Day 2 of being alone

My husband is keeping the kids at his parents until after dinner -- which means he's leaving at around bedtime and won't be home until 9:30 or 10 p.m.

I've gotten to the point where I miss the kids -- even the fighting and whining, the two reasons that my husband took them a state away.

Now I know many families would never dream of waiting until bedtime to drive home, but our kids (almost always) sleep in the car, so if he left immediately after dinner they'd both sleep for roughly an hour and then they'd be up until midnight.

So with everyone gone again today I did even more laundry -- all of the bedding, folded the mountain that was on the couch, pulled out the last of the shorts from the kids' dressers and worked on more Christmas projects.

I cut all the pieces for quilts for my niece and my nephew and did a huge amount of pinning for both. I should set up the sewing machine and tackle a couple of these gifts. James' blanket and cape shouldn't take long to knock out. What I really want to do is pop a big bowl of popcorn and watch TV.

da plane, da plane

So I spent my day to myself working on several projects for Christmas and finished one.

James has taken to pointing to the walls in his room and identifies them by the pictures hanging on them. So we have firetruck wall and train wall, and the wall with nothing he has named plane wall. He tells me he wants an airplane to hang on it.

So an airplane he will have.  And before anyone is too impressed I cheated -- I have trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler so I found on image online on a coloring page Web site and printed it off.

I had to make some changes to it as the original image had an elf flying the plane. I used carbon paper to transfer the image to the canvas. Some acrylic paints and now all I need is a frame.

Fine art it's not, but perfect for a two year old.

Two other presents for James were started -- a fleece blanket for his bed and his cape. The cape is to replace the one that came with a pair of Superman  PJs he received for his birthday. He loves running around the house yelling Superbaby while wearing them, but they are summer PJs and well it's far to cold for summer PJs now.

I just need to set up the sewing machine to finish them off. The binding is pinned to the blanket and the two sides of the cape are pinned to each other. A few quick seams and two more presents will be done.

Off to pour myself a glass of wine, watch some tv and knit a bit.

What to do, what to do

So it looks as if I'm going to have some free time this weekend (free time being defined as child-free time). My husband has decided to take both kids and go visit his parents for the weekend.

I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.

The quiet time will be nice -- and I appreciate the fact that my husband understands that the kids' bickering is beginning to get to me.

So now do I clean (and enjoy the fact that it will stay clean), read, knit, sew or just relax and do nothing.

Change of plans

So I started the cashmere scarf for dh and ran into a couple of problems. Cashmere on metal needles, for me, was a bad match. I was having trouble keeping the yarn on the needles - it just kept slipping. The pattern and the yarn was a bad match -- you couldn't see the stitches well enough to notice the pattern and it was looking to light and lacy for a scarf that's actually intended to keep the cold out.

It was frogged when I was about an inch in. I went and bought wooden needles in the right size and cast on again holding two strands. I'm just doing a simple garter stitch over 46 stitches. Much better for my husband.

The second change of plans comes with the dollhouse -- I might renovate the one I had as a child rather than build a new one. The decision will come down to how easily I think I can do a few things. First, place some stairs in the house -- it's always bothered me that it never had stairs -- and second take off the very 1970s wallpaper that's in there. I think it even has avocado green appliances. So all the furniture needs to be replaced as well.

My dollhouse was built and given to me by my aunt and uncle, who are also my godparents. It would be nice to pass down, if I can pull it off.

great presents or my trip to crazyville

So I'm already thinking about Christmas. I tend to plan ahead anyway -- usually making notes about ideas and the like. This year is a bit more hardcore.

Thankfully I'm crafty, because being newly unemployed it pretty much will be the Christmas of making presents (with a few exceptions, mostly for the 5 children in the family). James has asked for a plane wall in his bedroom so I've already started on the picture for his wall. I'm two-thirds of the way done with a sweater for Nikki and I hope to do another for her and today I just started a scarf for my husband. (yeah there's more than that but I'll save it for another post).

This scarf, and hopefully the hat and fingerless mitts to go with it, are going to be a labor of love. I poked around Goodwill yesterday and found a sweater that was made from 100 percent cashmere. The yarn is lace-weight and given that the sweater was a women's XXL that's a lot of yarn for the whopping $3.95 I paid for it.

Laceweight is not my favorite to knit with. It tends to make me a bit batty and it just feels like it takes forever to get anywhere with it.

But even before I could cast on I had a bunch of work to do. I had to carefully take the seams apart  and then I had to unravel the sweater. On a heavier weight yarn the unraveling is probably the quickest part but laceweight, well it can break if treated too roughly. I have a ton so spit splices because it broke several times.

Because the yarn is kinked when you unravel it, I then had to wash it and reskein it onto my swift so that it could dry. That pretty much took care of the kinking. Once the skein was dry I used my ball winder to make it into a nice neat cake.

Only then could I cast on. I'm doing the Vicuna Scarf pattern by Mary McGurn from Judith Durant's 101 Luxury Yarn One-Skein Wonders. It's a simple two-row pattern over 51 stitches. It really shouldn't take that long to get through every row -- except for the fact that I'm using aluminum needles. The yarn keeps slipping on me. I think I'm going to have to go buy wooden needles to help out with that problem.

So beside the crazy-making laceweight yarn I'm contemplating a really crazy-making project. On Saturday we took Nikki to Toys R Us to spend some of her Christmas money -- she kept migrating to the dollhouses - the least expensive of which is more than our entire budget for her Christmas presents.

