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20090928

First Hair Cut

Earlier this month, I had decided that Nathan's wispy bangs were getting to me and had to go. Unfortunately, and I knew this, his lovely curls were probably going with the bangs. Knowing this, I kept putting off the cut, but finally forced myself to go with Nathan and Paul to the child's salon at the King of Prussia mall. They had a Thomas the Tank Engine¹ area set up, which Nathan flipped about.

Last Time With Cute Curls


Ironically, the slogan of Rollercoaster Cuts is "Haircuts kids will scream for!" This is not an inaccurate slogan. I would go so far as to say that Rollercoaster Cuts uses truth in advertising, and they might like to use this photo underneath that phrase.

Oh No!


Our hairstylist would not let me give Nathan a pacifier, telling me I was coddling him. Nathan did not want to watch the Teletubbies or whatever other crap was playing on the television to entertain him. He did not want to be amused. He did not want his hair cut. He wanted me to take him out of that chair and move him back to Thomas the Tank Engine. I thanked God we had gone at night and no one else was in the place.

Sad Face


After a while, Nathan calmed to merely sobbing hysterically rather than screaming outright. Finally, everything was done, locks of hair were put away, Frank was thanked and tipped, and our boy photographed. Having already gone through anger and depression phases of hair cutting, he finally moved to quiet resigned acceptance.

Sullen Acceptance


He's still ridiculously cute with his haircut, but I miss his sweet little curls so much. This is a bit like when he first got his teeth in for his smile. They were adorable, but I missed his gummy smile. Well, I'll get used to this less curly hair. He still has his chubby cheeks, after all.

Chubby Cheeks


1. Woe betide you if you call him Thomas the Tank or Thomas the Train. Children between the ages of three to six will look upon you as if you were the most stupid individual on the face of Earth. I one time called Percy "the green train" and a little girl of about five said to me, "That's Percy" in the same way I might state "That ball of light in the sky is 'the sun'."

I Love Getting Stuff

I'm a fairly greedy person, in case you are not aware. I love to receive gifts and I love to win prizes. This is why this will be one of my favorite recent posts! It's about things I've both received and won!

Quite recently, I began to follow the blog Knitter in the Kitchen, mostly for her beautiful photography. She's not a frequent blogger, but then... neither am I. I must forgive this fault, or I am simply the pot to her kettle. Really, if you go to her site, you'll see that her photography more than makes up for her infrequent posts. However, I tend to follow craft blogs for their photography. A bit after I subscribed to her feed, she ran a nice post about her craft room that included a giveaway at the very end!

I have recently stopped trying to win giveaways because they are often swamped with comments and I don't want to win something unless I really want it. I couldn't ignore this, however. First was the fact that her sewing area is the most gorgeously coordinated sewing area I've ever seen. I'd weep with joy to sew in her room every day. (Seriously, check her ironing board out. My own ironing board is a mini version with a stained white cloth cover.) Second was the fact that she decorated the room in orange, brown, and white with a lot of linen. I love a color combined with brown and white. If you know me in real life, you'll know that Nathan's room is primarily done in green, brown, and white, and my own bedroom is Tiffany blue, brown, and white. Lastly, she was giving away two Amy Butler patterns and she hadn't advertised the post as a giveaway, meaning it looked like I had a shot in hell of winning. So, I took a chance. AND WON!

I now have my very first Amy Butler pattern and it's sitting on my pattern shelf silently intimidating me.

A Prize


See? There it is, going, "I need interfacing to work, Kitten." I have tried to shush it with the fact that I want to do eighteen hundred other projects first, and I don't have any fabric worthy of it, but it makes chicken sounds at me.

Thank you, Knitter in the Kitchen. I hope I make something gorgeous.

Next up? My birthday presents from Paul's parents. I say parents, but let's get real on who picked out these gifts. Thanks, mom!

Gifts, Gifts, Gifts


What you see there are Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy Johnson, a cute circular knitting needle holding case from Della Q, a tiny ladybug tape measure from Lantern Moon, and a gift certificate to Knitting to Know Ewe.

My mother-in-law was super cute when she gave it to me and told me that she was now obsessed with Lantern Moon. A long time lover of their rosewood and ebony needles, I understood where she was coming from. She told me we would have to go together to spend the gift certificate, and I am happy to do so. I love going yarn shopping with people, and I imagine it'll be fun shopping with her for yarn. I would say that we would likely have nothing in common yarn-wise, but I have looked askance at Helen's purple yarn purchases, and Christy has called some of my yarn loves "unicorn puke colored", I believe. Just because you have a lot in common with someone doesn't mean that you'll have similar yarn colorway tastes!

