The Heathen Housewife

You are not going to freaking believe it when I tell you who poo’ed and pee’d on the potty today. (Uh, and yeah, if you don’t want to hear about all this technical kid stuff, move along to the next post because there ain’t no knitting here today. Sorry.)

But really, guess.

Nope, not Daisy. Even though she’s probably smart enough, and even though there are kit out there to teach them how. We never got around to that with either of the cats, and Harry is dumb as a box of rocks, so don’t even bother guessing him. At least they are both, for the most part and despite their creepingly geriatric status, using the litter box. They are both looking royally pissed in this picture because I just woke them up from their nap on the cat-couch in the basement by flashing bright lights in their eyes over and over.

Julie probably did, but that’s way old news at this point. It’s even been a while since she’s had a potty accident.

And now I know you’re thinking “It better not be you or Joe, because none of us want to know anything about your potty habits.” And no, I’m not talking about any of the adults in the house because I have no plans to share our potty habits no matter how interesting they may be.

Who’s left, you ask? It couldn’t possibly be that tiny baby, the one who’s not even quite two years old yet. Not the one who doesn’t even poop at all if she can help it.

This was taken with the Sidekick during a bedtime game of behind-the-door hide and seek, which was unimaginably cute.

Why yes, it was in fact that one. I can hardly believe it myself. I had no plans for potty training at this point. I didn’t even consider starting with Julie till she was about three. But Sophie has been begging to sit on the potty on and off over the last month or so. The other night right before dinner, she kept telling Joe that she wanted to sit on the potty and he told her no because we were going to sit down at the table rightthisminute. Lo and behold, she had a BM in the high chair. And then today she was obviously in need of doing some business, yet obviously unwilling to do so in her pants. So, long story long, we read a few books, hung out for a while in each of the two bathrooms, and took care of a little business. Everyone was happy.

Until I insisted that she put her diaper back on, and that part was a little sad.

This growing up thing is happening pretty fast after all…

We did not, in fact, get good videos tonight. Julie decided she didn’t want to sing with her class.

Happily, though, we do have good videos from the other night at home, and I’ve uploaded a couple to YouTube for your viewing pleasure:

Hey, people!

I’ve been busy finishing some objects and stuff. This time of year, it is crazy. I’ve kind of had to choose where to put my energies, and sitting on the couch won out after a couple of long days.

No pictures tonight, I’m headed to bed, and I’ll save the details for after the gifts just finished are given, but let me just say that I can’t wait to see our friends – they know who they are – and hand over the goods. I love it when people appreciate my hand knit gifts, and these people have done it well in the past.

So much else – I wasn’t going to mention the store, I swear, but I feel like I should give y’all fair warning. I got an e-mail from a popular blog today saying that they’re going to feature my shop some time this week, so the little stock remaining, picked over as it is, may be getting even more picked over. Also, in preparation for the potential traffic, I went ahead and listed some baby pants patterns. I keep meaning to post about my awesome test knitters and show you some cute pants pictures – will have to get around to that soon!

In sad news, Julie had been mentioning that her little friend B*, the little boy she goes to school with and loves to death, was getting a new house. So I assumed they were moving locally. I found out today that ack! they are moving out of state. I am so sad for Julie that I cried when B*’s mom told me.

But in happier news, it turns out that her school’s family fun night is tomorrow, and apparently her class has been preparing some songs to perform. I got her to sing some of them at home tonight, and may put the hilarious video up on YouTube for you if I have the energy tomorrow night. Or, I may collect some more video tomorrow night and share that with you instead.

But I do have a lot of little holiday junk going on – I do a little picture web-page for my uncle’s family every year, and he’s sent me the photos so I better get on that soon (It’s kind of hilarious, really. I am so tempted to show y’all the link from last year, but oh, well, go ahead and look if you must.) None of the design is mine – I just did what I was told and provided the space, I swear! And now you know all about my paternal grandparents. Julie’s middle name is Marlys after my grandmother.

