Aww, Baby...

(Just thought I'd share this with you. What's cuter than a sleeping baby?)

Weekend Project

This morning, I suddenly decided that today was the day I was going to go through all of my yarn and needles and put them in a permanent place. For so long, I've just shoved them in a drawer, and now that my yarn habit is really starting to take off, they need a home.

So, being determined, I went to the Container Store. I spent a good hour there looking lost (but still determined) and (after chatting with one of the sales associates for a long time about knitting) I found a set of drawers that suited my needs. I went ahead and also bought some under-the-bed storage for extra yarn capacity.


But then, I had a basket of needles (mostly inherited from Una) that needed a home! Well I can't have that! Needles NEED a home!

So while the house was showing, Kerry-Lynn and I set off (determinedly) to Marshall's, Target, and World Market. We found a cute mug at Marshall's (the black and flowery one at the front - it was $3.24!) and two pretty blue vases for all of my other needley purposes. (They were on SALE too! I paid $4.48 for the big one and $3.48 for the small one.)


I LOVE the way they look.

Now, I just need to find a place to house all of my circular needles!

A Baby Update

It's been a while since my last post about little Miss Emma and I think that it may be time for a short baby update!

Every week I look after Emma, something is different. Babies grow so fast, and it's fascinating to watch their change and anticipate what will come next.


In the last two weeks or so, Emma has started to laugh. Her mouth gets all big and her eyes smile and these adorable sounds come out of her belly! It is just the cutest thing! In the last few days, she's started responding to peekaboo games. She doesn't giggle when I play peekaboo with her, but she does smile real big... I have a feeling that the giggling will start coming. As it is, she will make herself heard if she wants to talk. She has amazing volume with those little lungs of hers! This afternoon, I was making myself lunch and she was hanging out on the floor just happily screeching away and then giggling because it sounded funny. I think it's her way of saying "HI! I can talk TOO!"

Jenny (her mother) has started feeding Emma solid foods (well 'solid' I guess is relative. I wouldn't ever call that green bean mush a 'solid'). Emma doesn't like the green foods yet, but she does eat them. She likes carrots, too. But of course, the majority of her diet is formula. I love when I feed her and she reaches up and either tries to hold the bottle or holds my fingers. She has such tiny little hands...



Her depth perception has started to develop, and in the last few weeks she has started to reach for things, instead of waiting for them to be given to her. If I put her on the floor with a toy, she'll roll around with it and giggle and entertain herself with the toy for quite a time. She's definitely not at an age where she could completely entertain herself. (See? She grabbed my camera strap.)


The beginnings of teething are in full swing, and consequently she puts everything in her mouth. She's (kind of) stopped shoving her fingers so far into her mouth that she gags, but she definitely is chewing on all sorts of objects. (Exhibit A:)


Since Jenny gave me permission to sleep Emma on her tummy, Emma has been napping like a pro. She sleeps longer, better, and she is just a happier baby once she wakes up.


Poor Emma has been sick this week with a stomach virus. :( On Monday (and less so Tuesday), she just cried this pitiful "I'm just miserable - hold me!" noise. She's not been completely awful, but she has been exhausting. I hate falling asleep while "on duty" (Once I babysat until four in the morning and managed to stay awake), but I've fallen asleep several times on their couch this week without meaning to while Emma naps. I think Emma is on the mend, though. She's not quite so fussy today, so she is probably on the mend - though still a little warm. Poor baby.

Well, that's all the baby-related gushing I am allowed to do in one blog post. ;)

-----

In other news, in an epic battle between my index finger and the bread knife... my finger lost. It's the first time I've cut my finger in a really long time! It's really difficult to type with a bandaid on my finger. And speaking of bandaids, why does no one seem to have them? I had to go to the first aid kit in my car and dig one out.

(Before people - ahem, Gramma - start worrying, no the cut is not bad, and yes, the cut is healing.)

No sweater news today. Have only knit a little since my last post about the sweater.

It's a love thing today

So far, I've logged around 18 hours of work on this sweater, and finally I have (a piece of) the product.



