In case you noticed, my site disappeared for a couple days there. After several weeks of drought, we had quite the thunderstorm Thursday night. One particular lightning bolt struck close enough that I (with my poor sense of smell) could smell the ozone and it fried a couple of key components of our home network. Since we serve our own domains, it meant bye-bye web sites and e-mail connectivity till Joe bought new modems and access points and got them all configured. Quite a task, apparently, but he valiantly rose to the occasion and it’s all working once more. I love having a husband who is even more of a nerdy tech-head than me.
It just so happened that Joe had promised me some time to myself Thursday night, to be used for the express purpose of blogging. I had so much to say and it was getting backed up, running around in my brain, causing me all kinds of anxiety. Now there is even more bottled up and running around in there, so watch out, here comes at least some of it.
Let’s start with some nice pictures.
First, Julie and Sophie in the double stroller getting ready for our walk to the library last Tuesday. See how Sophie is grabbing at the toys above her? She’s really getting the hang of grabbing stuff lately – versus just waving her arms at it.
Julie is sporting a Hello Kitty bandage on her right eyebrow, covering the three stitches she got Monday night (a week ago) after bonking her head on the nightstand. You can read Joe’s version of events here. He really beats himself up about these things, and so I’m going to share two older photos of Julie, the aftermath of incidents that happened under my watch.
Her first shiner, after a similar incident where she fell off the bed and hit her head on the nightstand while reaching for a book in July 2004.
Secondly, her first road rash, after falling while trying to run along an asphalt path at Shepherd’s Harvest in May 2005.
Julie got her stitches out on Friday, and the little owie seems to be healing just fine. She will have a scar, but hopefully it will be mostly obscured by her eyebrow. It’s funny, the night before I jokingly said something to Joe about “Do you think I should save the stitches for her scrapbook the way moms save the first haircut hair?” and he said “I still can’t believe people really save locks of hair. Yuck.” I had fogotten how creeped out he was by that after Julie’s first haircut.
Okay, here’s another happy one. Julie is busy enjoying her sandbox.
Here’s Sophie that same afternoon. She loves laying out on the blanket under the elm trees, and lately she’s been getting lots of practice rolling over and squirming around. Joe watched her do a complete 360 turn over the course of maybe half an hour the other day. I can’t believe how quickly she’s growing and changing.
In preparation for my planned blogging time last Thursday, I had taken a couple of pictures of my knitting basket contents. Even though I’ve made significant progress since they were taken, I’ll use what I have so there’s something interesting to show next time.
- Starting on the upper left, the current pair of on-the-go socks are some Fortissima self-striping yarn in a plain stockinette that knits up really fast. Both are past the heel, so it’s smooth sailing till they’re done.
- Next we have the finished pair of Dublin Bay socks, which you can’t see very well, but they have a simple lace pattern inset on the ankle and I’m very happy with how they turned out. That’s a free pattern from Mossy Cottage, although I changed it to use only 64 sts instead of 72 in order to fit my feet better.
- The socks on the right are the most-expensive-socks-I’ll-ever-knit, ready for some purple toes. I actually finished knitting them over the weekend, and I’m in love with ‘em. They might even get to take a trip to the State Fair, I’m so satisfied with them. I did a little something interesting with the toes that I’ve never done before, and I’m curious to see whether the State Fair judges would like it the way I think I do. More on that another time if you’re lucky.
- Down at the bottom of the picture are a couple of balls of that cotton yarn I was using to make the -ahem- Ann Norling items. I’ve made three now and have enough yarn for one more.
- There’s also a swatch of fabric spit out by my knitting machine from that yarn that climbed out of the stash last month. I like how the swatch turned out, I even somewhat enjoyed knitting it up, but I’m really thinking about putting the machine away again without knitting an actual garment right now because there is too much else on my knitting to-do list.
This little sweater wouldn’t fit in the picture with all the socks. The pink one is a little bavarian twist thing I designed for Sophie last winter before she was born. My original intent was to knit a similar one for Julie so they could match, but I was sick of cables by the time Sophie’s was done. I decided I could handle them again and that I want to get this puppy done before the State Fair so that I at least have the option of entering it if I think it’s worthy. Also, we’ve scheduled a family photo shoot in August with Jeff Dunn, the guy who did our wedding, and I think it would be perfect to have them in those sweaters. I obviously have a ways to go before then, so I’m expecting this to be my tv-watching knitting for most of the summer.
There are so many other things I’ve been wanting to talk about. There’s been some breastfeeding debate going on in and out of the blogosphere in the last couple of weeks, and I wanted to share my own set of opinions on that, but not tonight. I could tell you about all the dinners I’ve cooked in the last two weeks – including some inedibly charred NY Strip steaks, some brats that had to be nuked after I took the first bite of mine, and some shish kebab that rocked. My poor allergy page continues to languish. I could tell you about Sophie’s new ECFE class, and the experience we had with the sibling-care for Julie…but all that will have to wait. It’s getting late and the knitting it calls.