What’s funny is that as I write this it is in the mid 60’s outside.  No wonder we can’t get well – the weather can’t seem to make up its mind.  We had quite an icy week.  The girls had 2 days off due to the hazardous road conditions, and it was quite a disappointment, since we were hoping for snow.  Emily and Neve were all set to make snowmen and igloos, “and a snow castle, too!!!”  Well, that didn’t work out so well but Emily still explored outside a little bit, but finding only a few icicles here and there (which always reminds me of Ralphie from A Christmas Story) she decided ice was simply no fun.

I will say that even though I am no fan of ice it was rather delightful not to have to wake up early those 2 mornings for the bus.  There was also no chorus practice or Girl Scouts for Emily on Tuesday which made my day a whole lot easier than normal.  We celebrated by eating blueberry pancakes shaped like snowmen for breakfast.  And the satellite install guy came out even though we felt sure he wouldn’t, given that climbing onto an icy roof was probably not the smartest thing to be doing.  Turned out he wasn’t the smartest satellite installer guy.  He ended up being at our house for 5 and a half hours and then Paul still had to finish up the job for him after he left.  I may have mentioned this already.  Anyway the satellite works now and it has helped out in the mental health department for me dramatically, as has (surprisingly) having a tv in the bedroom.  Oona has been much easier to manage in those early morning hours when I am not ready to be awake and she has had enough of sleeping.  Now I turn on Spongebob and we can snuggle until I am in a happier and more wakeful place.

The two days reprieve from school also gave Emily more time to work on her diarama, which was supposed to represent an arctic biome, complete with 2 animal and plant types.  She spent quite awhile researching, and then we threw it all together in just under an hour once all of the information was complete.

She included polar bears, arctic foxes, bearberry plants and caribou moss.  I was ecstatic once it was complete.  One less thing to worry about!

Sadly our winter weather lasted all of 3 or so days and today it has been rather warm.  Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that the sun and dryness and warmth motivated Paul to clear out a bunch of scrub behind the house and clear spots for my garden shed and pumpkin patch, but I hate these warm day fake – outs.  You see, it goes like this:  it’s winter.  You know it’s winter because the calendar says so.  February means winter.  But suddenly the warm weather pops up on you and you’re outside without a coat looking at the grass and the garden beds and the green sprigs that have been fooled into poking up through the dirt and you start thinking about spring, and you catch that bug.  You know what bug I mean – the one where you want to scrub out the house and replace the flannels with cottons and organize your seeds and go buy some bulbs and little flowers and just generally do all things spring – like.  Except that WHAM!!  Before you know it it’s 12 degrees and snowing!  Just like that!  I am a firm believer that winter should be winter, spring should be spring, and so on.  I am not a fan of ambiguous weather.

Which is why I have shunned the out of doors for today and instead have focused on finishing up that sock that I have been working on forever and a day.  I haven’t gotten to the heel yet, but it is definitely going more quickly this time, perhaps due to the fact that I could probably work the chart in my sleep at this point.  The only glitch in my plan has been the entrance of Oona into the terrible two’s.  The thing about this is that I didn’t see it coming.  Emily and Neve did not go through the terrible two’s.  Wait!  Do not scoff!  It was far worse than you think!  They went instead through the terrible three’s!  The terrible three’s is much worse because they are fully articulate at that stage and have no problem making clear why they are throwing their tantrums and delight in embarrassing you with this info in public places and in front of family and friends.  They also have the dexterity and strength to get into whatever it is they want at 3.

Oona has always been a delightful, sweet little thing, so I figured she was on track to become horrible at a later stage in the game as well.  The last week has proven me woefully wrong.  She is my first biter, and she gets great satisfaction out of causing me awful pain, either with her teeth or fingernails.  When I am knitting she will throw herself upon my yarn and needles as though she knows how best to cause the most dire problems for myself and for her (needles I say!!!).  If you allow her to self feed (which she is quite capable of) she will instead feed all of her food to the dog.  The dog LOVES Oona.  She adores pulling Neve’s hair and has twice left large purple bite marks on Neve’s face.  She can and does remove any article of clothing that is put on her, even those that button or snap up the back.  Ditto the diaper.   There is nothing that she is not interested in breaking or tasting.  Her mess making skills are unparalleled.

