What a Life!

The Charcoal Slog-a-long at one of its glorious stages.

I’ve decided that the Charcoal Slog-a-long I was knitting for Steve is going to bite the dust.

There were a number of problems with this project. I make the neck in front too deep and really needed to re-do it. The sleeve I had half-finished was not growing at the correct pace and I needed to re-do it with a different interval between the increases. And while those problems wouldn’t be enough to kill a project, the fact that I was bored out of my mind with it was what finally pushed it over the edge.

I’ve only knit one sweater for Steve – Galway Guy from Interweave Knits Sprint 2005. I gave it to him for Christmas 2005, though I had to re-do the sleeves so he didn’t actually wear it until last season. Here you can see him wearing it on Christmas Day 2006.

It was my first “big” project – as in, something that wasn’t for Ben. The largest project I had done to date took about two skeins of worsted weight yarn, and that sweater took ten skeins. Then since it was a surprise for Steve, I had to work on it during the day (I don’t usually knit during the day – just first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening). I even took it to a Mary Kay retreat with me and worked on it while I listened to the various speakers [I was running short on time to complete it, and I listen better when I knit anyway]. I loved it because it looked great and it was very interesting to knit with all the different stitch patterns and such.

Prior to that sweater, Steve said he hated hand-knit items. His grandmother was also a knitter and made him a sweater every year when he was a kid. Those sweaters, though, were 100% acrylic which makes you sweat but isn’t worth two cents when it comes to keeping you warm. Wool, on the other hand, doesn’t make you sweat but keeps you nice and warm or just plain comfortable wherever you are (otherwise, how would sheep survive the summer with their wooly coats?). So even though he had sworn he wouldn’t wear a sweater if I knit him one, I knit him one anyway. Out of Plymouth Galway, 100% wool.

He likes it. It doesn’t make him too hot. He wore it quite a bit last winter. When we went to special occasions such as Christmas or my Grandmother’s funeral. He also wore it at home when he was studying. It’s a comfortable sweater. And did I mention that I love how it looks?

Here it is, once more, in all it’s glory.

Steve even said I could knit him more sweaters. With one change, though. He would like them to be more plain. I’d show him pictures of sweaters in various magazines, and while he said he’d wear them if I made them, they were never plain enough.

So I decided I would knit him a plain sweater. I got a good deal on a stack of Cascade 220 Charcoal Heather 100% Peruvian wool, and I started to knit it up for him in a plain, stockinette sweater. I measured shirts and sweatshirts in his closet in order to determine the right size. And I knit, and I knit, and I knit.

I’m telling you, it was the most boring thing I ever worked on. Not only did every row last forever, every row was the same as the last. If all knitting was like this, I would not be a knitter. I know some knitters groove on this type of knitting because it is mindless – it is simply too mindless for me.

Even though I was interspersing working on it with working on St. Brigid (a project that is very complex), the mere thought of this project fills my mind with dreaded loathing, and I simply do not want such feelings to be associated with the person I am knitting this sweater for. And thus, I have decided to let it rest in peace.

Yes, I will be frogging the Charcoal Slog-a-long.

Not to worry, though. I have plans for all of the yarn – both what I’ve used so far and what has not yet been knit up. What I have used so far will be knit into projects that are felted, such as another LTK Pack-Pack like the one I made for Ben. (Once yarn has been knit, frogged, and re-knit, it can be a little more fuzzy than yarn that has only been knit once. Using previously knit yarn for felting, though, is just fine since the process of felting is really just making the yarn so fuzzy it sticks together.) I should also have some of the Cascade 220 Sapphire Heather yarn I’m using for St. Brigid that I can use for the lid. I think that will look good together.

I want to use the yarn that has not yet been knit to make sweaters for the boys. Sweaters based on brooklyntweed‘s Cobblestone Pullover in the latest issue of Interweave Knits. [I showed a picture of this sweater to Steve to see if it was plain enough and he said “yes” except for “all that stuff up at the top.”] There is a produce farm on north 84th (Sunwest Farms, I believe) that has hayrides and such in the fall. I want to take the boys there, in their jeans and sweaters, and try to get some Christmas-card-worthy photos of the two of them.

As the Charcoal Slog-a-long has sat in the corner as a UFO (unfinished object), I’ve thought long and hard about what it is that makes things worthwhile for me to knit. On one hand, I don’t generally like simple projects. The Cobblestone Pullover may be fairly simple, but it also has some neat features that make it more interesting than it might appear at first. Plus, knitting them for the boys means they’re fairly small and will be done rather quickly. On the other hand, I also have difficulty bringing myself to knit something if it will just be in my way when I’m done. I want to enjoy making the things I knit (the process), and I also want them to be things that I (or someone else) will use and love (the product).

