Two quick posts this morning. First, I stumbled upon the Go Local Challenge. Perfect encouragement for me this summer!
Second, I came across this exciting new publication:
Now if only the Skeptic would give in to those chickens. Or maybe we need to move to St. Paul. Apparently you can have one goat in St. Paul.
Filed under Urban Farming
We drove down to my parents this weekend to visit and to take the whole family, grandparents and all, to our CSA’s annual strawberry picking potluck. The farm is outside Virouqa, WI, about 45 minutes from my parents. Despite dragging my family to Virouqa before the potluck to go fiber shopping and visit their public market, we arrived at the farm exactly on time for the potluck. Kind of, until…..
I bounded out of the car, waving to Andrea (a farm assistant) who was coming across the lawn to us.
Andrea: Hi Are you guys here to camp??
Me: Nope. We’re just here for the potluck and to pick strawberries. Where should I put the food?
Andrea: Potluck? Well, see…the potluck is tomorrow…
Me: Tomorrow? That’s right, tomorrow, because I read that yesterday, it’s Sunday, Father’s Day, which is tomorrow, and today is Saturday, and I knew it was on Sunday so why on earth did I drag my entire family here today? (Continue with nervous babbling…)
Andrea: That’s okay…you can still have a picnic and pick strawberries today… seriously, it’s okay. Our farm is your farm!
Me: Are you sure you don’t mind? I can’t believe I came here on the wrong day. Really, I knew it was Sunday, I just don’t know why I came on Saturday, we were here last time on a Saturday, so maybe I just… and I’ve got to much to keep track of, I think, and….(okay, just shut up now or she will totally think you’re a crazy lady, crap, here comes Dad and I’ve got to tell him, and the Skeptic is getting out of the car with the boys and now they don’t get a tractor ride and, dang, every worker on this farm is staring at me, the lady who reads Sunday but thinks Saturday!)
The good news was despite feeling like a dumbass, we did have a nice picnic and picked a ton of berries. I’ve got about ten pounds to freeze. The farm and the farmers are wonderful! The problem was that this was really the icing on the cake, since I also got my family home an hour and a half late Friday night since I can’t seem to keep track on miles on a map. We stopped on Pepin to check out the Laura Ingalls museum and cabin and I got a little distracted. As Caroline Ingalls would say, “for shame, keeping your parents waiting until 8:30 for dinner.”
Tidbits from the weekend:
-If you stop at the musuem in Pepin and an old lady with orange lipstick is working, don’t bother trying to get her to like you. She won’t, and she won’t like your kids either now matter how polite and cute they are. But the museum is cool.
-When we drove up to the cabin outside Pepin and got out with out three kids, me putting Spinner in his sling, another family with three kids was also getting out and putting their baby in a sling. In the middle of nowhere, my almost doppleganger family. They were nice and we chatted too long.
–Ewetopia in Virouqa has an awesome, awesome assortment of fiber. Did I saw awesome?
–Trempealeau Hotel. Grandma and Grandpa babysitting. Yum. If you are a cyclist, this is a place to put on your radar.
-When my kids are grown and I want to live the quiet, fiber filled life, I want to move here.
-Lastly, in honor of Father’s Day, I’m going to show off what the Skeptic does in his workshop:
What is it? A panel. I have no idea what it does, just that he builds them from scratch, takes them to work and hooks them up to a lot of other stuff that I still can’t wrap my brain around. Not only is the Skeptic the best Dad, but I think he’s quite clever too. If he reads this he’s going to be totally embarrassed and tell me it’s no big deal, but I think it is. He even manages to make this stuff with little boys underfoot. And I have to say I’m pleased to know that our boys will grow up to be able to knit, sew, and make electrical devices!
All I want to do these days is spin. Not knit, now sew, spin. This is a bit of a problem, since I really need to do massive amounts of sewing. Spinner’s baptism is coming up in a month and I’m hoping to make two sets of curtains, a dress for me, and outfits for the boys. Yeah, I’m delirious. No matter what, I am determined that I will not be dressing Spinner in a goofy all white outfit this time. I did with Little Man and Knittykid, mostly because I didn’t know what else to put them in. I remember finding a couple baptism outfits that were nice, but they were at Macy’s and a small fortune. This time I am being a rebel and dressing Spinner in linen and japanese fabric. I also have my brother’s sweet baptism outfit form the 80’s that I might incorporate as well. Take that, stodgy old Lutherans!!*
As for the spinning, I finally finished up the fiber I spun for my doula and very dear friend:
It’s from Crown Mountain, and I think I’m obsessed with them as well. It’s Superwash in the San Franciso colorway. I spun up 8 ounces of it. I need more of this stuff. Although I’m not a huge fan of superwash, so I’ll be trying their BFL next.
