It's True

I have neglected my poor blog and her little audience. I need to redo that commitment to write everyday for a month. Perhaps in January. I do miss writing here, and I know that the act of writing keeps me sharp both mentally and in terms of writing skills. I know this is something I need to maintain in order to complete my Ph.D. But...well I became readdicted to knitting. It's the knittings fault.

I'm a very tactile person and knitting appeals to that in me...as well as my sad undeveloped artistic sense. I love hanging out in knitting stores, not actually buying anything, just lusting after the rows and rows of colors, textures, variety. Of course what's amusing is that I often buy skeins only to have them sit because I don't want to use them. They're almost too pretty. This was the case with two skeins of Italian ribbon yarn I bought on sale. They sat in my basket for over two years. Seriously. I'd look at them often, and imagine what they could be but could never quite bare to actually use them. I was afraid that my paltry skills would create something not worthy of such beautiful yarn.

In fact, my fear of being less than perfect is what lead to two years of having yarn sitting about but me doing nothing with it. This fall, I finally, decided to just knit, regardless of the consequences. I made a couple of very simple scarves for the girls. They were okay. Nothing spectacular but the girls liked them and they didn't look horrible. And me being who I am, I jumped into some deep knitting with an "easy" lace pattern baby blanket. Initially it didn't look too bad. I could see my mistakes but to H's untrained eye, it looked great. However as the weeks went by, the bottom started to swirl out like a skirt. At first, I just attributed this to it needing to be blocked but then it occurred to me that I had some how dropped a lot of stitches and the bottom was much longer than the top. I finished it then, and gave it to the girls for their stuffies. Now I'm finishing up the world's biggest scarf for H, and I just finished up two purses from that lovely ribbon yarn for the girls. The purses were my own design (very simple as befits such a luxurious yarn) and I'm proud of them. Next on my project list are a papoose, a kimono type sweater, and a hat for the baby, a scarf for Umberto, and hats for the whole family. I'm going to try socks soon.

As for other news, I am hugely pregnant. My plans to keep thin with a tiny cute belly blew up...literally. The blueberry kicks a great deal now to the point of hurting me sometimes. We are highly anticipating our water birth even though our insurance is threatening to not cover much of the expense. But I can't imagine giving a hospital birth at this point, and we'll eek out the money somehow.

Umberto had his EEG and his MRI. We won't know the results until Thursday. I'll update on his blog at that point.

We brought home a little something extra with our xmas tree. The place we were always buy our trees was offering free kittens. The kids fell in love with an almost pure black kitten with a little white spot on his chest. We caved to their pleas so now we have a new member to our family. It's nice having a cat again.

We had a simple Christmas this year. We decided to not buy nearly as much, and while we didn't get that same level of giddiness with the kids that we've gotten before, we did get kids who were ultimately much more satisfied with what they did get. In addition, we got toys we thought they'd all use, and that's been true so far. We'll definitely being doing more of this as the years pass. I don't see the point in going broke to accumulate more stuff that none of us really need. I know that Umberto felt it a bit more than the girls did. His friends were all getting Wiis, I-pods, etc. and he is old enough to feel that pain of why not me. We pointed out that he did get an X-box in September as an early gift, and we also pointed out that with the money we saved from buying too much stuff we can do things like get treats at Amelies (a French bakery in our neighborhood), go to B &N, go on small trips, etc. He was able to see that and accept it.

Happy Holidays everyone. I'll be posting a bunch of pictures later one, and will likely resume my one post a day in January so stay tuned....