things i have to say about knitting

1. My kids are interested in knitting themselves, but more so on whatever project that I'm working on rather than a project of their own. I've lost more than a few stitches due to passing my WIP to Madeline, so I'm not keen on having her work on whatever lacey pattern I currently have on my needles. She knit a fair amount of the crazy-long garter-stitch scarf that I made for Chris, and she's made a cute little cozy for her eReader, and that was a good project for introducing her to some increase and decrease stitches. Now that the scarf is finished, she's working on a mobius capelet with some very soft bulky-weight yarn.  My six year-old is just not allowed to touch my knitting stuff, period – I just don't have a plan for teaching her yet. When Sadie talks about what she wants to knit, it's always stuff like three-dimensional stuffed animals and I am so not there myself! I'm not sure that she's going to be hooked on knitting by knitting swatches, you know? 

2. Ravelry has been around for awhile now, and I am still not sure whether it's a blessing or a curse. I am definitely the type of person who will use whatever tools that I have access to research anything that I'm interested in to death. This means that when I decided that it was time to knit myself a new winter hat, I looked at over a hundred pages of patterns before finally giving up and just picking one. Too much choice is a bad thing – at least, for me. On the other hand, it's great to be able to look up a yarn that I'm clueless how to best use, and see what other knitters have successfully used it for. And to see what a scarf that I am smitten with is usually knit out of. 

3. I've spent far too many hours since last Saturday comparing photos of finished scarfs in three different shades of grey yarn. The worst part is that one of these yarns is totally discontinued, which makes my crush on it even more ridiculous. None of them are stocked at my local LYS, and are out-of-stock at the Canadian online retailers that I've been able to find. My fingers are crossed that I'll find something else in a similarly lovely shade of silver-grey so that I'm not tempted to order from the USA  … 

what i did in kindergarten

One of the new nightly traditions around here for my six year-old is the "let me tell you what I did at kindergarten today". Sadie snuggles down into her bed with a stuffed animal (usually a bunny, more recently a pony) and Boo, and usually leads off with, "You know what we do all the time so I don't need to tell you!" to cover the part of her morning that includes hanging up her coat and backpack, changing into her inside sneakers, and finding a spot on the rug in her classroom. And then I hear about what her class might have played in the gym, what letter of the alphabet they're working on, who logged some minutes in the "time-out chair" and whether or not it was a day that they met with the fabulous music teacher. 

And sometimes Sadie asks me what I did when I was in kindergarten.

I think that my kindergarten teacher was pretty fresh out of university, and that sometimes her boyfriend would join our class to play guitar while we sang.

I don't remember much about what I learned about numeracy in kindergarten, but I do recall going through worksheets to practice uppercase and lowercase letters. Neat penmanship earned a sticker, and one of my goals was to end the year with more of these stickers than my friend Eric (I don't think that I did).

There was a sticker chart on the wall, and I know that I had a gold star stuck on it when I learned how to tie my own sneakers (velcro wasn't yet an option!). I'm pretty sure that only reason why I was mastering shoelace tying was to get that gold start and keep up with my classmates. 

My classroom had a sand table, a water table, a nicely-sized "house" with the usual kitchen stuff, table, and doll cradle inside it. There was book nook with a carpet, and the tiny little tables and chairs, of course.

I wanted to wear dresses everyday (obviously, I hadn't yet had the experience about walking across the massive school field in -25C weather!), but I think that I only had two dresses (one yellow with tiny white dots, the other a rose-coloured floral with ruffles), so my mom made me alternate those with pairs of polyester pants in red, blue, and possibly green. When it was cold outside, I wore tights with a small diamond pattern underneath them. I'm not sure how much of my kindergarten waredrobe was bought at a store beyond those polyester pants – I do know that my mom made my dresses and a lot of blouses. My school shoes were brown t-straps like these, which I didn't even consider fashionable in 1980.

I wore a homemode princess costume for Halloween. I think that my crown was cardboard covered with aluminum foil, and my cape was a lovely organza printed with flowers! We also sang a song about yellow pumpkins, and my teacher had hid little tissue ghosts all around the classroom. I was especially good at finding them!

