Eli Vest

I had a high bar to reach for the Eli Vest.  Eli's mother is a knitter/seamstress/crafter extraordinaire, and I couldn't help getting really ambitious when designing a sweater for Eli. 

So despite all my intentions (which consisted of a simple drop-shoulder v-neck cardigan, maybe with some pockets for storing Eli's ever-present cars and trains) I ended up with a dapper herringbone shawl-collar vest.  What can you do.






I wanted something with a smallish gauge that could handle the tight weave of the herringbone, and so I settled on Rowan Handknit Cotton.  And lo and behold, everyone, that yarn is a gift from the gods!  Remember Rowan Calmer, that magical yarn that disappeared suddenly though we all loved it so?  Well, this seems to be Rowan's replacement yarn.  It is not quite as magical; it doesn't have that weird oily sheen, nor is it quite as stretchy.  But the gauge is a bit more forgiving, and frankly I'll take what I can get. 

It stood up to the herringbone, though I had to go up to size 8 needles to make sure it had enough give (and even then, this is a tight and not particularly stretchy weave.  Hence the wide rib edging). 

The herringbone is tough to work with, and to those who will knit this design when it comes out, I say: don't worry about keeping everything perfectly in pattern.  The decreases will come, and they will screw things up.  It'll all work out in the end. 

Pluck

Willow has been working on overcoming her fears.  Being Willow, of course, she does this in a very idiosyncratic way:

Willow: I don't like sweet foods.  I like really spicy foods!
Mommy: Really?
Willow: Yes!  I'm brave about eating spicy foods.

 
Willow: I just love Red Pufferfish Man!
Mommy: The guy you had a nightmare about four months ago?
Willow: Yes!  Red Pufferfish Man is my friend!  I have a lot of pluck!

Willow: You skipped a story.  You skipped the ghost story.
Mommy: Yes, I skipped the story about the ghosts because it's bedtime.  I thought we'd read the story about flying a kite instead.
Willow: No!  Read the ghost story!  You have to!  I'm very plucky* about ghost stories!

And so forth.  It's awesome, except that she freaked herself out with the ghost story and I had to sit in the room with her until she fell asleep.  But I have tried to take her as my inspiration, and overcome some of my fears.  Not fears of snakes, or of talking to people I don't know, because lord knows those aren't going anywhere, but more practical fears that really need to be handled, like stepping out of my routine and trying crazy things because they seem like they'd be fun, even if they might be disastrous.  I am trying to embrace that small side of me that is spontaneous.

Therefore, last weekend, Dave and I followed through on a plan we'd had back when I was pregnant, of driving down to Seaside Park during the off-season, spending the day at Island Beach, staying at a cheap motel, spending the next day at the beach, and then driving home.  Just a quick getaway, something inexpensive and still wildly different from what we normally do.  Great idea!  Let's do it!

It was beautiful.  It was also really freaking cold.  Like, huddled from the wind in a fleece and a vest and under a towel and still shivering.  Shockingly, not many people were on the beach with us.

But Willow had a blast--she dug in the sand and poured ice cold water everywhere, and Dave and I were happy as very cold clams watching her play and chatting.

Eventually, though, it got a little too freezing, and we packed up to head to the motel.  Which is where we really needed our pluck.

On the phone with my parents telling them this story, I was reminded of all the places we stayed when I was a kid.  Places where the light fixtures fell down from the ceiling, places where slugs crawled across the bathroom floor, places that, in my childhood memory, had no electricity and moldy walls.  But even with that hardy upbringing, I had a hard time with this place.  For one thing, it was literally fleabitten.  I have flea bites.  It was also, for a non-smoking room, so rank with smoke that everything we brought needed to be laundered as soon as we got home.  There was a small nail sticking out of the couch.  I was able to report that the people next door were watching The Goonies.

And both Dave and I, separately, were having internal arguments.  "Don't be so snotty.  It's fine.  You're imagining the germs.  Of course it's clean.  Of course nobody died here in a horrible and violent way.  Quit being such a drama queen."  Willow, of course, thought it was the most awesome place ever, and ran around and jumped and hid her toys in drawers we really didn't want to go poking around in, and was generally a maniac.  We spent about 20 minutes in there before hauling her out to go get some dinner.

At dinner, we went back to ignoring the motel, and had a blast--Willow marched up to the hostess and demanded to be served crab and fish and birds for dinner.  Which is, of course, so charming.  Dave and I took turns dodging the linguine worms they actually gave her (and Daddy pretended his dinner was a goldfinch, so she ate that too) and laughed and felt relaxed and carefree, a feeling we almost didn't recognize.

But then, of course, we had to eventually leave the restaurant, and we went back to the motel.  Where we got everything settled for sleeping before I finally confessed to Dave that I was having uncharacteristic germophobia issues.  Dave said, "Thank God, me too."  And we discussed leaving, and just driving home...and we really considered it, but it just seemed so cowardly.  It was one night.  We tightened our stomach muscles, and decided to stay.  I put Willow down to sleep in the bedroom and went out to sit with Dave and we drank tequila to sterilize and played Gin Rummy and actually had a blast.  We didn't do much of anything differently than we do at home, but for some reason, it was so much more fun.

