Flexibility

Yesterday was the older kids' piano recital. Normally our teacher splits his students up into two groups, resulting in a recital + reception commitment of about two hours. This year he went ever so slightly nutso and planned a huge extravaganza modeled on a televised awards ceremony. There were tuxedos, there were fancy dresses, there were awards, and a red carpet, and nominees and envelopes and drum rolls and the whole shebang lasted for over four hours. I don't know where my brain was when he first told us about this thing, but for some reason the scope of the event escaped me until late last week; our plan had been for the whole family to attend. Clearly, however, neither WB nor Young'un were going to be able to sit still that long, so (after much marital to-ing and fro-ing) the younger kids stayed home with B and I went to the recital.

I wasn't upset about this at all (four hours to sit quietly by myself and knit while listening to music and -- hopefully -- watching my kids win an award? not hardship detail) until I settled into my seat, pulled out my knitting, and realized that while I remembered my yarn, I forgot to bring any needles.

D'oh!

The recital was nicely done, but without any knitting it was a long four hours. The kids all played very well, though. That was nice.

Today I was going to catch up on some long-postponed chores, but my plans changed when I picked the baby up from her crib and realized that while she was sleeping she had morphed into a fussy little ball of hot. So I spent the morning with a feverish (102°), clingy baby on my lap and the early part of the afternoon at the pediatrician's office, where he diagnosed the child's second ear infection in three weeks.

Oh, and B is leaving town tonight and will be gone for most of the week.

Sigh.

This post is just too gloomy for words. Wait ... here's something. I finished some socks at the end of last week! See?

yarn: Koigu KPPPM #P516
(Raveled here)

On that happ(ier) note, I'm outta here. WB's prescription should be ready at the pharmacy by now.

A busy little bee

I finished Young'un's birthday socks yesterday. He approved of the colors, but witheld final approval until AFTER his new socks passed a "wearing" test. Young'un is a "no time like the present" sort of guy ... immediately after I wove in the last bit of yarn he took the socks from me, pulled them on, and headed to the yard so he could try out his new footwear.

Thankfully, my handiwork survived with flying colors. I will admit that I was a bit worried .... I know from experience that pirates can be very hard on their socks.

(I have informed him that if he wants his bee socks to last, shoes are a must.)

yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock
("Bee Stripe"/"Charcoal")
Raveled here

How to spice up a boring Wednesday afternoon

Young'un has had a clogged up, stuffy nose for what seems like weeks now, and has denied the existence of the problem since day one. From time to time I've prompted him to blow his nose, but for the most part I've played the waiting game, figuring he would eventually conclude that it would be nice to use his nose as more than a perch for his glasses. Patience usually pays off in situations like this, but as the days have worn on it has become clear that he would be perfectly content to settle for mouth breathing and the occasional furtive pick.

This afternoon I could stand it no longer, and decided that the time had come to shoot some saline spray up his nostrils in hopes of softening the gunk so that he could blow it out once and for all. I called the boy into the bathroom. I gripped his shoulder firmly, to thwart escape. I explained what I was going to do as I reached out, grabbed the saline bottle off the counter, thrust it quickly (but gently!) up his right nostril, and squirted.

"Ahhhh!" he shouted, as white foam bubbled out of his nose.

"Ahhhh!" I gasped and glanced down at the container in my hand. "Arrrgh!!!" I thought, as I realized that that the bottle I was holding held not saline, but corticosteroid mousse (prescribed to treat psoriasis).

I quickly grabbed the REAL saline bottle and flushed out his nose as thoroughly as I could. A call to the pediatrician followed ("Well, that's a first!" remarked the triage nurse), then one to a very calm lady at poison control, who reassured me that even if he swallowed some -- and he did; for the record, it tasted "terrible" -- he's going to be fine.

Never a dull moment.

I is for iris

The weekend that was

Several months ago B and Eldest decided that they wanted to take a guys weekend outing. They're both military history buffs, so they planned a trek to the national historic parks at Saratoga and Fort Ticonderoga. While they were tramping around battlefields, I plotted a pilgrimage of my own and took the younger kids to the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool festival.

It was a lot of fun. We saw animals:

spent time with friends:

and enjoyed some tasty snacks:

My memory of last year was that New Hampshire is geared more towards spinners than knitters, so I had no plans to buy anything. In fact, I vowed specifically NOT to buy anything. I did a reality check and said to myself, "Self, you already have what any objective person would describe as an embarassing amount of yarn in the house. The focus of this trip is going to be on spending time with the children and seeing friends." And I would have made it, too, if it hadn't been for Cate, who thrust a skein of Kate's cashmere into my hand just as we were all getting ready to go home.