I don't recall how many field trips my class went on, but I know that there was one that was to see a performance, possibly a play or opera version of Cinderella, and we got to go backstage at the theatre and see a dressing room. And there was one that was to a warehouse or factory full of stuffed animals, which kind of blows my mind now, because what were all of those stuffed animals doing in Edmonton? Was it possible that all toys weren't made in China in the 1980's???

 

if you’re bored and need something to read ….

 

3 Things Little Girls Need from their Fathers – this article reads very much "of the time" to me right now, but also timeless. This things have always been true.  To summarise

1. Respect her body and its capacities
2. She needs to feel close to you throughout your lives together
3. She needs you as a role model for how she should be treated by boys and men

Being Left Out Hurts – the title gives the topic of the article away, but it also includes one of things that infurates me the most (adult women acting like their still in junior high school) and something that I am really supportive of (advocasy for children). 

Learning to Love Criticism – my husband saw this open in a tab in my web browser, and hassled me some over the title, but this article caught my attention because the first paragraph stated that 74% of negative feedback given to women contains a personal attack, while only 2% does for men. This gender imbalance is truly abhorrant.

update on that moving thing

I'll admit that over the summer, I got a little bit wrapped up in the small details of our prospective overseas move. We received some less-than-positive information about a housing shortage, and I became rather obsessed with it.

Some of my concerns are still on-going . Like, the housing that we may be assigned to isn't very family friendly – no outdoor space for the kids to ride their scooters, create murals with sidewalk chalk, work on their frisbee skills. Not enough bedrooms. Too far away from the compound for after-school playdates to be do-able. I've learned that others concerns are going to actually work out fine, like how the kids will stay for lunch instead of coming home, which makes more sense considering their one-hour lunch break and the 50-minute round-trip travel-time. 

I went to an orientation session with the company last week, and it was all about the big picture, and it was a good reminder. More family time, because there's no overtime. Chris will get on the bus to come home at 4 pm every workday. Timely and quality healthcare (did I mention that one of my kids is waiting nine months to see a dermatologist here in Calgary?). A school that is rich in resources and extracurricular activities, small classes, and modest dress codes. Life in a small community. Excellent access to travel. My list of destinations is long: Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Jordan, South Africa … 

As I sat listening to my orientation leader and keeping an eye on the slides, it occured to me what this opportunity has to offer intersects pretty nicely with the things that I came to appreciate about living overseas before. And I strangely miss it. 

let them eat cake (and plastic and artificial dye and excessive sugar and …)

Despite the fact that I am regularly reminded that I haven't baked a loaf of banana bread in forever*, I really do like baking. That's well-documented in my blogging, too.

I look forward to birthday baking in particular, but I think that for Sadie's sixth birthday, the right thing to do is leave my cake pans in the cupboard. You see, she loves accompanying me on grocery-shopping trips to the Co-op. Her singular purpose is to run to the bakery section and gaze longingly at all of the decorated cakes in their display window. There are princess cakes, of course. There's a cake with cars. A cake with Dora the Explorer.

I remember the attraction of bakery display cases. I loved it when I was staying with my grandparents when I was little and we'd walk over to the B&A Bakery in Edmonton. The bakery smelled like sugar and yeast, and they'd always have a gigantic sheet cake with piped icing in the case to celebration one occasion or other, and multi-tiered wedding cake or two, usually with a fabulous (and now, heteronormative) topper. If you had asked six-year-old-me, I am sure that I would have said those cakes were more special than anything homemade. 

So Sadie's been picking out prospective birthday cakes for the last nine months, and I guess that her birthday is the day to make one of her wishes to come true.

I will admit that I have thought of baking and frosting a cake from scratch and popping a bunch of little figurines on top, it's not the right thing to do Firstly, the little sets of Frozen figurines are going for $40 in these parts, and secondly, I spent many a birthday celebrating with my mom's favourite kind of cake (World Class Chocolate ice cream cake from Baskin Robins) instead of my favourite kind of cake (I think that it was flan when I was a dairy-sensitive adolescent), and I still think that wasn't very cool.  Having the birthday person pick their cake is the way to go in the twenty-first century, yes?