And when, the next morning, it dawned even colder than the previous day, we drove home and took crazy hot showers and scrubbed everything and decided that it was great!  But we would never do it again.



*I don't really know what to do about the overuse/misuse of the word "pluck."  She really likes it.  She also misunderstood my explaining to her that physics meant that she'd fall out of her swing if she leaned way back like that, and so now when she's crazy in the swing and giving her mother a panic attack, she claims she's doing physics.

Tell Me A Story

One of Willow's more notable foibles since she learned to talk has been her insistence on narrating the world around her.

Willow: "'The wind blew the leaves sideways,' she exclaimed!"

Mommy: "Yes, honey, the wind did blow the leaves sideways."

Willow: "Her mommy replied."

Dave and I joke that the world is her novel, we just live in it.  It's a very charming and endearing trait, and I have never had cause to complain about it, and instead spend a lot of time patting myself on the back, thinking what a wonderful mother I am, that I read to her so often she sees the world as a book, and hey maybe one day she'll be a famous writer, and we'll live off her proceeds and she will thank me on every acknowledgements page and be so very very grateful that she'll buy me a house on some secluded mountain and send me boxes of books and chocolate.

But there has been an unanticipated, well, I hate to say flaw, because that would indicate that my plan isn't going to happen, and I'm not ready to give it up yet.  But certainly....annoyance.  I'm having to work a little harder for my boxes of chocolate than I thought, because now it's not just a matter of reading a lot of stories and explaining to confused children and adults that she's simply narrating what just happened...now I have to tell the stories instead of just reading them.

Which, fine.  I can tell a decent story.  I've read really a lot of fairy tales in my day, and I can concoct a well-plotted but simple and not overly wordy tale and invent it as I speak it.  This can be tiring, but it's not so much to ask.  Except that's not what's being asked.

Instead, Willow concocts the story.  (And I hate to sound all judgmental, but mine are way better.  They have a plot, more than one character, and something actually happens in them).  And then she asks me to re-tell it.  This may not sound annoying, but allow me to demonstrate:

Willow:  Tell me a story about how there was an owl named Peep who was a snowy owl and she was a girl owl and she flew all around Honeysuckle Hollow and through the trees and above the leaves and across the branches and down the colored road and all around.  Tell me that story.  Tell me a long story!

Mommy:  Okay.  Once upon a time there was a little owl named Peep.  She was a beautiful snowy owl.  She lived in Honeysuckle Hollow.  She loved to fly all around her hollow--she would fly through the trees and land on the branches and her wings would brush through the leaves and she would fly over the colored road.  It made her very happy to fly so far and so fast.  The end.

Willow: No, tell me a long story about how there was an owl named Peep who was a snowy owl and she was a girl owl and she flew all around Honeysuckle Hollow and through the trees and above the leaves and across the branches and down the colored road and all around.  Tell me that story.  Tell me a long story!

Mommy: Okay.  (Thinks for a moment.  Hits upon The Ugly Duckling).  Once upon a time there was a little owl named Peep.  She was just a baby owl living with a family of great horned owls, but as she got older her mommy and daddy owl realized that she wasn't a great horned owl after all--she was a snowy owl.   They were so surprised to learn that they had a snowy owl living with them, but they loved Peep so much that of course they wanted her to stay with them always...

Willow: No!  Tell me a story about how there was an owl named Peep who was a snowy owl and she was a girl owl and she flew all around Honeysuckle Hollow and through the trees and above the leaves and across the branches and down the colored road and all around.  Tell me that story.  Tell me a long story!  It's a very long story!

Mommy: Uh.  A long story just about that?  Okay.  Once upon a time there was an owl named Peep.  She was a snowy owl, and she was so glad to be a snowy owl.  Her feathers were white and speckled with brown spots and she had such a funny call for an owl.  She would say, kackackackack screech! kackackackack, and her call would echo all over Honeysuckle Hollow, which was where she lived.  It was a very warm place for a snowy owl to live, but she liked it there.  She loved to fly through the trees, because there aren't any trees in the tundra, where snowy owls normally live.  She loved the way the leaves would hit her wings, and she loved being able to land on a branch and see all of Honeysuckle Hollow from so high up.  Then she would swoop down and fly along the colored road--because the road in Honeysuckle Hollow has lots of different colors.  Red, and blue, and green, and yellow, and she would fly all down that road and then zoom up into the trees again.  She would fly and fly and fly and fly.  The end.  Did you like that story?

Willow: Yes.  Tell me that story again.

And again.  For an hour. 

How many times can you knit a hemline?

This took me a few tries.  Also I couldn't get it to hang on the hanger without looking crooked, though I swear the sweater itself is straight.

This is the Leni Sweater, it's knit in Spud & Chloe Sweater, on US 7 needles, so it's very, very cozy, and I love it and it's beautiful, but I have a confession to make--I hate designing with stripes.  I really like stripes, and this sweater, with a great deal of finagling, came out just how I wanted it to, but the problem with stripes is that unless you're making just one size, the stripe pattern is just not going to be your friend.

