Last night I came back from the store, and as I came through the back door, I found the yarn in my purse had snagged on the doorknob. This isn’t that unusual. However, this time the yarn was running through the doorjamb, past the closed door. Uh-oh.
Pics and more under cut.
Em: How can I be a zookeeper and a ringmaster?
Me: Maybe you can be a zookeeper in the Winter and a ringmaster in the Summer.
Em: Yes! And I can be a rock star in the Spring and an astronaut in the Fall.
Talk about living life to its fullest. I want to party with Emily!
Yesterday our family went to visit our friends’ family. They’ve just moved to town from Maryland. They’ve got a great house out in the boondocks, with woods and a creek a couple of doors down. We all went out to throw rocks in the stream and explore.
Emily has trouble with balance and knowing where she is in relation to things sometimes (a sense called proprioception if you’re curious). In the past, she has tended to be fearful about physical feats, but that’s been changing lately. So yesterday, I helped her across the stream on some rocks. She was asking how she could get back across, and she spotted a log across the stream. She said she wanted to try it. It was fairly high up. If she fell off this thing, she could get pretty beat up, but I thought she could do it. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance. I told her if she wanted, she could go for it.
She seemed nervous, so I said if she wanted, she could just use the bridge a little further down. But no, she really wanted to try. So she did. She shuffled her feet on the log until she was halfway across, then got a little more confident and walked the rest of the way carefully but normally. She stepped down at the end, turned back, and said, “I did it.” Then, adorably, she started jumping up and down pumping her arms in the air. “I did it! I did it!”
Of course, then she had to go back. And then return. And then go back again. There was much jumping and exultation. “I’m so brave!” Hee! That’s my girl!
I took a movie of one of her trips, but I’m having trouble getting movies to upload. I also took this picture, but unfortunately, my camera was doing that thing that it does. Even after color correction, it’s still pink. And runny. It’s like she’s crossing a stream on Saturn or something.
I’m so, so proud of my girl. This is good practice for Girl Scout camp in the Spring, if we go. And if we don’t, I still love that she’s becoming more daring. Today, the stream, tomorrow, Mt. Everest!
Last October I lost five pounds and kept it off until the end of the year. Then in January, I was on the road a lot and ate a lot of fast food, and comforted myself more than I should have with food. I didn’t exercise over the holidays, and all told, I’ve gained back two or three pounds and a point of body fat over the course of the month. I want to get back on the metaphorical horse, but it’s so freakin’ cold outside. I love the snow, I hate the cold. Maybe I’ll NetFlix some Firm DVDs. The woman they’ve got on the front page of their website looks like she’s gone a little too far. Eat a sandwich, woman!
Steve’s having to work today. He works a lot on weekends. Poor guy. I complain about exercising in the cold, but he’s been walking a mile up to the Lynx station and taking the train into work to get a little exercise and also save money and wear and tear on his car. Whatta guy.
At right: just before I left for Richmond the other day, I took this picture of Steve, Emily, and the Groovy Girl dolls. He’s a good dad.
I realized last night that I’d charted the full-size Charlie Brown stripe wrong, so I need to go back and redo it. Fortunately I haven’t actually knit the stripe, just charted it with paper and pencil. I know there’s software that’ll do it, but I’m on a Mac, I don’t know that there’s something out there for me.
Still kind of sleepy, having gotten to bed late last night. Today I need to hit the library, Goodwill, and Home Depot, and hopefully a coffee shop in there somewhere.
A few days ago, Emily suddenly took an interest in the Entertainment Weekly magazines I sometimes pick up at the store. I didn’t notice she was reading it until she came in and asked, “Who’s this?” There was a two-page photo closeup of Lucy Liu in a magazine from a few weeks ago. (It takes me a while to get enough time to read through these things. Jayne hats, you know.) Now Emily is absolutely fascinated with Lucy Liu. “She’s so pretty!” she keeps saying.
She and Steve searched for pictures of Lucy Liu online today, but unlike 90% of the people searching for Lucy Liu on the internet, they searched with safesearch on. Tomorrow she wants to draw pictures of Lucy Liu. In the meantime, to divert her from Entertainment Weekly, which has language which is a bit salty for an eight year old, I stopped by Borders and picked up a copy of Discovery Girls magazine. She flipped through it, but I don’t think it’ll hold her interest until it starts featuring articles on Lucy Liu. It’s all Lucy Liu, all the time here.
I’ll be out of town tomorrow, and Steve will be home to watch Emily since it’s a teacher workday. Hopefully they’ll have lots of fun with Lucy Liu. I should be back late tomorrow night.
This morning, Steve and I had been talking with Emily about going to the zoo at some point. She’s very excited, but clearly doesn’t want to go right now. She wanted to set a date far in the future, to give herself some time to get adjusted. She picked Nov 12th at random, and then we settled on a date in August. So after all that, she told us, “I want to go play now.” That’s fine. She’s eight, and we had been talking about something fairly directed and focused, and she was still in her PJs, for Pete’s sake.
Shortly thereafter:
Me: I need to go to the post office later, do you want to come?
