OK. Seriously, I didn’t need something like this to waste my valuable free time on. But in case you’re bored and looking for something to do, check out Weffriddles. I’m on level 29…
Author: Sarah
2 year well-baby visit
Vital stats:
2 years, 1 day old
24 lbs. 3 oz.
35″ tall
Carrie’s 2 year checkup was today, and she’s doing great! We were supposed to get a flu shot today, but for some reason the doctor said they were only giving flu shots to their 6 to 24 month patients. Um, OK, her birthday was yesterday and we were scheduled to get it today six weeks ago! For that, and various other things we’ve been unhappy with for the past two years, we’re switching to another pediatric practice as soon as possible.
I had to take her to get a finger stick lead test, and Carrie didn’t cry at all. She actually seemed fascinated by the whole process, and was thrilled to get a sticker afterwards. Then I was driving home and I hear from the back seat “red all over, mommy!” I pulled over in a parking lot and she’d removed the band-aid and poked at her finger until it started bleeding again. Sigh. Have I mentioned that blood is not one of those things I do too well at? But I managed to keep it together and get the first aid kit out, wipe her up, and stick another band-aid on her. Luckily she kept it on the rest of the way home!
Two Years Old!
Dear Carolyn,
Today you are two years old. I can’t believe what a big girl you are! I kissed you goodnight last night knowing it was the last kiss I’d give you as a one-year-old, and it made my breath catch a little.
In the past year you’ve learned so much. You’ve learned to talk, and you say the funniest things! You can run and jump, pull your pants up and unzip your footie pajamas. You draw circles and dots and straight lines, and would spend the whole day coloring and painting if you could. You know your alphabet, and can read all the capital letters, some lowercase letters, and single digit numbers. You can almost count to 20 (you get all the way up to 12, but then it gets a little sketchy: “12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20!”)
You’re starting to master pronouns, although you do mix them up sometimes, but most of the time now you refer to yourself as “I” instead of “Carrie”. When I ask you if you need a diaper change, you proclaim “I are dry!” You’ve started using the phrases “yes, I see that” and “nice shoes” (or coat, buttons, sticker, etc.) The other night we were headed upstairs to take a bath with the new bath crayons you got at your birthday party, and you picked up your toy phone and said “Hello? Yeah, I taking bath with crayons, bye!” One night at dinner you started squeezing your food and calling it “kind of squeaky”. We figured out that you meant “kind of squishy”. It’s sooooo hard not to laugh when you do things like that (which would just encourage you, of course!)
We’ve very much entered the verbal two-year-old land, where every single minute you come up with something funny and endearing to say. I could carry a notebook around just to write them all down in and I still would never be able to catch them all.
Even though you can’t carry a tune in a bucket, you love to sing. You know all the words to a lot of songs now, including “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, “Old MacDonald”, “Rubber Ducky”, “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes”, “Twinkle, Twinkle”, “Baa, Baa Black Sheep”, “Rock-a-bye Baby”, and (of course) “Happy Birthday”. You also think you know all the words to “La La La La Lemon”, “Sing” (from Sesame Street), and several others. You now could be across the house completely engrossed in something else and if I sit down at the piano you come running over and start sobbing about how it’s “mine turn!” You love to sit on the bench, plunk out notes, and sing a song. Don’t worry, I have a bunch of that on video already.
I’m so proud of how nice your manners are. You say “please”, “thank you” and “you’re welcome” mostly without prompting. You say “bless you” when someone sneezes and “excuse me” when you burp. You’re slowly learning to share your toys and take turns with your friends. Yesterday we went out for lunch, just the two of us, and I was pleasantly surprised by how nicely you sat next to me in the booth and how neatly you ate. You even shared your hot fudge sundae with me without complaint!
Mostly, I just want to tell you that the past two years of being your mama have been the most wonderful two years of my life. I have loved watching you grow, seeing you learn new things every day, and experiencing the wonder of ordinary things through your eyes. When I look back at your pictures and the stories I’ve written about you from the past two years, I am reminded again how precious, how fleeting, this time is. Soon enough you will be the mama writing letters to your daughter, and I will have to think back to your tiny voice saying “Thanks, Mom!” to remember how little you once were.
