Knitting Lessons

{ Saturday, March 20, 2010 }

Rocking the faux-hawk and playing with mama's knitting.
I hope you someday take needles in hand and get as much enjoyment out of this craft as I do, little one!

I'm THAT mom

{ Wednesday, March 17, 2010 }
I've been sort of straddling the world of the stay-at-home mom and that of the working mom the past few months. I feel very fortunate that I was able to cut my work hours back to part-time so I can spend more time with the bean during the day. In many ways, I have the best of both worlds.

Of course the flip side of that is that I also have the worst of both worlds. And that is this: the bean is at daycare 1/5 of the week and it would only seem fair that she would get 1/5 of the germs, but we seem to have a special deal where the remaining bugs are thrown in for free. Yay! Its heartbreaking to see her spend every weekend with a runny nose and gradually get better just in time to head back to school and get sick again.

On my days off work, we try to stay busy with playdates and activities around town so we don't both go stir crazy, but we have these freeloading germs that come along with us.

So, I'm that mom who's kid always has a runny nose.
I'm that mom who cancels a playdate because her kid is STILL sick (or sick again).
I'm that mom who shows up to storytime with pinkeye. (Me, not the kid. Oh, so much fun!)
I'm that mom who shows up late and frazzled because I was answering work emails all morning.

I'm also that mom who shows up on St. Patrick's day with the only kid who isn't in a cute green outfit. I guess I can't blame that one on work or germs, that one's just because I'm a flake.

Sweater Fix

{ Sunday, March 14, 2010 }
When I was getting the bean dressed for school the other day, I noticed that a yarn end had worked its way loose on her (brand new, store bought) sweater. My first instinct was to cut it off, but on closer inspection I saw what looked like a bunch of dropped stitches,

And proceeded to FREAK OUT

For half a second

before coming to my senses and remembering that I'm a KNITTER and should know how to fix the stupid thing, so I decided to fake it. I pulled out my tiniest crochet hook and picked the "dropped" stitches back up easily enough, but it took a bit of studying for me to figure out what to do with them.

Scary stuff

I ended up threading the broken yarn onto a yarn needle and sewing the top stitch of each ladder back in, then knotting the broken ends together. I have never succesfully completed a fix like this (I have a pair of handknit socks languishing in the back of a drawer because I couldn't figure out how to fix a hole), so you can imagine it took some time and a few different tries to get this to work.

But work it finally did. Yay me! I conquered the cute as can be sweater with the teeny-tiniest stitches ever. I am so glad that I figured this out, but I hope to never have to do it again (especially at this small a gauge). And oh yeah, this totally cured me from wanting to knit a baby sweater with teeny tiny needles.

Operation: Diapers No More

{ Tuesday, March 09, 2010 }
We first started putting the bean on her potty when she was a little more that 6 months old and our expectations were very low. We wanted to get her comfortable with sitting there once a day and hoped that she might do so without complaint after a month or two. The bean actually never complained about it and was very happy to sit there and read a book each morning. We were also surprised that it didn't take long for her to actually start using the thing--it was about two weeks before she was going consistently.

At some point a few weeks ago, we realized two things. First of all, the bean had gone to the bathroom in her potty each morning for the last 7 days, at least. Second, the bean had been going to the bathroom on her bath towel after every before-bed bath. The next logical step was to add another "sitting" right before bed (ideally before her bath). That second sitting has not been quite as successful as our early morning one--mostly because its harder to really schedule it at a specific time since we don't take baths every night. Still, she uses the potty at night about half of the time.

The plan for right now is to continue with twice a day until we hopefully have some more consistency at night. Then I think we'll keep adding sessions into the day until she's pretty much going every 3 hours or so.

The second part of our plan involves getting rid of disposable diapers. With the bean in cloth, she'll be better able to tell when she's wet which will help with our training efforts. You may remember that we had planned for the bean to be in cloth diapers all along, but we ran into a bit of a roadbump with that when she kept getting really painful diaper rashes that were only healed by switching to disposables. Her skin has toughened up a bit now and we're ready to switch again--the only problem being that she's outgrown the diapers I made and I'm still working on making new ones. Once they're all sewed, we'll switch back to full-time cloth and hope she handles it well.

We don't plan for her to be "full-time" on the potty until sometime after her first birthday, so we still have lots of time. As a newborn, the bean used more than 12 diapers a day--now, at 8 months, we are down to around 5 and we'll be working on getting that number down.

Getting around

{ Thursday, March 04, 2010 }
The bean has requested that I retract my earlier statements regarding her lack of interest in crawling.

She also feels very strongly that army crawling counts and I'm in no position to disagree with her.




Who knew all it took was a ziplock bag for motivation?