I came home and Googled and found this Web site: http://www.letsbuildadollhouse.com/index.html.

I'm pretty sure that I'm building her a dollhouse. The dude in the red suit and white beard will get all the credit but I'll get to appreciate her joy.

A new committment

So I stopped posting here for nearly two years, but I thought I would start this up again.

James turned 2 in July and Nikki turned 6 last week.

Nikki's now in first grade and doing fantastically. She reading nearly on grade level and her verbalization just exploded over the summer.

James is just a very active little boy and he doesn't stop talking even in his sleep -- which in our house is a huge change.

These days I'm unemployed. That's a load of fun and a long story but the newspaper was not the place for me to be any more. My days are now being spent with James and job hunting.  Still knitting and sewing to keep busy (and this year for Christmas presents).

Life is good.

Welcome addition

James Douglas arrived on July 1, 2007 (I have no idea how the date got messed up on my last post - it should have been from April of this year) weighing in at 7 pounds 9 ounces.

He's two months already and we just marvel at him. I don't think that my husband or I ever realized Nikki's delays until we saw JD in action. Obviously we knew she was delayed we just never had a way to quantify it.

He's a beautiful little boy and Nikki is a fantastic big sister. Just this week she decided that Brian did do the diaper change to her liking. He had changed JD and put him in the pack n' play (he's in the bassenette part) and left the living room to go make Nikki lunch before preschool. He comes back in and she standing at the pack n play and JD has his pants and diaper off and she's using a wipe on him.

Brian saved JD from Nikki's help -- I only wish he thought to grab the camera first.

My biggest thrill is how JD is growing. Largely due to her heart defect Nikki was declared failure to thrive at six weeks and I discontinued breastfeeding in favor of a NG tube and high calorie formula. But at two months there's been no formula and JD is already up to 10 pounds 10 ounces. Boob Juice really does work.

My knitting projects are coming along. I've finished the back of a sweater vest that will by my grandmother's Christmas present and I have the two front pieces on needles. I started and put aside a shawl I'm working on in laceweight yarn (laceweight yarn must be from the devil) because no matter how much I work on it it never seems to get bigger. I bought a different yarn and I'm doing a shawl out of that for my aunt. I'll go back to the lace weight when I don't have a Christmas deadline looming and a bunch of other projects I'd like to get done before then.

I'm awful

I'm apparently as good about updating this blog as I was my junior high diary.

To make it simple -- things for Nikki have been going great.

We learned last year that she had a problem with excess fluid in her middle ear, and while it took some work, we finally found a med combination that helps keep it to a minimum. About a month ago she finally passed a hearing test on one ear and was borderline on the other.

We've noticed a big difference as well. She's back to reacting strongly to loud noises (so much so that we won't be trying the Wiggles show again this year). And in the last few months she's really begun to try more words and sounds.

Her signing has really exploded as well. Mommy still holds her back some when it comes to that. School is working on things such as colors and animals, but at home we sometimes try to give her the words she really seems to need (food, etc). The Signing Time series for videos is just fantastic.

My husband is also very impressed with her arm (we've been working with her on throwing balls). He started teaching her how to throw over hand but every once in a while she switch to underhand and she can wing the ball right at you -- thankfull we only use soft balls because she would have really hurt my father last week. Now we have to work on teaching her control.

We've already started talking with her teacher about the plan for next year and we think we may have struck on a great idea. It looks as if Nikki will have the same teacher next year and will be moved to the afternoon class -- which is mostly young 4-year-olds and older 3-year-olds. She'll then move to the 4-year-old class the following year for a half-day and there's a good possibility she'll do the other half-day in a kindergarten classroom. The following year, she'll be in full-day kindergarten. With a September birthday, and the pressures from NCLB, we had some concerns about starting her in Kindergarten the year she turned 5.

If it all works out I'll be thrilled.

Once Mother Nature actual decides to let it become spring I can't wait to get her out to the Boundless Playground near us. She enjoyed it last summer, but she'll be able to do so much more this year.

The big news in our family is that in late June or early July, we'll be welcoming a baby boy into our family. We're all getting very excited about his arrival.

Partially because of our coming addition I've also decided to make this blog more general (in hopes that I'll update a little more frequently. I'm also going to be posting sewing and knitting projects I'm working on or finished as well as some of the house projects my husband and I have done. I really want a place to keep track of some of this stuff.

Communication gap

Nikki lags in expressive language skills. It's the biggest delay she has; but until the last few months it wasn't a problem in relation to her peers.

Now it's becoming a problem.

At home we are trying to expand her vocabulary using both words and signs from ASL but daycare has been left out of the loop a bit when it comes to her sign vocabulary. We made sure to let them know the signs for basic needs -- more, eat, drink, play; but as we added new words we've forgotten to teach daycare the "sharing" signs.

As a result Nikki is walking around with a bite mark on her cheek. She apparently signed 'give me please' and reached for what she wanted - the other child, not recognizing her request bit her when she took a toy.

So over the weekend I'll be creating a sheet of signs and our daycare center has agreed to send them home with her classmates. We're also going to see if her speech therapist will go to daycare once a month to work with Nikki and teachers.

Maybe we can bridge that gap.

Big changes coming

She's two and one half.

I just signed the paperwork today to start the process of transitioning my daughter from early intervention to the school district, where she will start preschool on her third birthday.

Sending my baby girl into an elementary school at three-years-old scares the crap out of me. So does having to go through the process of crafting her IEP with our local school district.

I wish there was a way to keep my little girl a baby forever.