Love, Mommy
Second Birthday Party
How to throw a two-year-old’s birthday party in three easy steps:
1. Bake a Blue’s Clues cake and paw-print cupcakes.
2. Clean like a madwoman until the wee hours because your house (always) smells like dog.
3. Be so busy keeping tabs on the two-year-olds running around the house that you forget to take enough pictures.
It’s a good thing Carrie’s real birthday hasn’t happened yet, because I didn’t even get any pictures of her actually blowing out the candle. I was too busy making sure she didn’t get her hair/dress/hands/nose in the flame and didn’t think to assign camera or video camera duty to anyone. This was the best Denis could get from where he was in the room – actually, even though you can’t see Carrie’s face it’s a really nice picture:
Despite that, it was a fun party! Carrie really had a good time (minus two or three mini-meltdowns that are mostly a daily occurrence and were probably not related to the party) playing with her friends, charming her great-grandparents, and (of course) eating cake. There were some seriously blue hands and faces on those kids…
The party was actually more dog-themed than Blue’s Clues-themed. If I’d thought, I could have put Carrie’s extensive collection of stuffed dogs and dog-related books out as part of the decorations. I didn’t even hang the streamers I bought though, just a birthday banner and some balloons.
This year there were 31 people (including the three of us). This was a “small” party – it was just (some of) our immediate family and Carrie’s friends, none of our friends or cousins/aunts/uncles/etc. I was sad not to invite everyone we did last year, but it’s just too much to have such huge parties every year. I think this one was borderline too stressful for Carrie, and next year we’ll have to split up the friends and family parties.
There are more pictures here. (Kodak Easy-Share Gallery, requires sign-in).
“I Love This!”
I’m still here – major work is underway for the second birthday party, and I’ve been spending every free moment lately working on Christmas gifts, which explains the lack of posting. However, I couldn’t let these little sayings go without writing them down:
The other day we were walking through Sears, right by the jewelry display. Carrie dropped both our hands, ran up to the display, put her hands on the glass and said “I love this!” Then she walked over a couple of steps, and repeated herself, and again…we’re in trouble!
After dinner this evening, Carrie was getting her crazies out by hopping around the first floor. Denis remarked (quietly) “what a nut!”. Carrie came hopping back into the kitchen saying “what a nut! what a nut!”
Also after dinner: I told Carrie “I love you!” She leaned in close and said “I love me too!”
And finally, Carrie was begging for a diaper change (unneeded) over the monitor after we put her to bed. I went up to change her and when I walked in to the room she stuck out her tongue, pointed to it, and said “tun hath oo-oo, nee an-ay!” (Translation: “tongue has boo-boo, need band-aid!”) Why she thought I’d give her a band-aid for her tongue when she won’t even keep one on her finger is beyond me.
My First Blow-Out
We had a fun adventure today. We had some errands to run, and the fastest way to get where we were going was to get on the Thruway for one exit. It was pretty windy (and cold) so I was fighting a little to keep the car steady. All of a sudden, I heard this big woosh and felt the car pull hard to the right. Apparently, you can really tell in a four wheel drive car when you suddenly get a flat tire! (I actually drove on a flat tire on the expressway for about 20 miles once in my old car, because it didn’t handle any differently at all and I had absolutely no idea I had a flat.)
I was sooooooo glad Denis was in the car, because even though I know how to change a tire, I couldn’t possibly have loosened those lug nuts myself. And did I mention it was cold? It would have been so much fun sitting on the Thruway waiting for a tow truck to come along and change a tire for me if I’d been with Carrie by myself. I didn’t even have my knitting! (Or gloves for that matter, but really, the knitting is way more important.)
Luckily, it was a clean puncture and I got us off the road really fast, so it was only $20 to have the tire fixed at Sears. Because if I understand correctly, four wheel drive vehicles have to have similar wear on all four tires, so with the 22,000+ miles I have on the car I would have had to replace all four of them.
Carrie kept asking me through the open tailgate, “Mommy, you ‘k?” as I was man-handling (woman-handling?) the spare out of the trunk and putting the flat tire back in. I was pretty surprised how not freaked out she was by the whole thing. Her biggest concern was that we were stopped, and she was still in her carseat, in her coat, and really, why on earth was she still in her carseat, in her coat no less, when the car wasn’t moving?!?
