House Arrest

You Make My Day

Lizzie surprised me with a "You Make My Day Award" last week and I'm finally getting around with sharing my top 10 list. (Yes, I'm a slacker and loser... Sorry.)

The hard thing about this is that there are SOOOO many people that contribute to bringing a smile to my face on a daily basis, some of whom are close friends, some who are virtual and some whom I've never met. Lizzie's posts make me laugh, Oiyi awes me with her work and her new baby, Stephanie, well she's a knit goddess... I read all of my commenter's blogs, adding them to my Google Reader whenever possilbe. So it was really hard deciding which ten folks to include.

I decided to make my list consist of the ten sites that I get the most from technically. These are the sites that I go to for rare techniques, curious knowledge, awesome demonstrations, complete inspiration...

Brooklyn Tweed
Glampyre
Grumperina
Knit and Tonic
KnitSpot
Rosemary-Go-Round
String or Nothing
Techknitter
Wendy Knits
Yarn Harlot

It's sad that the rules limit you. There are many other sites I could recommend, of course. For instance, check out the blogs of the folks commenting here. They're pretty neat people who make me smile more often than they know.

A year ago...

I was looking forward to our first real ultrasound of the twins. Now I'm simply looking forward to every minute of the rest of our lives:

P.S. I was tagged by Lizzie and will post my list tomorrow!

Pre-crawl

Aden's newest thing is to get on all fours and rock back and forth. He finally has gotten his little butt in the air on a consistent basis. Occassionally he manages to get his toes under him but usually he just pushes his feet against the bars of his cribs, propelling himself headfirst to the other side. Owie! Sometimes he manages to inch himself along by pulling both his knees forward.

Click to start the video above — we didn't have the file autostart because it was a little bit large. Mark's still tinkering with the video camera and just got some new software so we still have to figure out how to size these so that they're reasonable.)

It's very cute to watch and it all just makes me realize how quickly these little monkeys are growing. It's been 35 weeks since the kiddos were born. They're 29 weeks 2 days developmentally. Mark's still at home. I'm still working.

And the future is coming up on us sooner than we think.

The Recipe for Me

Well someone pegged it:

The Recipe For Liz

3 parts Craftiness 2 parts Instinct 1 part Flirtation Splash of Magnetism Finish off with an olive

What's the Recipe for Your Personality?

Inequality

While reading random blogs, I found out about The Daring Book for Girls, which was highly recommended by the blog's author. I remembered that The Dangerous Book for Boys had come out last year and read the reviews for both, promptly adding them to my wishlist for the kiddos.

Of course, Amazon suckered me with their "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section and I started cruising some books there.

I stumbled on the How To Be The Best At Everything books. And then I read  a description of the content and promptly felt disgusted.

The boys' text contains the more outlandish tips—"Fight off a crocodile." "Escape quicksand." In Girls, the suggestions are more sedentary: "Give yourself a perfect manicure." "Knit with your fingers." "Grow a crystal."

Give yourself a manicure while your brother fights a crocodile. The biggest thing a girl can imagine is having perfect nails? Wunderbahr.

Yeah, it's obvious that I want Hunter to be a strong, self-sufficient, capable, and above all RESPECTED woman. The fact that I want her to struggle less, be accepted more, is probably obvious to those who know me.

And yet I still see the same attitudes that I grew up with now. Girls should be quiet and delicate. Boys should be raucous and troublemakers.

As if.

I really didn't think the inequality in gender applied anymore but I guess I was wrong.

P.S. Thanks for the advice on teething. I bought the Hyland drops yesterday and am just going with nature's flow on this one.

Two Words

Teething sucks.

Locks

Guess what I did today.

Here's a clue:

If you guessed "got all your hair cut off because you had about four inches of dead / split ends and you got sick and tired of looking like a ratty Barbie doll dragged around by a toddler" then you win the prize!

Despite Mark's mutterings -- he loved how I looked whenever I wore my long, uber curly hair down and was against me getting it cut -- I got it all hacked off today. There were many reasons for it, but the primary one was that my curly hair kept knotting on itself and getting into these vicious tangles. And it didn't matter which conditioner I used. I would mega / ultra / superduper condition my hair and running a brush through it would still be torture. On top of that my split end would NOT stop splitting. If I had decided that I just wanted to get a trim to remove the dead ends, I would have easily lost two or three inches because my ends were that bad. My hair so enjoyed tangling and knotting on itself that I became convinced that if I didn't wash or brush it for a week, I'd have dreadlocks. Unfortunately, I hate dreadlocks so having the perfect hair for that look was not an advantage in my eyes.

I was also sick of not ever ever ever doing anything with my hair. I either slicked it back with two tons of gel and put it in a bun, or let it go au naturel and put it in a bun. I rarely, if ever, wore it down because I hated the feel of it on my neck and I also really didn't like how my hair looked that way. Unfortunately for Mark, my long curly hair never seemed particularly sexy to me, probably because I was always worrying about it frizzing or matting or worse.