* My husband ought to be thanking me for that five pounds of banana bread-weight that he isn't sporting, right?

random summer stuff

1.  Back-to-school clothes shopping is much better now that my kid has been out of school uniforms for a year. Last year is brutal (and we have a pile of unworn skinny coloured denim to show for it) and this year it's all "Let's look for a jean jacket!" and "This is the kind of sweater that I like!"
2. Gardening. I'm not sure exactly how worthwhile a pursuit this actually is. Calgary's growing season is short, and it's been a warm summer and my astrilbes and hostas will probably shrivel up and die if I go away on a holiday and diverge from my pattern of daily watering.
3. I will die quite happy if I never have to make another service call. I tend to pick businesses who do not return calls or even show up for appointments. It's been frustrating to arrange for an HVAC check-up and a window replacement. 
4. My child is starting at a middle school in September, and it's now August and I haven't exactly received any sort of documentation to let me know that her registration successfully transfered there from her elementary school. I'd love a school supply list and some sort of guidence about what the first day procedure is.

dumb reasons indeed

A heavy package from FedEx arrived a few days ago. Sadly, it didn't contain the early birthday presents that my five year-old was hoping for. The contents inside were from the company that Chris has a job offer with; there's probably a dozen forms due back at different times. There are several more boxes that Chris needs to have checked before we're moving for sure, and thankfully, I've been minimally involved with the paperwork. 

Last week, I posted that I only had a dumb reason for not moving overseas with this opportunity. This week, I kind of feel that I only have an dumb reason for actually going: family vacations in cool places. 

Yeah. That's it. The only thing left that seems positive (from my point of view, of course) is traveling to places like Turkey and Jordan and Cape Town with Chris and our kids. I'm not sure what else there is to look forward to?

Initially, we thought that all company housing was in compounds, which sounded good (and maybe more than good – these ones are like small towns with grocery stores, bowling alleys, movie theatres …). I've lived in a large compound before and it was awesometo have a safe place for the kids to play outside and ride their bikes, live near the school, and it was easy to make new friends in that sort of environment, too. I met other people just by being out and about. It sounds like the community atmosphere that Chris was told about during his interview. We've now learned that compound housing is incredibly scarce and we're more likely to be placed in another town in a furnished apartment, and that just seems a lot more … isolating (this housing situation would have been isolating in the other places I've lived, t00). So, this is something that I have to remove from my "postives about moving" list for the time being while "apartment in another town" goes onto the negative side, and it makes me feel rather blue to see that "awesome family vacations" is all alone. 

There should be more here, shouldn't there?

for the young foodie in your life

The first time that we lived in Calgary was in 2000, and one of our big discoveries was the Cookbook Company Cooks. Chris and I surely bought a lot of exotic salsas and jars of colourful salts there, but most of my memories of the Cookbook Co. are of taking cooking classes in the basement. It was a lot of fun when I started out (I remember volunteering to peel all the potatoes over the six week series if my cooking partner Raj would chop all the onions), but after four or so years, the foodie culture in Calgary had changed the demographics of the class and I wasn't enjoying them as much. We'd had a good run, though.

 Now we're here for Calgary: The Sequel, and we've enrolled Madeline in a week-long day camp at the Cookbook Co. Despite having to drive across the city twice a day, Chris and I kind of wish that we were thirty years younger because it's a pretty awesome day camp and we're totally missing out.

Madeline's made soups and salads and Mexican dishes and pasta dough for ravioli, and she's even eaten carmelized onions and stuffed mushrooms, but the really cool thing about her camp is the field trips. The campers have gone to Modern Jelly Doughnuts, Cibo, Janice Beaton Fine Cheese, the Brulee Patisserie, and Village Ice Cream. Madeline day is always better than ours!

 

isn’t summer supposed to be lazy?

