Bird and Little Bird

Hurrication Knitting.

Being housebound for much of the weekend left us all with an ample supply of both time and good excuses to work on various little projects indoors.  For my part, I did a bit more of the baby knitting.  This is the thing about knitting for babies: they are very small, so it is very fast.  I do like a project that I can start and finish quickly. In fact, these days, I kind of require it.

The pattern is from this book, and I found it to be well-written and easy to follow.  I used Quince & Co. Lark yarn in Snap Pea, and liked working with it well enough that I ordered some Osprey to knit up the sweater that Mariam swears she will wear if I make it for her. 

Oh! And it seems that O-Wool (another yarn company that I really like) is now selling their yarns online through their website.  Apparently it doesn't take all that much to make me happy.

Library Monday: Revisiting an Old Favorite on a Stormy Day.

 

So, Irene has come and gone.  Thanks to all of you who emailed or left comments letting me know that you were thinking of us and our safety during the storm.  Things were really fine for us here at the house during the storm yesterday.  We didn't really lose power for any extended period of time, and other than a handful of tree branches that came down, damage outside of the house was minimal.  However, it looks like it is the aftermath of the storm that will be the biggest problem here in Vermont.

It seems that we've lost our community garden plot to flooding.  The garden itself is near a river, and the majority of rivers here in Vermont have crossed over their banks and spread into the streets and neighborhoods surrounding them.  I suppose there is some chance that we might be able to salvage a few plants or a bit of produce, but considering the fact that Annie 2.0 reports actual small rapids running in the road that leads to the garden, I suspect the odds aren't that good.  Despite my frustration, I'm trying to maintain perspective on the whole situation.  Many local farms have been completely flooded, and nearby towns no longer have their Main Streets.  I'll miss my edamame harvest, but at least I'm safe with my livelihood intact. 

We were homebound during the storm yesterday, and both Mariam and I kept thinking of the beginning of A.A. Milne's story Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water from Winnie the Pooh. You know the one?  It starts like this:

It rained and it rained and it rained.  Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old- three, was it, or four? - never had he seen so much rain.

 

The quoting of Winnie the Pooh stories is a frequent occasion at our house; Mariam has most of them memorized word for word and likes to put a British accent on here and there when reciting dialogue from the stories.  Whenever she does her rendition of Rabbit or a great impression of Piglet, I'm reminded of how very, very much I like these stories.  I feel like it is a great tragedy of American culture that they have become totally co-opted by the cartoon versions of themselves.  The original Winnie the Pooh books are brilliantly written and are full of adventure and humor.  If you've never read the original stories, I cannot emphasize enough how very much you are missing.  You should get a copy yesterday.

To read a bit more about our favorite audio versions of these very beloved books, you can revisit this post that I wrote a good long time ago.  It's all still true.

Scenes from a Friday.

There were plenty of things that we were supposed to do today.  But mostly, we didn't do them.  Instead we listened to stories and made beads out of clay.

 

There was muffin baking, block tower building, and a little bit of knitting.

 

A very sweet and wholly unexpected surprise arrived in the mail.  Thanks, Paloma!

 

And we tried to enjoy every bit of the sunshine coming in through the windows.  Despite being a few hours west of the Atlantic, it looks as though we are in for quite a storm come Sunday afternoon!

 

My Shadow.

 

When he isn't busy stealing bags of cereal from on top of the fridge, climbing the window screens, unrolling all the toilet paper in the bathroom, opening kitchen cupboards with his paws, racing up and down the hallway at maximum cat speed (at three in the morning), ambushing unsuspecting family members or taking a succession of epic naps, he follows me everywhere I go.  I suspect that he thinks this token of affection goes a long way towards making the rest of the ridiculousness seem tolerable.

He is, of course, right.

On Knitting and Optimism.

I am pleased to report that after nearly two months of very frequent and sustained knitting, my first baby project is officially finished.  And, it is not a disaster, a fact which pleases me to no end.  I used the Forever Baby Blanket pattern from The Purl Bee and I would definitely recommend it.  It is an easy pattern that still manages to produce a blanket with with a nice loft that looks fancier than it probably is. 

