1. So far, the babe: has been into the dog food bowl, stood up solo for 2 seconds (twice), and enjoys racing me to electrical cords. She only has 2 teeth, but that is 2 too many for an electrical cord, judging by her performance on that apple she was shaving the other day.
2. Apparently something "wonky" is refusing to let the comments show on this blog. Levi likes to use that word. Bet you can't figure where he learned it.
Warning: If you don't care two-pence about knitting, scroll down to the bottom of this post for a quick summary.
Nana, being a grandmother, likes to buy dresses for her granddaughter, and she is cool about the fact that dresses sometimes start out in a big yellow ball. Plus said ball of yarn, from Bendigo Woollen Mills, gives her daughter a whopping great ball of fun, so it's a win, win, win all around.
I crossed my fingers for the size and cast on. Now, if you are out there thinking of taking up knitting, perhaps in the odds of trying to understand why I post about it so "dad-gum" much, I have to throw in a word. Don't look at the picture and think, oohh, I guess I better run down to the all-night-knitting store and get some metal double point needles. See, the first time I went to knit something in the round, I went to the store and bought the only ones I saw, which were metal.
I deplore metal needles. They are for speed knitters. That means they are slippery. That means if you look up to see what's going on around you, stitches disappear. This is not good for easily distracted people, such as myself.
Why haven't I replaced them? Well, I only use that size for certain things (they are only used on the top 8 rows of this dress, and then I can kiss them goodbye). And while I dispise metal needles, even more is my loathing for the idea of buying another set of something I already have, if you know what I mean.
This brings me to another thing I've realized lately. People in the knit-world are crazy about circular needles. Me? Not so much. I am one of those silly people still clinging to my wooden dbpns. But I tried some Harmony needles, with their really flexy cables, and I can see why people like them. I am also sitting on the floor with my 5 little sticks (that's 10 pointy ends, thank you), and my baby, who is speeding towards me with that look. Can we say catastrophe, both in the baby and knitting departments?
For the non-knitters out there, let me sum up this post for you: Blah, blah, blah, knitting, blah, blah, blah, knit, knit, knit, blah, blah, blah. Bubble-wrap.
We're spending this school year studying the Medieval Ages through the early Renaissance. We have this awesome pair of books: The History of the World, Volume 2, by Susan Wise Bauer, and the companion Activity Book. We've just begun to really get into castles and kingdoms and chivalry, knights and samurai. To start we raided the library and came home with over twenty books that Levi has been pouring over. And then we built our own castle. Out of cocoa puffs.
The idea was in Bauer's Activity Book, and basically you just make rice krispy treats with a little more rock-ish looking cereal. And then you smear your hands with butter and mold a castle. I think that you could really ramp this up with older kids. Dye coconut shavings green for grass and make a blue jello moat. Really mold that castle shape. Put little people into it.
Either way, our cocoa castle is really, really, really, yummy.
