really find the words to describe. Bad. Awful.

So, I drive to school to pick her up, kind of with the vague hope that maybe the school nurse is wrong. Of course she was not. We didn't see any live lice, but a whole mess of nits in 1 spot.

I left her in the office so I could go talk to her teachers about it, because I can NOT figure out how she has them again. There must be one thing of hers that we didn't get cleaned. I don't know. Also, I am stalling, because I know I'm going to have to nit comb her by myself (Rob working the late shift and all). My stomach actually hurt from thinking about doing this to her again. If you've never had to deal with lice, the way you have to treat them is mechanical. You can get all kinds of stuff to put on your head, but it won't kill the eggs, only the live lice. You pretty much have to use this thing called a nit comb. It's a comb with very very fine teeth, so fine that it pulls your hair when you use it. So fine that if there's an egg glued to your hair, the comb will pull it off. You have to do it in tiny tiny sections and it takes forever.

While I'm standing in the hallway talking to them, Sean walks by with a teachers aid because he'd peed his pants. Oh, and the extra pair he's supposed to have in his backpack weren't there. And school doesn't have anything that will fit him.

SO, I take Molly, drive home, get pants, go back to school, and drop them off. I actually dropped off 3 pairs of pants - 1 for him to wear, 1 for him to put in his backpack, and 1 that's too small to keep in the nurse's office for back up. Then I take Molly to the store. And we have a conversation like this:

Me: Molly, is there anything you want?

Anything I could buy you that would get you to let me comb your hair?
Molly: nope

Me: Anything?

Molly: No! Don't comb me. I don't want to be combed. I want to be EX combed. NO MORE COMBING. You can't comb me.

Me: OK but we have to comb out the lice. I know that you aren't going to like it but we have to do it anyway. I *AM* going to comb you. Is there anything I can get you to make you feel better?

Molly: Nope. No combing. I don't want any combing.

Me: what if I buy you ice cream? You could have it when we're done.
(She *never* gets ice cream- this is a major bribe. Gluten free dairy free ice cream is hard to come by.)

Molly: Nope

Me: Chips? Candy? What about a movie?

Molly: Nope

Me: Video game? Toy?

Molly: Nope. You can't comb me. No combing. EX combing.

Me: *sigh*

So, I buy some skittles for her and some dark chocolate for me, and some sugar free gum for Caitie because I'm going to make her help me. I don't usually like using food for bribes, but desperate times...

I also spent this whole time trying to call Rob so the name of the stuff that was our other option (there are several kinds of lice treatment, and the most common one is also the one that is the most toxic and least likely to work, but I can't remember which the other ones are- I only remember that there were 2 that were ok, and we used one of them before). He's not answering his phone. *sigh*

I'm sure that none of the stuff at the first store is the stuff we want, so we leave and go to store number 2, which has nothing. Store number 3 has stuff I *think* is the other stuff we almost used but didn't the last time. They definitely don't have the stuff we used before. All through stores 2 and 3 Molly gets more and more pissed about the whole business and is now just yelling about EX combing. (Everything is EX something around here). Call Rob again. Nothing. So I buy it, and a giant squishy hairy ball thing that Molly likes, drag her to the car and race home so I can beat the bus.

Molly wants to watch Wall-E. We can't find it. It's no where in the house, I have no idea. We settle for Tinkerbell. I put the lice stuff in her hair, which she cries about, but not that bad really. It says wait 10 minutes. I waited 20. I got all the sheets and pillows and stuffed animals and hats and start the mountain of laundry. Sean peed his pants AGAIN. I got the Time Timer and set it for 15 minutes. Gave Caitie the bag of Skittles, with instructions to give Molly 3 every time the timer goes off. I work on Molly's hair. It takes 3 hours, with short breaks every 15 minutes. In between she screams and I comb her hair. At some point I ate a hot pocket because I hadn't gotten lunch yet. 45 minutes into it Tinkerbell stops working. We take it out, clean it, put it back, still stuck. We finally had to skip a big portion of the movie. It seemed like the last straw for Molly. Not ONLY is all this horrible combing going on, but now the movie is broken. Hysteria ensues. By the end I was holding her with my legs, and my back is all screwed up.

I have to just say here that Caitie was fantastic that day. She had a school project and she worked on it in between running in to hand me things or feed Molly Skittles, and didn't complain once. She helped get Sean dinner, washed dishes, helped me strip the beds and gather hair supplies for decontamination, and was generally helpful and awesome. So much so that I was starting to wonder who she was.

So, I had just enough time to wash the crap out of Molly's hair, put it into a pony tail, get her dressed, change MY clothes, and run over to my sister's house to drop Sean and Molly off so we can go to the middle school open house (Gah- I am not ready to be the mother of a middle schooler). I practically threw them out of the car. Turning a corner on the way out of their neighborhood I hit something. I really couldn't even figure out what the hell it was but it made a really loud noise. I look behind me, can't see anything. Look at my right side mirror, it's folded up, smashed, and dangling by a wire. Great. I look back and apparently I hit the door of a grey (invisible) mailbox, which was open and sticking straight out. The mailbox was completely fine. Mirror is screwed.

Middle school open house seemed to go ok. Nothing terrible went wrong. I made it back in a reasonable time. Brother in law had made them dinner so I let them eat. Sean said he wasn't hungry. Oh, and he peed his pants again while we were gone. (Seriously?! He's 6. This is pretty ridiculous.)

Molly's favorite thing to do at their house is throw stuff down the laundry chute. Pretty much just anything. Down the chute. I was trying to wrangle all our stuff together, and every time I turn around Molly is putting something down the chute again. I finally got them to go outside, and Molly fell in the driveway, ripped her pants, and cut her knee and was bleeding and crying. This is when I start to think someone is actually out to get me. We get it cleaned up, put a band aid on it, and as I'm driving away at 10 past bed time, Sean says "I'm hungry". gah! Srsly? No.

We get home and I start putting people to bed. There's a massive amount of stuff to do, house is seriously trashed. I let the sink water out from earlier, and all of the sudden I'm standing in a puddle of water. The joint under the sink came apart. Oh come ON. WTF world? I don't even HAVE any clean towels left in the house at this point. Everything under the sink is wet. I had to clean it up with clothes and put them back in the laundry pile, which is threatening to block the path from my kitchen to the bedrooms.

Last thing I did was have a very big drink and go put the needles back in that had came out of the shawl I was knitting. Srsly.

I blame daylight savings time.