keep trying baby

I was looking through post titles, and found the one about the baby getting mobile back in January. Then 4 months later she's started another level of mobility. She's not walking on her own yet, but she's been thinking about it, and attempting it. She takes half a step and loses her balance. She's been rising to stand by herself without having to pull up on something else for support for a week or so. It's kind of interesting to watch her and you can just see the gears turning as she attempts these new developments. She keeps getting back up and trying again till something shiny distracts her for a minute. I keep hearing Dori in Finding Nemo, except it relates to my baby walking, not fish swimming the deep blue sea trying to find a lost offspring.
However, I'm also in a deep dark sea trying to find a lost offspring in my oldest son. But it's at that point in a parent's and a child's life when the parent can not convince the child of anything on a map being correct, so that child must swim the ocean and hopefully win against the currents and riptides. I think I may be in the territory that is familiar to St. Monica with regards to her son St. Augustine.
To say the least it's a bit stressful, and I've got so much going on that my ability to sit down and knit on that sweater I started is limited. Sadly even my mundane project I can work in the dark is needing repairs before I can proceed with it. I'm bound by the activities and naptimes of a certain little person who sees fit to only sleep in short spurts of time resembling a joke for a nap. I wear my shoulders in my ears more often than I should, and that is also compounded by a co-sleeping-to-nurse-baby-at-night-and-get-some-sleep-too arrangement. The chiropractor asked me how long we planned to nurse. My answer "as long as it takes, I have no idea" was not enthusiastically received, but the chiro is there to realign me and his concern is that I keep UNaligning myself. Prime example is right now as I type, I'm sitting with my legs crossed (hello vericose veins!) leaning back on my tailbone that was broken 9 years ago, with said baby on my chest - asleep for a power nap. Nevermind, she just squirmed and fussed till I put her tummy down on my lap...not that it's much better. I can't reach my knitting. And my coffee needs to be warmed.
And also as I type this my birthday girl is now awake after fighting sleep to stay up till midnight of her birthday. I got "first wishes" as the new tradition in my family goes. It's a little contest we all have to see who gets to wish the birthday person a Happy Birthday first, as in - stroke of midnight 12:00:00 birthday wishes. And now that the baby is up (5 mins later, I tell you it's a power nap for this girl. She fights sleep!), I can go warm up my own coffee since the older spawn haven't gotten that for me.
I have no idea what we're doing this Memorial Day/Clone birthday. I did make California Caviar and a tomato-cucumber salad just in case we do something. Now that I have replenished the mayo supply, I can also make potato salad among other things. Devildog was trying to get something thrown together with a friend. Any excuse to hang with a long missed friend right? We did take Clone to see the new Shrek movie in 3D with a friend yesterday. The girls absolutely loved it, as did we. The baby was a little restless and fussy, but we timed it around Devildog's work schedule, which happened to coincide with Mini-Human's naptime. It's a good story line, and I enjoyed the movie. I don't go to movies often, and I definitely didn't feel like it was a waste of money. I forsee buying this when it comes out on DVD. At least that way, I can pause the show when someone gets fussy.

And I read this before posting, wow what ADOS I have. It's probably due to interrupted insufficient sleep, lack of adequate coffee this morning, and my shoulders trying to get to my ears out of habit. I think I'll go make a french toast brunch for the Clone. I bought a loaf of Texas toast bread just for the occasion.

Blue Sleeves, a beginning

You can't tell because the stitches make it roll, but there's about 2 inches of knitting. And I'm on row 8, of sleeve #2. I'm doing two at a time. The general premise is that if I screw up, at least I'd be consistent, and the sleeves should come out to be the same length.

The yarn is smooshy and nuzzle-worthy. The needles are sharp and just zippy enough with some grip. I may be a convert to wooden needles now. Ah, how I would absolutely love to go shopping on the KnitPicks website again soon.
I may need to wait so that I can get the FLYLady Calendar before school starts in August.

Sorry for not being more talkative.