I cannot be too hard on Steve for liking plain things. I, too, have a rather plain wardrobe. Basically, if Land’s End sells it, I wear it. Plain jeans, t-shirts, and button-down shirts are what you find in my closet. I’m not big on accessories. I don’t go out and buy the latest fashions every season. I have decided, though, that knitted items are my accessory. If I need a formal gown, I shall get a long black sleeveless sheath dress and then make a beautiful shawl to go with it (such as this Morning Glory from knitspot). I’m currently making the Nantucket Jacket for myself, which I will wear with a plain button-down shirt and a pair of jeans, probably. St. Brigid will be another piece in my wardrobe that will go well with a simple pair of black pants. This is my new philosophy when it comes to selecting future knitting projects (and weeding out some of the old ones which have stalled).

So for now, the Charcoal Slog-a-long will lie in a corner in its current state. At some point I will actually frog it – perhaps because I’m ready to use the yarn for something else, perhaps because I simply want it out of my way. Ultimately, it has been replaced with projects which I am more excited about, projects that better fit into my newfound philosophy of selecting knitting projects.

Rest in peace, oh Charcoal Slog-a-long.

As a general rule, we do not allow our children to watch TV. Of course, there are exceptions. Ben has an Elmo potty-training video his grandma gave him along with Lady and the Tramp that Steve lets him watch sometimes on the weekend. And my early efforts at potty training consisted of Ben sitting on his potty while watching Sesame Street. But other than that, no TV.

Now Steve and I watch TV. The news. Football. NASCAR. Baseball. M*A*S*H. Sometimes Steve will watch home improvement shows or classic movies on the weekends. After the boys are in bed, we watch CSI, and Steve likes to watch E.R. But again, no kid’s shows.

Even I don’t sit down and just watch TV. I’m always doing something else, like making supper or knitting or planning my week or something. In fact, I find it very difficult to just sit and watch TV, though Steve seems to be able to do that.

Bottom line, the only TV our kids get regularly could be considered secondary TV (kind of like secondary smoke). And with that in mind, here is a little story to add spice to your day.

Yesterday, Ben was reading his George Learns the Alphabet book next to me while I was sitting on the couch knitting. He reads the various letters on the pages and talks about what the letters stand for and embellishes the information from there. I don’t know what letter he was on, but the dialogue was something like this.

“{some letter} is for duck and goose. We saw a duck and goose when we went to the fair. The duck and the goose say ‘Aflac,’ don’t they?”

Yup, they do.

You’re never too young to start playing the piano, right?

This is my little sweetheart playing his favorite keys on the piano.

Oops! He caught me taking pictures of him…

When it comes to handpainted yarn, I have mixed feelings. The colorways look so pretty when you shop for them online, but then you get them and they aren’t quite what you expected. Then when you knit them up, you get pooling and striping and all sorts of “effects” (rather than the colors being mixed up evenly over the knitted fabric). So generally, I then to avoid them.

However, a few months back, I fell hard for some hand-dyed yarn. It is yarn that I used to make wool diaper covers for my boys [in this case, for Joey]. It was on sale, okay? And it looked so pretty, I just had to order a couple of my favorite colorways. After all, it is my favorite yarn for wool diaper covers – it just works so much better than anything else I’ve tried.

I got the yarn, and, of course, it wasn’t quite what I had expected it to look like. So I put it away. In a dark closet where I wouldn’t see it. Joey had just upgraded to larger diapers and I had thought that would require knitting new wool. But our old wool pants fit just fine so there was no need to start knitting right away.

This weekend, I got it back out. [Actually, the real reason for getting it out was to mess around with my camera and play with the white balance settings and yarn seemed to be the perfect subject – lots of different colors to try and capture accurately and it wouldn’t run away or anything.]

The first thing I did was to re-wind it. I have two skeins of the guinness colorway here:

Which one do you like better? The one in back where all the colors are still pooled as they were when the yarn was handpainted, or the one in front where the colors are all mixed up on account of being re-wound?

I like the one in front better.

That colorway I was fairly pleased with. The other two were a lot more disappointing.

There was this one – the melissa colorway:

…and this one – the elijah colorway:

Both of them I had ordered before. You can see them knit-up here:

Shorts knit with the melissa colorway (2005):

Shorts knit with the elijah colorway (2005):

Handpainting is very much an art. Use more dye, the color is darker. Less dye, the color is lighter. You can use the same colors and yet come up with what appears to be a completely different colorway. So while I could send the yarn back and complain, a) the yarn comes from a WAHM, and while I know she is very concerned about customer satisfaction, I hate to cause her the trouble of having to exchange it, and b) quite frankly, such results are the nature of handpainted yarn, which includes handpainted yarn from other sellers as well. The only sure way to prevent such disappointments would be to order yarn where you buy the skein you see rather than buying yarn that is dyed to order (as in, dyed after you order it).