Must. Knit. Faster!
Ack! It’s 36° right now – that’s 36° Fahrenheit, not Celsius! It was 64 this morning, just barely sweater weather. And now it’s almost freezing and Carrie doesn’t have a hat yet, because I just started knitting it yesterday. It’s snowing just a half an hour west of here! For heaven’s sake, it’s only October 12th! This is all because Carrie’s Halloween costume is the thinnest, flimsiest thing ever, isn’t it? (And it has wings, so she can’t actually wear her snowsuit over top of it.)
But back to the hat: I’ve gotten to the crown decreases, but it’s almost midnight and my head hurts trying to figure out where to decrease. See, I’m using a pattern, but I couldn’t get gauge (by a lot) and I adjusted the stitch count, and now I have to do some complicated math…and…I think I have to sleep on it. Not to mention that even if I finished the knitting tonight it’s a striped hat and there are at least four thousand ends to hide.
Poor Carrie. I wonder if last years’ hat still fits?
Mommy’s Little Brass Player
Last night I got out my horn to practice for tonight’s rehearsal. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I hadn’t practiced at all in the two weeks since the last rehearsal. In fact, I hadn’t really played at home at all since…springtime? Maybe? Practicing is not my forté.
Anyway. Carrie was fascinated by the horn, and kept sticking her face up into the bell and saying “Hi Mommy!” into it. Finally she announced “Mine turn!” and tried to grab the horn away from me. So I showed her how to buzz her lips against the mouthpiece. Then I put the mouthpiece back into the horn and held it up to her mouth. And she buzzed perfectly and made a really nice sounding tone come out of it! She did it several other times in between playing with her toys, so it wasn’t an accident.
I wish they made kid-sized horns like they have kid-sized violins. I’d be totally willing to indulge her interest in the horn if it weren’t a) much too big for her to hold and b) much too expensive for me to replace now that we only have one income. I wonder if they still even start kids on the horn in fourth grade anymore?
“You ‘K?”
There are times I wish I had a tape recorder on the baby monitor. This is the conversation I heard this morning before I went in to get Carrie:
“Whoa, be careful! You ‘K?”
“Yeah, I ‘K.”
“Need kiss? (mwah!)”
“Thank you!”
I guess she was either talking to one of the triplets or was having two of them talk to each other.
Oh, and Carrie learned the word “mine” over the weekend. Now everything is “mine”. “Mine socks”, “mine apple”, “mine, mine, mine!” I guess it had to happen eventually! (She does know it’s “Mommy’s knitting”, though.)
2mm Needles, How I Love Thee…
Everything I’m knitting lately seems to use my size US 0/2mm needles. So many things, in fact, that I have to plan carefully the order in which I’m going to work on things so that I have a size 0 needle available when I need it. I’m thinking I should order another KnitPick’s size 0 circular or two – they’re certainly cheap enough to have extras! So what are all these fine-gauge projects?
A teeny-tiny hat and the most ridiculously cute booties ever:
The yarn is some leftover Fortissima Cotton Colori, which is discontinued, but it is the softest cotton sock yarn ever. I have one more skein in these pretty baby colors, and I’ll be so sad when it’s gone. (For the record, one skein yielded a preemie hat, a newborn hat, and a pair of newborn booties, with about 6″ to spare.) And before anyone gets any ideas, these were a gift for a baby shower this past Sunday.
Another Devan sweater:
I didn’t take great notes the first time around, so I actually knit this much on smaller needles, realized it was much too stiff and figured out I had used a different size needle last time. Rrrrrrip-it! But using size 2 needles for the body (it’s still size 0 for the rolled hem) made a huge difference in the drape.
And last, but not least, the doomed entrelac socks:
The pattern, my friends, sucks. If I didn’t know how to knit socks in my sleep, and hadn’t knit entrelac before, there’s no possible way I could knit these socks. The pattern isn’t the problem, though, it’s the yarn. Who could possibly tell, looking at this skein, that the colors changed every single inch?!? This makes it impossible for there to be nice, defined squares, and instead I’m left with this variegated mess. I still want to make this pattern, and I still want to use this yarn, but they are not meant to be together. Better to figure this out now than before any long-term commitments were made…