At first I could not imagine why my sweet tempered little cutie was acting this way suddenly.  And then it hit me – she’s 18 months old, and at the right stage for the terrible behavior that is the hallmark of her age.  And she is enjoying every minute of it.

So I guess it’s been about 8 days since my last post.  Sorry!  You find yourself in bed with a nasty cold with symptoms too gruesome to describe, then there’s a nasty ice storm leaving the kids at home for a few days and the next thing you know it’s been a week!

I’ve been working on that second sock and I will have a progress report soon.  When I’ve been unable to knit (sleeping baby on my chest) I’ve been reading some fun books about ghost legends in New York State.  And then, of course, there is Lost, which just started up again last week, much to my excitement.  Which is a great segue into my best news: we ditched our old satellite system and got a new one all hooked up!  And it works!  We have tv again!  Not only that, but they had some nice flat screens on sale at Target so we picked one up for our bedroom.  We’ve never had a tv in our bedroom before.  Not one in 13 years of marriage.  But, since 95% of the time it’s just me and Oona in our bedroom, and with argumentative kids who will one day be surly teenagers wanting to watch crappy teen dramas, we decided it was high time to have our own tv sanctuary.  Great for those lazy icy days when you’re still not quite feeling well and just want to snuggle up with your favorite baby and watch Spongebob.

Cheers!

Yes, I finished sock # 1 of the pair.  I’ve never ever had a sock take me so long to complete when I’ve thrown myself into it.  I blame the cabling.  They will be quite a beautiful pair, though.  On Friday I had the heel turned and broke out the french press to fortify myself for the long weekend.

It was just girls on Saturday (Paul was in Connecticut) and with a forecast of cloudy, frigid, and possible snow I was full of giddiness at the promise the weekend held.

Anyway, the sock got done.

I think I’ve mentioned that we don’t get cable here.    Our neighborhood is too new, there’s not enough demand for it, blah blah blah.  We have satellite but it is iffy.  I’ve always had this complaint about satellite – we have bad karma with it or something because when it goes down, it goes DOWN.  It doesn’t come back up until Paul gets home and goes on the roof or does whatever looking at it sternly and it works again (no I don’t call people.  They can’t figure it out either and make me feel stupid to boot)  It did not work this weekend, and I knew that Paul would not have a chance to look into it so I got some dvd’s to watch.  It was great until the dvd player went on strike.  I won’t get into the details but there is now a pile of parts that used to be a dvd player on the table in the craft room and I had to move the knitting and baby playing operation down to the living room so we’d have some tv.  It also didn’t snow, but it WAS frigid.  Good thing we had gas for the fireplace.

All I have left on this is to close up the toe, if Sushi will let me.  I plan to cast on the second one tonight, before I lose my steam.  And let me add that I will NOT be knitting anything with cables for awhile if I can help it.  I think some nice plain mittens and hats are in order.  I also have some lovely self – striping sock yarn that will look quite fetching knitted up in a plain and easy stockinette stitch.  So the battle is won, but the war is far from over.  One more to go.

Oona has caught the ick that has been plaguing Neve (cough, stuffy nose, fever) and we had a rather long and troublesome night last night, followed by my realization this morning that I, too am on the receiving end   of this oh so wonderful virus.  Very soon I will be donning my warm pj’s, sitting by the fire with my little needles and yarn, and NOT letting Oona play with her Tadoodles.

Excellent concept: toddler friendly crayons.  Washable.  Water soluble.  A great idea unless your toddler is normal and likes to taste everything.  That’s when water soluble becomes a big, fat mess.

Yippee!  I turned the heel on sock #1 last night!  It seems like such a huge accomplishment with how long this sock has been taking me, and given how quickly a pair of socks can usually be whipped up.  I am choosing not to think about the fact that I still have to work up the toe and do it all over again. No, no I will not think about that second sock looming on the horizon. Or the fact that Oona has been pulling down the house all around me while I try to knit.  As an aside, it’s really difficult to work fiddly little cables on size 1 needles when your baby keeps yanking your shirt and yelling “BOOBIE!”

