Kiss My Knits!

The moment every mother who knits enjoys the most. Em picked these to wear tonight. My child voluntarily chose to wear something I knitted for her.

“I’m going to wear these on Christmas Eve AND on Christmas Day!”

Yes. Totally worth the effort.

Edited to add: It’s the next day, and she’s had the socks on since last night. She’s just gone in to take her bath and folded her socks neatly and put them on her bed. “I’m going to wear my socks again after I take my bath!” I think I may have created a smelly-footed monster.

Em has weak enamel on her teeth. The dentist says it’s nothing we’re doing, it’s just the way it is. She thinks it probably happened in the last bit before she was born or in the first few months after she was born. Sometimes antibiotics in early infancy can have that effect, and Em did have some ear infections.

She doesn’t drink soft drinks or juice, just water. She does eat gummi-type candy sometimes. She brushes after every single thing she eats. She doesn’t like to eat lunch at school, and I wonder sometimes if that’s because she knows she can’t brush right afterward. She HATES going to the dentist. She knows she has to. She tries to be a good patient, but when she has to get fillings, she is just awful. It’s not her fault, she’s just so anxious and scared that she can’t help herself.

So tomorrow, we’re going to the dentist, and she has to get two fillings. One of them is a re-do of one that was previously done, perhaps because the filling contracted a little and more decay crept in. They’re going to sedate her. I’ve explained all about what’s going to happen, and while she does have questions (“what if I wake up while they’re doing my fillings?”) she seems fine with it.

I am beyond nervous about this. However, for Em’s sake, I am playing it very cool, as if this kind of thing happens all the time and is no big deal. The appointment is in the morning, and they say she’ll be good as new right around 2pm, so I’m letting her lay out of school tomorrow. I’ve got a new Christmas video for her and a sticker book so she’ll have something quiet to do while she’s recovering. My husband is coming with us so we’ll have someone to drive while I stay with her in the back just in case she’s ill on the way home.

The bright spot is that tomorrow afternoon we’ll be getting our Christmas tree. At least that’ll be something good to happen.

Pardon me, I have to go “tell a silly Red Riding Hood story with things that didn’t happen in the real Red Riding Hood story.” Parenthood, in all its glory.

FO: Holly Jolly socks
Yarn: Knitpicks Bare DK weight superwash merino handdyed by me
Pattern: Made up
Needles: US3/3.25mm
Gauge: 6.5 sts=1″


Notes:

Dyeing this yarn was a test run for my Yarnomatic ™. It’s basically a bunch of lengths of PVC pipe which I can combine in different ways, Tinkertoy style, to drape the yarn around in various configurations. This was one gigantic hank, longer than I am tall, acid dyed using cold pour and then steamed on the stovetop. I’m pleased with how this turned out. The color repeats are about 3 yards long for the red and a bit longer for the green. It striped up just as festively as I hoped. So festive, in fact, that it’s tough to get a good shot of the finished sock that doesn’t blow out the red and make the green look blue. The “in progress” one probably has the most accurate color.


This was knit toe-up starting with 20 stitches and increasing to 44. The heel was an afterthought heel, great for preserving the pattern in self-striping yarn. These took 160 yards. The ball band calls for a size 5 needle but I’m a loose knitter. I think I could have gotten away with knitting them on a 4, but I wanted them to be sturdy.

My daughter is enthralled with Christmas, so my father suggested this would make something nice for her. She agreed. The bad news is that she has big feet for a kid, at 9 inches long and 8.5 inches around. The good news is that she likes ankle socks. These are very thick and I think they’ll be good for sleeping and lazing around the house.

I’m thinking over what else I might like to do with 84 yards of Holly Jolly yarn.

I have no idea what this means.

Emily wanted to know what the planetary symbols are, so that she could more easily identify the glow-in-the-dark planets on her ceiling. She decided not to have them orbit the sun anymore, but instead to move across her ceiling in a rough line as if she were looking up at them at night. Since she can’t rely on position to identify them now, she wanted to use the symbols which are painted on their southern poles.

I knew some but not all (I always screw up Jupiter and Saturn), and she wanted me to write them all down so we pulled up NASA’s page listing the symbols.

She looked at the page for a while and clicked around the “kid stuff” sections.

Her: N-A-S-A. What’s what?
Me: NASA? It’s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA. It’s where the American astronauts work.
Her: Really?
Me: Yeah! NASA! There’s a base in Florida, and one in Texas. The astronauts and all the people who help the space shuttle go up work there.
Her: … REALLY??

Now I’m wondering if she thought astronauts were imaginary, like fairies and mermaids. I mean, she learned about the moon landing in school, and she can reel off the names of the most famous astronauts, and she tells us all the time she wants to be the first person to walk on the sun (ouch!). I even did a Brownie program involving space that used a handout on female astronauts. She should realize that yes, astronauts are out there. But her level of incredulity makes me wonder. Maybe she thought it was a “long time ago” thing, or maybe she didn’t realize there was a whole organization devoted to these things. Or maybe, way in the back of her mind, it really was in the same category as wizards and magic wands.

Yes, Virginia, there is an astronaut.

Em skips into the room.

Em: “Did you know that I have some cupcakes?”
Me: “You do?”
Em: “Yes. And they don’t have any cupcakes in China, so I’m giving them my cupcakes.”

Em skips out of the room.

I think I need to pick up a couple of cupcakes for Thanksgiving.

246 yards DK weight superwash wool, crockpot dyed with acid dyes. Base was blue left over from previous dye session. It was more kool-aid blue than I would have liked, so I softened it up. Pink was added to one side after blue had exhausted, then lilac added to other side after pink had exhausted.

