I’m still dealing with an annoying cold, but we managed to have a really good day in spite of the continued sneezing/coughing/gagging/etc. After tossing around a few ideas, we decided to head out to Little River Park with the stroller and a blanket to get some fresh air.

(Please excuse the crappy iPhone photos; I forgot the real camera at home.)

It was a perfect day. Sunny, breezy, with the leaves at their peak.

We took a short walk around the paved/gravel paths first…

…then we headed over to the field near the playground area to let Griff crawl around and enjoy the sunshine.

Griff crawled.

Griff ate a little grass.

Griff and daddy watched the birthday party going on over at the picnic shelter.

One amusing note: a little boy who was there decided to take a whiz under one of slides on the playground, in full view of us and anyone else who might be around. This resulted in one of his playmates shrieking, “He peed in my secret lair!!!”, which was about the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

We came home and I made a big gloppy chicken noodle casserole with peas and carrots and a crispy breadcrumb topping. It was very tasty.

After dinner, I entertained myself by putting socks on Griff’s head. (They were clean!) Griff looks weirdly like Jamie Hyneman in this photo, if Jamie Hyneman was a baby who liked to wear a flowered black sock on his head. Or maybe it’s just me.

Griff seems to have latched on to the knitted snake that I made him as his lovey/transitional object/whatever you want to call it. For the past several days, he’s been dragging it all over the living room, hanging onto it for diaper changes and when being carried off for meals, and generally not letting it out of his sight. I’m flattered that he picked something I made, and I’d love to put it into his crib with him at night to see if that helps him sleep better, but the fact that it’s a 30″ snake kind of screams “strangulation hazard” to me. Or am I just being paranoid?

On a related note, we think he may have a promising future career as the leader of one of those snake-handling churches in West Virginia. I’m thinking about knitting him a fake bottle of Strychnine to go with it.

And finally, I’m still slowly plugging away at Griff’s hat. I managed to knit a border around it, and I’m working on embroidering snowflakes on it. Once that’s done, gotta do the pompom and attach the earflap cords, and then I can line it.

Today was an unexpectedly great day. It started out crappy, rainy and cold, with the little man waking up repeatedly around 5am and us dragging him to bed with us so we could get a few more hours of sleep. After that, though, things slowly improved. We had no plans for the day, so we had a nice relaxed morning. After lunch, we drove out and got me a flu shot (whee), stopped by Joann Fabrics to get some crafting supplies, and then headed to Barnes & Noble to spend a long-unused gift card on some board books for Griffin and a magazine for me. After we got home, Jag watched Griff so I could get some spinning done (more on this later). After that, we bundled Griff up into his stroller and went for a nice walk, and then came home and had a lazy dinner of things that are outrageously bad for us (ie, potato skins with cheese and bacon, and jalapeno poppers).

After dinner, we tried out a new straw-based Nuby sippy cup with Griff, since he’s still not taking a bottle from anyone but Jag, and he was less than enthusiastic about other sippy cup designs in the past. It was a smashing success! He drank almost 3 ounces out of it in total, which is far more than we expected.

We gave him the bottle to play with on the floor, and after rolling it around and chewing on it for a while, he managed to get it turned the right way and suck on the straw part without any help. This is a really really good sign for the future. I had sort of resigned myself to the idea that I wouldn’t be able to leave Griff with anyone for more than 2-3 hours until he was weaned (and who knows what would happen in some kind of emergency). If he’ll start taking a straw sippy, that’s a whole lot of pressure off me.

Now, back to the spinning. You may recall that I was working on this lovely Grafton batt:

Well, it’s done! Here are the fresh-off-the-bobbin singles:

And here it is after a soak in Eucalan:

(I’ll spare you a photo of it hanging up to dry in the laundry room.) I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Once it’s dry, I’ll do a yardage count, and then try and find a pattern that will show off the color gradations from bright orange to black. Could be anything from a cowl to a scarf to mittens, depending on how much I got.

I’m sure glad I sewed these eye stalks on firmly, because Griff loves him some alien eyeballs. He likes to put things in his mouth and then either crawl around dragging them, or pull up on the couch with the whatever-it-is dangling from his face. It looks hilarious.

He looks just like my sister in this photo. Which means, like me as well, but I tend to think he looks like his Aunt Robin in moments like this. That seems like a very “Robin” expression to me. 🙂 Do you agree, Auntie?

The shirt he’s wearing is another reverse applique experiment. I like it, but I should have done the owls as two separate appliques rather than sewing them together and having a distracting seam in the middle. This shirt is one we use as a pajama top anyway, so no big loss. It is cute.

The hat knitting is going slow but steady. I managed to get him to try it on, needles and all. He’s very interested in the yarn. I’m going to need to put an alarm on my yarn stash!

Here’s the earflap held down against his face. It’s going to be really adorable, I think.

And T is for Teething, which is what has been occupying Griffin’s time this week. In between the fussy episodes, though, it has been possible to get a few things done!

First up, a plain gray Old Navy tshirt that I embellished with some plaid reverse applique for our little G-man. This shirt is a size 2T, and he’s swimming in it, which is great because it means he’ll be able to wear it for longer than 3 weeks. The funny thing is, the arms are way too long, but the torso length is about right. (Please to be ignoring the drool spot. The little man is quite the fountain these days.)

