Kiss My Knits!

Before: This is the pic from yesterday. The yarn is the DK weight of Knitpicks’ “Bare” 100% superwash merino wool, acid dyed in the crockpot, primary color blue plus a little violet. The dye uptake wasn’t as thorough as I’d like, perhaps due to late addition of the blue, but more likely due to inadequate pre-soaking of the yarn. I decided to overdye the skein in darker tones.


After: What in blue blazes? This is the same blue yarn overdyed in the crockpot with a mixture of purple, violet-blue, and black. Unfortunately, my black had been mixed long ago and the red/orange elements had begun to separate. I didn’t realize this until I had upended the remainder of the bottle into the crockpot and started it going. Rinsing the bottle out released a flood of orange precipitate. Too late now! I hadn’t mixed any vinegar into the dye, but I still let it sit a lot longer than it should have. Let this be a lesson not to be a miser by trying to store mixed dyes beyond their natural shelf life.

Well, I learned something and it’s an interesting effect I would not otherwise have gotten, sooo… success? Sure. Why not.

Today’s the first day of the new school year. Em was at the door and raring to go at 6:30 this morning, but I kind of stalled her until 7am (the earliest the school doors open). At that point, we were in the yard and she started to go around the house, saying she wanted to walk to school. Oops! If I’d known that in advance, I wouldn’t have stalled so much. We wound up driving, but we’ll walk together tomorrow if the weather permits. We did walk up to the school’s open house last week, so she knows what she’s getting into.

Coincidentally, I grew up in this house and went to Em’s same school, starting there at the same age she is now. I walked to school myself. I think it’ll be a great way to start the day.

Today I’ve run the greenway – I’m jumping on my first free morning – and come home and watered the plants and done a little wii fit stuff. My weight was up a little the last couple of days as I madly sucked down water bottles to free up enough for dyeing. Heh. It’s back down now.

Later I’ll be packing up more kits and hats, as well as a ball of stash yarn which someone bought. I need to post more for sale. Tonight, hopefully, I’ll be binding off socks from my last batch of handdyed sock yarn.

I hope your day is as great as mine has been so far!

Emily saw some of the women’s springboard diving in the Olympics tonight. Now she wants to go to the Olympics. Sport: diving. Her unwillingness to duck her head under water may prove to be a minor obstacle.

Her favorite diver was Guo Jingjing. She asked what her American name would be, since she knows that my Malaysian/ethnic Chinese friends have Chinese names and American names. She then extended that a bit further to all foreigners and wanted to know what the Russian’s American name would be, etc.

We askd what she thought the divers were going to do when they were standing at the edge of the diving board. She answered that they were getting ready to fly. Easy to see why she’d think that.

Sweet kid moment: she wanted all the competitors to get into the pool so they could all swim together. Aw.

So I was up early this morning because I had a nightmare. I had been working in The Office, yes the one from TV with Michael Scott as my boss. In my dream it was a radio station, and I managed to get a job interview at CNN.

I had arrived at their office and had learned all the details of the sample story they wanted me to write and was just about to start, when I heard Emily wailing from the other room. Seems her new child care person had refused to let her go to the bathroom and she had peed on herself. They’d brought her to CNN to wait for me, but she was getting more and more upset. I had to cancel the interview and take Em home because she was so unhappy.

I’m sure there was no symbolism whatsoever involved in that dream.

On the up side, Emily is totally on board with going to the zoo today! It’s unbelievable, considering what a homebody she’s turned into. Plus she’s still in her jammies and is playing her favorite computer game, so those are other factors which might make her say no. Her favorite phrase is “maybe later” but she’s going for this. Yay!

We’ve gone to the NC Zoo many times, but never the Riverbanks Zoo, so I think we’ll try that one. After I get some coffee. Not to jinx, but it looks like a good day after all!

Things I wish I had a picture of:

My daughter in her swimsuit, walking back to the hotel room. Her left arm is crabbed, her fingers curled into a claw. She’s got her left foot turned to the side and is dragging her leg. Her head is tilted at a 45 degree angle.

Me: What are you doing?

Her: I’m a zombie!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! That’s mommy’s little weirdo.

Em is fascinated with miis, which are the little characters on our Wii. When we run using the Wii Fit, she gets very excited to see which mii we’ll pass next. When I was done running today, she decided to take a turn on the Island Lap so she could see which miis came up. I’d be hard pressed to get her to run long distance outside without complaint (especially in our 90F heat), but she really enjoyed this.

Disclaimers: If I’d known we were going to be doing videos, I would have vacuumed. And picked up things. And bought a new couch. Also, my overenthusiasm is meant to encourage her to keep exercising; I don’t always sound like I’m hopped up on the happy juice.

Thanks again, Dad!

Thank you for the Easy Bake oven, Illiane! We broke it out this evening and made cookies. These cookies, according to the package, contain all kinds of goodies like partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil and pack a whopping 160 calories each.

