Clearing the Decks

Goodbye for now to the lone Jaywalker. No bets on when it will either be finished or joined by a matching sock. But I am taking a few moments to pet it today, just because it finally grew by some (metrically-measured) amount.


All Olympic training, such as it was, is over. Today it starts. Cue hysterical laughter, as my training has consisted of having a plethora of children, arranging it so that rolling viruses (virii?) have come through the household, I haven't slept more than three consecutive hours in a week, and pretending that I can knit more than a row without making some goofball mistake.

I love thinking of people all over the world anxiously watching the clock, ready for their 2:00 p.m. cast on. I've gathered supplies:


Rounded up: a variety of needles in different sizes, for casting on and off, knitting short and long (I'm open to some flow in the process), floss, needle, pattern, yarn. The pink embroidery floss and the blue needle (focus problems thanks to the camera-strap-grabbing baby) are there because I know myself. Mr. Lifeline and I are going to become pretty close friends, I think. Notice that I've actually made a mock-up of the pattern, complete with repeats glued across the middle. Anyone operating on as few synapses as I am needs all available external help . I'm going to find some magnets and use our metal "make a word" boards to keep track of where I am.

I'm also not showing the remote for the TV. I warmed up last night by watching a videotape of Elizabeth Zimmerman and Meg Swanson cheerily knitting a percentage sweater. It reminded me that life is long, there's a lot to learn about knitting, and making something beautiful will eventually last longer than even my childrens' snotty noses.

Cheers to knitters everywhere.

Why Mommy Can't Knit

String Bean had an excellent suggestion in the comments yesterday, and I quote: "It would be horrible not to have time to knit every day (EVERYDAY!!). But I don't have children, so I'm probably missing something. Teach the kids to knit! Once they get the hang of it, you can finally sit down and knit (a few months later...) while they quietly sit still and knit. Quietly...while sitting still. No noise. Maybe?

Yes, it really is a great idea. Two of my four can knit, and two of them are probably too young. Well, at least the seven month old one is. She, however, really enjoys chewing on yarn. And the knitters? There is almost nothing my children cannot do while talking. Really.

At any rate, I don't mean to make my situation with my children stand for anything more than one person's life with four small people. And my idiosyncratic small people at that, too. Somewhere there is a family with four or more children the ages of mine, and this family probably has lots of time to knit. Heck, they probably have time to meditate. All of them. Calmly. Together.

My experience is different.

For whatever reasons, nature, nurture, bad karma, a life well-lived, I have the children I have. And right now, that means that I don't have purt near any much time to knit during the day. I take the time I do have, and I try to make as much time as I can, but I do knit rather slowly, given my "knit two, rip one" credo. Plus, it's not all bad. The kids are diverting, sometimes more than diverting, and I read while nursing.

So, those Jaywalkers? They're now about 3" or 7.5 cm (I'm going to stick to metric from now on; it seems so much more). Green sweater? Well, I've got ribbing. This evening's knitting time?

I spent it being helped to plant seeds, because I now have some of these:



Please accept my apologies for the quality of the picture. It had been a long day. Just about half of my new garden beds are there. Enough to drive me to my seed boxes and pencils and whip me into a gardening frenzy.

Plus, the ladies are now behind bars.

I can plant without fear of chicken depredation, being used as a landing perch by the overly friendly hen, or inadvertently encountering. . . well, poop.

Even with only a smidgen more sock, it all adds up to a good day.

Tag, I'm it

My children seem little worse for wear today -- maybe they worked out all the psychological harm I inflicted on them yesterday through imaginative play. I haven't yelled at them yet today, despite Thing 3's screaming insistence that I "Make pancakes NOWWWWW!" I cut that fit off by gently setting down the bowl of hot cereal in front of him and walking off. My kids seem to operate on the "food on the table is worth a thousand fits" method, and once he'd eaten, peace was restored. Okay, that plus two readings of Jan Brett's Armadillo Rodeo. In a row. Now they're in the bathtub. Expiation? I hope so.

Busy day today, with lots of running around (and, I fear, little knitting), so I'm going to go ahead and meme. My internet friend bfmomma tagged me. She and I "met" almost 11 years ago, when we were both expecting our first children, on a due date list. We've been bumping into each other on email lists ever since then, and now, bwaaa haaa haa, she's knitting.

Without further ado, here we go:

4 jobs you have had in your life

book repairer at a library
dog poop scooper
ice cream scooper/waitress at a Swensens
college composition instructor on line

4 movies you could watch over and over
Um. . . "Raising Arizona"
Ummmm. Nope. No more. Don't like the over and over thing.

