Just in time

I never claimed to be timely. Just in time for spring, I finished my fingerless gloves last night. (No pictures, unfortunately. It’s a gray, rainy day and my house is like a cave.) I used this pattern, which I had saved from a 2007 page-a-day knitting calendar, and Paton's SWS in Natural Plum.

As more evidence that I shouldn’t knit while watching T.V., I wasn’t completely consistent in recording how many rows I knit, and one thumb is one row shorter than the other. This, of course, is completely obvious to me and driving me crazy. I took a poll of the household: three people can’t tell at all and three cats don’t care enough to even look. I’m vacillating between ripping out one row on the longer thumb and just living with it as an exercise in non-perfectionism.

If I start the summer sweaters I planned for last year and haven’t had time for, do you think I’ll have them ready just in time for the first snowfall?

Syncopated

The other day, Child One and I were having a conversation in the car (where many of our best conversations take place) about whether the Beatles’ song “Come Together” would be a good song for his band. I said that I thought their singer would like singing it—I was thinking this because it would fit in with his abundance of front-man attitude (unpolished though it is at his young age of 12). But before I could say this, Child One said, “Yeah, he would like it; he likes syncopated songs.”

Syncopated?

Now, Child One has used big words before. He’s been known to drone on and on about topics that I don’t fully understand, like certain video games. And when my kids talk about scales and flats and chords, it does sometimes feel to me (who can’t even yodel) like they’re speaking Etruscan or some other language I know very little about. But—as far as I know (I have to admit that I’m not always fully listening)—this was the first time that he’d used a word completely outside my experience, whose meaning I couldn’t even guess. So casual, so confident, as if he were saying any old word.

Just like when I realized that Child One’s clothes were closer to man sized than little-boy sized, I was jolted by the reminder that he’s growing up. As a mom, I’m used to my kids asking me the meanings of words; I’m not used to having to ask them. While he’s still so young in some ways, Child One is moving beyond me in others.

Unexpected

We've had a few snow flurries over the past few days, and yesterday a couple of inches of snow fell very quickly, over the course of an hour or so. And more fell overnight.

In parts of our neighborhood, we've had snow on the ground continuously since December. This is not the norm here--I don't know if it's ever happened before--and I, for one, was not happy to see several inches of snow on our deck rail this morning.

But, trying to make the best of it, I eschewed an umbrella in favor of my camera for the walk to school and took pictures on the way home--over 100 of them--until my fingers were numb and my hair was full of ice crystals. One thing I like about taking pictures on snowy days is how colors that you might not notice on a sunny day stand out more, like the green moss on this tree:

The playground was empty this morning, but the park will probably be full of sledders after school.

When I got home, I took some more photos.

I was given some tulips last week. Because I live with a plant-eating monster, any flowers I get are put outside the kitchen window, where I can see them but they are safe from being ripped apart. Today the tulips stood out against their background of huge, snowy trees.

This is my garlic, busy growing despite the weather:

This rope swing hangs in the clearing in our forest:

And this ball, which belonged to my mother-in-law, hangs in our kitchen window.

Finally, like me, a little bird on a set of outdoor shelves waits for the flowers of spring.

Bagels!

During last year, my Year of Living Differently, I often found myself not moving on to new ways of living, but going back to how I used to live, back when I took more time for the things I enjoyed. One of those things was baking from scratch.

From the time my husband and I moved in together until we had our first baby nine years later, I used to bake at least once or twice a week. All of our friends were students, most of them guys living in dingy apartments or dorms who came to our place for dinner several times a week, so I always had enthusiastic recipients for my baking.

I took a class on bread making through the community centre and I was hooked. I baked almost all of our bread and rolls. A jar of sourdough starter perpetually bubbled in the back of our fridge.

Other things crowded into my life and baking was pushed aside (left on the back burner?) more often than not. But I’ve dusted off my recipes and gotten back to baking. Ah, kneading—I had forgotten how therapeutic it is. Set the timer for 10 or 15 minutes, flour your hands (or, in my case, flour your hands and then remember to set the timer, thereby getting flour all over it), and start. Fold, press, turn; fold, press, turn. Stop thinking about all the things on your to-do list, feel the tension start to abate, fold, press, turn.