My holiday cards are scheduled to show up in the mail any day, and those will take priority when they do. And I’m trying to crank out a bunch of cookies and hope to mail off a couple of care packages early next week. I’ve been so good about just eating a few, sharing a few with the girls, and then double bagging the rest for the freezer which keeps ‘em fresh and avoids temptation.

There is so much else I could share – I decided on the J Crew coat because the fabric was so much nicer than the Eddie Bauer one. Most of the girls’ Christmas presents have arrived, including the ones from HearthSong (except one stocking-stuffer from them which said in stock on the web site but that they listed as backordered on the packing list, and which they promised would be in the mail the next day when I called, and that was a week ago. No big deal if we don’t get it in time for Christmas – there’s tons of stuff for the stockings already!)

Alright, I’m off to bed!

Hi, sorry for the shameless self-promotion here. I promise I won’t mention the etsy shop again at least for the rest of the year. But I thought I’d let everyone know that I’ve marked all the remaining yarn in my shop down to $15 a skein. I’d really like to move it out of my office by the end of the year, partly so I won’t have to figure out how to declare it as inventory on my taxes.

So if you’ve looked at my yarn in the past and thought it was just a bit too dear, now’s your chance to have your own pet skein. Or if you want to whip up a last minute gift for someone you love, there might still be time for a super-fast knitter…or maybe you could just give them the skein of yarn in a package and tell them that it will become socks after the holiday. There is even one skein left of the Valkyrie colorway, a purple and gold that would be perfect knit up for your favorite Vikings fan…

On top of that, anyone who purchases two or more skeins can specify in their comments to seller their choice of either a free pattern (socks, baby hat, adult hat) or a few notecards to be included in your package.

Time to go to bed…I’ve been baking cookies all evening, and knitting on mittens in between batches. Pictures of that and more tomorrow-ish.

I haven’t talked much lately about Julie’s dance lessons, but I have a whopper of an update. If you’ll recall, we signed her up for ballet/tap lessons in September after months and months of her obsession over all things dance. She especially loves Angelina Ballerina, and can get pretty into fantasies of performing on stage. The girl wanted lessons. And then we started lessons, and it was a little rocky for a while there.

For a while, we almost took her out of lessons altogether. Out of fairness to her, I think I’m going to leave out some of the details about why and how it went down. I’m just going to say that Joe and I did our best to balance our decisions about how to help her with this – we knew she wanted to do it, we knew it would be good for her, but we didn’t want to push her to do something that was uncomfortable or traumatize her over something meant to be fun. In the end, it worked out and she has been enjoying her classes much more. And part of those classes has been practice for the Nutcracker recital put on by the dance school.

Julie’s part was a small one in the party scene at the beginning, which meant that she got to wear her Christmas party dress that we already had. She was very excited to put it on for the dress rehearsal yesterday, and Sophie wanted to get dressed up, too, so I let her.

The biggest part of a dress rehearsal is waiting around for everyone else to rehearse. I could not believe how well my girls behaved – they sat in these chairs for almost two hours without complaint. It didn’t hurt that I had tons of snacks and activities along for them. The raisins again – they are magic!

And finally, it was Julie’s turn to get up on the stage and run through her little routine.

She did exactly what she was supposed to do when she was supposed to do it, and she smiled her biggest, happiest smile the whole time.

I can’t begin to express how happy I felt for her. She had been saying earlier in the week that she wasn’t going to be in the performance (for reasons only she knows). I had told her that she didn’t have to perform if she didn’t want to, but that she did have to get dressed up and at least be at the rehearsal and at the performance.

I stood in the wings, holding Sophie in one hand and snapping pictures with the other, and tears welled up in my eyes – okay, I actually cried a little bit. I was so. freakin’. happy. for her.

And this morning dawned, things were looking good. We went out to breakfast and came home and played around the house for a bit. The girls got dressed up and I managed to remember to take their picture in front of the tree before we left the house.