I had a picture of my progress but alas my camera died and I am too lazy to replace the batteries right now.  Instead I’ll post some this weekend, hopefully after sock #1 is finished.  (Wishful thinking?)

Paul is headed to Connecticut to pick up my brother’s car this weekend and Maddie will be here to help out so I am going to plant my butt in front of the computer and watch old episodes of South Park and Family Guy while I get down to some serious knitting.

I avoided “second mitten syndrome” way better than I usually do with “second sock syndrome”.  Mostly because with the first mitten I had some issues and I was determined to work them out in short order on a second one.  It also doesn’t hurt that I was using a fairly chunky yarn in a straightforward knit stitch for little hands.  Neve now has a pair (though one is slightly mutant) of red mittens to keep her little fingers warm on the playground.  I’ll be working up another, better pair for her, and one for Emily, too, though she has a pair of fleece ones already.  Good thing, too.  Our highs this week are only supposed to be in the 30’s, with lows in the teens.  Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking.  “That’s downright balmy!!”  And you know, I’d have agreed with you once upon a time, when I’d stand waiting for the school bus at the bottom of an ice covered driveway at 20 below.  But that was in the days of the north country, when the snowbanks were so high in the winter you could barely see the houses in a neighborhood as you drove by, and there’d be enough snow that people would be skiing in May wearing tee shirts and shorts.  Those were also the days of living in homes with furnaces. Here we have heat pumps.  To me this means “has to work a lot harder and doesn’t always quite cut it”.  It could also be that after 13 or so years in the “almost South” I have just become a wimp.  Let’s just agree that here, for us,  daytime highs in the 30’s is COLD.  So I am glad that Neve has these.

I’m glad they’re done so I can get to finishing the socks for mom.  And the cleaning.  Good God the cleaning.  Oona’s been helping.  She found the under – bed fur babies and tried to flush them out.

Since it’s gotten colder they’ve been huddling together for warmth and Oona can’t resist aiming herself at them like a bowling ball.

And speaking of the cold, how is it that we still have spiders?  After dinner this evening I was cleaning up the kitchen and Emily pointed (I thought) behind me and yelled “SPIDER”!  And since I thought she was pointing behind me I ran in the opposite direction to get away from it, and toward her.  At which point she screamed and ran backwards away from me, pointing and yelling that I had walked into it and it was now on me. Lunatic that I am, I panicked and (of course couldn’t look for it lest I faint at the sight of it)  ran toward her, furiously swiping at my neck and chest and screaming at her to GET IT OFF ME!!! all while she was running away from me shouting GET AWAY FROM ME!!!!

Yes, dinner at my place.  Such a calm, sane time.

As in many other things, in knitting there are projects where you think you know better the mechanics of how a project should come together than the pattern writer and so you go rogue, and you end up with a big mess and realize that “duh”, you didn’t actually know better, and should have followed the darn pattern.  And then there are times where you ignore your gut, because you don’t want to go rogue and end up screwing up another project.  And you still end up with a big mess.

I finished one mitten according to pattern.  And screwed it up totally when it came to the thumb.  I followed instructions to place all the thumb stitches on scrap yarn and keep on knitting them and  it turns out I cannot correctly accomplish this.  I should have just placed all the stitches on a holder and worked around them because that would have better achieved my desired result.  Oh well.  I still have a usable mitten for Neve, but I am not too pleased with it.

For the second one I am going to do more research and see how it should REALLY be done, and hopefully I’ll have mastered the mitten by the time the second one is complete.  They knit up rather quickly when done in one color, which satifies my need for finished objects.  I’d like to make some stripey ones and patterned ones as well, and I doubt they’ll go as quickly, but should be fun nonetheless.

And by the way, did you know CVS locks all their printer ink on the display hooks so you have to ask the cashier to walk back ad get it for you?  All I wanted was a black printer cartridge and I felt like I was purchasing some sort of contraband.   Friends dont’ let friends print recipes from Martha Stewart online!!!

Here it is New Year’s Eve and I still haven’t posted my Christmas pictures.  I suppose that now that I have re-arranged the playroom/craft area and am totally worn down from all the work plus the nasty cold I am trying to ignore (and I’ve gotten some gentle nagging reminders) means it’s time to sit back and go through all the pictures – at least the ones from my camera – if Paul has any good ones, I’ll have to steal them later.

