So we did finally find a Carrie-sized rake, and we spent a good portion of today raking the lawn. Well, there was probably at least as much jumping into leaf piles as raking, but at least the lawn is mostly de-leafed at this point. (There are still quite a few leaves on some of our trees, but they look like they’re planning to hang around all winter at this point!)
Carrie says, “Hurry up snow, I want to make a snow angel!”
Dear Carolyn,
I’ve been thinking long and hard about whether to keep writing these letters now that you’re three. Will you really appreciate them when you’re older, or will you just be embarrassed that I put all this stuff about you on my blog? But I just can’t seem to let it go yet…maybe when you’re four?
This month, I’m happy to say, has been fabulous school-wise. I can’t even get you to give me a kiss goodbye sometimes, because you’re so eager to run off and join your classmates. This makes me really glad I stuck with it during those heartbreaking drop-offs – not that you ever really cried when I left you, but you just clung to me with all your strength. Now you can’t get enough of school!
You’ve also become a lot more comfortable hanging out at the shop with me when I’ve had to bring you along. You love to “play store” with the bins of sale yarn and your toy cash register. And you really help me out when I’m putting price stickers on the yarn…although I probably shouldn’t admit that since you’re not old enough to work yet!
Three so far is definitely harder than two was. You’re trying to become your own independent person, and I’m just trying to get us places on time. You have an uncanny ability to move slower than molasses whenever we’re running late. But we’re figuring it out, you and I, and I think by the time you turn four, three will be a piece of cake!
Love Mommy
Carolyn helped us get ready for Thanksgiving, by making some pumpkin pies. While Great-Grandpa looked on, she stirred and mixed, and made a very lovely pie:
Delicious!
Yesterday we had an all-day needle felting workshop at the shop. I had so much fun, I couldn’t stop making things!
We did “paintings” with fiber:
And 3-d objects:
And then I tried to make an ornament (mine is the one that is decidedly not ornament-sized, the other one is one the instructor gave me):
Finally, I brought home some layers of wool to try wet-felting. Carrie and I pounded at it for a bit and wound up with nice, thick wool felt:
Felting is fun!
Do you remember the autumn-colored merino I bought at the Hemlock fiber festival? Well, first I turned it into this:
This is the first yarn I’ve spun that I’ve felt was worth knitting into something, and I’m very, very happy with how it came out!
OK, I need to preface this by saying that I adore Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving, I will be breaking out the Christmas music and starting to decorate the house. But today I am feeling pretty malevolent towards the whole Christmas thing…
See, I need a rake. Specifically, a kid-sized rake that Carrie can use this weekend with Denis so they can get some yard work done while I’m at the shop. I’d like a decent quality rake, but at this point I’d settle for some piece of plastic junk that will be recalled in six months due to excessive lead paint.
Target was a bust. They haven’t had fall stuff out since before Halloween. In fact, the sales associate actually laughed at me when I asked where they might be hiding. KMart was also a bust, although I couldn’t even find anyone to ask. So I thought, Home Depot! They must still have rakes, because their business is home, lawn and garden stuff, not Christmas!
I was encouraged by the big “Fall Cleanup” sign hanging near the door, but that turned out to be a grand total of 17 giant black plastic rakes sticking out of a box…right next to a field of plastic Christmas trees. And when I went to the service desk to ask, I was told “oh, kid rakes sold out a long time ago.” Um, it hasn’t really been fall for all that long… “But it’s Christmas now, and people see them and buy them for gifts so they sell out really fast.”
OK I have two problems with that statement. First of all, who in heck buys a rake as a Christmas gift for a kid? And second of all, last I checked, it’s November 7th. If I’m reading my calendar correctly (and it’s been a long day, maybe I’m not) Christmas is December 25th. If I had walked in on December 7th and asked for a rake, then maybe I could see the reasoning behind telling me it’s Christmas now and rakes are “only sold during the fall. Um, you know, while the leaves are falling.” (OK, um, as a matter of fact all the leaves are actually still mostly on my trees. So, I was kind of thinking that fall isn’t exactly over yet…?)
I’m all for holiday spirit and all that, but please, for the love of Christmas, can’t we at least enjoy some turkey first? And perhaps a good bit of raking and leaf-pile jumping?!?
Carrie finally got her ladybug cake and her party today. She had a blast playing with her friends – it was basically one big playgroup with pizza and cake.
Lisa and I made Carrie’s ladybug cake using Jenny’s instructions. It was funny – when I searched for pictures of ladybug cakes on google images, out of the thousands upon thousands of cake images, Carrie picked the one that a friend of mine made. Small world, and all that.
After a rousing game of “stick the spot on the ladybug”, during which I learned that 3-year-olds can’t reliably keep their eyes closed, we lit the candles and cut that ladybug into pieces. Delicious ladybug pieces…
This was my favorite cake so far that I’ve made for Carrie. It was so much easier than the others, but she absolutely adored it – probably because she picked it out. And it was fun to learn that I could bake a cake in a pyrex bowl. It had me eyeing my Pampered Chef batter bowl…if Carrie ever requests one of those princess dress cakes – the kind with the doll stuck in the top – that batter bowl is the perfect size and shape for it!
Now, though, I’m so tired I’m ready to fall down. Oh, yeah, that might be because it should really be 11:30 instead of 10:30. Drat that time change!
…world’s smallest knitter!
We’ve been hosting the World’s Biggest Sock Attempt at our shop for the past week, and this morning I sat Carrie on my lap and helped her knit a few stitches on it. She actually really got the hang of how the needles moved, she just had some trouble with wrapping the yarn.
So now, when she’s older and people ask her when she learned to knit, she can legitimately say she learned when she was three! (We chanted the children’s knitting rhyme while she did it: “In through the front door, once around the back, peek through the window, and off jumps Jack”.)
I signed Carrie up for a dance class at the YMCA. We needed to buy a leotard, ballet shoes and tap shoes. The only XXS leotard left at our local Target was blue, and thinking Carrie would definitely want pink I asked an employee if they carried them, or could hold one at a different Target. But Carrie spoke up and said, “But Mommy, I want the blue one!”
Doesn’t she look fabulous in her blue leotard? And she had so much fun in her class! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as cute as those six little 3- and 4-year-old girls doing teeny tiny little pliés and tapping their way across the room heel-toe-heel-toe.
I was worried when I bought the blue leotard that Carrie would see all the other girls in pink (and they all were) and want pink instead. And she did, on the way home in the car, say she wanted a pink leotard like the other girls. But she (I think) accepted that the store was out of pink, that she had chosen blue, and that she looked absolutely beautiful in it, and that maybe when she out-grew it we’d try to find a pink one.
Good thing, too, because I’m most of the way through a blue leg-warmer…