Last night, I finished the back of the sweater. (YAY!) I also cast on for the front and hopefully I'll be able to knock the rest of the sweater out for my (highly ambitious) deadline of the 14th of July.

22 days? I can totally handle that.

(I also have deadlines for 2010 and 2011, when the other Harry Potter movies come out, but those are a little bit easier to make and a lot less ambitious.)

So cheer me on!

It's a love-hate thing.

Reasons why I hate my Weasley Sweater:

1) Endless. Stockinette. Stitch.
2) Mindless knitting.
3) Doesn't seem to grow unless I look away.
4) It's taking FOREVER.
5) It gets boring really quickly.


Reasons why I love my Weasley Sweater:

1) Endless stockinette stitch.
2) Mindless knitting.
3) It's blue. I LOVE blue.
4) It's an easy pattern.
5) It's for ME.


This afternoon, the house was showing so I went over to my LYS (local yarn shop) and sat down at the table to knit. I started around 1:30ish with a new ball of yarn and 2 1/2 hours later, I had progressed only four inches (I started where the stray yarn is hanging out along the right side). It's frustrating, considering I worked so long.

(For the record, at 20", I am 8" short of where I need to stop knitting the back and start the front.)

Haircut!!

I love my new haircut SO MUCH that I just have to blog about it.


(Do you like my webcam action? I definitely rock the low-quality and the dark room.)

It's cute, it's short, though it is the same length as the one I've had for the last two-ish years, but the bangs are different.

But the best part?

My hairdresser got rid of about half of my hair. Not even kidding! She thinned it out so much that it feels entirely different. My hair is deceptively thick (very fine, but thick). Already my head isn't so hot. (Which is important for the summer, seeing as how every day for the last two weeks has either approached 100 or equaled it.)

I am so excited. Best haircut I've had in a long time.

A Post about Guilt and Knit Night

So, I do feel bad about posting only once or twice a week but recently my life has been sucked up by babysitting, naps, and (on occasion!) knitting. My sweater (picture in the future!) is now probably about 15" long now and ALMOST looks like it could be the fabric for something fabulous. Unfortunately, I have enough yarn left for maybe two more rows and then I have to wait for Staci at the Knitting Nest to get more in! She assures me it will be sometime before next Monday and that she will email me when it does come in... so until then, I've taken up my "Knitting == Therapy" socks.

(Imagine a pretty picture here. I don't have my camera OR the sock on me.)

I don't like blogging about sad things, but sad things do occur in life, and last night I wasn't in the best of moods (read: crying...For reasons I'd rather not discuss on le blog) when I went to Knit Night. I had a throbbing headache and was a total mess but I knew that I wanted to go and soak up the atmosphere of so many women knitting and being a community. It just seemed like the best thing to do, and sure enough I was right. I was only there for an hour and a half but within 20 minutes the ladies around the table had cheered me up and made me (kind of) forget about what was upsetting me so much.

I feel like I do owe them a huge, ginormous "Thank you" for being such wonderful, supportive people. Monday nights are the best of the week. :)

(And because this has been such a pictureless blog, I now present a lolcat:

There. Feel better now? Picture cravings satisfied?)

Nature Photography Strikes Back

It seems I am quickly becoming quite the nature photographer.


The baby birdies are flying now.


(And playing, "King of the Branch" too.)

'Lil Birdies

Welcome to the front of my house. Waaaaaay up in the right hand corner, there is a birds nest which is occupied every summer by the barn swallows when they lay their eggs.


A few weeks ago (I think two-ish) I took pictures of the hatched baby birds. They, like most baby birds, were ugly buggers who poop all over our stoop, but were adorable because they cheep-cheep-cheep all day and are babies. (Babies are ALWAYS cute!)


You can see four in that picture. And in this picture as well (taken this afternoon):


They are a lot better-looking now, right? I named them: Curly, Moe, Larry, and Tish. (The mother is named Madame Poopsalot Ondastoop)

Well, it turns out there are five little birdies. And the fifth one I will name Ralph. Ralph, you may notice, is in the process of pooping onto the stoop (which my mother just LOVES.)


