Springing

It's been a challenging week to say the least. The oldest has decided that he's old enough to do his own thing, regardless of what his parents (or the law for that matter) have to say on it. He's become a gadabout. It got nasty Monday night. I have not seen him since Monday, except briefly Wednesday night - and only because I had a police officer round him up, and even more briefly Thursday night. He's got his side of the story that he tells his friends and their parents, garnering him a place to sleep for that night. I'll spare everyone the details of the latest drama, because really, do we need to feed THAT llama any extra fodder? It's something else Satan is doing to throw heaps of sand on my sidewalk, in hopes of me slipping and falling. I've got a broom, and friends with brooms. He can survive without us (paraphrasing his words here), and that much is plausible. But survival is less heinous when one avoids burning one's own bridges. My oldest sister taught me that 20 years ago. (GAH, I feel old writing that!)

The bright spots in my week involve the younger 3 kids.

I had to tend the baby a second while on the phone with a friend. I handed the phone to Beast for a minute, who shared thoughts with that person. When I got the phone back, the friend was duly impressed by the location of Beast's head on his shoulders.

Clone went to the yarn shop with me today so I could read over a pattern there for a sweater I want to make for myself. When we got home, I was talking to my friend (the one who taught me to knit) about the pattern. After I hung up the phone, Clone asked me to make a sweater for her please. (She keeps stealing my blanket and it was only a matter of time before she asked me.) I'll sit with her soon and we'll go through Ravelry first, and then other sources if need be to find one for her that I can manage. I need to stash-bust anyway right?

Mini-human...well she's very interested in whatever we're eating. She makes chomping motions with her mouth, and it's funny to hear her smacking her lips while she's playing on the floor, scooting around with authority like she does. She's trying to sit up on her own, pull to standing, and figure out that whole moving the feet thing - SIMULTANEOUSLY. She's got opinions already and is rather vocal. She's not unlike any of the other kids were as babies, and I wouldn't expect anything else from her either. She's got 2 new-to-us pieces of equipment, and loves them. The Fisher Price Infant-to-Toddler rocker is her favorite at B's house. Clone loved sitting in one at C's house as a baby. Mini-Human turned herself over in the rocking chair, slid down till her feet hit the floor, and then stood in front of the chair playing with it. Devildog walked into the living room tonight and was somewhat dumbfounded by her antics.
And the Evenflo Jump & Go - entertained the older 3 for hours. The older kids had the Graco Bumper Jumper actually. Beast used to walk his way as far forward or backward as his legs allowed. Then he'd pick up his feet and swing back and forth till the momentum slowed. And he'd repeat. We'd see him playing in the doorway and a couple seconds later we'd see him flying. We'll see how Mini-Human does with it, but so far she's enjoying that too. I wouldn't be surprised if she followed Beast's springing running start.

another yarny WIN

WOOT WOOT FREAKIN WOOT!
I goofed, but left it because I'm not frogging back. I'm so excited it's rediculous. I was getting annoyed because I couldn't get this pattern wrapped together with my brain. Finally it clicked and I was sailing from there. I figured out what I needed to do to mark stitches.
Because I was making too many knit vs purl/purl vs knit mistakes, I needed to pick back freqently till I could visualize the stitch patterns. So I had to mark not only the point in the pattern as instructed, but I also had to mark my slipped stitch too in case I had to pick back the entire row.

Yes, I'm excited about a yarn pattern. At almost 2 am. Because I finally figured it out and have now cast off the item from my needles.
I'll post pictures later. You muggles probably will never understand my excitement. The project defied me, and I ripped it back to cast-on 3 times. The 4th time was my charm. I am so gonna make this in smaller sizes for my girls now too. Well not now-now...I need sleep. Later-now. Clone will be so excited for me when she sees it in the morning.

just WOOT! It's all I can say.
I did my own version of THIS.