Recently I’ve combined the old and the new by baking something I’ve never made before: bagels! Dropping donuts of bread dough into boiling water—how fun is that? Quite a lot of fun, actually. I used a recipe that I tore out of a Family Fun magazine way back in 2004; you can see it here. The first time I followed the recipe exactly, and the second time I made 16 smaller bagels instead of 8 larger ones. They turned out great both times, even though I bake in a 1970s-era oven that achieved consciousness sometime before we moved into this house and likes to spontaneously heat itself up to 500 degrees F.

Sorry, I have no pictures. My kids loved these bagels so much that they even had them—plain—for dessert instead of ice cream (crazy, I know. It must be their father’s fault), and they ate them all before the light was good enough for a photo session.

Simple Valentines

Some of you know that I have two blogs, this one and Always an Editor, which is more writing oriented. I’ve decided to merge them into one—this one. From now on, I’ll just be posting here. Maybe this way I’ll post more often, because apparently Hayley misses me.

I had two favorite parts of Valentine’s Day when I was a kid: making paper-bag “mailboxes” to hang on the backs of our chairs at school (I was addicted to the mail even then) and getting a box of candy from my dad.

When my parents were still married, I would wait by the window for my dad to come home from work on Valentine’s Day. He always had three heart-shaped boxes of candy, small ones for my brother and me and a larger one for my mom. After my parents split up, I got my box on the Saturday after Valentine’s Day. In those days, we didn’t give out candy at school, so that box—being the only Valentine’s Day candy I got—was much anticipated. I would eat just one piece a day, making it last as long as possible (where has my sense of self-control disappeared to since then?).

I moved a thousand miles away from my dad when I was 14, when my mom decided to return to her hometown. I was so surprised on that first Valentine’s Day when a heart-shaped box arrived in the mail. It was more than a little squished, but it made my day.

We don’t make a really big deal of Valentine’s Day in our house. For one thing, my husband just doesn’t do romance. And over the years, as we’ve watched Valentine’s Day at school escalate from a simple card to full-blown goodie bags and mother-made cards worthy of Martha Stewart, we’ve kept it simple. Child Two gives out cards—made by her if she’s had the time, store-bought otherwise—and one small piece of chocolate.

In the spirit of using what we have, Child Two and I looked for the leftovers from previous years’ boxes of valentines, thinking that because she’s always favored themes with wide age appeal, like animals and I Spy, she could probably cobble together a mix-and-match set to use this year for school. Lo and behold, we found an unopened box of Peanuts valentines. It’s amazing what we find in our own home!

I follow my dad’s tradition of giving each kid and my husband a box of candy. And I made four cards this year, two to send off to people who could use some cheerful mail and two for my kids. The ones I mailed were made (appropriately) from stamps.


For my kids, I cut hearts from my stash of saved paper (magazines, junk mail, old calendars, patterned paper bags, etc.).

These were originally folded greeting cards, but I realized, as I glued the last heart down three minutes before I had to run out the door to pick Child Two up from school on the 13th, that one card was upside down. Typical! Knowing I would have no time to work on them that night, I just cut the fronts off, turning them into postcard-style cards. That’s the great thing about making stuff for your kids—perfection is not necessary.

Little to show

I don’t have much to show for my time these days. I’ve got a couple of projects in active progress (as opposed to the works in progress that have stalled for one reason or another): my fingerless gloves and a year-long sampler stitch-a-long with an online needlework group I belong to (which I’m already behind on, of course). My evenings are so busy right now that by the time I get a chance to sit down, I’m more likely to be taking a cup of tea and a book to bed than doing crafts.

I haven’t made any profound crafting resolutions this year. I have some projects in mind and some general goals, such as using the supplies I have and finally doing something with at least a few of the hundreds (thousands?) of photographs I’ve taken over the past couple of years.

I have spent quite a few hours lately tangled up with metres and metres (and more metres) of black fabric, making a cape as part of a costume for a teenage cousin. I don’t usually do this “Susan knows how to sew; let’s ask her to do it” kind of sewing, but this cousin has recently finished treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I’m so happy to see her feeling more like her old self again. How could I refuse her fuzzy-headed plea?

There was too much heavy fabric to lay the pattern out on the dining room table. The cats love when I cut fabric on the floor—I ended up having to lock Jamie up in a bedroom for the safety of his whiskers when he started attacking my scissors. Me? Not so much. My knees are not the young things they used to be.

Wordless Wednesday #29--Patiently waiting

Taken December 24, 2008.

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's, see wordlesswednesday.com.