We’ve got everything ready to make our Thanksgiving dinner.  Davey and I may start a couple of things this afternoon.  I forgot all about deviled eggs!  Have to have some of those.  I want to persuade David to make a pecan pie.  He went through a pecan pie making phase back in 1997, when we lived in Seattle. Time for another one.

Today, David happened upon Davey watching a little tv while resting against a comfortable backrest.

I think Timber was ok with it.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Davey took his first class at the Little Gym today.  He had a great time.  He did a somersault!  (A marvel to me – I am so ungymnastically inclined that it is embarrassing.)  He ran around, he climbed, he rolled, he jumped, and he loved it!

Almost as fun was that for the next 45 minutes after class, he played with a 5 year old boy (actually 5 and 3/4 – the little boy explained to me).  They played and played and played.  I talked to a nice mom and learned more about the area.  She told me about some great activities in the area that  we’ll be able to do with Davey.   I was also very excited to learn about a Montessori program that is part of the public school system.  Yay for that! (Preschool all the way through 12th grade if we wanted!)  So that was very fun for me.

Now it is time to go get our ingredients for our Thanksgiving dinner.  I decided there is just not enough room in our little kitchen for a turkey, so I took the easy route and got a turkey breast at Honey Baked Ham.  They are so good, much better than I would make.

Our menu is going to include some Pioneer Woman recipes.  I want to make her cranberry sauce.  I am also going to make her sweet potato casserole, although I think it could technically count as a dessert.  I will attempt to make dressing, and then of course it would not be Thanksgiving without the green bean casserole.   I think that’s about it since it will just be the 3 of us, and one of the 3, I won’t mention any names, probably won’t touch any of it!

I am still thinking about dessert.  I think a pumpkin pie is inevitable, although I confess I am a fan of the Mrs. Smith.  Maybe I should try to make my own.  I could do that.

So we gotta go shop!  My trusty helper will accompany me.  If you take little Davey to the grocery store.  He will want a car cart. (That’s what we call the carts with the ginormous kiddy car on the front.)  Chances are, he will then want one of the free cookies for little kids.  Chances are also good that I am going to bonk someone or break something. (My little tribute to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie) I narrowly missed taking out 3 jars of spaghetti sauce the other day.  I worked in a grocery store.  There’s nothing messier.   Except for a plastic gallon of milk exploding.  That’s worse.  The car cart is a menace!  Davey loves it though.

I am knitting some.  I am not knitting on my Joy of Sox sock though.  I have decided to do some last minute super secret Christmas things.  I don’t know yet how many or if they will work out.  I am having a lot of fun with the current project though.

Ok off we go!

This morning Davey helped me finish making this little monster.  He was my creative director.  I put eyebrows on this little guy at first, but Davey asked me to take them off because they made him look mad.  Then he decided that he did not like this one at all, and he wants a red one. He did name this little green guy “Cutie”.

We tried to go play with the sidewalk chalk for awhile, but a massive bone-chilling cold front was blowing through.  This was not predicted that I know of.  We thought it was going to be calm and 55 this afternoon.   By 11, when the dogs were on walk #2 for the day, (they are old and need to go out 4-6 times a day) the wind was blasting and it was icy cold.

David was getting ready to run  which is why he was in shorts.  The change in weather really tackled him during his run.

Davey also spent some time decorating his car.

While David was running, Davey and I built this structure.  It was my first time.  I am not very good at it.  You run the little marbles through, and mine kept showing up at the most unexpected and wrong places.

It was fun though, and Davey helped me work it out. (Timber can always be found in the background.  14 years old, and he is still so curious!)

Happy Sunday!  We are getting ready to go “stroll” at the mall.

I was getting Davey dressed, and I asked him, “Davey!  You are getting so big!  How are you getting so big?”

He answered me, “From all the vegetables that I don’t eat.”

I said, “I think you are trying to make a point!”

He laughed and off he went.

Davey has been talking about learning to use scissors.  Safety scissors to be precise.  “Mommy, can I learn to use safety scissors?”

So yesterday I got him some.   He had a great time learning to use them.  It requires close supervision at this point, but he really started to figure out the motion, and what he needed to do. I showed him how to hold them and how to move them, but it takes some practice.  It’s really interesting to me to watch him work through it.

It took intense concentration.  I think his mouth opened every time he opened the scissor blades.

Blades closed.

The addition of the tongue indicated an even more intense concentration. (I can see Davey reading this blog someday.  “Mom, seriously?”)

Timber was hanging out nearby.  He was probably hoping I’d keep up the close supervision.

