rain on tulips

I’ve decided that genetics are just grand… I’ve finally gotten my migraines under control (well, better than they’ve been in a while), and AE got her first today. Well, I’m relatively certain that’s what it was: foggy peripheral vision with lights, followed by a quick-onset, one-hemisphere headache. *sigh*

I’ve given her some tylenol and a low dose of caffeine, and glass of water, she’s eating lunch, and then will lay down for a while to see if the symptoms don’t let up.

I hope this is just a one-time thing, and not the beginning of something life-long.

EK has been showing signs of getting ready to potty train the past couple weeks — taking off diapers as soon as they are wet, for instance.

Well, last night while she sat by Fuul on the couch, she signed “potty”, and when he asked her if that was what she signed, she said “ok”, which is her way of telling you you’re right!

So, onto the potty she went, and three times last night, she sat on the potty and actually did something! First time ever, and she kind of seems to get it!

Its been kind of hit or miss today — she’s gone every time she’s asked to sit on the potty, but hasn’t stayed dry in between trips. I could probably put a little more effort into making sure she’s going on a real schedule, but I’m not there yet. And I’d rather that she figure it out herself, and she’s not doing bad for her first day!

Woohoo!!!

I was up in the pre-dawn dim light, without glasses, not fully awake, making a bottle this morning.

Turned around in the kitchen and walked square into the edge of a cuboard door that had been left open.

The resulting goose-egg on my head is quite lovely: it has my old scar from falling out of a highchair running down the middle, and it throbs frequently, reminding me it is there. There’s no bruising yet, but I’m sure its just a matter of time? Do you think the purples and greens will clash with the pink in my hair!?

…and gnashing of teeth!

I was six rows past where I should have put a lifeline.

I was ten rows short of where I intended to put a lifeline.

I was 77 rows past where my last lifeline was placed, before the lengthened area of the stole.

EK climbed up on my lap, caught her foot in the cable of my circular needles, and pulled half of the stitches off the needles on a pattern-side row.

Result: I lost nearly 11 inches of length frogging back to that last lifeline. An entire days’ work (and I did nothing else during that time) undone.

The only good part is that I had made a mistake somewhere in the middle of the pattern area I had to frog that I’d not been able to correct by dropping stitches and re-working them with a crochet hook, so now that mistake that was so obvious to me is gone… but oh, the sadness at all that loss of work!!!

(And Fuul’s response: you know, the beauty of writing is that you can’t instantly lose whole days’ work in one fell swoop. Maybe, maybe not. But there is satisfaction in tactile creation, that sometimes lacks in computer-screen text. Maybe.)

I’ve not disappeared, as much as it may seem otherwise! We’re just running around and getting into the swing of summer — just in time, it seems, for the first day of school to be imminent on the calendar! What else is new!

Boys got home from camp, dirt-colored, sun-tanned, and having had a fantastic time!

I cleaned up the house, just in time to have a visitor from the Stake ask Fuul if he would serve as the 2^nd Counsellor in the Elder’s Quorum.

I actually practiced my karate outside of lessons, and managed to land totally wrong (read: rolled over the top of my left foot and ankle out of a stepstool kick), which left it numb and unresponsive to ‘lifting’ for a few hours, and now has it sore and aching on lifting. I’ve got it wrapped, which helps, and have postponed my next karate class, to give it a bit more healing time.

Fuul’s group at work had another barbecue last night at a local state park, and it was really nice to let the kids run around in the warm weather and let someone else cook for once! It was also nice to get to meet the families of Fuul’s officemates, and spend some time talking with them. (I only wish that I were better with names… I hear them, and they are immediately gone! Such nice ladies, too!)

Today I’m hoping to hang out a bit (now that I got the email fiasco taken care of — Comcast decided they didn’t want to allow third-party domain email through their servers any longer, so Fuul had to do some searching to find out how to ‘correct’ the problem) and maybe get some work done on my Mystery Stole; I’ve almost gotten to the point where I need to decide for certain if I want to add extra length. I’m leaning toward yes, if anyone is wondering! I ought to do some writing as well, but my ankle is throbbing some, so I may have to wait until later after I’ve had time to put it up for a bit.

EK graduated from her preschool class this morning… she’ll still be back again for two months in the fall before she turns 3, but for all intents and purposes, today was graduation!