My solution is to make narrower stripes per size, because despite how I purchase sweaters in stores, when I'm knitting them it really, really bothers me to interrupt the stripe and just finish it off right there.  You know what I mean?  You can see I gritted my teeth and did it anyway on the sleeves, because sleeve length is just not forgiving enough, whereas I can say "It was meant to be a tunic for 3T!  It's a little less of a tunic for 4T, but totally a tunic again for 2T!") because I think the sweater looks good either way.

But.  Stripes are persnickety.  And they're not very nice about it.  They say, "you only have so many rows to work with, lady, so if you don't want to put a buttonhole in the middle of a color change, you'd better make your stripe reeeaaallly wide there, or give up a buttonhole.  Your choice." 

But the stripes weren't even my biggest problem, by the end.  My biggest problem was the notched hem, and I absolutely positively was going to put in a notched hem, it was all I wanted in the world, a notched hem and a button or two at the collar.  Doesn't seem like that much to ask, right?  But getting that hem to stay notched once I knit on the garter edging, and not smooth itself out into a gentle little anthill instead, was in fact something of a challenge.  And I apologize to anyone who will knit this sweater someday, as it has seemingly random increases and decreases tucked all in that garter edging, but I assure you they are not random and are in fact the result of careful knitting and reknitting and cursing and reknitting again.

It worked, by the end.  It was just a very long road to a very simple (looking) sweater.

Eggs

I had a migraine this weekend, and so Dave found himself in the position I find myself almost every day: what does one do with a child for hours and hours on end?

The answer: eggs! 

You have no idea how entertaining eggs can be.

You can read books about Easter Bunnies and their eggs.  You can act out some of the things in this book.  And then, with a flash of inspiration, you can remember that we have plastic eggs somewhere in the basement, and then the eggs will really take over.

We have had, by my count, about thirty-five Easter Egg hunts since those plastic eggs made their appearance the day before yesterday.  Most have taken place in my house, but as my head improved we ventured out to Liberty State Park and had free-range egg hunts (yes, more than one) which did earn us some strange looks, but who cared.  We tricycled around the park with eggs in the back bucket.  When Willow hides the eggs, she hides them all in one place and tells me where they are.  We have sorted the eggs by color, pretended to cook with them, pretended to sit on them.

And then this morning, when the more traditional uses for eggs began to finally lose their savor, we used them as currency.  I suppose it was more of a barter system, but when we played grocery shopping, we used eggs to trade for fruit.  Three pink eggs got you two lemons, and so on.  

I'm tempted to color Easter Eggs this afternoon since we skipped that this year, and this egg thing doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon.  But we already ate eggs for breakfast and even though every year I make deviled eggs (and I do dearly love deviled eggs) that still makes a whole lot of eggs and I'm not sure I feel up to consuming all those eggs, since it's not like anybody else is experiencing the joys of Easter a month late. 

Owls & Monkeys

So for What To Knit When You're Expecting, I made some Owl & Monkey pillows.  And since they were by far Willow's favorite thing in the entire world, I decided to try for a little continuity.  Here we have Owl & Monkey hats:

They're knit in SweetGeorgia Superwash Worsted, using US 6 needles, and I will never, ever get over my love for that yarn.  It's just so soft and silky, an absolute joy to knit with.  These hats are knit flat and then seamed (it was the easiest way to get that fake intarsia thing happening).  I had the hardest time wrapping my head around it--was a flat hat really going to be round??

But it is, and seaming it was much easier than I thought, and my Little Owl absolutely loves her hats.  Even if the owl hat is just another for the collection.

Easy To Love

It's easy to talk about how hard it is.   I have a bad day--or a bad bunch of days--and I run to Facebook or the blog and vent.  But when there's a stretch of easy we (or I, at least) tend not to talk about it.  Who wants to hear about how awesome your kid is?  Dave gets a lot of text messages exclaiming about how beautiful Willow is, what she said, how smart she is, how funny she is, while the internet is left thinking she's annoying and possibly insane.

Not so.  Most of the time, I think she's amazing.   And it's the details that make her so.  Yesterday we went to The Great Swamp Wildlife Refuge where, well, we didn't see many birds, but we saw snakes and turtles, and Willow refused to put down the taxidermied meadow vole, and even if we didn't see birds, we pretended to be birds, with such consistency that Willow asked for a wing ride instead of a shoulder ride, and ate seeds and said everything in tweets. 

This morning we read about penguins, and so we pretended to be penguins for hours, eating pear-shaped squid, hiding from orcas, and jumping on and off icebergs.  We even buried ourselves in snow and sat on our eggs to keep them warm. 

And then Willow told me a story about a tree who wanted to walk, and so he lifted his roots from the ground and walked up the side of the apartment building across the street, and then jumped down with his roots spread wide and landed with a thud.

Is any of this as amazing and fascinating to anyone who isn't her parent?  I have no idea.  I think probably not.  But to me, she's a show that I could just keep watching, because it is comfortingly sweet and yet wildly unpredictable.