Next we have my attempt at a sleep sack in some cute flannel I had laying around. The result here is not the fault of the person who wrote this lovely tutorial. I threw this thing together over 2 days, during periods where Griff was only mildly fussy in the pack n play instead of wanting to full-on scream in the pack n play. You may notice that the cats are upside down. The ones on the back of the sleep sack are, of course, right side up. Since I only had 1.5 yards of fabric, and due to the directional motif and the way the pattern pieces need to be cut from the 44″ fabric, there was no way to cut the pieces without one side or the other being upside down, and I cut out the back piece first, using my typical genius for this sort of thing. This was also my first zipper installation experience. The zipper works, and the zipper is firmly attached to the garment. That is all that need be said on that topic. Griff wore it last night and slept no worse than usual, so I apparently managed to remove all the pins.

(No, the zipper is NOT upside down; sleep sacks have the zipper inverted so the little occupant can’t get clever overnight and unzip himself. Please see this actual Halo™® Sleep Sack™® for reference™®.

A real Sleep Sack™® costs around $20-$25, and the fabric for this was less than $10, so I think it’s a pretty good deal. I’ll probably make some more in the next few months.

Griff needs a hat, so I’m knitting him a cute earflap number from Itty Bitty Hats. I’m using some green and brown Plymouth Boku that I bought an entire bag of on clearance from WEBS a while back, intending to knit a rug. This was before Griff came along. What are the chances I’m going to be knitting an entire rug these days? That’s right, so let’s use some of the yarn for a hat! The stockinette is curling like a bunch of drunken Canadians armed with brooms. I sure hope the crochet edging and fleece lining will take care of that.

And last, we have, unbelievably enough, something for me. I need a new purse, since my 2-year-old Target number is about to completely disintegrate, so I’ve been working on knitting this thing for many many months, using a couple skeins of Boku and various leftovers of wool from other projects. I managed to get it and the I-cord for the strap felted this week, and I should have time to install the grommets and get a lining sewed in this weekend. Maybe. I blocked it over a cardboard box, which gave it a nice rectangular shape on the bottom.

Pre-felting:

Post-felting:

The End

A little Garden Gnome came to visit us today!

He kindly agreed to go to the Hillsborough Farmers Market with us.

He brought a little basket to carry his purchases of fresh turnips and gnome bread.

He had a great time until one too many idiots asked if he was a mini Santa Claus. (Seriously? Come ON, people!)

The End

I adapted this from a recipe I found online. It was amazingly tasty! I was out of the house most of the day, so used canned pumpkin; if using freshly cooked pumpkin, I think the roasted seeds would be extremely delicious sprinkled on top. I was unable to take an attractive photo of this stuff, so use your imagination. 😉

The best thing about this soup was that Griff totally loved it. (We fished out the large bacon and onion chunks for him.) He was flailing his arms and making the hungry-baby-bird mouth motions every time a new spoonful approached.

Pumpkin Black Bean Soup
3 (15 ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 (16 ounce) can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup butter (I used half butter/half olive oil combo)
1 1/4 cups chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups beef broth
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
1/2 pound bacon, chopped up into small pieces
1-2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Cumin, sage and Hungarian paprika to taste (Spanish smoked paprika would be really good too!)

Pour 1-1.5 cans of the black beans into a food processor or blender, along with the can of tomatoes. Puree until smooth. Set aside.

Melt butter/olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic, and season with salt and pepper. Cook and stir until the onion is softened. (I added my spices at this point and cooked for a few minutes; I think the heat brings out the flavor of the cumin in particular.) Stir in the bean puree, remaining can(s) of beans, beef broth, pumpkin puree, and vinegar. Mix until well blended, then simmer for about 25 minutes.

While the soup simmers, fry up the bacon in a separate skillet until crisp. Stir the bacon into the soup, along with as much of the bacon fat as your conscience will allow. Serve with a dollop of sour cream.

Griff’s meals have been growing increasingly messy, and his current bibs are proving to be too small to contain the smears and spills. I ordered a yard of some cute apple oilcloth from an Etsy seller to use for the floor under his high chair, and a half yard in another colorway to experiment with. (This is the new vinyl laminated cotton oilcloth, not the old-school linseed oilcloth.)

The oilcloth is pretty easy to sew with. I used a free pattern I found online, and some commercial bias tape I had lying around to finish off the edge, since I don’t have a serger. The top pocket edge is just zigzagged for stability.

Here’s Griff modeling his new bib!

And the bib in action. It seemed to work quite well, and the pocket caught a bunch of junk.

After his dinner, Griff decided to kick back and have some feet for dessert.

Don’t judge me!

It’s been 365 days since I married the most terrific husband and dad ever.

And the most handsome man on the planet! 🙂

It’s been a very action-packed year.

I can’t wait to see what this one holds!

Mmmm. These are just regular old-fashioned rolled oats, not steel cut oats. (Steel cut oats are less processed, so why are they so frigging expensive???) We used this recipe, left out the wheat germ because we didn’t have any, and reduced the milk by 1 cup. This stuff will stick to your ribs as well as most of your internal organs. I’m looking forward to having leftovers for breakfast this week! Griff had some for his breakfast (with the big chokey fruit chunks taken out), and seemed to really enjoy it.