Wordless Wednesday: Play-Dough Creations

With no help from us, Will created "ice cream sundaes" with his playdough.  Right down to a spoon to scoop them up.  Sounds like this kid is going to enjoy cooking as much as Mommy and Daddy!

Leapin' Lizards!

It's February 29th....that magical day that only comes around every four years.  When I was a kid I thought that there was something magical about it, and I wish I still believed that.  I thought that anyone born on this day was kind of screwed, only getting a birthday ever four years....I mean, how messed up is that?  From a kid's point of view anyway, as an adult it seems to be kind of cool.  A visit from the Wrinkle Fairy every four years.  :)

Happy Leap Day to all.....hope someone out there is doing something more awesome than me:  spending it behind a desk.  But hey....Wednesday's Knitting Night!  I look forward to it all week.

No new and exciting projects to talk about, I've mostly done charity knitting.  I've got fifteen pairs of mittens done since 1/1/12, and a whole bunch of baby hats too.  Something big is blooming on the horizon though, but I'm not sure what the next "big" project is.  Annndddd.....I've started my shopping list for the tent sale at Webs in May.  Yes, I am well aware that it's 2.5 months away, a girl's gotta have a plan!  (and a budget.)

Just in Time

The Baby Blanket is finished!

And with no time to spare....I got a text from the Mom-to-Be that she was being induced due to complications soon afterwards.  Miss M. made her debut last night and I woke up to text messages from a proud Grandmother!  She's such a doll, and I can't wait to meet her.  I don't know when I will get down to Florida again to see her and Mom, but I can't wait!

Sundays are made for.....

Baby's Baptism.  Our niece was baptised this morning, and she was sooooo beautiful in her christening gown!  Afterwards we headed to a family get-together which involved good food and catching up with old friends.

They're also for tackling that pesky weekend to-do list:  As soon as the caffeine from the afternoon coffee kicks in there's a lot more laundry to fold and whatever else I put on that list.  Oh yeah, corralling the toys.  Parents out there:  you know what I'm talking about.  After changing the nursery back to an office (complete with a new light thanks to Hubby yesterday!)  we also got a new TV stand and bookcase thing from Ikea for organizing the toys.  Our family room looks like two separate spaces right now:  one is fabulously organized, the other looks like a hurricane passed through.  Time to do some weeding out and donating!

Lastly, they're for racing the clock.  My friend Heather is due any day now with her first child, Baby M.  (In case you're new here, she is the one that I surprised in Florida last month!)  I still wanted to knit her one more thing, and I didn't have enough time to pull it off before my trip.  It's a carseat baby blanket, my go-to item for all moms.  I love this pattern, it's a short baby blanket with a hole (on purpose!) in the middle for a carseat belt buckle.  That way, the blanket stays on Baby, keeping him (or her) warm and snug.  The pattern is actually a worksheet, you fill out the numbers based on a swatch.  I hate swatching, I avoid it whenever possible and just wing it.  But with some things, like a sweater, it's a necessary evil.  Nobody wants to put in the time knitting a sweater and find out it doesn't fit because you didn't take the time to make a freakin' swatch.  So sweaters, and this baby blanket, are the only things that I swatch first.  In this case, no swatch=no pattern.

My work-in-progress.

 I have made this blanket several times before, and it's always well-received.  However, I usually use a bigger needle size, so this one is taking  for-ev-er!  So I am racing the clock, as Baby M is "due" this week. Luckily we all know that a due date is a guesstimate, and not an exact date.  So I don't know if I have til tomorrow, or two weeks from now.  I'll just keep knitting.

Happy Weekend to you and yours!

Tease, Tease

Can I just say how much I love my new job?  I've interviewed about 25 people to fill the 30 spots in the new apartment building.  I'm making 2-3 trips a week up there to assign mailbox numbers to apartments, choose one of the two offices to be "my" office, talk to the foreman about washers and dryers, and to answer many questions about the building.  (How's the rent figured again?  Are you going to enforce the no-smoking policy?  And the biggest WHEN can I MOVE in????")   The emails are coming full-force:  questions about funding, assigning phone lines, establishing emergency contacts, ordering a dumpster.  All the little details are swirling around me, and many are looking to ME to make the decisions.  It feels great.  

  Every time I drive up to the new building, I walk in and sigh with delight. After the past four years, I feel like I've won some sort of lottery.  Clean!  Bright!  A real office!  Walk the halls and it's cheery paint colors, new carpets, and a hair salon in the building.  (for the tenants, not for me.)  There's a sundeck, for Pete's sake, a SUNDECK on the second floor!

Yet all of this is going on while I'm still working my "old" job.  For every time I drive up to the new site, it's a four-mile drive back to the old one.  And those four miles away lead into a completely different universe.  Dealing with difficult-to-fill vacancies.  Tenants who don't care about their homes, their neighbors or heck, even themselves.  Lots of things, some of which are not worthy of writing about.  (I hate wasting my thinking time on them, let alone waste space on my blog!)  The stress level is reaching an all-time high.....bringing work home on the weekends and having my mind on my work when it should be on other things.  I'll be playing with the boys, and my mind will wander back to my desk.  It never seems to fully vacate.