At last, it's FINISHED

I have been knitting this since June 2008. I cast off February 23, 2010. In my defense, during that year and a half, it did hibernate a LOOONNNNNG time since I was working on that Neverending-baby-towel for Heather D & her daughter. Then it was just plain too freaking hot and I was too freaking pregnant to touch it. Then I had a new baby and she took all my time and energy. If I didn't have 3 older kids to entertain her and tend her I may not have finished it till June of NEXT year. So last month, I got down to the last skein of the Baby Clouds yarn in my possession. I could see light at the end of the tunnel.
The yarn was freecycled to me and I don't expect to ever use this yarn again. When I got it, I was only crocheting, not knitting. I didn't know how and hadn't found a friend to teach me. This yarn is horrid for crocheting, and works up easier in knitting. So said Heather herself, but it was another year before I was able to get a lesson out of her, and it was only because she was moving halfway across the world to an Upper Midwestern State that I squeezed that lesson out of her even. It's extraordinarily forgiving of errors, but that's just because the yarn has ulterior motives. It was out to get me. I refused to be defeated by this yarn in 2006 when I acquired it. No way in hades I was going to concede defeat after this much time either.
Now to remind the children that this is MOM'S blanket and of all the others they've stolen from me, this one has personal investment and I'm not interested in sharing too much. I was so very excited to find that I had reached a point in the project that I could call it done and be happy to have a fuzzy string of scrap yarn leftover.

My text message to Heather at 1 in the morning?
"WOOOHOOO!!!! CASTING OFF THE BABY CLOUDS WRAP! i refused to be defeated by this yarn 4 years ago and damn it i win."

Fowl Play on words

I got a phone call from Heather D, who taught me to knit and taught the oldest to play violin. She was sitting on the couch with her 1 year old daughter, working on a knitting project she designed (LOTR Tree of Gandor). Her PhD Student husband came home to find some BBQ chicken in the works. He turned to Heather, and asked "Is the chicken done knitting yet?"
So I had to tell her about a funny from Beast. He was making brownies and needed eggs for it. He held one egg up and said "Look Mom, it has eggzema"

New Schedules

I'm making an effort here to NOT whine about this new schedule that is starting this week for both Devildog and myself. He gets new hours, I get a new service schedule. Instead of working my big stores weekly and being assigned the little stores on the service schedule, I'm now given the little stores in one lump group and get to schedule them however I want as long as it's done in the first 2 weeks of the month. I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, but this is coming exactly the same week Devildog's shift changes too. Thankfully I've got menus planned for the week to get us through it. I do believe the crockpot will be my best friend in all this, as much as Devildog dislikes my frequent use of it. I'm not his stepmom, and I have an arsenal of recipes that I know work, and others that I have been really wanting to try making. I don't quite understand his disdain, and I make no apologies to him for my adventures with food. I'm not fearless, but I loathe boring food after growing up with a mother who could screw up a box of mac & cheese. There's a difference between comfort food and same-old-same-old. Usually you WANT the comfort food, and you ask for a peanut butter sandwich when same-old is served.
Plus, the KP duty between the boys changes hands today too, as it's the first of the month. I'm not sure where Devildog is going with this method he's devised, but I am going along with it. There are very distinct personalities between the boys and it's an exercise in tongue-biting and rosary-reciting with these two.
Recalling the advice my sister gave me at the start of 8th grade when I whined about the way they worked our class schedules...

The only constant in life is change.

And she's right.

Universal Donor 2

I am what you could call a Universal Donor. My husband, the Devildog, has some dominant genes, and all four kids have his blood type. Not one of these suckers have mine. Story of my life, it seems like I've got what everyone (in my house at least) else wants or needs.
However, last year when I donated blood in January, little did I know I was going to need to keep that blood. OOOPS. No wonder I had a stronger than usual reaction to the donation. It was December when I finally donated again. So, that meant it would be February when I could donate blood. I dragged 3 of the 4 kids with me. It's a long story why, and I won't bore you with it. MaNiC MoMMy does a virtual blood drive and her deadline looms, which is the only reason I'm getting around to posting this. I live by flying by the skin of my blessed assurance apparently.

In any case, I went to donate and the vampires - they love me. I have good veins that behave and don't roll. I had the Oldest Boy take the picture. It was difficult for him because he wasn't on the front side of the camera this time. He followed instructions better than Devildog did last year though. He got more than just my arm in the picture. However, he caught me looking down at something, and I look like I've got my eyes closed. And then when I was done, we got freezer pizzas from the grocery store even though I really wanted the kind from a pizza place (name withheld), and I went home and had to have a nap. This is why I schedule my donations for Fridays. I can go home and slack around and not do anything the rest of the day. And I'm incredibly thankful that even though I have FOUR spawn, they are spread apart in age and they entertained the mini-human till she needed feeding...because I've got the good stuff somebody else inevitably wants or needs.

sippy cup rant

I just have to vent and maybe someone in a marketing department will do a search for sippy cup and my blog post will appear in their findings.

