Still boring!
Ha! Borked Nablopomo again. Totally forgot to post yesterday. Utterly consumed by knitting related carpal tunnel pain.
Feeling better today, thank you for asking. Am about to drive family to get some Best Rated Wings at the Best Rated Local Wing Place. Apparently, there is some sort of STEELER FOOTBALL game on tonight, which really interferes with my Tina Fey time, but whatever, I am the best wife and I won’t make a peep.
choo-choo
He’s got one-track mind.
Toasty hands
I finished knitting the first pair of mittens!
It’s so awesome how this knitting thing is making sense now.
Owen loves them; he calls them his “Santa mittens.” When he puts them on he’s Santa, and I’m the girl elf, and Mac is the baby elf, and Iain is the boy elf, and we have to sit on the radiator and work the “present-making machine” churning out “City Legos”; he catches them in his mitts (because they’re hot off the presses!) and puts them in his imaginary sack.
He also asked me how to make Playmobil pirates, because he didn’t know how, and I told him we could look up the elf plans on the internet, and he pointed to his play house and said, “I don’t have internet here. Or a phone. Just a doorbell and a clock and a window and a mailbox and this thing for a dog’s bones to go in.” Man. Harsh digs up there in the North Pole.
Here he is, modeling his mittens. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cuter Saint Nick.
The Football Widow’s Lament
O my belovéd! You speak to me distantly, as though calling from across one hundred verdant yards, your words swallow’d in the grande melee that issues forth from a tiny box of glass — hark! I hear you cry now!
“What child is this?” you inquire, forlornly, “who stands before me, a better door than a window?”
From dawn to deepest night you gaze, enrapt: the fumbled pass, the joy intercepted, the curses streaming forth anew — until (O blessed time! the moment of our reunion!) your champions, hailing of the burg of Pitt, dance triumphantly; their pennants of black and gold do wave, and I with haste do turn off the fucking football.
(To be fair, he only watched three games today!)
I’m a little slow on the uptake
I have been thinking a lot lately that my Self of 10 years ago would probably have punched my Self of today for being content puttering around the house, SAHMing and whatnot. (Though she would have playfully punched me on the shoulder for finally learning to knit — you should have seen the scarf I knit for my friend Jeff in college. It was like a trapezoid, that was on acid, that had a run-in with a goose.)
Anyway, my point is that it took me a long time to realize that raising children and creating a home are not worthless pursuits or somehow less valuable than a life spent working one’s way up the chain of command at a newspaper. There is no line in the sand that says You are This or You are That. There is no such thing as Mommy Wars; motherhood is merely parenthood, and most humans enter that reproductive phase of life at one point. Taking a few years out of one’s work career (if that’s what I end up doing) is merely one person’s path through parenthood, not a Statement or a Track or a Cause
Too much of parenthood in this country is minimized as soccer mom work, joke fodder rather than seen through the lens of family and connection. Every one has parents; everyone comes from somewhere. Most people (I think most, statistically) will create a family of their own one way or another, or find themselves as a caregiver to someone else at some point, be it spouse, child or aging parent. It’s narrowminded and dangerous to assume that child-raising belongs to women and women belong at home; likewise it is narrowminded and dangerous to assume that raising children and staying at home are lowly, marginal or worthless activities. They are human activities.
Life is a ripple, or a wave, or a ribbon. Time bears you forward into different circumstances, doing different work that affects the larger society or culture as a whole. Arranging words on a newspaper page is one such service to your community. Teaching the children of that community about manners and love and respect and compassion is another.
To my Self of 10 years ago, I would say this: After critically thinking about so much, and fighting back over so many things, don’t overlook this. Motherhood is not the M word. Talk to me in 10 years. Get some of that stuff out of your system, take a step back, listen, think — and move the yarn forward if you want to purl.
I like to distribute my obsessions
This week, it’s knitting 24/7. After I finished my vest, I cast on for a roll-brim hat for Owen, using a pattern out of Joelle Hoverson’s Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. My gauge was off, so that hat ended up fitting Cormac better.
