My sister from Montana came to visit for 2 weeks and she and L had a wonderful time together. 

We miss her tons!

Kisses

While Colleen was here, we went to visit our brother Glen and his family on their Farm in Iowa.  One of the best places in the world to be, if you ask me!

With fantastic views:

Interesting wildlife:

Fun stuff for kids of all ages:

My nephew "Eviel Kneivel"

A Boy in his natural habitat...dirt

Best of all…lots and lots of family!

My sisters, brothers (all but one), nephews, cousins, parents.  All in one place.  Couldn’t be better!

My siblings and cousins

A supremely relaxing weekend.

Next time: August Part 2: The County Fair! With Actual knitting content!

Little Bird and Mama

Scene 1: an ordinary sidewalk on an ordinary summer day.
Time:  Mid afternoon
Characters:  L  a rather extraordinary 2.5 year old
                          Mama:  a rather ordinary Mama
Enter stage left Mama and L walk along sidewalk

L:  Mama look!  Puppy!
Mama:  Yes lovey, there’s a puppy. 
   And though she knows he is far tool old for such questions she continues:
Mama: What does a dog say?
L: I can smell you! 
Mama:  Not Dug, L, DOG!  I think we’ve seen UP too many times!  What does a DOG say?
L:  Quack Quack! 
Mama: Not a DUCK, L, a Dog!  Oh man…

L Checkin out Chicks at the fair 2010

Scene 2: Later that day at the Fairgrounds

Enter Stage Right…Mama and L walk through the deserted Fairgrounds, fondly remember the week of the fair…

L:  Wanna go Fair and see the Camel?
Mama:  The Fair is all done, honey, the camel isn’t there anymore.
L: Camel go bye bye? 
Mama: Yup, that’s right, the camel went bye bye.
L: Sheep all gone too?
Mama:  Yep, the sheep are all gone too.
L: Gamma and Gampa go home?  Gamma B go home?
Mama: Yes, they went to the fair with us, didn’t they? But they had to go home to their houses too.
L: Aunt Colleen?
Mama: She went home to Montana, didn’t she?
L: Gamma and Gampa went home in Aunt Colleen’s big truck? 
Mama:  Not quite…
L:  It’s okay.  See ya later camel!

Exit stage left…end scene…

Fair Camel

 

This however, is a daunting task for me.  I wasn’t all that great at keeping up with my blog before I had a kid, now, how will I ever keep up?  Now that spare time is so fleeting, and “free” time a rare commodity.  When a free moment occurs, I hear the call of the knitting needles and yarn, its gravitational pull is far greater than that of the computer.  Besides that, it’s been at least 2 years since I last blogged with any regularity, how can I catch up with everything that’s been going on in the last 2 years in my knitting,

BrooklynTweed's "Redhook"

with my son,

(L in his Tomten Jacket during one of his umm…inquisitive moments)

with my hubby,

(B in his icelandic version of EZ’s shirt yoke seamless sweater)

with my life?

And the thing is, I can’t catch up.  It would be totally overwhelming to try.  So I guess I’m just going to have to start again instead of start over.  Starting over at starting again? I’ll figure it out…somehow

Me in my Swallotail Shawl by Evelyn Clark

This year, I thought I would try for one that I could perhaps realistically follow through with.  It’s simple really, I’m resolving to revive this dusty old blog.  At this time I am leaving some pretty broad parameters for revival:  I am committing to blogging at least twice a month.  Now that The Kiddo is old enough to play on his own for brief periods and he has decided that upstairs is his favorite place to play (and upstairs is where my computer resides), this goal should be an attainable one.  The Hubby has found me this wonderful new theme for said blog and I feel that he thus deserves to see his wife use it from time to time. 

I don’t know where this new blog may lead…I cannot promise that my posts will always be about knitting or will contain photos (which to me are the lifeblood of an interesting blog), or that this new blog won’t be continually saturated with anecdotes about my child and parenthood that will be interesting to no one but me, but it’s my blog, I can do with it what I choose!  I have written blog posts so often in the last year and a half, always imagining some distant reader perusing those words and becoming inspired or at least mildly interested, enough to come back and read the next post.  Now I think I will try to focus on writing for me.  It’s what’s most important anyway.  Should someone else decide to read this, then all the better.  I hope it will be enjoyable to anyone who would devote their time to it.

Been working on getting E’s blog back up and running so she can use it.  We moved to a new webhost and I finally got the latest version of WordPress running.  Also found this great knitting theme from David Cole.  The link to his site where you can download it is at the bottom.  Worked on getting a lot of the kinks out of the links, pages and general format.  I had used so many different plugins and “hacks” with the old versions of Wordpres that it was kind of a mess going to the new version.  Think I finally got it up and running though.  Hope E likes it…  And I hope you do too!

In the meantime, here’s my spikey haired kid, pre-first-cold.  His nickname has turned out to be so appropriate!

(I know how cool I am)

(Cool…Joe Cool….)

Now we can be all charged up for another day of exploring new things….

(what the heck is that thing??)

(Eddie says…Is that baby human still here???)

As a sidenote, I have no idea why my blog has lost all it's sidebar links and buttons and it's pages.  I'm not very happy about it and unfortunately don't have time to fix it.  The links shouldn't be too bad, but the pages would take a very long time to reconstruct so I have no idea if I will do that or not.  Maybe I'll just have to start with the current year of knitting (if I ever have time to knit again!) and just rebuild from there.  If Liam continues sleeping like this, I may be able to knit again someday instead of falling exhausted to the couch every time he naps!

(click for bigger)

That 6 hours might start at 11pm it might start after midnight, but it's 6 hours just the same.  He's definitely his parents son, a little night owl.  He likes to be awake between 9 and midnight but the thing about Liam is that if something he's doing bothers you, give it a day and he'll completely change.   

I'm so happy it hurts.  Unfortunately, it means that sometimes I wake up in between, wondering why he's not up yet, but I'm sure I'll get over that as I get used to his new schedule.   

He's getting so big and starting to focus a lot more on what's going on around him–including focusing on us!  He smiles sometimes but that's usually followed by filling his pants so still probably not the "social smiles" we're waiting for.  But at 7 weeks, I'm just happy with the prospect of getting a little more sleep.  It makes everyone happier!  Maybe I'll get to knit again someday!