This stuff is so soft it's frictionless. Which explains why once I'd picked it up I was incapable of putting it down again ("This theory is wrong on so many levels," sniffs Eldest).

Sunday was a quiet day. I read the papers and worked on the Sooper Seekrit baby blanket (Raveled here) while the children did homework, practiced piano, and spent several blissful hours plundering the Spanish Main. B and Eldest came home loaded down with pamphlets, a camera full of pictures, and some beautiful roses, but the WoolyBabe gave me my favorite gift of all ....

on Saturday she slept all the way through the night for the very first time.

Perfection.

Butterflies flutter by

A month or so ago Young'un started making noise about raising butterflies. "Great idea!" I said, and hied myself to the computer to order a Painted Lady kit. It arrived at the beginning of April, with six caterpillars instead of the five promised ("bonus!" said Young'un), and the boy wasted no time naming his new pets. He called them Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob and Bob. He even made a sign, lest one of us decide that one of the caterpillars looked more like a George:

We've all had a great time watching the caterpillars grow. We cheered when they started migrating to the top of their jar and spinning their cocoons, we took bets as to when the butterflies would emerge. Young'un was hoping that it would happen on his birthday, but it would seem that the butterflies didn't take their date books into the chrysalis with them ... the first Butterfly Bob made its appearance exactly one week late.

that red stuff? the butterfly's first bowel movement.
Young'un thinks this is hilarious.

Besides uttering such groaners as "a watched chrysalis never hatches" (a joke I wanted to take back the minute it left my mouth, as the possibility that one of his caterpillars might DIE hadn't occured to Young'un before I suggested it), I entered into the spirit of Butterfly Watch '08 by pulling an appropriate skein of Opal Rainforest out of my stash and casting on, with a stated goal of having the socks done by the time the butterflies were ready to release.

yarn: Opal Rainforest "Rosa die Susse"
Raveled here

I'm all about project-based learning.

The biggest battle you've never heard of

Last weekend WB and I got on a couple of airplanes and went to visit one of my dearest friends, who moved from Chicago to Nashville last summer. The baby proved to be a champion flyer, even if she did refuse to go along with my grand scheme for knitting on the plane (I was going to wear her in the sling, but she prefered to spend our flight time nursing while sprawled across my lap).

As a good friend and even better hostess, Tanya made sure that I got to drop into some yarn shops (although I exerted remarkable self-control, you can see my haul here), but the highlight of the trip was our visit to Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee.

"(Franklin) is the blackest page in the history of the War of the Lost Cause. It was the bloodiest battle of modern times in any war. It was the finishing stroke to the Independence of the Southern Confederacy. I was there. I saw it."
--Sam Watkins, 1st Tennessee Infantry

On November 30, 1864, Carnton was pressed into service as the Confederate field hospital for the Second Battle of Franklin. Although the battle was short (only five hours, from 4P to 9P), fighting was fierce, and when the smoke cleared there were around 9500 men left dead, dying or wounded (the vast majority were Southerners; the Battle of Franklin decimated John B. Hood's Army of the Tennessee). Six of the dead were generals; the day after the battle four of them (Patrick Cleburne, Hiram Granbury, John Adams and Otho Strahl) were laid out on the back porch so that their men could pay their respects.

In the aftermath of the battle, Confederate survivors took great trouble to identify those who had lost their lives. The men were buried near the battlefield under temporary wooden markers which gave their names, rank and unit. It wasn't long, though, before the writing started to fade and the hastily-dug graves began to fail. So the owners of Carnton, John and Carrie McGavock, set aside two acres of land near their family graveyard, and paid a local man $5 per body to exhume and re-bury nearly 1,500 soldiers.

The men were buried with their comrades, their burial places carefully recorded in what came be known as the Book of the Dead. The soldiers buried here are from every state in the Confederacy (except Virginia).

The McGavocks maintained the cemetery at their own expense until their respective deaths. A fictionalized history of Carrie Winder McGavock and the McGavock Confederate Cemetery was told by Robert Hicks in his bestselling book The Widow of the South.

The plantation has been under the care of the Carnton Association since 1978. They have done an amazing job of restoring the property ... if you're ever in Middle Tennessee, Carnton should be high on your list of places to visit.

Our tour guide referred to Franklin as "the biggest battle no one has ever heard of", and I guess she was right! Heather was the only one to correctly identify Carnton, so she has won herself some sock yarn. Congratulations, Heather!