What a Life!

I opened our front door just a crack and this is what I saw…

In other news…someone from where Steve works called to tell him not to come in today as all the roads going into Lincoln are closed due to the snow. On the news, I-80 is closed from the Platte River to somewhere west of Lincoln. Yup, closed in both directions.

What a storm!

If you look out our windows right now, you won’t see anything but whiteness. No, we don’t have twelve feet of snow or anything. I think when the whole thing started after we went to bed last night, it began with rain which turned to little beads of ice on the windows. Then the snow stuck to that, and the snow is still falling, and no one has gone anywhere so you can’t see any tracks or anything. It’s just all white.

I can still see the tires of Steve’s truck, though, if I look really hard. If they were half buried, then I’d say we’d gotten a lot of snow. Last night, the prediction was 1″ to 4″. As we speak, Steve is listening to one of the local news stations and they just changed the prediction for Lincoln to 6″ to 12″. Even UNL is closed (according to Steve, that doesn’t happen very often).

And you know what this means, don’t you? All this crazy weather we’re having? Global warming, my friends. People keep talking about it, and storms like this just reinforce it. Last night on the news, they said the ice caps were melting and all the polar bears were going to die by 2030 because they’re having to swim more than they’re accustomed to. Yup, it’s happening. The polar ice cap is going to melt and we’re all going to drown.

Then again…perhaps not. Last weekend Steve told me the average annual snowfall for this area is 28 inches, and as of our last storm (last weekend), we’d gotten 24 inches so far this year. That means snow is normal, folks. It’s not some crazy global warming phenomenon. Just because it’s not 70 degrees and sunny doesn’t mean the weather is crazy and global warming is going to kill us all. Seriously.

If we have summer and winter every year where the animals have to hibernate and all the bugs get killed off (this is why Steve says winter is good…because in places like Florida the bugs never die, they just grow and grow and grow…and I will admit that bugs in Florida tend to be huge…), couldn’t there be larger trends of warming and cooling as well? Nature has adapted to feezing cold every winter – birds fly south, bugs disappear, bears hibernate. Who’s to say that polar bears don’t know how to swim just for periods of warming like this? If we weren’t accustomed to four seasons every year, I can only imagine the hullabaloo gloabal warming scientists would be creating every winter when so many things disappear. Will the bugs be back? Yes, they will. Where they are right now, I do not know. I can only tell you that they reappear each spring when the weather gets warm.

Who are all these global warming people anyway? They’re scientists that predict weather. Okay, last night, less than twelve hours ago, they were predicting 1 to 4 inches of snow. This morning, they changed it to 6 to 12 inches. They can’t even predict accurately twelve hours out, so what makes you think they actually know what is going to happen in 2030 when all the polar bears are supposedly going to die? How often is the weather forecast really that accurate? Yeah, they knew it was going to snow, but it’s winter time, y’all – I could have predicted that too. If they could get a better grip on what’s happening in the short term, I’d be more inclined to believe their long-term predictions to. Just saying is all.

Now that’s not to say I don’t think we should be worrying about our “carbon footprint.” I’m all for taking care of the earth. We do use lawn fertilizer, but in moderation (nothing like our neighbors next door who have some guy from the grass chemical company out there every other week, I swear). We keep the thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer. We curb our driving habits and drive gas-efficient vehicles, though they’re not hybrids or anything. I’d be happy to drive a hybrid if it cost the same as a regular gas car. We only buy what we use – our house is not filled with junk we do not need, and we use things until they are completely worn out, so we’re not filling the landfills with our gluttony. We regularly take things to the recycling centers around town. But we don’t do this because we fear global warming – we do this because we believe God made us stewards of the environment, and it’s important to be responsible stewards and not just trash what we’ve been given. (See? Republicans care about the environment too.)

Personally, I think we need to be as careful about caring for our environment as we are about making predictions about stuff like global warming. It’s politically incorrect for a scientist to say that global warming isn’t a proven theory. I think the dissenting scientists should be able to voice their viewpoint as freely as the ones claiming that we’re all going to die from global warming. I’m a Republican, but I think it’s important for Democrats to be able to voice their opinion as well. Why shouldn’t we be able to hear both sides of the global warming debate? Based on their track record at predicting weather twelve hours in advance, I wouldn’t consider global warming an air-tight theory. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with being allowed to debate something – if it really is true, debating it will only further prove it to be so. Only allowing one side to speak is a sign of weakness, a sign that they’re afraid their theory might be thrown to the dogs if people looked too closely at it.

But what do I know? I’m not a scientist. I just have my own version of an inconvenient truth – that scientists don’t know everything, and we need to be a little less quick to draw conclusions from people who don’t necessarily have a proven track record. Just saying is all…

The other day, I had left some yarn remnants – short pieces trimmed for tails I’d woven – out where Ben could find them and play with them, which he likes to do.