Afterward, there was a “Family Fun Day”, with food, face painting, crafts, a bounce-house, and water play!

I took a ton of pictures, though the one that I saw first and went ahead and edited for web-use was this one of the three girls in pink… it was a fun day!

Just want to note for myself… Visual Services evaluation took place this morning; she will qualify for some services because though accuity is good, there is low vision in some sense or another. She will qualify until she’s 21. Her new splints came in, and fit inside the shoes we already have, so we don’t have to shell out for new shoes immediately! We put them on, and her knee position looked immediately better. I think it was the right choice. (Hers look just like the ankle-height pink ones to the right there.) And lastly, I finally got around to requesting referrals from her pediatrician (who finally got her entire record from the last peds office — 300+ pages!) to see a pediatric endocrinologist for her thyroid/hormone levels that are supposed to be checked frequently, and a pediatric dermatologist, so we can try and get on top and stay on top of all of her skin issues (dark hair, eczema, new ‘rash’ like bumps… poor girlie!)

Got one copy at the grocery store, got two more Saturday morning from Amazon.

Three books. Five interested readers. (I got mine to myself; everyone else had to work out how to share!)

Finished it tonight.

LOVED it.

Will refrain from any further discussions until others have had a chance to finish… at least the others in my house!

But I do love it! I put the ‘red’ over everything, so there is no stark line, because even the dark hair has the pink tint to it!

I might just leave it this way for a while!

So, I got a new hair dryer last night after Fuul got home from work, and I’m happily waiting for the second step in the hair-processing project to finish… I bleached this morning (not nearly so blonde as I had hoped, but as I’m over-dying, its not horrible that it left behind some red-gold) and I’m in the midst of the two-hour dye process for the red. The dye looked really pink going on; I suppose I’ll be happy with pink, though I had it in my head that red would be fantastic.

If I like the results, I may post pics later. If they don’t quite look like what I want on the roots then I may do a third process (black for the roots and bangs), then maybe post pictures later. *shrug* We’ll see how it goes!

In the meantime, I got ambitious and put dinner in the crockpot, and vacuumed out the couches — not under the couches; who needs that kind of a project!? — before the weekend!

And, I downloaded and printed off the charts for Clue 4 for MS3, so I’ll likely be starting on that one this afternoon, if CC and EK ever decide to settle in for naps. It doesn’t look promising in the near future, though.

Haircolor update, 20 minutes to go: The color through the plastic wrap is looking rather PINK. Not a subtle pink, but a glaring, obnoxious pink. (OK, so I love it, even if it isn’t going to be the dark pillar box red I was going for!) But, I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to add in the black roots before any photography takes place, because all-pink might be a bit… much???

Fuul drove to work today, because there was nothing on the calendar that meant I needed the truck, and I was going to happily stay at home, knit, maybe write a bit, and absolutely dye my hair.

And then my hair dryer didn’t work. My hair has to be dry before I can put color or bleach or anything on it, or it just won’t work.

But I can’t get to the store to buy a new blow-dryer because Fuul has the truck.

A friend called, offering to take my kids for a few hours to watch movies at her house on their projection system.

But I can’t get them there, because Fuul has the truck.

Its funny in one of those ‘oh so typical’ kinds of ways!

I finished Clue 2 yesterday of the Mystery Stole 3, and was so excited that I nearly decided not to include a lifeline at the chart change — everything was going really well, so why take all that potential knitting time to run a lifeline???

And yet, I’m so thankful that I did! Three and a half rows into the third clue, I was knitting a wrong-side row, and found I had missed or dropped a yarn over on the previous row. So, a little tinking never killed anyone. But I was tinking a row that had six incarnations of “slip one knit two together pass slipped stitch over all”, and it just wasn’t coming up right.

The obvious choice? Frog it.

And so I did, and only lost 3½ rows of stitches, and had it all back on the needles and all the stitch markers back in place by the time I went to bed.

But needless to say, I was none-too-happy about the entire thing. Well, except for the fact that I had put in that last lifeline….