Last June...

What finally dragged me to the shears today was the utter frustration that I have with how I feel I am coming across professionally. None of my suits fit properly, so while I'm back on the Weight Watchers bandwagon, I'm self-conscious about how sloppy I look. I can't button any of my jackets anymore, my belly is sticking out under my clothes, and I can't breathe in some outfits because they're too tight. (Reminds me of early last year when I was pregnant!) My hair wasn't winning me any style points since I almost always looked disheveled when I wore my hair curly and I hated how stern and strict I looked with my hair slicked back.

I've always loved my hair short and I think the picture below shows why:

Let's just face it, short hair is plainly me. It says "Liz" in ways that my long hair didn't. Even Mark was surprised on how natural my short hair seemed on me.

And frankly, that kind of genuineness is what I want to exude.

[Edited to add] P. S. All my co-workers raved about my hair today. And judging by the comments thus far, you guys are digging the new 'do too.

Another One Down

The crochet gussets will be finished shortly and then I will cast on for another new ribby. Two down, two to four to go.

And so to bed...

I was hoping to finish the second wrap today but after a too long and frustrating workday, I've decided to take advantage of my night off from baby duty and hit the hay a bit early.

Aside: Mark and I have started alternating who cares for the babies at night. Currently I'm "on duty" Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Alternating nights allows both of us to get a full night of sleep on a more regular basis.

As of 8:50 this morning, I had gotten about 65% through the pattern, so it's easy to see where I would think I might finish the whole shebang tonight. And, as of now, I'm about 80% done, which is frankly not shabby progress. I finished 75% of the crotch ribbing during my morning commute, worked on the remaining 25% during my trip home and worked on the first 9 rows of the back when I got home.

I almost got no knitting done as I was falling asleep while Mark did the dishes. But once he relieved me from keeping an eye on the kiddos, I had to prep my breakfast and lunch for tomorrow – I'm back on plan, baby! –  and then started fixing a glitch on my iPod.

Somehow, I lost an entire chapter of "The Fellowship of the Ring" and wanted to fix my playlist as it pissed me off to find myself transported from the well scene in the mines of Moria to Legolas singing in Lothlorien. I also wanted to rip "The Children of Hurin" audiobook that Mark gifted me with, so I had to force myself to stay up, sleepiness be damned, in order to do that.

So while iTunes took its sweet ass time getting my books into my playlists, I knit, updated my Ravelry profile and drank a glass of wine.

And now, iPod playlist fixed and at a good stopping point, I find that I'm suitably relaxed and ready to face another soul-sucking day at my job.

1:33

I'm ready to crash, having been up and about since 5:30 this morning, but I'm staying up so I can give the babies their next dose of Tylenol. Turns out that they did not avoid catching my cold -- which I'm actually not quite over. They've both been feverish and fussy today, and have made Mark's day a living hell. Unfortunately, Mark is also feeling under the weather, which is going to make for an interesting week as I REALLY can't take any time off this week. My majordomo important project is hitting Beta this week and I absolutely have to do the face-time thing at the office.

Oy.

If Mark winds up being too sick to care for the babies, I may have to beg a favor from one of my friends. It'd be a paid favor, as I would compensate him / her for looking after the babies, but still, it's a major one. I keep kicking myself for not finishing enrolling the babies in ELC, Inc's backup daycare, but I realize that I wouldn't be able to drop them off if they were sick so it's kinda moot.

To keep myself busy tonight, I made it about a third of the way through on the second of the newborn ribby wraps. This one is in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes:

The second one is going a lot faster than the first since I now understand how the pattern works a bit better. Being that the baby is due any day now,  I'm going to shoot for four - six wraps, half in the newborn sizes and half in the small. This is a pretty quick knit, although I AM dreading all the finishing work, but I'm pretty comfortable in thinking I can accomplish that. In addition to the initial grouping of Ribbies, I also want to make at least one Hybrid Rib Soaker since Sandy has expressed an interest in having some in that pattern later on down the line when the baby is a bit bigger.

In anticipation of the next ones, I dug out some Cascade 220 Superwash from my stash:

(The colors are actually nicer than they appear here...)

I also dug out this yummy treasure:

It's to make these:

Yup, they're the ubiquitous Transition Gloves. I fell in love with some of the finished ones on Ravelry and well you can guess the rest...

I may reorganize my queue a bit so that I can start these after I finish the soakers. I admit that knitting all the baby knits I have embarked on for the twins can get a bit monotonous so maybe having a little fun something something waiting for me at night will keep me motivated.

I'm trying real hard not to be shiny-nickled this year.

P.S. Expect a MAJOR update to the 365 galleries. I've all the pictures but haven't gotten around to picking, resizing, cropping, uploading, etc. I plan to get that all done by MLK day at the latest.