Christmas Eve the girls made cookies for Santa.

Then they logged into NORAD and checked on Santa’s progress before heading to bed.  An hour later, they were fast asleep.  I don’t know how, or why, but something tells me we’ll never get that lucky again.  (and incidentally, how come they never go to sleep that easily when we’re trying to “get lucky”?  Seriously!)

I was able to get the house all prepped for Santa’s arrival and start the brioche so that Paul could make the pigs in a blanket in the morning.  I got the table dolled up, and as if on cue, our neighbor Jack stopped by and brought us a beautiful arrangement:

Perfect for our table!  And with the girls sleeping so well, we were able to get into bed by midnight for once!

It was a busy day, but at least we got enough sleep -unbelievably we didn’t get prodded to wake up until almost 7:30.  Santa even set a brand new alarm clock next to Emily’s bed and programmed it to play We Wish You A Merry Christmas at 6:00 but she woke up, marveled that Santa had left her a cool clock, shut it off, and WENT. BACK. TO. BED!!!  I don’t know what kind of weird un-kid-like planet Emily comes from, but it got me some extra zzzzz’s, so I guess I can’t complain.  I barely got any pictures of them opening their gifts on account of how quickly they tore into them and how low the lighting was (for once Paul and I didn’t have the “what do you mean you are going to have every light plus the photo lamps set up and on before they can open their gifts?” fight).  But we caught a few happy moments, even with Oona, so wasn’t too sure what to make of the whole thing.

Once the wrap was gathered up and the girls were busily tearing every single toy out of its packaging and demanding batteries and instructions, Paul got to work making the pigs.

It’s a tradition for us – I make up a batch of brioche dough on Christmas Eve from  Baking With Julia and the next morning Paul rolls it out and wraps it around some Lil’ Smokies and voila!  Yummy pigs!

Neve likes to supervise so she can eat as soon as they’re ready.

Uncle Daddy arrived first and helped Neve open her new Bratz doll (yes, she got Bratz.  No, I don’t like them, but I also know better than to make a federal case out of it and turn them into forbidden fruit).

Neve LOVES hangin’ with her Uncle Daddy.  And he’s a good sport for letting her boss him around, which she pretty much did until my parents and sister got here.

Maddie proudly showed off her new togs – all from Hot Topic, and mostly Twilight related.

Grandma and Grandpa got Oona a Dancing Brobee!  (Check out her wicked bed head – she looked like some crazy anime character)

My Christmas Baby.

I was totally excited my brother came, but it took Oona awhile to warm up to her uncle KB (and everyone else for that matter).

Dad helped me out in the kitchen, thank goodness.  He is a total chef himself, and my uncle Eric is also a real foodie.  Both of them spend a lot of time watching Food Network and studying food prep techniques.  They’re both pretty incredible cooks, and as intimidating as you know that is, add to that my Uncle “Daddy” who went to the Julia Child school a few years back.  Try cooking while those three are in your kitchen!  I was nervous also because I was trying a new recipe from Williams Sonoma for stuffing to go with the pork crown roast I made.  It all turned out very well, though I did have to weather some jokes about how ill – equipped my kitchen generally is.  (I am totally taking steps to fix that, and mom and dad got me some awesome Wusthoff knives to help me on my way).   Anyway, just before we sat down to eat my SIL set out christmas crackers filled with whistles and crowns for everyone, each with a different tune, and then attempted to conduct some holiday songs.

FYI: don’t expect those whistles all to work right or play the correct note.  It was a hilarious lesson in making the most out of the moment when things aren’t working right.

And then there was food!  Glorious food!  Actually I am getting pretty hungry right now just thinking about it.  Crown roast of pork (with gravy made by the Gravy Master himself, my dad), apple –  pecan stuffing,  potatoes mashed with parsnips, and creamed spinach, also made by my dad.  droooooooooooool……

The day was a success, the kids were happy, the families were well – fed and then there was this:

My brother.  In my kitchen.  Doing dishes.

Magical.