We also learned an important lesson about letting things cool down before touching them. A lesson which apparently had to be learned the hard way, by Emily touching a pan fresh from the “oven” leaving a red mark on her thumb. As God is my witness, I warned her many, many times. She just got excited and forgot as she tried to pull the pan out a little farther.

“OUCH! Ouch ouch ouch ouch!” We learned to run cool water on it, and then she went in and put a bandaid on her hand. Well, she’ll probably remember the lesson better that way than she would from just my warnings. To quote Em, “That really, really did hurt!”

However, with all that, the cookies were good (I only had a crumb which broke off, and two are still in the fridge), and Em had a very good time. I’m going to poke around online, but I’m pretty sure I could make regular chocolate chip cookies in these, so I may see if Em wants to try to make her own sometime.

Thanks again, Illiane! If there’s anything else your girl doesn’t want, keep us in mind!

I’m not quite sure what to make of the doll tableau to the left, which Emily set up in our kitchen. Nor am I quite getting the meaning behind poor Mulan, robe askew, strung up by her hair. I think the only real message here is this: kids are weird.

The cord binding Mulan’s hair, by the way, is from the pulse oximeter on the treadmill, which has now left our home. The plan is to use that space for storage for my yarn to get it out of the bottom of the freakin’ closet!

…went well. We had a bit of a glitch at the start. Yesterday’s showtime was 1:10, and I assumed today’s was as well. We arrived at 1:07 and purchased tickets… only to discover that showtime was at 1:50. D’oh!

It wasn’t quite enough time to go back home, and not enough time to find something really entertaining, but it was enough time to get bored. We wandered around the outdoor mall area for a bit, but that kind of things tends to wear on Em. When she said, “I’m soooo sleepy” I decided we could head inside and wait there. So we waited a while. Then we went in to the theater about 15 minutes before time and watched the ads. Em decided to wait to eat the candy she’d selected – a Nerds Rope – until the actual feature started. So we sat and waited.

Em did very well. She finished her candy and started in on my/our popcorn, polishing off the bag. She got about 2/3 through the movie before she was flopping all over the seat. I did have to tell her not to flail her arms around so much, since there were people behind us, but I only had to tell her once. She was well-behaved, and didn’t ask to go home. She didn’t want to stay through the credits, which I always like to do but wasn’t going to ask her to. When I asked her afterward what she thought of the movie, she said it was good. I agreed.

This was a good choice for us. It wasn’t too hard to follow, and even if you didn’t get the more adult subplots, you could still enjoy the action and cute characters. I wasn’t sure if Em was really taking it in, since she often doesn’t react much, but at one point she said, “Oh, no, Wall-e” so that told me she was paying attention. For myself, I think I enjoyed it more because I’d seen “Hello, Dolly!” recently, as bits of that movie came up repeatedly.

All in all, I’ll mark this a success. It went just as you’d expect any visit to the movies to go, which was exactly what I was hoping for.

Em’s been saying today, “I do not want to watch Snow White. I watch it a lot.” A week ago, she’d had it in heavy rotation for about a week, with it playing all the time. That’s not an exaggeration, it was on every single moment she was awake that we grownups weren’t using the TV, and when we grownups were using the TV, she would stand next to it with the DVD in her hand, waiting for the all-clear. When I wasn’t in the room, she would frequently call me back in to watch some key point. If I left the room afterward, she’d call me back in.

Snow White is a great movie, don’t get me wrong, but not ALL THE TIME. Also, if she does something all the time, it dominates her thought and speech to the point where she can’t talk about anything else, which doesn’t make for great conversational opportunities with other kids. Finally I had to gently tell her, “You’ve been watching Snow White an awful lot. We need to turn it off for a while.” So today, a week later, her saying “I do not want to watch Snow White. I watch it a lot.” was her way of saying, “I really want to watch this, but I know I shouldn’t. So I won’t. But I really want to. But it’s wrong. But I still really want to. But I’m going to convince myself that I don’t. Although I still really do want to.”

It’s hard to know this sometimes, because on the face of it, “I do not want to watch Snow White” is a pretty simple statement. But because I do speak fluent Mom, I got it. Apparently just saying, “no, you can watch Snow White, it’s okay” wasn’t enough to reassure her. So today I sat down with her and said, “You know, sometimes you like to watch the same thing over and over, and I know you really like that. And that’s okay, I understand it. But sometimes I don’t like to see the same thing over and over. That’s why I asked you to turn it off. But we haven’t seen it in a while, so it’s fine to turn it on again. It isn’t going to bother me. It’s really okay to watch Snow White.” So she promptly got out the DVD and put it in, because as I say, she really did want to see it.

She really does want to be a good kid, even when she doesn’t understand the rules.

I started this post more than an hour ago. Em insisted that I come in and watch Snow White with her, so I stayed for the whole movie. She was giggling with glee through the whole thing, and discussing it in her fashion as the movie played. Then she’d look back at me for support as she talked. Love that eye contact. She’s such a sweet kid.