An attempt at DE-stressing

I realized earlier this week that I have not been knitting in ...um, well a while because I think it was the last midnight knit in at my LYS (local yarn shop) that I attended. And even then, because Mini-Human was demanding much of my attention, and I was distracted untangling someone's yarn for them, and talking to Persnickety, and tending the baby, and deciding on a sweater pattern (AGAIN, after someone sold the yarn I was going to buy from them to make a different pattern that others went through some effort to get me), and playing with the yarn winder (want one of those for as many times I frog projects), and stuffing my face - I didn't really do any knitting. Well since knitting helps me alleviate stress, my lack of knitting may be contributing to it since I'm not doing anything to unstress myself. I was bored with the 3 mundane projects already started. I was waiting to cast on the sweater till I got my KnitPicks interchangeables. I have a set of Boye interchangeables and decided that since I like knitting and enjoy it more than crocheting, I was going to invest in a nicer set of interchangeables. I used part of the tax return to indulge my craft with good tools. It was time to start that sweater.
So, I stopped at the yarn shop Friday so a friend could meet the yarny folks after I gave her a preliminary lesson of a knit-on cast on. Once there, she decided a private lesson would be wise. I also took Clone who didn't knit anything and Mini-Human who got a hold of 3 balls of Cascade that I quickly saved from her fast fingers, and wound two skeins of my sweater yarn into nice flat cakes so I could do two sleeves at once on my new tools. I was spending so much time rewinding yarn, I once again, knit nothing.
Mini-Human is changing her sleep pattern, and I'm hoping to get longer snippets of time to knit again. Last night I swatched, this afternoon I cast on.
Let me just say that simply swatching for this sweater and the initial casting on for sleeves has been enjoyable, and so far I'm really liking my KnitPicks Harmonies. Plus they're pretty. And the cable is flexible. I'm trying to get my brain to wrap around this 2 at a time idea but it's fighting with me. I can't find my stitch markers so I can designate a color to each sleeve and keep track on paper. Not only am I moving on from squares and rectangles and into a sweater, but I'm modifying the pattern. This requires math, and me to write down what I am doing with each row and sleeve. I did say I was ATTEMPTING to de-stress. I pray this sweater does not add to it.

Busy, Noisy Baby.

I know it's been a month since my last post. It's been crazy, head-rolling-down-the-street busy.

The mini-human shrieks, growls, grunts, crawls, pulls up, lets go,and stands for a few seconds on her own. And like her mother, SHE EATS. She's still a mama-milk monkey, but holy mackerel, don't let her see you moving food to your face. She wants it. I got the kids a barrel of pretzel snaps (the square grids) last week and while it's almost gone already, MiniHuman has had her share of them. As my kids are, someone dropped one and missed that fact. The baby being mobile, jumped on the opportunity. I was in another room, so I missed the whole episode. I returned to the room to find the baby leering at her sister as Clone was eating pretzels. I picked up the baby and told her the pretzels were not hers, but she could have some puffs. It's a Gerber Graduate puffed grain snacky treat thing that makes many babies squee. Mine just wants to eat. In any case when I picked her up, I asked why she smelled like pretzels. Clone said "oh. I gave her one" ::facepalm:: I guess it's good these are not overly salted like a lot of others I've acquired. I told the kids she can't have them because of the salt. Nobody listens to me. Nor do they pick up after themselves. She still manages to get pretzels.
Well tonight was no exception. She was shrieking at me - either to be fed or her pants were full. She goes from zero to sixty quickly and it all sounds alike. She had been whacking stuff behind me on the floor and she was there a while. I smelled something foul and assumed it was cleanup time. I soon discovered that she had sounded an alarm, but there was no content to match. I did find this when I went to change her though.
I don't ask. After the first one, you figure those buggers will manage to get almost anything in their diapers by the sheer fact that there's just enough gap and they've got the dropsies at the correct angle. Given the not so soft edges, I guess I'd be complaining too.