[You can go here and click on the link in the description to see the colorways (it’s a pop-up or I would link it directly) in order to get an idea of the difference between what I show above and what I was looking at when I ordered. The results the first time I ordered the yarn may be closer to what the pictures show, but in both instances, the yarn I actually got looked a little different than the yarn I saw online when I ordered. And yes, I know that with any yarn, what color it looks like online is not necessarily what it will look like when you have the yarn in your hands due to different color adjustment on monitors and such.]

After putting it away, then taking it back out and re-winding it, I must confess I liked it a lot better than I had at first. When I wind the yarn so its mixed rather than pooled, I get a better feel for how the yarn will look when it is knit up, and I just like it a lot better.

Now that I re-read post and see the colorways on their own without seeing the pictures I ordered from first, I’m really liking it. In fact, I’m worried that anyone reading this post is going to think I’m a fool for not liking it.

Ah, the joy of handpainted yarn!

Sometimes the best way to solve problems is indirectly.

The spitting thing? Based on my scientific observations (ha! ha!), it’s only a problem when Ben is bored. Keep him busy and spitting isn’t a problem.

Yes, boredom is an issue we have with Ben right now. I never had that problem when I was his age, but then again, I had someone next door less than a year younger than me who I spent hours every day playing with. One of the things I think Ben needs is a playmate. There are no candidates on our street (at least that I know of) but we do know three families with little boys his age who he enjoys playing with (and whose company I approve). I shall make more of an effort to make sure he gets together with his little friends more often – as in, more than the once a week we are doing currently.

Sometimes a small investment of time has big payoffs. I’ve found that if I spend fifteen minutes reading Ben a story of his choice, he will in turn spend an hour reading the book himself. A simple way to stave off boredom without an overwhelming amount of effort on my part.

I’m trying to include him in my activities whenever possible. The other day I made a peach pie and Ben “helped” me. When I finished rolling out the crust, I let him use the rolling pin a little to give it the “final touches.” When I mixed the peaches with the sugar and flour, I let him stir it a little – again, “final touches.” I remember enjoying watching my mother cook and bake when I was a child. It doesn’t take much effort for me to involve Ben in what I’m doing, and the amount that is slows me down really is almost less than the amount of time and effort I would spend getting after him if he was left to his own devices.

And that book I ordered last weekend? A lifesaver! I highly recommend it for every SAHM with a three to six-year-old. It is very much along my lines of thinking (discourages tv, encourages activities we already do like going for a walk and such) while giving me lots of ideas where I can enrich what I am already doing. Stuff that I can fit into our lives…a little here, a little there. I so needed something like that.

One friend suggested I enroll Ben in preschool. The potty-training thing has been my official excuse, but she said he is no more potty trained than her children were when they went. All children his age, it seems, have accidents. But the real issue? We are contemplating homeschool, and that would mean doing preschool at home, not sending him somewhere else. I am adamant that we will remain open to all options and do whatever is best for each of our children, whether that is homeschool or enrolling them somewhere else. At the same time, that means putting in sincere effort when we come across snags and trying to figure out what the real problem is rather than blaming it on how he is being schooled.

In this case, I’ve struggled a lot with my desire to homeschool and his apparent boredom. But for now, my conclusion is that he could be bored in preschool too. I wasn’t enrolled in school until the second grade, but from then all the way through high school, I found school to be quite boring. It wasn’t until I was in college that I enjoyed school as much as I did the year my mom taught me at home. [That would be one of my main motivations for wanting to homeschool my children.]

The socialization issue? Homeschoolers argue that socialization means learning how to get along with people, and that should go beyond learning how to get along with people who are exactly your age (which is the type of socialization a child gets when going to school). While I agree, I also see the need for children to have playmates. Everyone needs to have good friends they enjoy spending their time with. In a school setting, you might meet people or make a friend or two, but the kind of social time spent with a favorite playmate is something even a child enrolled in school would do mostly outside of the school setting. So whether or not Ben has time to spend with playmates is less about whether or not he goes to preschool and more about the effort that I make as his mother to see to it that he gets to spend time on such activities.