I do have to admit that this project didn't go all that brilliantly in the beginning.  For whatever reason (read: short attention span), I struggled a bit with getting the hang of the pattern and kept finding myself off by a stitch or two.  When I finally realized that there was a visual pattern that I could use to keep myself on track when my mind wandered away from counting, things started to go quite a bit better and the frogging became much, much less frequent. 

The knitting of this blanket, above all else, was really an act of faith on my part.  At the time that I began it, in early July, I was still feeling a lot of anxiety about the possibility of losing another pregnancy, despite the fact that I was well into the second trimester and was supposed to be letting go of some of those feelings. When I bought the yarn for this blanket, there was a part of me that felt like I was taking a huge emotional risk.  It honestly felt dangerous in some small way.  But also necessary.  In casting on, I was telling myself for the first time that it was okay to start imagining us as a family of four.  We might really and actually get to have this baby. 

 

And how things have changed since then! I finished the blanket the other evening just as Dan brought up the subject of baby names for the first time.  A tiny little wardrobe of hand-me-downs and gifted baby clothes is starting to make its place in our bedroom closet.  I cast on this morning for a tiny little sweater for our little guy, and it would seem that indeed, the three of us are actively getting ready to become four. 

So, here is the thing that I've learned about optimism: it feels really good.

 

The Week That Was.

This week:

- We dug up the first of our potatoes from the community garden plot.  And had them for dinner.

- I realized that despite my distinct preference for toys made of natural materials, I still think that Playmobil rocks.  Mariam will play with those goofy little unicorns for hours and that is a beautiful thing.

- Speaking of plastic toys, Mariam admitted that one of her concerns regarding the arrival of a baby brother is that it signals an inevitable takeover of the house by Star Wars Lego sets.  Upon reflection, I realized that this is one of the bits I'm really looking forward to.

- We discovered this very cool biodiversity card game via a post from the equally cool gals over at BIG Kids Magazine.

- I came this close to finishing my first baby knitting project.

- Okay, so I didn't actually see these pictures for the first time this week, but I did have to go back and look at them again, because they are absolutely stunning.  I suspect that you'll agree.

One at a Time.

I mentioned the other day that I had finally gotten around to cutting out the pieces for the quilt that I've been planning to make for about the last year.  Afraid that I might lose momentum on the project (again), I decided that I should probably give myself some sort of parameters for the sewing bit.  My agreement with myself was that I would piece one row a day, meaning that I could have the rows all done and ready to arrange and stitch together in a little under a month. 

It's is probably best to just admit that I have a really hard time starting things.  I have a project que a thousand miles long, and this is unlikely to change unless I undergo a radical personality transformation sometime soon.  I'll let you know.  Anyway, this quilt has been at the top of my list for such a longtime, and it started to seem like the longer it sat there, the more difficult it was to just get on with it already.  I am therefore pleased to report that the "row a day" commitment is going swimmingly.  In fact, now that I've removed the pressure to finish the project quickly that I usually apply to myself, I find that I'm having a pretty good time piecing the rows and instead of the five I planned on having done at this point in the week, I've done eleven. 

Of course, there may be another limiting factor in this situation: in yet another effort to demonstrate that pregnancy is filled with nothing but joy and wonder, I can really only sit down for a few minutes at a time before my ankles totally swell up.  Not that you needed to know that.

The Days of Late Summer.

 

Day camp and swimming lessons are over for now, and the summer days that are left are mostly without too much planned activity or structure.  I was a little nervous about this, because I think Mariam and I both do better with a little bit more of a plan, but after a few weeks of being so very occupied with the business of summer vacation, some downtime turns out to be nice.  I finally cut out the pieces for the quilt I've been threatening to make for approximately forever.  It's going to be a big one, so the cutting alone took about two whole days, but getting it done feels really good.