Emily: No, thank you. I want to stay here.
Me: Okay, that’s fine, but I’d still like you to put on some daytime clothes.
Emily: Okay. Then will you leave me alone?
Heh. I think she was worried I’d still make her go to the post office. The thing is, she really doesn’t mean it rudely! Any more than she does when she says, “I don’t want to answer that now” or “I’m done talking” and then launches into an involved story involving someone imaginary. She really does mean what she says, and she says it very matter-of-factly. She’s had enough of whatever I’m forcing her to concentrate on, and she needs to do her own thing. The tough part is getting her to communicate that in a way that doesn’t come off like “talk to the hand!” We seem to have curbed a flat “Stop talking” from her.
So what’s a short, effective, direct, polite way that you can tell someone that you need to not talk with them anymore? Something an eight-year-old would understand would be ideal.
Back at last from the in-laws. A pleasant time, as always, but the last bit was loud and chaotic. In fact, it was chaotic enough that I apparently mis-knitted an entire row of Shedir and will have to rip back. I couldn’t do so in the car because by the time we got out of there, it was already dark.
I got a copy of Barbara Walker’s Treasury of Knitting Patterns from my mother-in-law, so I thought I’d try out some stitch patterns in the car, but it was too dark to even see the pages. Instead I decided to amuse myself by trying to knit a design out of yarn-overs strictly by touch. I’ll generously say that it needs work. Well, at least it was quiet in the car, so that was restful. I’ll figure Shedir out tomorrow.
Emily got Christmas presents from her grandparents and cousins. From her cousins, she got two Ty girls, so it’s just as well Santa decided they were an okay gift and brought them, because she would have gotten some anyway and then Santa would have looked like a piker. Yeesh. Anyway, now she’s got four, so she’s well on her way to a collection. And believe me, with her autism driving her toward a desire for full sets and completeness, she’s a natural-born collector.
We’re all tired now. As for me, first thing tomorrow I’ll have to hit the office store – my printer cartridge ran out of ink and I need to print out more patterns. Now that I have the pattern in a nice tidy pdf (thanks, knitter Dave from the Apple store), I want to take it to a print shop and get a quote on having a bunch printed for me. I have a feeling that four pages, full color, front and back, on index card stock is going to be a little pricey. I’d like to do a redesign into a booklet form, but I don’t really have time. Besides, this pattern works really, really well in its current form. I wouldn’t want to shrink the type or pictures too much. Until the holidays are over, I guess I’ll stick with my ink jet.
There are things I want to do in Dragonrealms before the festival closes, but I’m having trouble making time. Em goes back to school on Wednesday, so maybe I can sneak in a few things if all goes well.
Until tomorrow, I leave you with this picture of Emily borrowing her cousin’s Christmas gift – a Hannah Montana wig. Emily now wants one. Well, her ambition is to be a rock star, so I suppose it’s only natural. Just call her Emily Tennessee!
Merry Christmas, one and all! I hope you are all enjoying your day! Reporting on the material side of things, Emily had several items she was hoping to get but didn’t think she would. She got them, so that was great for her. And yes, she did get two Ty Girlz from Santa. The way she said “Santa is real” on her way to bed last night kind of made us think this might be the beginning of the end, so we wanted Santa to have a big showing this year, just in case.
She also got some unexpected things, like a karaoke machine from Grandma (“It’s so beautiful!”) and the Wizard of Oz on DVD from Grandpa, which she’s already watching. You know it’s a hit if she put aside her other toys to watch it. She just watched Bert Lahr’s big “King of the Forest” musical number and said, “Wow!”
Another unexpected hit was the glow-in-the-dark solar system we got for her. It’s currently hanging from the ceiling. Emily loves space, but I don’t want to just get her educational things. We need not have worried. Not only is it the solar system, which she loves, but it also provides another light source to illuminate any monsters which might be in her closet.
Steve got this super-cool monster movie calendar from the Museum of Modern Art. Emily started to pick out a Wizard of Oz calendar, then I said, “remember, we want to get something Daddy will like, not just us, since it’s for him.” She instantly picked this out. My husband LOVES old monster and sci-fi B movies. Emily could not have chosen a more perfect gift. I have no idea how she did this, since for obvious reasons we don’t let our sensitive eight-year-old watch things like “The Brain That Would Not Die.”
Emily apparently decided early on that I needed to have a pair of shoes. And that’s how I wound up with these little babies. Can you her me squealing? Apparently there’s one store in Charlotte that sells them, and they only sell them in men’s sizes. Fortunately, I have a pair of black Converse high tops so he was able to get the size fro those, since they’re apparently also men’s shoes. The clerk told my husband, “Now, you might want to get her a pair of really cool socks to wear with these.” My husband informed her that I knit my own. Ha. Take that! I can’t believe my husband went to a mall near Christmastime for me. What a guy! I’m thrilled.
More than the things we receive, of course, Christmas is about the things we share. Steve and I have already mangled “New York New York” on the karaoke machine together. Here’s hoping you and the ones you love make many happy memories of your own today.