To market, To market

That's the song I'm singing to the house I know Divine Intervention is sending our way. The houses I am looking at in our budget and neighborhoods we're willing to live in are not jumping out and biting me. It's a bit annoying because I would like to find something soon. Of course I'm not seeing it because a) it's not there, not being on the market yet, b) this current house is not ready enough to vacate, nor have I decluttered enough (doesn't look like I did anything at all, because essentially I haven't), and c) I'm known for 11th hour everything. I was even born at 10:28 pm. My best papers in high school and the little bit of college classes that I took ages ago were written at 1 in the morning. I guess it's part of my wiring.

I'm being patient. I don't have much choice really since work is busy right now. I have a feeling work will be busy for a while. The boss asked me to cover some recently vacated stores, adding to my 12 store list, making it 13 on my assignment list, plus another 5 to fill in till a replacement is hired. Then Clone is going to camp next month. I think I have a slow week next week, because this week is already jam full. I think that's when I'll be able to squeeze in the Mini-Human's 9 month checkup and a camp physical for the Clone.

Yet, I'm up beyond the 11th hour, blogging. In my defense that's only because the Mini-Human was up till 2. You read that correctly. UP. TILL. 2. She fights sleep like a trooper, and I need some time to decompress. Unfortunately for my knitting, I can't pay attention enough to knit at this hour. That sweater pattern requires note-taking and attention. That's not possible when I'm not brain-cooperative.
But wait! There's more! For the low low... oh wait, wrong market. No I'm just tired and feeling overwhelmed by a lot of things. My shoulders reside in my ears almost permanently and my back dislikes me often enough. Anything more that I say on it, would be whining, and per FLYLady, I'm not allowed to do that. So I'm going to just crawl in my bed.

A new house needs a few things

You may recall me saying we are restarting our home search. The timing is stellar, since work is gearing up for resets too. Devildog works a crazy shift schedule that makes it inconducive for anything. So I am feeling very overwhelmed by all this, even before it starts full swing. I'm wired to be that way. Right now I am working on 15 minute blocks, and this one consists of feeding the baby while I blog. She's almost asleep and I think my timer's about to buzz anyway. I need this kind of structure today, as I'm working myself up over all of this work around me and that's just foolish. But I am dreaming too. I'm mentally thinking of the stuff I simply want for the new house, not even the needs. Among them for anyplace we live is a Kitchenaid mixer. I've tried to win one from The Pioneer Woman several times. My chances are slim because she has so many readers. The author of one of my favorite cookbooks is giving away a red one. While you're there check out what else is Saving Dinner and how you can save yours. Some of my favorites to cook come out of Leanne Ely's recipes. I have found a few things that I now love that I wouldn't have thought to eat before. Kale is one of them. Food can be an adventure, and on a smaller scale and budget then this adventure we're on right now with buying a house.

Now if you'll pardon me, my timer buzzed a few minutes ago. The baby is now out of my arms, and the rest of my list beckons. I'd still just much rather knit though.

Sit down, Mommy's tired

Well we've hit more milestones. There are 2 bottom teeth. If she is going to escape, I'd rather she do it safely. So I taught her how to climb off things feet first. She will now also arch back when she's on my hip to indicate she wants down, and NOW. She's been standing on her own for a couple weeks, and I knew it was inevitable - and soon. It's now. The mini-human is walking. She and her 3 older siblings all were early walkers, Beast started at the end of 7 mos, Oldest and Mini-Human 8 mos and Clone was my "late" walker at 9 mos. With each of them, everyone was amazed that they walked so early.
She loves being outside. The other day Beast & his friend went outside to play with the basketball, and Clone was immediately out the door with them. Mini-Human was near the door and the last one out didn't make sure the storm door latched. I was knitting and counting stitches and heard no noise, then a click. I called her name and got no answer. I grabbed my camera and went to the door because in my gut I knew she was up to something. Sure enough she was on the doorstep reaching for the dirt and leaves just beyond the concrete. The next day I was outside and opened the door for her. She demonstrated how she got out the door, hanging on to the door and the frame till she could get off the first 3 inch step, then plopped to her bottom and crawled away from the door. Here we go again....