 

 

Mariam has spent parts of the last three days turning this cardboard box first into a boat, and then with the help of a friend, into an airplane. 

 

And, while I was doing all that fabric cutting, my little engineer was hard at work making a bridge out of jellybeans and toothpicks.  There were general complaints that the fruit-sweetened jellybeans from the natural foods section are clearly inferior to gumdrops for this purpose, but I think that everyone managed okay.

 

And, I finally convinced Mariam to do this puzzle, which we've had for over a year but have never done because she insisted that it would be too hard. 

We did complete it, but honestly, it was really hard!

Library Monday: The Blue Hill Meadows.

I was getting down our copy of The Blue Hill Meadows by Cynthia Rylant this morning, thinking I might write a review of it for Library Monday, when Mariam came along.  "That," she said, "is a really good book." And just like that, she took it out of my hands and went under her playstand canopy with a pillow and settled down to read.  I figured that this probably indicated that it was a solid choice for sharing with you all.

The Blue Hill Meadows is the story of the Meadows family, and a year in their lives in the rolling Virginia hills.  Each chapter follows one season in the lives of the Meadows family, chronicling the ordinary events that make life feel extraordinary.  Life is made up of new puppies, fishing trips, good neighbors, snowfall, and the search for a perfect gift for a special person.  All the things that life really is full of, each worth being appreciated in its own way.

The Blue Hill Meadows is yet another of the books by Cynthia Rylant that are heartwarming, gentle and sweet, without feeling overwrought or sappy.  Rylant has a gift for writing in a way that feels so comfortable and reassuring to children, without sacrificing the elements of a well-written story.  Her writing always feels as though she has carefully considered the placement of each word upon the page, the result being a story that gives a sense of being crafted, as much as written.

Of course, it is now mid-morning, we need to be at violin lessons in an hour and Mariam hasn't had breakfast and won't get up off the floor until she has read The Blue Hill Meadows from front to back. A good book indeed.

Thinking in Color.

 

One of the first things I did once I knew that we were having a boy this winter was to get on the phone with my mom to enlist her in helping me make stuff for the little guy.  I think it might be fair to say that in our relationship I am the idea girl, and my mom is the one who actually makes things happen.  For example, I've been known to piece a quilt top and then send it to my mom to quilt and bind it.  Because she is awesome, she tends to not complain about this tendency of mine. 

Anyway, ever since seeing Alicia's beautiful crewelwork sampler, I knew that it would be the perfect project for me to convince my mom to do.  I sent her a link to the pattern, and she instantly said that she would do it, but then we quickly ran into a little bit of a problem. Choosing colors.  I wanted colors that were "boyish" but also soft, and I went through the crewel yarn sections on various websites making a list of colors that I thought would work. I emailed my list to my mom, who looked them up and then described what they looked like on her monitor.  Not at all the same.  And, when she went to the local yarn shop to check out the colors in person, they looked completely different from what they looked like on either of our monitors.  So, she adjusted the list of choices to what made sense from my descriptions of what I was hoping for, and then sent me a scrap of the base fabric with little pieces of the crewel yarn woven through it so that I could see where we were at.  Of course, all this is to say that I should probably have just let her pick all the colors to start with.  

 

 

And, since I appear to really enjoy obsessing about projects for long periods of time before actually beginning them (or allowing my mother to), I also ordered a yarn card from Quince and Co.  I had let Mariam pick some yarn from their website a couple of weeks back to make a couple of little things for the baby.  You know, a further attempt to lessen her shock at the idea of her long awaited sibling being a boy.  We were both happy with the colors when the yarn arrived, but just as with the crewel yarn, the colors definitely looked a bit different than expected.  I am totally enamored with all things Quince and Co. right now, and figured that since I will likely be ordering more yarn from there in the future, the yarn card was probably a wise investment.  It's good to know what you're getting yourself into, I think. 

 

Anyway, what I mean to say is this:

1. Thanks, Mom.

2. I have a lot of knitting to do.