(There ARE five... I'm not making it up. See?)


Being the "Talented" photographer that I am, I waited patiently with my Fancy Camera and had the action setting set on my camera so I could see the mama bird come and feed the babies. Well, all I got were some pretty cool action shots of the mama bird flying AWAY from feeding the babies because my camera doesn't shoot fast enough.


(But they are pretty cool pictures, eh?)

Ridiculous

I would like to share with you, my lovely readers, something absolutely ridiculous that I encountered tonight:


(Click to embiggen)

Mom and I spent a good fifteen minutes trying passwords and having them rejected.

(For obvious reasons, I won't TELL you what the password was, but, broken down, it looks something like this: ********

Yall have fun with that. ;) )

What is even MORE ridiculous is that we tried things like putting the @ sign before a series of numbers (because, you might note, the @ sign is legal) but it took it to mean that @ stood for 'a'. We couldn't use 8, because it looked too much like 'B' to the computer, and we couldn't use a real word longer than four letters, so we had to make a word up in the end. Do you know how many abbreviations of words have four letters in them and are still considered words? It seemed like we picked them all.

The moral of the story is to never underestimate the power of IT people who have way too much time on their hands.

-----

Sweater coming along nicely. Will run out of yarn soon if my LYS (local yarn shop) doesn't restock soon. They only had one skein of my desired color when I went in to buy. :(

My First Sweater!

I was driving home from work this afternoon and it was 100 degrees outside. And I'm knitting myself a sweater!

(All the ladies at knit night agree it's about time I knitted myself something!)

I've decided to knit my first sweater and so far it's going swimmingly. Of course, as you can tell, it is clearly difficult and challenging in many, many ways. (Ahem... stockinette stitch.)




This was taken before knit night tonight, so it's a little bigger... but not by much. I knitted for a good three(ish) hours and already I can tell that I could be being a wee bit ambitious to hope that I can have this finished for the Harry Potter movie opening in a month and six days. But then again, I have been known to churn out an entire sock in an afternoon when I want to. Perhaps with a little love, determination (God knows I have buckets full of determination), and some excellent naps from Emma I can get it done!

The pattern is the Weasley Sweater from Charmed Knits, because it delights me to be so dorkish! I'm knitting it with Cascade Heather 220 (The blue is Midnight 9449 and the silver is Misty Lilac 9324. Although honestly, I don't see how it's lilac at all. It's definitely silver.) Instead of having an H (or an M, like whoever-that-was in the link earlier) it'll have an S. For Stefanie.

(Because it's my sweater and don't let me find another person who needs a size L whose name starts with an S to give it to.)

Baby Talk

A few weeks into this whole nanny thing, I'm starting to get the hang of it. I'm more confident with the baby, I am learning to recognize what she wants when she is upset, and I know how to change a diaper without getting poo on the changing mat. (The last one is key!)

I really like being a nanny, and I know that I always will love childcare. I loved being the Cooper's summer sitter a few years ago, and quite frankly, I've been babysitting for nearly six years now as my primary source of income.

But there is something different about nannying for a baby. It's rewarding and exhausting but on a totally different level than caring for an older child.


In the three weeks I've been taking care of Emma, I have noticed quite a number of changes:

For one, she can almost stand on her feet in her little bouncy chair. Her little toesies are just touching the floor.

She's started to wiggle and kick a lot more. If I'm not holding her, she's in her little boppie by my side. I don't know how much more pulverizing the left side of my body can take. I wonder how much longer the little wiggle-worm will go before she can start crawling and sitting by herself!

For another, she's started showing signs of teething. (The drooling, the pulling at her ears, the constant gumming of her toys.) She's not any more fussy than she normally is, but I have a feeling that will come.


She smiles more. I love her little smile. She's a very talkative baby, and she has started to make those little high-pitched happy noises. Those make me melt!


She's also started to sleep better for me. So far, she hasn't slept for more than 40 minutes at a time (except for yesterday, when she nearly slept for two hours in the afternoon!) and I figured that after a time, she would sleep better for me. And it seems like that time is coming.


(She sleeps touching her ears. It is so adorable.)