After two years of knowing that this place would exist and now it's here....it still feels like a dream and that I'm never going to get there, I'm going to get woken up instead and realize that I'm going to be stuck managing the old place forever.  I just have to keep telling myself, it's coming.  It is coming.  I've seen it with my own eyes.  An office with built-in cabinets and a long counter against one wall, a glass door with my company's name on it.  A keybox that *I* chose the location for.  I'm almost there, I'm almost there, I'm almost there.  Hold on, just a little bit longer.  

Wordless Wednesday: Those Little Cherubs

Sh*t Knitters Say

Leave it to the folks at Webs to take on the Sh*t People Say videos and make one for knitters....I'm not guilty of ANY of these things at all.  AT.  ALL.  Especially not the one about picking random skeins of yarn in colors that I like and wondering what they could aspire to be.  Or taking too many pictures.  OR looking at things that people are wearing in public and either wondering if they knit it or if *I* could knit it.  Ok you got me....I'm everything in this video.  Except the one where she's bringing home the yarn and hiding it.  I just bring it home without shame, and let the ribbing begin.  And then...I begin the ribbing!  :)

Thanks Webs, loved it!

Music to My Ears.

It's a busy Saturday, with errands, cleaning and the usual running around.  For the first time in over...oh I don't know how long....we all slept through the night! So that made all the running around a lot easier, though my sleep debt is still pretty high so I feel groggy.

Will was a lucky kid today, he got to go out on errands and spend time alone with first Dad, and then Mom today!  Daddy took him to BJ's for some staples, and he came home really excited.  "Mommy!  Did you know that you can eat a little bit of EVERYTHING in BJ's before you buy it?  I had a little cheeseburger, and some hot dogs with mustard.  And guess what?  I like mustard now!"  Ah.....so he's been introduced to the food samples.  And he likes mustard.....he is such a picky eater that if BJ's food samples got him to try something new, then I'm pretty stoked about it.

Later on, Will and I went to the library.  I had a bagful of overdue books, and a couple books on hold.  We spent about half an hour browsing books in the children's room, and he sat on the floor "reading" a book about the dentist.  We took another big bag of books home, including two DVD's of The Wiggles.  As we were walking out the door to the parking lot he said with a big smile and a satisfied sigh "Mom?  I LOVE the library.  Everything about it.  I love the books, the movies, the librarians.  Well, maybe not the parking.  But everything else.  I could just stay here all day!

Music to my ears.  I'm so glad to be raising a kid that loves the library as much as I do!

Cookies for Valentines

#48:  Participate in a Cookie Exchange


My friend Rochelle is hosting a Valentine Cookie Exchange tomorrow night.  I LOVE this idea, because I've heard of Christmas cookie swaps but not a Valentine's Day one.  The holidays are pretty hectic, so this is a good time of year to do this!  I'm "cheating" by bringing cookies from this great bakery in the city.  The invite said baked or bakery, so I'm not breaking the rules.  Things have been hectic around here for the past week with illness and work, so that S'mores Cookie recipe that I found on Pinterest is going to have to wait.  Mmmm.....cookies!
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UPDATE:  Thou speaketh too soon.  Been up since around 4:30am with a five year old with the stomach bug.  Hubby was the unlucky one who got to stay home with both kids, 'cause the daycare's got it too.  Caregiver AND other kids.  Apparently it's all the rage, everyone's doing it!  I don't dare say something stupid like "Thank goodness the 2-year old was spared!"  Blerg.  (But at least I have the cookie platter from the bakery.  It's the little things that make the sucky things suck a little less.)

"Meet Virginia"

After about a month of knitting, the Virginia Shawl is complete!  I actually finished the knitting of it about a month ago and haven't found the time to block it until now.  It definitely needed to be blocked, to show off the rows of lace edging.   FYI:  Spreading out a shawl and pinning it to foam boards with two children running circles around you is a daunting task!

It's a bit bigger than I expected, but I am absolutely in love with it.  The Dream in Color Smooshy yarn was perfect in this project, and from my stash.  

Later on, I'll make this again for my mother, also a "Virginia" (as her middle name.)  Hers will be in natural and tan variegated sock yarn that she chose from HER stash.  (hooray for stashbusting!)  

The Best Toys

At this stage, the best toys aren't even "toys" at all.  The best toys are commonplace things, like laundry baskets or boxes.  These two boys of mine adore boxes!  And with the furniture that we ordered from Ikea, there was certainly a lot of cardboard.  While I was in Florida, Brian sent me pictures of the boys sitting in their cardboard boxes (which Will lovingly calls a "cabinet") with their blankets, and markers.  Later on the boxes became "planes" so they could fly down to visit Mommy in Florida.  The possibilities are endless.  So while it's driving me a little batty to have ample amounts of cardboard around the house, the creativity that's going around is really great.

We're loving our "new" office and family room.  So much has changed in this house in the past couple of weeks, with moving everything into the office, setting up the family room, etc.  Brian and I agree that the house feels cozier and there's definitely more space in the family room to move around.  There's still some work to be done:  the walls in the office are bare and need some decoration, we're going to get some baskets for the storage unit in the family room and we're going to do away with the toybox.  However so far, we're quite happy with the results.