There was more waiting – back stage this time. That’s Julie with Teacher Rachel. Rachel is so sweet, so nice, so patient, so wonderful. We love Teacher Rachel. I wish I had the time to knit her some leg warmers for Christmas. I’m actually tempted to try and squeeze a pair in, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. She will get a nice gift certificate instead.

Here they are just off the stage, waiting to go on. All the little girls love Teacher Rachel. Oh! and one of the little girls saw me with Julie and said “You cried yesterday!” and I said “Yep, sometimes I cry a little bit when I’m really happy.” and she said “Are you going to cry again today?” and I said “Maybe. I hope not.”

Julie smiled and sat where she was supposed to sit…

although this time she got a little distracted by the giftwrapped prop boxes…

But it worked out in the end, and she skipped right through the human tunnel when it was time, and took her little curtsy.

And they came off the stage, and all the little girls checked my face to see if I was crying – there were a few happy tears in my eyes, but none escaped this time. And we snuck in the back of the auditorium and watched the rest of the show, leaving just in time to get back on stage for the final curtain-call…

And the part that Julie was looking forward to all week…

She got her pink roses from Mommy and Daddy and Grandma Harmony. And life was good.

I was all rarin’ to post this yesterday, but instead found myself embroiled in what became an entire evening of trying to get a few packages ready to mail out and in the mean time dig through the pile of crap that had once again overtaken my desk.

But here I am tonight, and the pictures and memories are still fresh enough. Everything worked out yesterday afternoon so that after lunch we were able to decorate our gingerbread house. Sophie got a front-row seat in her high chair, and Julie pulled up a stool.

I had all the candies set up in little bowls and ready to go. The girls were SO excited to eat candy. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but my girls have had almost no candy. This Halloween was a big break in the candy-eating dam, but there is not candy available in our house on a regular basis.

But still, Julie did a great job putting the candies on the house, and did so in an impressively organized fashion.

Sophie watched and worked her way up to a sugar high.

Julie wanted to try her hand at the icing bag, so we got out a sheet of waxed paper and she went to town. I’m glad she accepted this compromise over practicing on the house. I enjoyed watching her practice with it, and simultaneously assuaged my obsessive-compulsive need for a well-decorated gingerbread house.

Sophie said, “This is fun! I’ll have some more sugar, please!”

Julie’s icing tube came open at the top, and she ended up with a big glob of it on her hands. So I told her she could lick it off, which she started to do. Sophie saw Julie licking the icing, and wanted in on the action. So Julie, bless her little heart, let Sophie lick some of the icing off her hand. It was hilariously funny and cute.

I was having so much fun decorating that I started pulling things out of the cabinets to add to the house – remember those Honey Bunny cookies? Now they’re hopping all around the place. I found some stale Swedish Fish in the back of the cupboard, and made a little pond for them to swim in. I pulled out some mini marshmallows and made some smoke coming out of the chicklet-gum chimney. The trees are the only inedible part – I made cones out of construction paper for lack of something better.

Gotta love the timer function on the camera.

Here’s Julie’s work of art. She said it was the forest. I don’t have the heart to throw it away, so it’s still sitting on the counter with the house.

And oh, hey, look! Finished object!

I thought these were going to be four-year-old size, but instead after felting, it looks like they will be just right for the almost-two-year-old. This is Malabrigo worsted weight, knit on size 5 needles with a cast-on number of 36. Just your basic generic in-the-round mitten pattern, with a couple of stripes thrown in for fun. Now it’s time to go start the second pair.

Hi everyone, it’s time for another camera-dump. Ya ready?

It snowed here over the weekend, and the girls and I were outside for a few minutes enjoying it. Really, it was a few minutes. That’s all I can take. Thankfully, Sophie doesn’t seem to like the cold so I can blame coming inside on her. Yay!