Someone help! My tape measure is attacking me!

Ladybug Tape Measure


I love getting cute tape measures!

How are all my readers doing? I see you all blogging about your crazy knitting, so I assume well. I'm still chugging along myself, and I expect I'll have some anklets to model for you all soon, as well as the start of Shalom. Helen, when do we get together?

20090922

Darlings, I've Missed Sewing. And You.

Let's not speak of the week we were separated, let's talk about our future together. Wait, let's talk about the last week. After all, it affected my blogging. First, Paul had off all week, so we took one of those fancy Staycations! A year and a half ago we did the Babymoon. I love these trendy new terms so much that I must do them. We celebrated my birthday with dinner, a gift, and a cold. (Nathan provided the illness, screaming, general lack of sleep, and bad temper. I provided the cuddles. Paul provided the gift and dinner.) I then spent several nights playing on my new Xbox 360. It's even dragged me off the internet prior to midnight. It was a miracle and it has helped ween me, slightly, off the need to hang on my computer to all hours. Says the girl blogging at one in the morning.

Either way, after several days of devouring Fable II, I came up for air yesterday and decided to start crafting again. I finally cracked down on that make-up bag I've been wanting to make, and I started to actually sew. You can see my awesome sewing area here.

What A Mess


Do you see that fancy zipper? That's nearly as far as I got before I realized I needed Elastic Thread. Damn you, Heather Ross! I've never worked with this stuff before and now I'm all nervous about it. In fact, I think most of the reason I haven't been working on this make-up bag before is that I'm terrified I'm going to screw it up. It looks so complicated. The zipper part of this bag took me roughly an hour. I had to figure out how to use my zipper foot, figure out where to sew on the zipper, figure out how to pin three layers of fabric evenly.

The pattern called for me to pink some of my fabric at one point, so I pulled out my mom-mom's awesome pinking shears. She was born in 1901, I believe, and as you can see, she paid a high price for these shears!

Mom-mom's Pinking Shears


Today, I went to Jo-ann Fabrics to grab the thread I needed, but also to pick up some fabric for a button down shirt for Nathan. It's some awesome train fabric, which I got two yards of. I should have enough to make him both a shirt and some PJ pants.

New Train Fabric


I will now end this horribly written post. I'm clearly too tired to blog.

20090913

Trying To Update Blog URL

I'm having some troubles, folks, and I beg you to bear with me. Both Helen and I posted recently, and neither of those updates appeared in my feed reader (Google), so I decided to go back to my old URL of a blogspot.com domain. I suspect that I need to be able to update both my CNAME records and my A records, and, unfortunately, I can't do so currently.

20090911

I Said Blogs Without Photos Suck

And yet... My blog is photo-less. Sure, it has a sexy new URL, but it takes more than URLs to run a blog. It takes photos, good writing, and a regular posting schedule. Since I'm never going to have a regular posting schedule and the chances of good writing drop, I need photos. (Please note, this is not a comment on Helen's writing. Her writing is good and gets posted at shops and linked to and adored.)

So, I thought I'd do an update on where my knitting projects are at. But with pictures! I'm still working on my Schaeffer Anne anklets, and I've decided against knitting Nathan a pair in this yarn.

Clover Needles


The mohair pretty visibly stands out as you can see from a close up of the first sock.

Close Up Of Sock


I'm fairly sure you get put in the Time Out For Bad Mothers corner if you give your child a rash due to something you knit him, and with my luck, he'd be allergic to mohair.

Due to August's heat I stopped knitting on my Slytherin scarf for a while, but the weather is cool once again, and it's time to start knitting this sucker up. I've pretty much given up the dream of having this scarf done this winter, but we'll see. It is pretty long already.

Half Way Done


Do I really need all the repeats? (Yes, I do. I ordered extra yarn because I ran short for Paul's Gryffindor scarf.)

Lastly, I bought a new tape measure for my sock knitting bag.

My New Tape Measure


Coincidentally, my plain white tape measure, which I lost months ago, came out of hiding the day after I received my new tape measure. Maybe my new tape measure is the kitten, and my old tape measure the ninja.

So, did I bring the sexy back?

20090910

Ravelry is powered by 10 calculators and a puppy on a treadmill.

One of the many things I do in real life is blog and tweet about email. So, I keep an eye on a bunch of feeds to supply me with materials. Then, in yesterday's review, I came across a post about the backend of Ravelry.