I am not sure what’s going on in the next picture.  It might be something like, “Mommy!  Enough with the pictures!”

Fun first time with the scissors.

Here’s what else I was working on yesterday evening.  I decided to learn magic loop.   Now that I have knitted in the round with 2 circulars, I think doing it with one was even easier.  And so much fun.  I like to knit little toys, but it’s tough with dpns.  Not many stitches on the needles at first, and I feel like I am juggling with toothpicks.  Magic Loop = so much fun!  I watched a good video and it was not hard at all.  So here’s my project in process.  I hope to have it done by tomorrow.  I just need to knit two little legs.

Happy Saturday.  I think we are going to go check out a community called Lone Tree.  David’s heard it is a really nice place to live.  Our fingers and toes are crossed that our Arkansas house will close next week.  Please cross yours too!

Yesterday, Davey and I made a cranberry pie.  I guess technically it’s more of a cobbler, but the Pioneer Woman calls it a pie.  I love cranberries and wanted to make it immediately after I read about it.  Davey insists that he loves pie.   We made the pie, and Davey couldn’t wait to try it.  He took one bite and walked up to me, “Mommy, I love this pie!”  Unfortunately, he had a very forced tone to his voice and he was chewing on the bite of pie like it was the worst thing he’d ever put in his mouth.  It was just a bite of crust too.  I didn’t think a tart cranberry would go over well.   Poor thing, he wanted to like the pie.

We watched the Pioneer Woman go head to head with Bobby Flay yesterday.  I love the Pioneer Woman, but we had another interest in the show.  We knew that David’s brother was there during the entire filming, so we made it our mission to catch a glimpse of him on camera.  He’s a chef who now teaches at a culinary school, so the school was somehow part of doing this “Throwdown” show.  Anyway, we looked and looked.  No sign of him.  Finally, I saw a headless person leaning against a counter.  He was in the very back.  We could only see him from the neck down, but it looked like it could be his neck.  It looked like it could have been his arm resting on the counter.  We are still not sure though.  David left him a message so that we can see if the shirt he was wearing that day matches the shirt we saw on the show.

So that was fun.

As often as I can, I like to use the blog to document specific things about Davey so I can remember them some day.

1.  Davey likes to stand on his head.  We are looking into a 3 year old tumbling class.

2.  Davey does not eat vegetables.  We are working on it.

3.  Davey loves to build.  We built with Tinkertoys for quite awhile this morning.  He still likes tearing down though almost as much as building.

4.  The other day, out of the blue, Davey said, “Mommy,  I didn’t like being in your tummy.  It was embarrassin’.  There wasn’t any furniture in there.”

That’s all for today.

I was taking a few pictures of my current knitting projects.  When I went to download the photos, I found this picture as well.

David is not here, so I asked Davey what was going on here. Apparently he was making a spider with those wiki sticks.  Those are such fun.  Not any spider either.  This is the itsy bitsy spider.  And that’s all he had to say about that.

I have ordered a book which has a pattern that should work for David’s sweater.  We are going to then have a serious discussion about color choices.  David only wears blue or gray.  That might be a slight exaggeration, but if you look through his closet that’s about all you see.  So I am having big doubts about this light gray almost off-white hue for the background.

I am not knitting much.  Here’s what I have done on my next Joy of Sox sock.  I have done 1 ten round repeat.  At this rate, it’s going to be awhile.  It’s just a sock that needs my concentration, and in the evenings I have trouble locating my concentration.

This pattern is so neat though.  I thought I was going to be making bobbles, but this is different.  You increase 1 stitch to 5 stitches and then you knit those 5 stitches as you do the next 2 rows.  Then you do the slip slip pass over slipped stitch thing and take it back to 1.  Really neat.  I hadn’t done that before.

I’ve mostly just been working on David’s socks in the evenings lately as they are easy to knit.  I am in straight stockinette stitch now to the end of the sock.  It’s a gray sock and not incredibly exciting.  I am hoping they will fit David.

That’s about it.  I have another stack of papers staring at me and waiting to be graded.  Tomorrow I will take them on!

Yesterday we decided it was time for us to go to the snow since the snow has not come to us much yet.  When we told Davey, he kept running around the apartment yelling, “I’m so excited!  I’m so excited!”  We checked the roads and everything looked ok, so off we went to Breckenridge.  It’s something to leave a dry Denver with temperatures in the 40s and then an hour later to be at the top of a pass with snow and ice and temperatures in the low 20s.  The Eisenhower/Johnson tunnels were a little weathery, but the roads were not too bad.

