A fun Saturday morning at the NC Museum of Life + Science.

Communicating with the sheep in their own language!

It’s never too early to start min-maxing your Halfling Beguiler character with Daddy’s help.

More scooting.

Give a toddler a colander and some pipe cleaners, and this is what you get.

And this is what you get 10 minutes later.

Griff’s sweater has been separated into body and sleeves and the boring mindless body knitting slog can commence.

Griff was less than thrilled about trying on the partly finished sweater (it fit fine). In fact, in this photo, it looks like we’ve rigged him up in some kind of woolly toddler bondage gear. Now everyone who googles for “woolly toddler bondage gear” will find my blog. Yay!

This weekend we didn’t have any particular plans, so we ended up going to a lot of parks with Griff. Cornwallis Road Park off 15-501 is now one of our favorites; it’s conveniently right on the way to South Square and No Hope Commons/Patterson Place, and we feel less guilty about dragging Griff on errands if he’s had some time to run around outside first.

We discovered a great toy store this weekend in Patterson Place: Learning Express. We stopped by to see if we could find something fun for Griff to either ride on or push around outside, and he promptly attached himself to a Kickboard mini-scooter and rode it around the store until we left (under violent protest from Griff). The staff were very patient with us and didn’t even visibly roll their eyes as Griff repeatedly rode the floor model scooter through the cash register area and nearly took out several displays around the store. Sean and I were both too busy keeping Griff from destroying the place to get a good look at the merchandise, but the selection seemed to be fantastic for a wide range of ages.

Griff’s a bit under the recommended age for the scooter, but he’s the right size to use it, he absolutely loves it, and we think he’ll be able to use it for a few years at least. The three wheels make it very stable. The only times he’s fallen off are when he’s tried to ride it into the grass.

He doesn’t really have the scooting motion down, but he does seem to understand that he needs to ride with one foot and kick with the other. He doesn’t quite have the coordination to put the motions together yet, but he’ll get there. He’s fine with standing on it and letting mom or dad push him along. We managed to do the entire paved circuit at Little River Park with him riding on the scooter or scoot-walking!

I love how at the end of this video, he’s like, “Screw this, I’m going in the opposite direction!”

Griff also discovered alternate ways to use the scooter!

Griff took time out from his busy scooting schedule to collect fallen branches and examine the water spigots at the picnic shelters. He is totally fascinated by the water spigots at every park we go to. No idea what the attraction is.

Hey Dad, can you hold these for me???

I’m a little disappointed in my progress on Griff’s sweater. I’m about halfway done with the yoke, but I had been hoping to be a little farther along by now. However, I’m loving the way the colors are all working together, and it seems like it may be a bit big, so at least he won’t outgrow it before I’m finished knitting it. Probably.

~

Now that I’m working again, we end up packing a pretty ridiculous amount of stuff into our weekends. This weekend was no exception. We went to the Durham farmers market, had a nice lunch outside on the patio at Tyler’s, went to Wake Forest for a birthday dinner and celebration for my dad, did a couple grocery/general shopping runs, got Griff his first professional haircut, stopped for post-haircut frozen yogurt, and tried to go for a walk around West Point on the Eno (except we parked, turned around, and found Griff completely passed out in his carseat, over an hour before he was “supposed” to be napping). Also, I made my first batch of homemade doughnuts, and started knitting a sweater for Griff. No wonder we’re so treaking fired. 😉

Some photo highlights of the weekend:

Griff climbing on the turtle at Durham Central Park.

I have to show some photos of this inexcusable cake wreck we special-ordered from the N Durham Harris Teeter, which has the most incompetent bakery staff of any Harris Teeter in the Triangle. This is a special order cake, this is not a cake being sold at a deep discount over in the scratch and dent section of the bakery cooler. Griff and Sean were waiting in the car when I ran in to pick it up, so I just glanced at it and headed out. Once we got home and looked at it, it became obvious that the cake was severely sloped and a half inch shorter on one corner than the other, there were gobs of crumbs/cake showing through the icing at the back, and whatever alcoholic had scrawled the message on the cake had put it in “frigging quotes”.

I was too embarrassed to give this piece of crap to my poor Dad, so I called Robin and begged her to pick up another cake at a real Harris Teeter in Raleigh.

See? Perfectly level.

My dad put Griff to work on sweeping the porch right away.

We made my Dad blow out the minimum required number of candles (3).

We all enjoyed the cake, but Griff enjoyed it on a different level.

If he grows up and grows a black Hitler mustache and a beard that resembles that Wooly-Willy guy who you add a beard to with a magnet and iron filiings, this is what he’ll look like.