Doing a "Dora dance"

I just got done replacing the fill valve (aka float valve) on the toilet. It's been running for ages and I've told Devildog it needs to be fixed. I changed out the flapper and that helped but moons later it started running a lot again. Well this past week I've noticed a lot of running water sound in there and lifted the tank lid this morning to find the water running straight into the overflow drain. I lifted on the float part and it didn't shut off the water, so I turned off the supply and wrote a note on the mirror in dry erase marker. It asked my crew to please turn off the water supply to the toilet. In my travels today I stopped to get the fill valve that Devildog forgot to bring home from work. I was unwilling to wait for him to do it, risk him forgetting again, plus I knew I had enough skill to master that.
It would have been much much much faster if the baby was asleep or just not in my unsunny regions. Eventually I did get it done. It's one less thing Devildog has to do, and one more thing I now CAN do.

Restarting an adventure

I had a blog post all typed up and damn if Blogger didn't eat it.

Reader's Digest: We got a preapproval for a mortgage again. We're now looking for a house. There's a debate between a 3 bedroom or a 4 bedroom. We have 4 children and the age differences between the younger 3 spans enough that a 4 bedroom is merited. The Devildog thinks we can handle living in a 3 bedroom. I know the limits of my sanity, and Devildog forgets those limits.

We'll see what the market has available for us and I'll get back to you.

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.

moving onward and upward

Well it's been a busy couple weeks since my last post. I'm feeling in over my head on a lot of things. I am feeling like a failure on many fronts. I'm not sure what crawled up a few unsunny places but it needs to find its way to the septic tank or sewer lines. I am not naming names, pointing fingers or giving examples. It's multi-faceted and multi-pronged. No one thing is stirring my pot, but sure as the night sky is dark, the devil's making me use my broom. A LOT.

My stinkin' thinkin' is not helping the situation. I've taken to saying "urg" in place of some choice words, or something directed at an individual.

But the bright spots in my days include those times when my oldest isn't being a jerk, and actually being cooperative and reasonable. He's more often surly than not, and has a completely different way of thinking than I have. He's a sweet child, with incredible brains. We're not seeing eye to eye with some of his choices. It's when Beast takes the baby to play with her, just because, or more impressively when I'm at my wits end with her (and she with me). It's when Clone comes up and hugs me, and writes stories with accompanying pictures. It's when she asks to read stories to her little sister, even though her sister can't sit still long enough for me to change her diaper, much less hear a story. It's this little baby who I argued with God that it was perimenopause and that He was not entrusting another child to my care, because look at what we did with the first one - eesh. She's exploring her world, and we're learning to communicate in our own way. Let me just say, she's very vocal - and it's more apt to say that she's training me to recognize her language. She's been pulling up on things, and has occasionally let go for a second before plopping on the floor. More recently, she's using more leg power than arms to get upright. This week, she's making the next move towards cruising. She's occasionally transferring from one place to a place next to it without sitting down first. She's doing well with food - and prefers what WE are eating, not the stuff in jars. She goes nuts trying to get our food. We're working on pincer grasp, waving, drinking from a cup, and answering to her name. She gets baby puffs to snack on, a sippy cup of very diluted juice to learn how to drink from it, and she's doing well with both. Her laugh is infectious, and her smile gives me a 'mommy melt'. My favorite is the squinty-eyed, wide-mouth belly laugh. It's even better if she's kicking her legs. To laugh with full abandon is an awesome gift. I love that she can incite laughter from each of the older 3 kids with her cuteness.

Oldest was going around tonight naming colors in Spanish - a language he dislikes to the point he took German when he was in SC. I was a tad puzzled by this, but we live in Florida, so if he learns multiple languages - go for it. However, Mini-Human was looking at her big brother like "dude what the heck are you doing?" I suspect she's going to perfect this look and use it on her siblings for years to come. It will most likely be well deserved.