WHY THE HECK DO ALL THE DANG SIPPY CUPS HAVE TO BE SPILL PROOF??????

I don't want valves and mechanisms that prevent the liquid from spilling. There is a time and place in this world for such inventions, just not when I am teaching my baby to drink from a cup. On the other hand, the only other non-spill-proof models I've found have an air hole in the top which allows physics to work as it should and the entire contents of the cup flow freely out of it. All three older kids had a Tommee Tippee cup that had two handles and a weighted bottom and slanted spout in the twist on lid. They were very readily available in the mid-90s for the boys, and it was a miracle that I even found one by the time Clone arrived in the early 2000s. I thought I was done having babies (God keeps laughing at me), so I gave away that prized sippy cup. Now with Miss Must-Be-Upright, they're NON-EXISTENT! I've been looking on ebay, amazon, etc to find one and haven't started scouring the second-hand stores yet to find just one. I can't even find a picture of it online. And no, I don't want one that is so vintage, I'm hesitant to give it to my child. I'm one of those weirdo parents that insist on teaching their baby to drink from a cup with the added lesson of cause-effect-consequence. As in, tipping the cup causes the liquid to move out of it, and that effect in excess causes the consequence of junior getting to clean up their mess. I've done similar things with nursing. Fall asleep or play at your workstation and it is removed. Yes, she's nearing 5 months old and maybe it is early to start this stuff by some standards. Honestly, those opinions can fall by the wayside and I'm going to do what is tried and true for my household. If the baby is grabbing for my cup and trying to drink from it, I give the baby a drinking test. Using a small regular plastic cup and a small amount of water, I see how the baby handles drinking from it. So far the attempts are going well and she's actually swallowing water as often as it it's dribbling down her chin.
I do have some other options in this adventure of cup-training that I didn't want to have to use. I may explore those ideas while I continue my search for this dinosauric contraption.

And just so you know, I am absolutely biting my keys on the rest of my rant involving parental choices and manufacturers' responses to those choices. I may be a slacker mom, but there are some things my kids have learned that their peers should have been taught.

baby yammering

It's a baby post. Just thought I'd give fair warning in advance.

My cousin J had baby #2 very late Valentine's Day. It was almost the day after, it was so late. They have a little girl who is just shy of a year old, and now she has a little brother. My friend Kristin had her long-awaited baby boy last week. All these babies.

My own is moving forward with leaps and bounds in her developments. I have long forgotten where her siblings were at this age. I just know that I am not ready for all this mobility. She's been rolling a lot, and she does so with authority. She's sort of scooting, and trying to get up on all fours. She gets rice cereal, and has come to expect it daily. I've long held the practice of putting baby in the high chair at the table with us at dinnertime. Baby gets toys if not old enough to eat what we're eating. Thankfully tonight I made her bowl of cereal at the same time I got my own bowl of chicken & dumplings dished. She saw us spooning food into our mouths and started making fishfaces to tell me she wanted some. The rapid open-close-open-close was funny. She does well with spoon feeding. Like the older 3, if you don't keep that spoon shoveling, she gets vocal. Varying noises are emitted from high pitch shrieks and low 'aaahhh' to things like "nin-gah!", and "na na na na". Clone's word for food was num-num and well, I'm guilty of reusing it. Apparently I'm being mimicked by Miss-Must-Be-Upright.
She later went to sleep a few hours and got back up - you guessed it - hungry. Snacktime was more like it. She spent as much time eating as she did excitedly telling her guardian angel all about her day. She wasn't talking to ME, I can tell you that much.
She's makes no bones about declining an offered pacifier or toy. It gets thrown, her head turns away and she makes a "nuh" noise. In turn, if she wants something, she'll do everything she can to clearly indicate as much, including kamikaze nosedives. She and I are learning our "language", and I think this is happening much earlier than it did with the older 3 kids. Of course by this point, with 4 kids, my brain and memory fail me often, I'm lucky my bra is under my clothes and not on top of them when I leave the house.
She chews on most anything she can get in her hands, or get her mouth onto. It's almost like having a puppy, minus the splintered table legs. And I can't tell you how many times I've reread this post to correct the baby's "help". I'll need a new desk soon. Baby drool is pretty potent stuff and I'm sure the veneer on my sawdust & glue furniture will give out in no time. As I type this, I'm sure my keyboard is at risk for shorting out from drool. She's standing on my lap, smacking the keyboard, chewing my fingers, and knocking things to the floor. Cats do that...come to think of it, she DOES sound just like a cat sometimes when she's talking or crying. I tell people who offer me a pet, "Um, no thanks I have 4 kids that do the exact same things as a pet, but at least I can make an attempt to get slave labor out of the kids, minus the shedding."