4 places you have lived
Charlottesville, Virginia
Knoxville, Tennessee
Tempe, Arizona
Grandada Hills, California

4 TV shows you love to watch
Arrested Development
I end up watching a lot of Animal Planet with the Things, but again, I don't watch much happily

4 places you have been on vacation
Ireland
Venice, Italy
San Diego, California
Alaska

4 websites you visit daily
Those knitting ones
Those friends' ones
Go Fug Yourself
Katie Allison Granju

4 of your favorite foods
toast
Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch ice cream
ollalieberries
kale sautee'd with garlic and raisins and pine nuts (recipe available on request)

4 places you would rather be right now
Nope. I like it here very much. I would rather be knitting, though.

4 bloggers you are tagging
Everyone I know well enough to tag has already been tagged!

Screams have just erupted from the bathroom.

Gotta run,

Evil Mommy

Out of the Mouths of Babes

It started as such a nice day. It wasn't raining, first off, so that was a very good thing. We got up, ate, did some schoolwork. . . the baby went down for her first nap . . . aaaaaannnnnnddd, I went upstairs to the playroom.

I had intended to get the children to pick up just a bit, and then send them outside so I could get in some well-deserved knitting time. Even though I got this done in my Knitting as a Spiritual Practice group:



















I hoped to get a lot more progress done on both -- I wanted to finish most of the leg of the Jaywalker and to get into the pattern on the green cable sweater (when is a "cable sweater" an "Aran sweater?" Does it have to be cream? From Ireland? Who knows?).

At any rate, when I went upstairs, and noticed just how much mess was up there, I started to get unhappy. When I noticed not one, not two, not even three but four rotten apple cores, strewn around the computer desk, I really started to lose it. The addition of some of my "special things" (believe you me, I have very few of these) taken out of the yarn room and played with was just sauce. So all of us then had to pick up together, not just a few things, but ev-er-y-thing.

Cue crying, yelling, fighting, accusations of slackage: "It's not fair! I'm doing it all and they're not doing anything!" My favorite was when Thing 2 shouted at Thing 1, "You're making me talk so much I can't get my breath!" I did my share of yelling, I'm sorry to say, and even intimated that if they were going to treat the room as a sty, we might as well put pigs in it.

Needless to say, it wasn't a great time. It got worse when a friend of theirs showed up to play while her parents, who are landscape installers, worked on our back yard. I had to tell her that they couldn't play until they were done, because by this time, all the stomping and yelling had woken up the baby, which is nearly a capital offense. Being kept away from their friend only heightened the already-high levels of distress.

Finally, after many tears, many fights, me thinking both that I was really tired of this and that maybe I'm just not cut out to, you know, rear children, and far too many rotten apples, it was near enough to "clean" to spring the kids.

They ran out like puppies from a cage. Another friend came over -- yahoo! Now there are four children, ages 4-6, romping through the house. The baby was awake, so it was just loud, not criminal. They started a long game complete with costumes and stuffed animals, and I was just sitting down to breathe when I hear one of my beloved darlings say screech, " "Hey!!! Do you want to play babies and evil Mommy?"

Just call me Penelope

It would be the height of understatement to say that I haven't been knitting much lately. Actually, to be completely accurate, it would be more the case that I haven't been knitting anything I've kept lately. I'll knit, then rip, then knit, then discover I've messed up the pattern repeat again,* then rip, so on and so on. I don't even have impatient suitors to make it a reasonable thing. I'm just in a slump, I suppose.

Thing 3 is still sick enough to require a bit of my attention, and the littlest Thing is still an in-arms babe much of the time. I'm generally okay with all of this, really I am, but it doesn't do much for my concentration.

This "concentration" isn't much to start with, if history has anything to show about the present. Let me tell you a little story. About a year ago, I figured that I could start early and knit slipper socks for my sister and her wonderful husband for Christmas. (We'll call him "Sven.") I found a pattern I liked, knit my sister's up, and began on his. I knew they had to be larger than hers, but I didn't know how large. I couldn't ask him for his measurements, because then he'd know I was knitting socks for him. I didn't think I could just wing it, but I didn't know what to do.

So I asked my sister to estimate his size, and she asked if I needed measurements. "Yeah, that would be good," I said, "Can you measure his feet while he's asleep?" "I could undress him while he's asleep," she said, which struck me then, and continues to strike me now, as pretty funny stuff.

Measurements in hand, I created the first sock. Wonderful! Then, somehow, life intervened. Months went by, months. Finally, some time in November, I picked up needles and knit this:


Nice, huh? But I didn't remember how many stitches I'd grafted together on the tip of the toe of the other sock. Was it 12? 8? I set off to find it and compare. Not hard, right? Except, the Other Sock was nowhere to be found. Look, I'm pretty disorganized (anyone who can knit a "pair" of socks that takes nine months isn't completely on top of her game), but I only had three children when I knit the first sock. And my knitting stays in one general place unless it's actively being worked on, and that sock wasn't there. I think I probably put it away "for Christmas," feeling all ahead of myself. Only I forgot to tell myself where I was stashing completed gifts. We tore the house apart. No sock.

