Kiss My Knits!

…that keep on giving. And mine appears to have given me whatever pukey stomach virus she had on Sunday and Monday.

Worst. Birthday gift. Ever.

sigh.

What had been just some kind of garden variety cold bug for my daughter seems to have gotten worse, with her waking up, stumbling out of bed, and throwing up all over the house tonight. Twice. Plus other intestinal problems.

Poor baby.

If I’m not answering your IMs, it’s because I’m tending to my daughter. Here’s hoping it’s all over soon and she’s back to her happy, weird self.

Remember how my booksforsoldiers guy very kindly sent my daughter a box of candy and a stuffed camel? Well, he wrote to ask what the camel sounds like. He said, “I would assume it might sound like a camel but I rarely hear anything out of the camels when they pass us in the desert. Pretty quiet actually.” So I finally put batteries in.

Ho. Lee. Crap.

Unless real camels burst into song when you push on their shoulders, this does not sound like a real camel. And the eyes… the eyes were very unexpected.

Shall I share a link? Yes, I think I shall.

Small camel movie
Big camel movie

Does anyone out there have any clue what this song is? I’ve plumbed resources all the way to an online buddy of my husband’s in Israel, and no luck.

I’m pretty sure that this is some kind of demon camel meant to hypnotize my daughter into joining the Taliban or something. Excuse me… I feel the need to go put on a burqa.

Some of y’all know that I occasionally send care packages to guys and gals overseas through http://www.boooksforsoldiers.com (Politically, if I leaned any further left, I’d fall down, but I absolutely want to support these individual men and women who are far from home, working on behalf of our country.) Well, one guy in particular has been super about writing back. Which, happily, works to his benefit because then I want to send him and his buddies more stuff. “This Is Spinal Tap” is next up to go out. Sidetracking, if you haven’t seen the DVD of this, you really, really should. The commentary is done by the cast members as if they were in the band. So it’s Nigel and the rest doing the commentary, and it is freakin’ hilarious! I highly recommend it.

Aaaanyway, getting back on track. I had mentioned in a recent mail that my daughter had been sick on Halloween and hadn’t been able to go out. Well, apparently the guys in my soldier’s tent had gotten about 75 lbs of candy for Christmas from various organizations back home who wanted to be extra nice to the troops at the holidays.

Seventy five pounds. Five guys in the tent. That’s a lotta candy. So they sent a care package to my daughter consisting of four pounds of candy and a stuffed camel. The box is deeper than it looks in that pic, by the way. It was very unexpected, and so nice!

I’m going to have to hide the box, though. My daughter has already burned through at least five lollipops since yesterday afternoon.

I’m just really impressed with the thoughtfulness of these guys, to take the time and money to pack and ship a big box of candy to a five-year-old girl they’ve never met. It really reaffirms my faith in the basic goodness of people.

http://www.tvini.org/images/myipod1.jpg

My daughter has some wooden cutout letters that she likes to use to spell things with. Her spelling and reading is great, but the manual dexterity isn’t there, so she uses preset letters to play with a lot of the time.

She came running in to me to say, “What did I write?” So I followed her in to see, laid out on the floor, EYE POD.

That’s my little Mac geek girl!

Our husband was helping our daughter get her pajamas on tonight, when she lay down in the middle of our bed and started making big, sweeping semi-circles with her arms and legs.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She answered, “I’m making bed angels!”

Awwwwwwww!

I finally bought the pattern to the Bottoms Up Bucket Hat from ChicKnits. I was going to make it for yet another baby. (Seriously, people. Just keep one foot on the floor. I can’t knit fast enough.) It knitted up nicely in Noro Lily, a blend of 70% cotton and 30% silk. It was fun! However, I knew it would be a little bit big. Soo… now, once again, I will probably wind up knitting another baby gift.

Aaanyway, here it is on my resident 5-year-old model. Brim down, and then with brim up. I’m thinking about making a little flower pin to go on the brim. We’ll see.

So two days ago, Emily finally mastered the mouse. (Well, mostly mastered.)

Today, she popped in the disk for Grand Theft Auto III.

That’s bad, isn’t it?

Just in time for a baby shower tomorrow night, I’ve completed booties and hat. They wanted something pink, so it’s pink with a vengeance. The hat is a combination of the “Li’l Devil Baby Hat” and the “Official Kitty62 Hat” from kittyville.com. I believe there’s an adult devil hat in “Stitch ‘N Bitch” too. In retrospect, I could have gone smaller and it would have been fine. The hat and booties together only used about 2/3 of a skein of Lamb’s Pride Worsted, and I even doubled it on the booties to make ’em nice and thick. So the whole project came in for less than 7 bucks in materials. We’ll leave aside the question of labor, of course.

It’s too small for my five-year-old, but nonetheless I made her put it on (before I attached the pom-poms) so I could see it. And now I must share with all of you.

I do like to do something new for every project, so for this one, the new thing was a provisional cast-on around a crochet chain. And pom-poms. I’d never made pom-poms. Pretty easy, since McGyverish directions are out there on the web. 🙂

I’m pleased! Now, I must wrap. And no, I won’t be hand-crafting the wrapping paper.