[And I will be the first to confess that while I got along with the kids in school as I was growing up, I didn’t have the kind of friendship with anyone that I had with the little girl next door who I spent hours playing with before either of us went to school. The closest friendships I have now are ones I have formed during college and beyond. So going to school wasn’t the “key” to making friends for me. In fact, when I was in gradeschool and especially in high school, I often wished for a good friend, a favorite playmate, someone I really enjoyed spending time with, but most of my “friendships” were quite superficial. Being in school did not meet that need.]

I’ve heard from other parents that four is a tough age. They aren’t enthused with their world anymore (like Joey is – he completely entertains himself right now, just like Ben used to). Yet they don’t have a long attention span yet, allowing them to do things like sit and color or do other such activities for more than a few minutes. In fact, my assertion that it isn’t the terrible twos one must worry about – it’s the terrible four’s – has been met with confirmation. One family said that they were almost to the end of their rope, and then their child turned five and became this completely different person who was so much easier to entertain and get along with. I’m hoping that experience is true for us as well, though we have a ways to go before we reach that milepost.

For now, though, I have hope. I have taken action and done things that make living with Ben a little easier, and I have ideas for more things we can do as well. There is no reason why living with Ben cannot once again be the joy it once was (at least most of the time). We shall prevail.

Our heat wave has come to an end with the arrival of a weather front that is bringing us rain and thunderstorms. It was raining softly when I woke up this morning. It’s cloudy and dark right now, and everything’s wet. The hourly forecast online says it’s gonna be raining on and off like this all day.

Growing up in Florida, I am accustomed to lots of sunshine. The only times when we had days that were cloudy and rainy all day were when we had a tropical depression or something like that come through. We were far enough inland that the winds were never that remarkable. Yes, we hunkered down if a hurricane was coming toward us, and sometimes it seemed a little windy when tropical storms came through, but we weren’t on the coast or anything so we never got the brunt of it.

So when rainy days like this come, my mood always shifts. Introspection. The desire to curl up in a corner and read a book all day. Normal routines fall by the wayside as though my motivation has been washed away with the rain. I don’t know why, but that’s just how it is. [I think if I lived in Portland or Seattle where it’s cloudy and rainy like this most of the time, I think I would struggle with forcing myself to be productive and go about my normal activities in spite of the weather.] Rainy days are productive, just in a different way than normal sunny days.

Today I was supposed to go to town. I had a therapeutic massage appointment this morning, and I needed to get in my second visit at the chiropractor this week. I hadn’t found anyone to watch the boys during my massage appointment (Steve usually helps with that but wasn’t able to this week), and the chaos of going to the chiropractor which I tolerate on sunny days overwhelms me today. I don’t want to go to town – I want to retreat. I was also going to get groceries. And the socks I am entering in the state fair are due today by 3 p.m., if I am going to enter them.

I’m sure if I had a J-O-B, I wouldn’t be letting a rainy day stop me from going to work and doing all the things that go along with that. I used to hate working on such days, but I always put my nose to the grindstone, did what I had to do, and somehow got through it.

But now I’m a SAHM. I don’t work 40 hours a week – I’m on duty 168 hours a week. I’m still feeding my children and supervising them as they play. I’m still reminding Ben to go potty and changing Joey’s diapers. Ben is actually outside right now, playing in the rain. It’s only sprinkling at the moment, and he’s been eating yogurt outside for breakfast. The rain doesn’t seem to be stopping him.

Going to town is a big enough ordeal when it’s sunny outside. Ben is slower than molasses getting in and out of the car, and both boys have to be buckled in to their car seats. Even if it was just sprinkling when I was getting them in and out of the car, I would get soaked each time I did it. If I was working, dropping them off and picking them up from daycare would mean getting wet twice; running errands means getting wet twice for every errand, and I had at least four on my list for today. Do you see why I drag my feet at the idea of going to town on a rainy day? Yet I still wonder if I’m being a wimp by canceling my appointments and just staying home on account of a little rain.

Then last night I had a series of bad dreams. The ones where your worst fears come true. All of them. And I don’t know if those worst fears are my intuition telling me of things I don’t want to admit or if I’m just making other’s life situations my own. I think it’s the latter, but it always scares me that it might be the former. It’s one thing to have those worries running around in the back of my mind; it’s another to dream about them and see how they might play out. I hate it when that happens. Somehow I need to let them all go. Somehow. The usual magic solutions aren’t working, though.

So today I am staying at home (except, perhaps, to take my socks to the state fair, which is on our side of town, unlike the other errands I had scheduled). I’m sure it will be a very productive day, as days like these make me see things differently and I get ideas for how to solve seemingly perpetual problems that never seem to occur to me on sunny days. But I must step back and rest if I am to make the most of this day. Yes, if I am to make the most of this day…