Since I took that picture today, I can confidently say that having another baby and moving house didnt' magically cause wherever that sock was/is hiding to disgorge it. I still believe, in the face of all evidence, that it's somewhere in this house. And I'm not grafting that toe until I find it.

Why do I believe, in the face of all evidence, that the sock still exists and is in the new house? I could say it's because I don't want to knit another one. And there is probably some truth to that. But it's more along the lines of similar incidents resolving themselves.

I haven't knitted the Jaywalker socks; I haven't done more than three inches of the green Aran for my daughter (and those three I ripped out); and I really haven't knit on the orange vest. (Dainty Bess awaits the Olympics to start). At first, I didn't knit on the orange vest because I didn't want to mess it up -- I'm not going to outgrow it, there's no completion date hanging over it, it can wait.

Then I didn't knit on it because I couldn't find it. I looked in the knitting basket by my bed, in my carry-along knitting bag, in the diaper bag I usually don't carry, in the car, in the yarn room. . . no vest. I asked my kids. No vest. [This means nothing. They routinely say they don't have something when they do, or they didn't touch it when they did, or that they haven't seen it when it's in their rooms. But I had to ask.]

Instead of panicking, I just knit (and ripped, and so on) on my other two Sisyphean tasks projects . I knew that vest would show up in good time. Or not, like the sock. But then I went hunting for some tights in a corner of my closet.


Yeah. I don't know what it was doing there, either.

*Both my friend and the wonderful authoress of the pattern helped me work out why I was not able to knit the Jaywalker pattern. Suffice it to say, the problem's not in the pattern, just this operator.

A Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading

I was going to post the saga of Sven's slipper sock today, but Grace invited the knit blogging world to this event, and I have just the piece. I wonder if anyone else will pick this particular poem?

But first, a digression: I grew up being "all about" literature (that's lit-ra-chur, not just "books I like"). I studied it, I devoured it, I wrote tedious papers about it. All that said? It was all about novels. Poetry, not so much. In fact, in my first high-level poetry class, all I could figure to write about the assigned work was how little I understood it. I ended up getting an A, so that may tell you something about the state of higher education. Or not.

At any rate, every once in a while, a poem sneaks under my defenses and hits me square between the eyes. Maybe it's a famous poem, although being a poem-phobe, I wouldn't know it, maybe it's not. This one does it for me. Still. Every time.

The Rain Stick for Beth and Rand

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Up-end the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.
Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

Seamus Heaney

Not knitting, not sleeping

After feeling like I had no business holding needles the other day, I did what any sensible knitter-with-problem does: I asked other people for help. The wonderful denizens of the knitty board nailed my issue, as did the lovely pair over at Yarn. I used some of my babysitter time to get help. When I got it, I returned home because the baby was awake, and headed out to apply my new knowlege. That knowlege is -- inc 1 does not make 1 equal. I now pause for the titters of amusement rippling out in the universe. Well, yeah, I could have read the instructions. Or I could have assumed I knew what I was doing and ended up messing it up.

After I left the coffee shop because the baby was shrieking and blowing raspberries so loud that no one could hear their coffee steam, I finished applying my new knowlege and got this:


I kind of like it. But that's all I did. Why, you wonder, did I not immediately complete some bit of knitting beyond swatching? Well, I'm basically a housewife. I also educate the young ones in my household, but all of the house duties mostly fall to me. I also am a housewife who hasn't slept in about three nights due to various members of the household being sick. Last night, Thing 3, of the cloggy ear canals, had a quick-onset ear infection. Between him literally waking up screaming in pain, my spouse getting up to blow his nose, Thing 2 having a screaming nightmare in the middle of the night, and the baby waking up just because she's a baby. . . well, you get the picture. I'm feeling a little ragged.

Today, we've been to the doctor (burst eardrums plus fevers warrant visits in my book), gotten the necessary meds, done a load or two of laundry, run the dishwasher, gotten the baby to nap, set up all the kids under a blanket in front of a movie, and made my bed, and I finally feel as though I can exhale.

I'm going to swatch the second cable for the sweater. And I'm going to ignore my creeping suspicion that I don't actually have enough yarn according to my kitchen scale. I did the thing where I paid out enough yarn to register on the scale? And then I measured that, and weighed the whole ball, and did the math. . . well, we'll see. It's old yarn. I think I got it from my knitting teacher in Tennessee, and she had probably had it for a while. Maybe I can find something to match well enough if it comes to it.

I'm also going to ignore the fact that I'm still the only knitter in the known universe who is having actual trouble with the Jaywalker socks. I should probably count the stitches on my needles, just to make sure I actually have the right number, but I have to have something to blog about in the future.