I have some other stuff almost ready to show off the wheel, in the meantime I’ll be trying to maintain my focus.
*I actually adore stodgy old Lutherans, just so you all know….
Filed under handspun
I added my Copycat socks (hereby known as my SIL Copycat Socks) to Ravelry today:
Feel free to queue them up for an easy summer sock project!!
We celebrated Little Man’s last day of kindergarten tonight. I am absolutely floored that I now have a son who will be in first grade. Wow. My first baby is all, 100% boy.
My second baby is working hard to be all boy, but luckily Knittykid’s got a lot of baby in him yet. Any my third, well…. let’s just say that despite the fact that Spinner thinks he’s a big boy like his brothers (climbing the stairs already and all that, yikes!) I’ve told him that under no circumstances may he get any bigger. Nope, not even a bit.
We were sitting in Pizza Luce tonight, celebrating the beginning of summer. The Skeptic was talking about how he hopes that when the boys are all bigger, big enough that they don’t need anyone to cut up their pizza, or remind them to get out from under the table, or to take them to bathroom since it’s their first foray out in public without a diaper on (I decided today would be a milestone for Knittykid, too)…he hoped that even though it will be a lot of fun to be out for dinner with three teenage boys, we will remember how very, very sweet these times are.
This is an excellent idea. I need to save some cash and in reality I have a ton of food around the house. Having our CSA box each week, which includes cheese, will make it easier. And I’ll still buy milk too.
Report to come…
Filed under Uncategorized
I can tell this will be the new game this summer. I’ve gone full throttle with the whole dumb thing, much to Little Man’s delight and confusion.
Here are the dumb socks. I have also knit another pair of even dumber socks, which I’ll show you in another post.
These are actually my Copycat socks. I copied the pattern off a pair of store bought knee-highs my sister-in-law was wearing. These are a few years in the making since I
lost the second ball of yarn for quite some time.
The pattern:
Size one needles, about 8 stitches per inch gives you a medium sock.
I used a Double Start cast on for 70 stitches. (Nancy Bush, Knitting on the Road. See a tutorial here.)
The basic stitch pattern is:
Round one: k8, k2tog, yo.
Round two: knit.
Knit a basic heel flap, continue the stitch pattern across the top and pick your favorite toe. I used the standard k2tog, ssk.
The sock yarn is from Sandy’s Palette.
Personally, I love them.
As for the whole “dumb” thing, I’m going to try the humor route with this one. Words like dumb, stupid and shut up have been favorites of Little Man’s lately. Some of it is from school, obviously, and it’s every kindergartner’s job to see how far he can go with certain words. (Believe me, he’s tried them all. Dumb is tame compared to what he let loose the other day).
Aside from what he picks up on the bus, a lot of it has surprisingly come from books we’ve read…. Superfudge? It was a favorite of mine as a kid so I grabbed it from the library, but wow, the put downs really fly! We love to read here, and Little Man will sit and listen for ages to just about anything. I still love Fudge, but it is a bit of a bummer when it seems that every book written is full of name calling.
Now, I’m not naive. Kids have been calling each other names for as long as there have been kids*. And I do believe that dumb, stupid and the like have their purpose. It just seems that when I compare The Secret Garden to Spiderwick (both of which are great stories) it’s a small handful of putdowns vs. dozens of them….
Not sure where I’m even going with this now. It’s late, I want to go knit. My point? I’m tired of shut up and stupid and dumb and all that jazz, but I’m going to play the game and try to have a bit of fun with my kids to get my point across. Which is why Little Man was totally confused today when I asked him if my new socks were more dumb, less dumb, or equally as dumb as my Copycat socks. And then I went upstairs and laughed like a crazy lady.
*Just yesterday, Laura Ingalls told Nellie Oleson to shut up in
“On the Banks of Plum Creek.” 🙂
Filed under family, finished objects, home, kids, socks, Uncategorized
Knittymama 