Reading this post, the very first thing I wanted to do was go buy something from their store. I would call Ravelry one of the most useful websites I've ever encountered. It's got SO MUCH. And it's basically running out of a paper box. Ok, not that bad, but they are running a LOT of stuff on a very little hardware (and Amazon S3), and they're bootstrapping the whole company from their ads and tee shirt sales and donations.

So, if you love Ravelry, and you've been thinking one of those tee shirts is pretty cute, but maybe a little pricey, remember, you're supporting a good cause!

P.S. Cooking is a craft! I'm doing crafting! I'm just blogging about it somewhere else. Also, who wants french fry grease on their sweaters? Yuck.

P.P.S. Are y'all noting the awesome new URL of this blog? Jenn rocks!

Fifteenth Month Doctor's Appointment

Shoe Malfunction


Fifteen month old baby coming at you! Do you like looking at him sliding and losing his sandal (which no longer fits him) because he unvelcro-ed them from his "tiny wide feet"? The "tiny wide" thing is from the Stride Rite people we saw today when we got him measured for his new sneakers. Them shoes cost money, it's true, but they were helpful, sweet, and honest. When we were looking at the shoes, the person helping us told us not to take some of them because they weren't up to snuff.

We went to Nathan's fifteenth month doctor's appointment today with Dr. Chin. I still love her, but she's going on her maternity leave so she won't be around for his eighteenth month appointment. I resisted the impulse to tell her she didn't look like she was eight months pregnant, and she didn't, because I remembered everyone telling me that all the time.

Nathan decided on this visit that he hated the doctor's office, he hated being locked into the room while I stripped him, he hated the nurse, and he hated the doctor. He decided to tell each of these things and people and events how he felt by howling and crying. After his visit with the doctor, the nurse came back to give his vaccinations to him. I mentioned to her that he had cried during his visit with the doctor, and she laughed, and said, "We heard." I flushed red, I'm sure.

Nathan is still sitting at 50% for height and weight, but he fell to about 80% height. I am not sure how accurate the height or weight measurement were considering Nathan was howling the whole time and clinging to me. He's doing fine for walking (ie, he is walking unassisted at this point) and for feeding himself, but he's on the low end of normal on his speech. He doesn't like to talk to us in real words, and he uses Mommomomomomomo and Daddadadadad more as babbles than as a way to get our attention. He does say "go" an awful lot, and he's started to say "wow" after I say it when he's done something with his toys that is neat. Like, if he sorts his toys correctly, I say "wow" and then he says "wow". Or if he puts his stacking rings in the right order, we repeat this wow process.

Two updates in two days, folks, try not to get used to it. I think I'm just posting here to avoid my knitting/sewing blog.

20090909

Nathan -- The Update

Okay, it's not really really an update about Nathan. Well, it's a bit of an update. He's 15 months old, officially, and he can walk! I realized the other day that I wasn't posting here, and Paul asked me to post something.

I should really be using this space more to post about what he does and to show you all photos of him at his cutest. I've been trying to get back into the habit of photographing and videotaping him, because I know one day I'll want to remember the days when he easily falls asleep in his car seat after a big party, or when he can barely stand up on his own.

So, I'm really just writing here to say I'll be trying to write here more often. If nothing else, I want to post pictures of our vacation in Ocean City, Maryland from July!

Cute Nathan moment of the day: When Nathan, my mom, and I went to the Shins' apartment, Nathan did not want to talk to them. He kept hiding his face in my neck, or against my chest, or against my legs. He didn't even want my mom to hold him, constantly trying to shove into my arms when she took him away. I held him until he calmed down, and which point, he was all about playing with their tennis ball and smiling at everyone.

20090907

GLOAT GLOAT GLOAT!

Guess who just won ninjakitten.net? If I can ever get the nameservers to update (propagate, BASTARDS), I expect that this blog's URL will change, and I'll feel up to working on my book review blog. If not, well, at least you can reach me at my new domain email addresses.

I wouldn't normally post this short an entry, but I won! Also, I finished a sock. Wowsers. That is what knitting is like? I forgot!

20090902

People, I'm Dying

I know, I know, I know I said I'd have some pics and posts that were relevant to crafting, but that was prior to my imminent death by cold. I'm exhausted, stuffed up, and grumpy, so I thought I'd tell you all that before you decided my blog sucks due to lack of updates. Which it does.

Three important notes before I head out for today.

1. I am bidding on a vanity domain for my various blogs. Obviously the words ninja and kitten are involved, so wish me luck.

2. Nathan has actually walked in his quest for more food to shove in his mouth.

3. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back on the menu at Starbucks. I spend half my year waiting for this day.