Kiss My Knits!

I think this year I may skip Simucon.
And here’s why.

Our family is continuing to slowly de-clutter the house. It’s the home that I grew up in and later purchased from my folks, so I know most of its little nooks and crannies, but apparently not all of them. Yesterday we tackled some drawers in the kitchen, which led to these little discoveries.

Gold stamps plastered to the inside bottom of a drawer in our kitchen. It’s tough to make out, but the writing beneath George Washington reads, “Your Golden Opportunity To Save.” Which store gave these out? Were these being saved up for something, or just randomly shoved in a drawer? Were they deliberately pasted there by me as a toddler, or accidentally plastered down by water damage? Who knows?

Found on the side of a drawer in our kitchen while we were cleaning. These are both local numbers. This is neither my mother nor father’s handwriting. The house was built in the early 60’s, and my parents or I have occupied it pretty continuously since. Maybe some numbers a workman had to remember? A couple of love connections?

My mother tells me that she and my father didn’t buy the house until ’68, but I recall that my deed says it was built in ’60 or ’63. There’s plenty that could have happened in the five years before it passed to us. Who knows what other mysteries we’ll find?

Shelf liner (non-adhesive) now covers the gold stamps, and I didn’t scrub off the phone numbers. They can be little mysteries for the next homeowner after we eventually move out.

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!

This weekend is a biking event called 24 Hours of Booty. The event is named after the Booty Loop, the informal name for a stretch of road through the heart of Charlotte popular with serious road cyclists. They wear those little biking shorts, and they’re all in great shape, hence the name “Booty Loop.”

Today a lane was blocked off, and there were entire teams of cyclists whizzing past. Right in the middle of them was a guy sporting a giant moustache, making great time on top of the biggest unicycle I’ve ever seen in my life.

I wanna party with that guy.

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!

I’m pretty sure I have to make these. TOO CUTE! They’re from Knitted Sock Sensations. I’ve been weeding my shelves, so I can probably squeeze in one more knitting book.

Later on, I’m planning to up pictures of some of my bookshelves and if you want something for a token fee plus shipping, then let me know. I was going to make this post a very long entry with all of that in it, but it’s still cool out, and my husband is back from his bike ride, so it can wait. This is my opportunity to get out to the Greenway and run. I can clean anytime – I have to seize any opportunity to get out and exercise!

…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.

Tomorrow, Em and I are going to see Wall-E. This will be the first time she’s gone to a movie theater. When she was younger, we didn’t think she could sit still, and then lately she hasn’t wanted to go because it’s new and different and therefore to be shunned. But I’m not presenting it as a choice this time, I’ve just been calmly saying, “On Friday, we’re going to go see Wall-E” and telling her a little bit about what it’s about. She’ll go along with something that you tell her is going to happen. She seems interested.

Going to the movies is a good experience for a kid to have, in my opinion. It’ll be a good opportunity for me to help prevent another idiot cell-phone talking moviegoer from entering the world. You don’t know these things unless someone tells you, and I’d rather it be me who tells her than have someone turn around and lay the smack down when she starts kicking their seat in the middle of, say, a retro showing of Schindler’s List.

Interestingly, I’ve read on some autism boards that Wall-E is a particularly good movie to take children with autism to, since there’s not a lot of complex dialogue to confuse kids who have trouble with language. Em’s doing better in that regard, but I’ll still be interested to see if that seems to make a difference to her.

Green Jayne finished, orange Berrocco Jayne hat on the needles.