Then I knit a hat for Owen:
and as soon as I slipped that one off the needles I started working on a pair of mittens, which is what I’ve got going now. I also updated my ravelry notebook and trolled for patterns. After I knit two pairs of those mittens (one for each kid, thereby completing their winter wardrobes), I plan to make a couple cowl-neck scarves and a few pairs of these arm-warmers/fingerless mittens, one to keep and one to donate to charity. What’s a good charity to donate a pair of mittens to?
Anyway. It’s all practical, utilitarian knitting right now, quick work to keep us warm this winter. But one day, when I get all that stuff done, there’s a sweater in this 1961 sweater book that I want to try. I’m totally ready for sleeves. (Hey! You could get one too and then we’d be sweater book twins!)
This is the haps
Basement: smells like poo.
My shoe: smells like poo.
Baby: crying.
Preschooler: conked the hell out.
Yarn: purchased.
Buyer’s remorse: experienced.
Blog: updated.
Word.
Dropped a stitch in my Nablopomo
Hey! Lazy people like me should probably at least check their web site once before turning in for the night, right? Like if they’re doing some sort of blogging project that requires daily posting, they should probably check that they posted what they meant to post, right? ‘Cause I forgot to do that last night, and I screwed the pooch.
EVEN IF THAT POST WAS DRIVEL, it’s still, you know, a post. And it counts. Like this post! Sweet Betsy Lou, I just keep getting better. As with the hat I was trying to knit today, once you miss one stitch the whole thing just kind of unravels and you should just frog that sucker and start again. OR … dig out your crochet hook, nab the loop and throw that sucker back on the sticks. This post … is the crochet hook … of my Nablopomo.
A point! Do I have one? I don’t know. What I do know is this: I think I’m like 200% over my daily allowance of The Office, and I have nearly knitted two hats. Also, since writing that last, saccharinely chipper post I am convinced that the other shoe is going to drop and I will be punished for my good fortune. My mom says maybe this is how things are supposed to be, but I don’t know. I mean, Barack Obama is the president elect? I have cable television? I figured out how to knit on double-points? I think one of y’all better pinch me, ‘cause I got to be dreaming.
Of course, my writing ability has all but disappeared, so maybe the universe saw fit to make a tradeoff.
11 days in and we’re all bored already
Nablopomo woo! I know you all are like BORING, bring on the crazy or something, enough of this craft talk.
Or not. That’s fine. It’s all fine. Life is pretty good ‘round the way. I think Iain and I are thinner, happier and more productive here in our new town. Today my sister and her boyfriend came over and played with the kids and we made pretzels. The exciting part is that they can do that now! Three hours is a little long for a road trip but at least it’s physically and geographically possible. I’m just feeling pretty happy about life and my little SAHM domestic thing I’m working these days, washing the dishes and making the beds and stewing a little sumpin in the crock pot and knitting. It’s good. I took pictures but haven’t uploaded them yet.
HI! Stream of consciousness is so not interesting here anymore. I’m not even saving the drama for my mama — she has enough of her own these days and things are just … pretty good over here. I mean, we do have a lot of stink bugs that are still showing up, and a radiator may or may not have sprung a weensy little leak, but you know what? Small potatoes. Ain’t nothing gonna get me down. It’s November and I’m fit as a fiddle and Western PA is kind of really suiting me right now.
BORING! But the best kind of boring.
Would it be rude to blindfold my guests?
My sister and her boyfriend are coming to visit tomorrow — our first houseguests — and my house is a big ugly pile of blech. And I’ve lived with it just fine for the two weeks we’ve been here but right now, trying to put things in order for their arrival, it’s driving me straight bonkers.
Sure, some of it is because I have planted my butt on the couch and knitted when I could have been painting the inside of the built-ins, but some of it is because there’s only so much you can do with hand-me-down furniture and a 100-year-old house when half your shit is in the basement and the other half is strewn about the house because you have two kids under 4.
Blame-shifter, that’s me!
But really. It’s bugging me. Maybe it’s the lighting tonight or something but everything just looks janky. Suppose I’m lucky our coffee table isn’t made out of milk crates. And nobody really cares whether my house is “decorated” except for me, but I do care. I’m very sensitive to my surroundings, don’t you know. All the personality quizzes tell me so.
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