A new member of the "mommy club"

My friend Kristin just had a baby boy today. He was a week late, and not nestling into mom's pelvis. The doctors induced, and after a 24 hour process that was not going anywhere, the decision was made to do a cesarean birth. Once they got in there, they found the reason he didn't move down was that he danced so much his cord was wrapped around him. I sent her a text to tell her I'd been thinking about her and praying for her today, and she responded that she needed it. I then said that I told the baby to send her guardian angel to watch over the baby and help him get outta there, and that I was sending mine to help her get the baby out too. I'd hoped that maybe my speedy delivery vibes would help her somehow, since there was some Buddah-belleh rubbing going on earlier last year. Oh well, I'm only *so* helpful at any given point. At least she now has her heart's desire finally. It's been a tumultuous journey for her to get here, and she made it.
Congratulations, Kristen and Jere.

brain = fail

I got logged out of my blog dashboard by one of the kids hijacking the computer a few minutes when I wasn't parked at the desk. Subsequently the site wants you to remember your password in order to get back where you want to be. It took a week to figure it out, and I have GOT to go in and change my security question. WTH was I thinking...nevermind.
I recall mentioning the multitude of passwords I have.

Earlier I whined about my body saying "get a new job". I heart my chiropractor. I'm feeling much better after an adjustment, a session with the TENS on steroids, and a weekend of resting my back. I was told to make use of my sister's birthday gift - an exercise ball and rebuild my core muscles.
In other news, I have managed to get some more knitting done recently. Not that anything is even close to finished. Two projects were started in the Summer of 2008, and neither is finished. So what do I do? Pick up another project. Clone took a "learn to knit" class at the library and the yarn that was donated for the class is Paton's Soy Wool Stripes and very splitty. I traded some cotton yarn for her SWS and swapped the project she started onto my size 10s from her beginner sticks (one red, one blue) and while she tried to figure out a knit-on cast on (it's all I know how to do - long tail scares me for some reason, but so do yarn overs right now), I looped away with it. It's a self striping yarn if the project is narrow enough. Once again dropped a stitch, thought I rescued it, and later realized that I bungled that one too. The Yarntender might consider offering a class on rescuing stitches, for people like me.
Of course, knitting while doing other things that involve the mini human makes for mistakes. Not only has she started to go mobile, she's now found her feet. The ped thinks she'll walk early, but the others did too.

I think a large portion of my broad and long term brain failure (aside from the copious number of kids) was my lack of the FLYLady calendar. It is worth every single penny spent on it, and so am I. I finally got the money to buy it and some other stuff, and that arrived Monday afternoon. But nonetheless, I've been at a loss of cognitive function quite a bit lately. Sleep deprivation, work, 4 spawn, funky shifts, and general ADD all get thrown in one of those industrial "Will it blend?" machines.

My running joke this week (or any other time really):
brain = pile of yarn barf - yarn

Then amid all this my friend Persnickety had another birthday, further proving to the doctors that all they really do is merely PRACTICE medicine, they can't call themselves a medical super league. I still have her Christmas gift in my den.
And my other friend Chrissy (who never bothers to blog anything anymore, or ever) had another birthday too. She's older than I am, about the same age as my two older sisters. Her husband bought a new honkin hube boob toob ... and was smart enough NOT to say it was her birthday gift.
And then later this week, I have an appointment with the vampires to donate blood now that I am eligible again, for MaNiC MoMMy's virtual blood drive.