And on to the doughnuts. I made pumpkin spice doughnuts using this recipe adapted from one at Epicurious. When she says this is a sticky dough, believe it. It was a real pain to work with and it stuck to everything in sight, which was really annoying when cutting it out and trying to move it from place to place. Luckily, doughnut dough doesn’t mind being worked over and reshaped a lot. I used my largest and smallest biscuit cutters to cut the doughnuts. It took a little fiddling to figure out the right burner setting to keep the oil from losing too much heat after the dough was added, but otherwise, this was a messy and time-consuming but not very difficult project.

The dough really puffs up, so don’t make the doughnuts overly thick. If they’re too thick they’ll take longer to cook through, and you’ll risk burning the outsides.

I found that a fondue fork was perfect for flipping the doughnuts over and fishing them out. I used a metal barbeque spatula for the holes. The holes really needed to be kept spinning in the oil to cook evenly.

I rolled the doughnuts in cinnamon/nutmeg sugar. They were deeeeelicious. This recipe makes an absolute ton of doughnuts, and we have a lot of leftovers. If they’re still decent tomorrow we’ll have them for breakfast again. Next time I’ll halve the recipe.

And on to the knitting. I’m knitting this sweater (Ravelry link) out of brown Plymouth Galway and the squooshy 3-ply handspun that I made from the FatCatKnits Polwarth fiber. This pattern is perfect for small amounts of handspun, and I think the colors are going to be fantastic together.

Last but not least, Griff’s haircut. Sean and I have been finding it increasingly tricky to trim Griff’s hair, and the last haircut I gave him was so bad it made me want to put a paper bag over his head. He was starting down the toddler mullet path and it was driving us both insane every time we looked at him.

Sean found a place called “Peek-a-Do” (yeah, yeah, shut up) near Southpoint and we decided to give it a try. It went very well. The stylist was really good with Griff and he was totally enthralled with the toys she gave him to play with (there was a DVD of “Cars” playing also, which he totally ignored). In fact, he was so enthralled with the toys that he had to be dragged out of the salon kicking and screaming! Yay toddlerhood!

Griff loves breakfast more than anyone I’ve ever seen. This morning, he put away a bowl of oatmeal (and this wasn’t just oatmeal, it was hot muesli with almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds, made with half whole milk, and I added a chopped apple and some raisins), a whole banana, and a 4oz container of yogurt. I turned around at some point and saw him picking up his bowl to lick the last of the yogurt out of the bottom. I have no idea where he puts it all. Toddler stomachs are supposed to be small, right?

Crazily enough, I finished some knitting projects this week. This is pretty huge for me, given my limited free time these days. These are my flip-top mittens, made in a combo of Cascade 220 and some of my 2-ply handspun. (The handspun is superwash, but the Cascade isn’t. Shhhh!) I’m very pleased with them overall as my first colorwork project; the blocking did wonders in terms of evening out the stitches. The one thing I wish I had done differently is to put ribbing on both edges of the “hole”, but the curling at the bottom edge hopefully won’t bother me too much. The stranding will make them nice and warm this winter, and being able to easily extract my fingers to do stuff that requires actual dexterity will be really useful.

I also managed to eke out a matching Calorimetry headband with the leftovers from the mittens, two strands held together. It’s thick, squishy and warm. I wear my hair up most of the time, so a hat isn’t really an option in cold weather. Now I just need to pick out a button for it.

Since this blog is the closest thing we have to a baby book, some vital stats. At his 18-months-and-2-days appointment, Griff weighed in at 32lbs 3.5oz and measured 35.5 inches long. (So close to being a full yard! I knew I should’ve stretched him on the rack a little longer.) He wears 18-month pants, a 3T shirt (long torso like daddy and great-grandma), and size 9-10 toddler shoes. His favorite word is “Uh-oh!”

Whether posing underneath the slides at a park…

..chowing down at his favorite Mexican restaurant…

…exploring the mysteries of the HVAC system with his trusty lawn mower…

…enjoying an upside-down book in his easy chair…

…petting a very tolerant kitty….

…finding a new use for a bike rack…

…or calling to report something strange in his neighborhood (there’s something weird, and it don’t look good)…

…Griff is a pretty awesome little man.

I maded some yarn! Yay!

This Falkland wool top that I dyed up a couple years ago…

…spun over a period several months…

…became this chain/Navajo plied DK to (mostly) heavy aran weight yarn. 218 yards, 5oz.