On paper, this week looks pretty good in terms of free time for me, because both of my kids are in day camps. In practice, it's kind of crazy, because one kid gets dropped off at nine, one kid gets dropped off at ten, and then I do pick-ups at noon and three. Working in travel time, the net result is that I'm home for a period no longer than two hours. This isn't exactly the best week for me to undertake a big project like un-wallpapering the tv room in the basement or deep clean the closets. 

The camps, however, are being thoroughly enjoyed by the kids. 

I do have enough time between chauffeur stints to contemplate our big decision for the month – whether to move again later this year or stay here in Calgary for another 12-24 months. I have reasons for not wanting to move again right now – we just moved into our current home about six months ago. I'm very fond of it – we renovated much of this place and the gorgeous and functional lockers and cupboards in the mudroom? They weren't there before; we put them in for us. The double sinks and separate shower in the main floor bath? Again, we put that in especially for our family. I might even cry a little when I think of abandoning the kitchen because I love the tile and the dishwasher and the big apron front sink. 

It doesn't make much sense to be that attached to material objects, and in the big scheme of things, this house doesn't rank that highly, anyways. I think that it's just affecting me so because we just moved in a few months ago and our personal investment still feels high. 

There are some compelling arguments for moving overseas again. The school that me kids would attend does not have the sort of budgetary issues that the schools in Calgary have, so more specials, full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes. International schools take cool field trips to places like China, instead of less-cool field trips to the Spyhill Landfill (as Madeline did with her fourth grade class). The location is rather ideal for future family vacations in Europe, Africa, and Asia, which is probably the most exciting element for me. And based on our previous time overseas, our lives were a little less rushed, and it would be lovely to have more downtime together again.

It's weird, but this decision feels like has more variables to consider than it did when we voted affirmative for Thailand back in 2007. 

Whatever we decide, that ugly wallpaper in the basement still needs to be taken down, so we'll be rather busy no matter what we decide to do 🙂

another status update

And the costume is very nearly done.

The tulle skirt was finished up first – I followed the instructions from this tutorial and this tutorial and the biggest ordeal of the project was actually working with the tulle. Sadie's skirt has six layers, and I cut them out separately so that the sizing would be truer. This was fine, but then lining up all the layers of tulle to baste them together was a tricky matter because the fabric was both a little bit slippery and a little bit static-y. But they sewed together fine (plus a cotton layer for lining) and attaching the wide elastic went exactly to plan. I copied the circle skirt tutorial and downloaded the circle skirt pattern template from the Scientific Seamstress and it was extremely helpful. I needed to the entire pattern to make a tea-length skirt for my average-height five year-old.

The next part I worked on was the sparkly bodice overlay. I'd changed my plan for this part at least four times. I've actually sewn two. The first one was a simple tube that I'd drafted using one of Sadie's tees; it looked really good but when I thought about it, it was kind of a pain for her to shimmy into. I thought about sewing a panel of the bodice fabric directly onto the leotard, but the obvious problem with that scenario was that my fabric wasn't stretchy and the leotard obviously was. I googled and Pinterested and found a new tutorial that had a good solution. It's basically sewing a rectangle and thus, really easy. I have never seen this Wonder Under product, so I used Steam-a-Seam 2 for fusing the cotton lining.  I added a  bit of length to Sadie's in order to ensure the elastic on the tulle skirt was fully covered, and only put elastic part-way down the back to accomodate her bottom. 

 

In the meantime, her leotard arrived in the mail, and I was happy that I'd gone with the Capezio version because the colour is a lighter blue than the ones I'd seen in real life at the dance supply store. I've started to sew some beads and sequins around the scoop neck. 

The glitter organza was delivered yesterday, and when I pulled the fabric out of the plastic sleeve, it looked like a bag of pixie dust had exploded in the kitchen! It looks like a lot of the glitter came out in the wash! Anyway, I'm happy with the sparkle as a stand-in for ice crystals. Also, ordering from Joann's across the border was completely painless. Shipping cost and time was reasonable, and my order was a small enough value that I wasn't charged any duty. Now I just have to sew the thing ….