Sophie did enjoy taking a little ride around on the little sled. We need to buy a bigger one, and go find one of the many sledding hills around here to introduce them to real sledding, but for now, this did the trick.

Julie enjoys throwing chunks of snow into the street and watching them splat. I take the credit for that one, as I enjoy doing it almost as much as she does. I just have to keep an eagle eye on her to make sure she doesn’t edge too close to the street and fall off the snow bank.

Sunday we decorated the tree. I know a lot, maybe even most, people have themes for their trees and they end up looking like works of art. Our tree is eclectic, and I love it. The glass ornaments go higher up, the homemade and soft ornaments go at the bottom. I didn’t realize how many ornaments we ended up making last year till I opened the box on Sunday, but I felt a little proud of myself for managing to do all that with a toddler and an infant. Julie was thrilled to be allowed to hang some of the glass ornaments this year.

Sophie was pretty fascinated by just everything about the tree. We are going through the “look-don’t-touch learning process with her, I’m afraid. Notice I’m wearing that blue sweater minus the bobble-nipples.

Yesterday I tried my hand at bread again. This time whole-wheat. It was pretty good, if a little dense as homebaked whole-wheat tends to be. It was fine smeared with butter and honey as afternoon snack and maybe even a bit better with our split-pea soup for dinner.

Still not what I would call mannah, though. We’ll keep trying. The only problem is that I ended up eating way too much bread and I felt quite sick afterwards. I need some self-control!

Julie was at a friend’s house last week and found herself wearing a shiny tiara out of the dress-up clothes there. Ever since then, she’s been begging me to help her make one, so yesterday we did out of construction paper, aluminum foil, glue and sequins. It turned out pretty cute.

This stupid light fixture – we had it installed during the great kitchen renovation a couple years ago. The fluorescent bulb inside burned out several days ago, and we couldn’t figure out how to get the lid off to replace it. My electrician was out of town and not returning my calls, so eventually I took this photo to send along with Joe to Home Depot so he could get some advice there. Luckily, they had the same model and he got it figured out. It was simply maddening to have one end of the kitchen all dark and gloomy! It was driving me crazy, and now that we have the light back, it’s freaky how beautiful and bright it is again.

I did a little yarn dyeing over the weekend. It’s for a custom order, and I hope it’s good enough. It took me forever to get around to doing it for various reasons, but I’m hoping it will be dry enough to mail out tomorrow. Assuming, of course, that I can get us out of the house – there is more snow coming down right now.

A few weeks ago I bought one of those gingerbread house kits. It felt like a total cop-out to buy the pre-made cookies and the candy all kitted up, but I knew that I would never get around to baking one myself, and I knew Julie would love this project. We will make our own gingerbread cookies, but I don’t think I could make a house this nice myself anyway.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to get started on this project, partly because you need a nice little block of time to work on it without people crying or melting down or needing to be held. Mostly, though, I was putting off the struggle that ensues whenever I embark on a project like this with Julie. She wants to do everything herself, and I’m sorry, but my four-year-old cannot handle things like running the hand mixer, squeezing the frosting bag, or even putting gingerbread walls into place without getting all spastic. In the end, though, she was happy with just watching and licking the beaters.

I mixed the royal icing and put it into the bags. I like to use water glasses to hold the bags while I fill them up – I just turn the edges of the bags over the sides of the glasses kind of like trash can liners, and it makes it ever so much easier to scrape the frosting into them. Also, the glasses serve as nice holding areas for the bags in between uses, helping to minimize some of the mess.

I needed a base to set the house on, so I cut a piece of cardboard and covered it in foil. Classy!

Here is the picture of the sample house on the tin it came in. I can only imagine how *lovely* ours will be by comparison!

The directions tell you to put the sides together, wait a few hours, put the roof on and wait overnight.

The roof is on now, and maybe tomorrow afternoon we’ll decorate.