I have become a total Chain-Ply Ho. I love 3-ply, it’s so round and so squishy and so nice to knit with. I do not love having to spin up 3 separate bobbins, however, and I hate having leftover singles. I used to think chain-ply was kinda cheating, but who the hell am I kidding, I barely have time to do grocery shopping these days, let alone get all uppity about spinning techniques. Once I saw this video of Sarah Anderson doing chain-ply in her mellow, zen, Bob-Rossian way, it was all over.

The one bone to pick I have with this yarn is that I apparently started spinning the singles while thinking “thin! socks! fingering weight!” and then somewhere along the way I started thinking “hat! sweater! worsted! fat! squishy!”, so the yarn starts out at probably a DK weight and settles into a heavy aran weight later on. I’m thinking the longer color runs might make it nice to use as part of a top down yoked sweater with some simple colorwork or stripes.

Griff has taken teething to all all new level of crappiness this weekend by popping out four canine teeth simultaneously and waking up in the middle of the night crying from the pain. In between doses of ibuprofen, we’ve been trying to coax him to eat lots of soft and/or cold things, since his appetite has not been up to his usual I-need to-feed-thirteen-tapeworms standards.

Peach and strawberry ice cream at the farmers market was a hit…

…as was a homemade frozen chocolate pudding pop, although the more he ate, the wronger and wronger it looked.

We also managed to coax out a few smiles (and drool) at a nearby playground. The playgrounds in Durham are oddly deserted on weekends.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had any knitting or spinning content on the blog, so here’s a selection of wool top that I dyed this past weekend. There’s a variety of different fibers: superwash Corriedale, Shetland, Rambouillet, and Finnsheep.

These were all intended to be for sale. I had originally planned to sell them at a gathering this weekend where a friend was going to be vending her fibery creations, but the first week back at work really kicked my butt, and with Griff teething and in a semi-permanent state of cranky-nose-faucet ever since he started day care, we decided it would be best to skip the event.

I’m really glad we did, because I’ve come to the realization that I totally hate selling stuff I made. Hate hate hate. The entire time I was dyeing these fibers, I wasn’t having the least bit of fun. I was fretting over whether people would like the colors, whether all the dye had exhausted, if I had rinsed out any excess well enough, and if so, if I had compressed and matted the fibers too much, and so on and so on.

I was recently thinking back to the 6 months or so I had an Etsy store. It was an extremely stressful time. I worried about shipping, I worried about whether people would like the fibers once they got them, I worried about whether they would spin well.

In short, I’m just not cut out to sell stuff. I have no problem giving things away (in fact, I enjoy it), but once money exchanges hands, the whole situation becomes really unpleasant for me. So I think my days of dyeing fiber (or making anything else) to sell are over. And now I get to keep everything for me. Woohoo!

Last Monday I started back at work, after a year and three weeks at home with Griff.

The week started like this, with lots of effort and uncertainly.

And then we pushed off, and away we went!

Somebody stop this crazy thing!

It was a wild ride in the middle…

…but at the end, we survived, and finished up smiling.

Given today’s 110-degree heat index, we decided to try something new and air-conditioned as a treat for Griff during the last day of this week’s mini-staycation. We had read some positive reviews of BigEBounce in Cary, and headed that way this morning to try out their toddler room. We were not disappointed.

We went during the morning open play hours, but without a reservation. Despite this, the owners let us in for the cheaper reservation price, which saved us $3. Very nice! Parents are not charged an entrance fee.

A staff member gave us a brief tour and promised that the toddler area would be blocked off and monitored to make sure the bigger kids didn’t come in. This was one of the main reasons we chose this facility, since a 15-month-old doesn’t stand much of a chance against a horde of boisterous day camp tweens. (They were expecting 100 older kids in the other rooms during the morning!) The staff were as good as their word, and we had the entire toddler area to ourselves for a lot of the time, although another little guy around Griff’s age joined the fun partway through our visit. This was a big plus, because while he refused to follow mom and dad into some of the more enclosed bounce house areas, Griff was unable to resist imitating what this slightly older toddler was doing.

Standing in the middle of a giant bouncy platform while trying to photograph an overstimulated 1-year-old doesn’t result in crisp, clear images, but here are a few highlights of our visit. Definitely the best $6 we’ve spent in a while! Anyone with a kid under 5 who hasn’t had good experiences at the more mixed-ages places should definitely give this one a try. They also have a giant bouncy maze/slide room for the bigger kids, as well as ping-pong tables and a ton of videogame consoles to keep the older ones entertained. The free wifi was nice, too.