(For reference, I’m knitting this on US3 Circular needles, using Fortissima Socka yarn color 2002 (black), and Toho 8/0 seed beads in Silverlined Dark Amethyst)

Its been far too long that her babies have been taking bottles… more than a year longer than she wanted her daughter to, and a couple of months past when she thought her son should have stopped. And complacency — or lack of a desire for the expected meltdown — kept her at status quo for far too long.

The most frustrating part in the entire debate, a debate taking place entirely within her own head, was that her lovely daughter had already been weaned once from the bottle: fourteen months previous, the little girl had been taken off any food by mouth cold turkey before she had her tonsils out, and after more than a week in that state, she had gotten past the idea of bottles at all. And, as wrenching as those first few days might have been, it was almost a relief to her parents not to have to fight through that same battle at home at some later date.

And then the fateful swallowing study: the one that said the little girl was breathing fine on her own, but absolutely, positively needed to go back on a bottle to control the flow of liquids into her mouth.

So. Back little girl went on the bottle, and the quick arrival of baby brother, who rapidly adapted to the beloved bottle, and, well, she found herself nearly 15 months later with two bottle-addicted little ones, and not nearly enough sleep during the night.

One day soon, she resolved, the sacrifice would have to be made, and they would both need to be weaned.

She could see no positive reactions on the horizon from any of them.

This week was hot, and the a/c, running continuously on the first hot day, managed to freeze over the intake hose, so no cold air came into my house at all the second, hotter day. We finally shut the whole system down and let everything melt clear, and we’ve since been cooler in the house, though it took two days to reach normal. And the temps outside dropped then, too. Ah, life!

DS was at Cub Scout Camp all week, and I went to chaperone on Thursday. When we got there, though, his group had enough chaperones, so I got recruited to manage the station where scouts built kaleidoscopes. I helped five groups of 18 eight to ten year olds make kaleidoscopes all afternoon. Not as bad as I had feared, and I got to watch all the ‘end of week’ Cub Scout skits — always a lot of fun!

EK had multiple things going on this week — school; sleep study follow-up (her apnea is worsening again, obstructive apnea possibly exacerbated by central apnea – feel free to pray its not that!); a return to the ENT specialist (nose spray to try and help with the apnea and ear drops to clear the fluid from her ears); more school; brace clinic (she’s getting new splints in the next week or so, to help with her balance and the increasing pronation in her right foot); and we met with the representative from the school district who will help us with the evaluations and transfer in November from the Birth to Three program to the Early Intervention program through the schools. Lots going on, and lots of new questions to get answered and problems to solve!

JS had his 12 year doctor’s appointment, and got blindsided with four shots (we only were expecting one). He held up pretty well, considering. He’s still on the smaller side (25%-ile for height, 3%-ile for weight — they are asking us to send in his growth charts from previous doctors to see if this is normal for him; gotta go track those down, I guess). He did get his Boy Scout Camp medical release signed, so that’s out of the way now.

DA has been kept busy babysitting; AE and GC have been drawing and creating skits to share with the family; and CC has been running running running and testing us to see if we really mean it when we tell him not to hit his sister with sticks and trucks and xbox controllers. Yeah, he is going to hit the terrible twos with a vengeance!

I signed up for the Mystery Stole 3 Knit-a-long. Its going better than I had expected. I know there are at least three or four ‘wrong-direction-slanting decreases’ in the first section, but I’m not going to frog back to get to them. They add character, yes? I have had to tink back a couple of rows when stitches got miscounted; I’m using lots of stitch markers now to try and cut down on those kinds of issues.

Fuul has decided that its time to quit procrastinating and do the ‘things we always wanted to do’, otherwise we’ll end up ten years down the road essentially in the same place, still wanting to do things we’ve not started. Trying to figure out now how to fit them all in!

Yeah. Its hot, and getting hotter. And my air conditioner is running full force and not doing a lot of good — ok, its only 76 in the house, where its past 90 outside, but if only the insulation were better on this house*…

Babies are asleep. Kids are fed. DS is dressed and waiting for his ride to Cub Scout Camp. I’m about ready to sit unmoving on the couch for the afternoon, except for maybe the miniature twitches it takes to knit…

Possibly I’ll have more, coherent things to say when the sun drops and the temperatures follow…

*Longstanding grrrr situation placated only by the fact that we rent and don’t own this energy guzzler… winters don’t fare much better with the heating bill…