Knitpicks ties its skeins tighter than I do, which resulted in the white around the ties where the dye didn’t penetrate. Note to self: retie Knitpicks yarn before dyeing.

That’s it for the hand dyes for now. I’ve still got a couple of skeins to do, but the holidays are upon us.

As for the Christmas yarn, my father suggested it would make something nice for Emily.

Me: “Grandpa thinks this would make something nice for you, like some Christmas socks.”
Mr. Tvini: “Do you think that should happen?”
Em: “Oh, yes!”

So there you have it. I’ll be casting on for Christmas socks for Em either tonight or tomorrow. Lest anybody think that it’ll mean less knitting for me, her feet are 9 inches long and 8.5 inches around. This means that she and her grandmother can share shoes. My girl’s a Sasquatch!

Today we’re off to the toy store for one more doll before the December toy drought begins. This is the one she’s picked out. She’s very excited by this and has actually drawn a “welcome” sign for the new doll which she has put on her bedroom door. We don’t buy new toys before the holidays, so by the time Christmas arrives, she’s buzzing around the tree like a hummingbird. Mwahahahaha…

Girl Scouts today was an unmitigated disaster that ended in us leaving after 20 minutes and me lecturing Emily that she would have been able to do the activity (making a kaleidoscope) if she’d paid better attention and listened. This was true, mind you, but I shouldn’t have been saying these things while I was so upset. At least I didn’t yell. In hindsight, if she didn’t want to do the activity, I should have pulled her aside again (I’d pulled her aside twice in the 20 minutes we were there) to remind her not to be abrupt when rejecting the other girls’ help and not to continually complain that she didn’t want to do the activity. Then we could have just watched the other girls, or gone to another area while they finished up that activity, then seen if she was ready to join in the next one. (I should add here that she told me as we were leaving that she didn’t want to do the activity because she didn’t know how to do it.)

I could have handled the whole situation better. I shouldn’t have been so quick to take us home. It’s just frustrating, because she consistently says she wants to be a girl scout and go to meetings, and yet sometimes she also says that she doesn’t want to go. However when I ask if she wants to stop going or really not go, she says no. She wants to do it, but it’s just too much for her sometimes.

But while I know that she’s got issues, she really COULD have looked in the general direction of the girl telling them what to do, or watched the hands of another girl, or accepted their offered help, or tried harder to listen, or remembered to say “I don’t understand.” Em gives up easily. I can’t let it slide every time just because she’s different – it’s not fair to her in the long run. It’s a lot harder to help her if she won’t help herself. And yet, she’s only nine, and I wasn’t the boldest child either. I can tell you how effective “just suck it up” would have been with me (not that I said that or anything even close). It’s just tough to know where the balance is.

If this troop did more guided activities, like singing or playing structured games, it would be better for Em, yet I don’t think there’s another troop with room for her. Anyway, now I’m upset and sad and frustrated and angry, and I know Em knows it.

I’m taking five while she plays “pretend girl scouts” with her dolls. I’m taking this time to reflect on how I could have done things differently today. I think I’ll handle things better next time, and I think Em will too.

I have to go out briefly this evening, and I’m bringing home mini-marshmallows for hot cocoa. Sipping hot cocoa with marshmallows and bashing kobolds while playing D&D tonight sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

I just walked in the door from the grocery store to hear my daughter singing “Oops… I Did It Again” by Britney Spears. Mr. Tvini asked her where she heard it, and she said it was from Barbie. Sure enough, it’s on Mattel’s Barbie website.

You know what I didn’t need to hear my daughter doing at age 9? Singing “I’m not that innocent!”

I may have to declare a fatwa on Barbie. Although Em’s attention span is pretty short, she’s already moving on to “What I Like About You.” The attraction seems to be that they have the lyrics printed up, karaoke style. She really, really like to see lyrics, and to read closed captioning with her movies. Helps her keep up. She’s faithfully transcribing the lyrics from computer onto a sheet of paper.

In other news, there’s a new neighborhood cat that keeps coming around the house, much to our indoor cat’s fascination. At right: Nerys and the night visitor. It looks just like her, except it’s gray. In the low light, it’s tough to tell a difference. “Kill us both, Spock!”

Finger update: swollen and gross. Still tough to type around. I’m not knitting any Jayne hats today, because even if I’m the only one who knows that the yarn would be rubbing up against huge poison ivy blisters, I have too much respect for my Jayne customers to do that to them. Ew. Ew ew ew.

Mr. Tvini works on the tech side in the newspaper business, so he’ll be leaving for work soon so he can spend the evening up there in case anything goes kerflooey. I think at this point, he doesn’t care who wins, as long as it’s a landslide and he can come home early and get to sleep. I’m in agreement, except that I’m a little more definite on whom I want to win. Gobama!

Okay, time to stop agitating my finger. Now there’s a statement you don’t hear every day. Later!

First off, check out the article to the left. Click through to the big size. It’s a 1943 Better Homes and Gardens article about low-cost ration-friendly things you can do for Halloween. I pity the poor child who got a head of cabbage made up to look like a clown. It’s just sad.

Second, who has the coolest online buds in the world? Me! Pictured at right is the surprise package that sent! Spoooooky soap! In addition to looking cute, these smell really great. Em was very excited to get mail, and since we skipped her bath last night on account of Halloween, you can be sure these will be used tonight. In fact, I know I will have to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t use them all. Thank you so much, ! This was so thoughtful and sweet!

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to “help” my daughter eat her candy. It’s my motherly duty!