He found them and stood in front of the couch (where I usually sit when I knit) and wound the yarn around his hands. “I knitting,” he said.

The he took his yarn over to our picture window, laid it on the sill, fiddled with it to get it to look just right, and then went over to the bookshelf to pick something up. He walked back over to the yarn, put his hands up to his eyes, and started taking “pictures” of what he had made. (The bookshelf happens to be where I keep the camera – handy, yet up high and out of reach.)

Oh, the things we learn about ourselves when we have three-year-olds who like to reinact what they see us do!

So here’s a picture of a sock I finished recently…posing on the windowsill, of course.

In other knitting news, I finally sewed the buttons on Isabelle’s sweater (Isabelle is the name of my friend’s little girl who will wear it). I hate sewing on buttons, so yes, it’s taken me a month to get this done.

Pretty?

Here is a close up of the collar area. I think it came out so much better than the first sweater I made like this that Joey wore. I bound off instead of decreasing, even just one stitch. Then I just picked up the stitches evenly around the curve. I am very pleased with how it came out. See?

Finally, I got the yarn in from Knit Picks that I had ordered (my excuse for not posting yesterday).

Here is the yarn and the beginnings of a little sweater I’m making for my friend who has bright red hair and loves Mary Kay’s Jungle eye color.

As you can see, my skill in taking pictures of my knitting is improving. I think this is the best photo I’ve taken yet.

Monday I decided to make another attempt at potty training. The theory was that I would put Ben in underwear and pants, and when he ran out of clean clothes, we would stop for the day.

I put him in real clothes around noon, and by 1:00, we were on the third set of clothes. Yes, that’s every 20 minutes he wet himself.

The first time he was quite upset about it. I’ve had in in disposables exclusively recently because the cloth diapers we were using were getting too small and they weren’t very absorbent anymore so we were having them leak fairly often. Enough of that.

The first time he was upset about being wet, and after that he didn’t seem to care. I would take his clothes off and then sit him on the potty for a couple minutes while I got out some fresh clothes.

Here he is, sitting on his potty. As you can see, he was really enjoying this.

Around 1:00, Joey was ready to go down for his nap. I was sitting in the glider nursing him, and Ben was running around like a maniac. I told him to slow down, but of course, he didn’t listen.

He ran right in front of me again, and this time I stuck my foot out to stop him.

I stopped him alright. He didn’t see my foot, and he fell. And when he stood up, there was blood everywhere.

Joey was happily nursing…so I held him with one hand and tried to get Ben into the bathroom where I had water and could try and figure out what was going on.

He had a nose bleed, and blood was coming out of his left nostril about one huge drip per second.

Steve gets nose bleeds all the time, and Ben has had them too. But this was the worst I’ve ever seen.

What do you do when someone is bleeding? This is a three-year-old, remember. I didn’t want to tip his head back for fear he’d choke on the blood. I tried putting pressure on it, but the nose is not an easy place to apply pressure, and he’s a three-year-old and three-year-olds don’t appreciate pressure applied to a sore, bleeding nose.

I had Ben in the tub. The floor of the tub was covered in blood. I mean, he probably only lost about a tablespoon of blood. It just looked like a lot. His hands were covered with it, his face was covered with it, and he was touching the shower curtain and the walls so they had blood on them too. Oh my!

I took Joey and put him down in his crib, hoping he’d fall asleep. I went back to Ben and decided all I could do was monitor how much blood he was losing and see if it was starting to stop. It did finally start to slow down, but it took a good ten minutes before it had pretty much stopped.

I ran water in the tub to rinse out all the blood, and I wiped the walls down as good as I could. When most of it had been washed away, I filled the tub with water and gave Ben a bath. I wiped off his face gently, and I gave him his fish so he’d play in the water and the blood on his hands would come off on its own. He’d stopped crying at this point, and playing with his fish seemed to make him feel better.

When I got him out of the tub, I put him back in a diaper. I put the bloody rags and my bloody shirt in the same laundry basket I’d brought into the bathroom to gather his soiled clothes from potty training. I took the basket downstairs and washed everything with a generous helping of hydrogen peroxide.

And thus ended our first attempt at potty training this week.

On Tuesday, I didn’t even bother to try. I did have somewhat of an ah-ha moment, though: I decided that it wasn’t just Ben who needed to be motivated to potty train with fun things like stickers and stories and fishing trips. I need a treat too for making myself figure out how to get him trained. I’m thinking it’s going to be yarn. Expensive yarn. Expensive yarn for me. Now that’s more like it…

Old camera: Olympus D-595 Zoom

New Camera: Canon S3 IS

Now that I’m able to get much better shots, I need Photoshop so I can tweak the images and make ’em really good!

Always something more…