Breckenridge was great.  It’s just about our favorite place right now.  I guess we ought to give some of the other resorts a try, but we just keep going back there.  There was quite abit of snow.  It was very cold, but we bundled up.  Davey is very bundled up here.

He wanted to play in the little park.  We have learned that slides seem to be extra fast in the cold!

He was so happy and excited to really play in the snow for his first time, that he was hugging the snow.

He rolled in the snow like a little happy puppy.

Like a little bitty puppy, I am telling you.  He rolled and picked up snow and rolled some more.  He made snow angels, but mostly he just rolled around.

One snowy kid.

Davey likes to watch tv while sitting on our recliner; however, he often watches it like this:

He loves to stand on his head, and he often tells me that he is “practicin'”.  “Mommy, I keep falling over!”

I’ve never voluntarily stood on my head in my life.  (The involuntary time occurred in middle school P.E.)

I guess it makes for some good blood flow to the brain?

I am going to need some good blood flow to the brain to figure out my next project.  (That was a rather forced transition.)  Here it is.  I am thrilled if David or Davey request that I knit them something.  I just finished a beautiful brown/grayish hat for David.  He didn’t request it though and at first he didn’t like it.  He likes it a lot now though.  I am also knitting him some socks.  Again, he didn’t request them, but I assured them that he will be happy to wear them under his waders when he is fishing.  But now he wants me to knit him a sweater.  Here is a picture of THE SWEATER.  It’s a cool sweater.  He even wants the colorwork.  (I’d thought maybe he’d just want it in a solid color.)

So here’s the dilemma.  I need to find a pattern.  I think that I can figure out the colorwork if I have to.  It will be more good exercise for my brain.  But I am not yet capable of designing an entire sweater.  So I’ve got to figure something out.  I am thinking that I may want to try a steek.  It just occurred to me that I may have to use a steek for easier completion of the colorwork.

And David is not little.  It’s going to be an XL undertaking.  One more reason to do it in the round.  He has requested it by January.  I laughed as I typed that sentence.

I have been looking through ravelry, but I haven’t found anything quite right yet.  We are going to a yarn shop today and I will check out some books.

I am preparing a waiver that I am going to need David to sign before I begin.  It requires that he wear said sweater even if it turns out slightly wonky.  It’s the wonky clause.

I finished my last pair of “Joy of Sox” socks last weekend.  I delayed longer than I would have liked to start the next socks.  First of all, I’ve been a little scared.  This pair of socks requires the use of 2 circular needles, and it is a toe-up pattern.  I’ve never tried this before.  I finally decided it was time to take a look at the pattern.  I’d hoped to get a lesson on socks on 2 circulars from my friend Susan, but I hadn’t been able to do it yet.  My fault since David and I have alternating teaching schedules and that doesn’t leave much free time.  I had begun to contemplate bringing Davey along with me for my knitting help, but I just didn’t see that going well. (Also, I did get the opportunity to build some new brain pathways figuring it out myself.  I try to help my brain out as much as I can.)

So!  Today I looked up a youtube video on Figure 8 cast on.  Not hard!  Very fun!  Then I started on the toe.  I have to say that I may be a convert to circulars for socks.  It has been so much fun so far.  I’d tried this technique, believe it or not, on the very first pair of socks I knitted.  Well, they didn’t actually get knitted, because I could not figure out how to do the heel with the circulars.  I had never knit a heel before though, so I could not use any kind of sock intuition to help me through it.

Now though, I’ve knitted enough socks to be able to, so far anyway, figure out where I need to go.  I can see why people like this technique.  The two circulars are really a lot easier to manage at the beginning of the sock when I haven’t knitted many rows, and it’s all kind of flopping around on me. I can definitely see myself always using 2 circulars for toe up socks rather than dpns.  It was much easier for me to get a nicer looking toe than it would have been with the double pointed needles.

This pattern is called “Make up Sox”.  It’s got this climbing vine pattern on it that may eat my lunch.  It involves some kind of bobble like things, cables and following a chart.  If it is not a color chart, then I tend to have difficulties.   And when I do get to that heel, I may be in trouble.

So Davey and I hung around here all day today.  He likes to say, “Mommy, will you come in here (his room) and knit while I pack for ‘school’?”  Of course I never refuse an invitation to knit.  So I watch as he empties enormous bins of toys in preparation for school.  I ask him how in the world he plans to get all that stuff to school.  “I have a truck, Mommy.”  ahhhh.

So I got a chance to knit the toe, to realize that there was errata in the pattern, to rip out the toe, and to knit it again.  (My second cast on was much better, so this was actually a good thing.)  Here’s the toe:

Here’s how it kinda looks on circular needles rather than dpns.  So far so fun!