In the mean time, after Julie’s dance class tonight I realized that we had no dinner waiting for us at home, so I dragged the girls into the fancy grocery store that’s in the neighborhood to pick up some quickly-prepared fare that I’m not even going to admit in public. But once there,we found this:

They were having a Lego menorah-building contest! How cool is that?!!! They even had a “giant” menorah made out of duplo blocks!

I felt a little creepy taking pictures as I was the only non-Jewish person hanging around that part of the store, and I felt even a bit creepier explaining it to Julie, hoping that I wasn’t saying anything offensive. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.

And now, I have to go work on the knitting. I’m finishing a certain pair of mittens for a certain little friend of the family who is expecting them. I’d like to get the pair done tonight and maybe even start on the pair for the little sister of that family. To keep me company, I have a DVD of old-school Sesame Street from 1972. I watched part of it last night, and it’s great! All the grown-ups look so young. Bob and Gordon, Maria and Luis…and some of the muppets look a little freaky. Muppet technology has come a long way, I guess.

I really want to thank everyone who played along with my wish list game. I feel like I’ve received gifts from so many of you this last week or so. Gifts of being reminded what I already have, both materially and in thoughtfulness by my family. Gifts of wishes that I should have things that you have and love – maybe someday regular massages will be in my budget! Gifts of your time and energy that you’ve put into thinking up something great for me to check out.

I want you all to know that Joe has been reading your comments too, and not just him either. The husband of a friend and reader called me up the other day and asked me about what to get her for Christmas. Thanks to you all, I was able to send him here and I’m sure he found lots of great ideas that she will love. I’d like to believe that there are others like him out there waiting to be enlightened.

In any case, as I’m going back through all the comments, the copies of them that are in my e-mail in-box, I’m putting them into a special folder and then will use the random number generator to draw one out. Now, I have to point out that I asked y’all to post responses on the original contest post and a bunch of you didn’t. If you had, it would have made my life oh-so-much easier right now, but I don’t have the heart to leave you out of the running so I’m taking the extra time to sort ‘em through.

I’m sorry I don’t have time tonight to respond to all the rest of the suggestions. Please know that I read them all, and really appreciate your thoughtfulness!

So I ran the random number – it was 58 – and I had to go almost twenty people down the list to find someone who had left contact information! It seems like a silly requirement, but I need a way to e-mail the winner that they’ve won, and it’s not like I’m generating some kind of spam e-mail list! I even went through the Blogger accounts of the people in question and most of the profiles were unavailable, or led to blogs with no e-mail information.

Which is extremely lucky, I guess, for Flan, who did include her e-mail address when she recommended that I get some kind of new workspace option like storage or desk for my office. Flan, I’ve thought about that and really would like to get a new desk in my office some day. The thing that holds me back is that I have a feeling no matter how much horizontal space I have, I will still manage to clutter it up. So until we have unlimited funds, I’m sticking with what I have.

E-mail me with your snail-mail address, and I’ll pop the book out to you this week. Unless you want to finally meet up for that cup of coffee and/or dyeing party we’ve been trying to plan for the last eon. Shellyk at shellykang dot com.

And now, I’m going to go take a break. I haven’t had one all week. I’m exhausted.

I was going to get the contest drawing done tonight, but instead I was busy helping to rearrange furniture, cleaning up a bit, wrapping some X-mas presents, and doing this:

Joe and I hauled up all the X-mas decorations, he set up the tree, and I put on the lights. Right now he’s finishing up assembling the Playmobil advent calendar I bought on clearance last year.

I know better than to try and do tree lights with two little girls running around. It’s hard enough with help from the furry friends. There were some curse words involved.

At least we’ll be ready to let the girls help put ornaments on tomorrow. Joe doesn’t get into the whole tree-decorating-is-fun thing, but I do, and I think the girls do too.

Contest winner drawing will have to wait till Sunday night, I’m afraid!

In the mean time, a gratuitous cute-kid picture from this afternoon: