Easter Fun

We had a lovely Easter. Just the three of us. 

There were eggs to find.

With lots of treats inside! 

Eggs in shoes! What a funny Easter Bunny!

The sunshine led to a walk.  A hike through the woods by our house. Just down to the beach. 

And some swings. A walk that ends with a trip to a park and swings is the best kind of walk ever!

(Note her knitted hat; it's the pumpkin hat I made her before she was born. She's out grown it but refuses to wear the one I made her this winter. She always grabs it when I say, get your hat. A lady today thought she looked really cute in her carrot hat. I went with it. Maybe next winter she'll wear the one I made her this year. You know, when it's clearly too small for her.)

I hope you had a lovely day too!

Happy Easter!

What's missing from the blog?

I've been looking over my blog lately and I realized what's been missing from Meg's Knitting Knot: the knitting.

I entered 2013 with just a few goals: do more writing (such as getting my blog going again) and to knit for myself. While the first goal is going somewhat well (I'd like to post more but due to lack of time/energy/mostly nothing that interesting to say I don't), the second isn't going that well. But I am knitting.

I'm almost finished with a baby gift for a dear friend who's expecting her first baby (a girl) in early May. I'm making the Baby and Toddler Tiered Coat. It's pictured here in a rare moment of quiet. The wee one was asleep. The hubby was out of the house. And I either finished the chores or chose to ignore them and sit in the sunlight on the couch. It was glorious. I'll post a photo once I'm finished with the gift.

Oh, and my hat obsession may have come to an end. I finished Rosebud by Jared Flood. It's gray, it's slouchy and I love it. I just haven't taken any photos of it. I'll work on that for you all. I know you can't wait!

this moment

~
Over at SouleMama, she has a Friday ritual called this moment - a single photo, no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor & remember.
~

I thought I'd start doing it as well.

Have a photo from your week you'd like to share? Leave it in the comments section, I'd love to see it.

Patching, bracing & another guest post

I've written another guest blog post for Little Four Eyes, a great blog and resource for parents of children with a variety of eye issues.

This post is particularly important to me as it is heart wrenching: to brace or not to brace Ruby's arms in order to keep her from ripping off her eye patch after 25 seconds of wearing it. It's a tactic that does work. It's just one I was hoping to avoid.

I've been showing Ruby that her baby doll (the blue one) needs to wear her eye patch in order to see well. Each night when we come home, we patch her doll and give her a big kiss and a hug for being so brave. Now she's beginning to think all of her dolls have eye issues as well. This is going to be an expensive training lesson. 

A little "eye" obsessed

A while ago I started teach Ruby about body parts. 

We started with "Where's your nose?" and quickly moved on to "Show mama your toes."

She got pretty good at it. She can tell you where her head is. Her ear. Her tummy and of course belly button. She'll show you her teeth and pucker up her lips when you ask her. She knows her knees and she did look at me funny yesterday when I started explaining where her elbow was.

But, boy is this girl ever good at finding her eye.

Perhaps it's because we pay more attention to her eye than pretty much any body part in the house. And she knows it too.

She'll just look at me now and point to her eye and say "Eye!" She has no problem walking up to you and sticking her finger in your eye (when one is at her level) and letting you know that's your eye.

She points out eyes on all of her dolls and her teddy bear. The other night, as I read her a book, every time I turned a page we had to stop and point out all of the eyes on the little duck and little goose as they went on their merry way to find a pumpkin. (It's a holiday book but she loves it so much we keep it out all the time.)

The thing that gets me about this is, she only points to her right eye. The bad eye. The eye I'm always fussing over. 

Is the contact still in her eye? Is it actually over the pupil so we can patch? I now have eye patches in easily accesible places on both floors of the house so I can just grab one (or 5) and start the fun once we've looked at the eye.

I wonder if she knows she has two eyes since only one really works and we're always fussing over the other?

Now, if I can only teach her to say, "Mama, my contact has popped out of my eye. We must stop what we're doing right now and look for it."

For the record, when we took our baby sign language class I did ask the instructor to teach me to sign contact and she looked at me like I was nuts. I was the first parent in her 15+ years of teaching baby sign language that had asked that question. Come to think of it, she never really taught me the sign for "where's your contact?"

What the crock?

You know those food blog posts where people praise their cooking abilities? How their recipes turned out just perfectly? 

This is not one of those posts.

By a long shot.

This post is this:

This is what I came home to one night last week. It was supposed to be Asian beef. But instead it was burnt crap. And the house smelled like burnt tomatoes and vinegar. It was so disappointing. Not only was I looking forward to another crock pot success, but I had actually told people about this great new recipe I found, how I had it cooking while I was at work. Yup, I had this working mama thing down people! 

And then I came home.

I think we ended up ordering pizza.

I can't remember. The rest of the night was a blur.

And it took two days of soaking in sudsy warm water to get that crap out of my pot.

Any crock pot winners you'd like to share? I could use a few good recipes please!

Patching update: little victories

Little victories.

That's what I'm savoring this week.

I've got a new eye patching plan. Two new boxes of patches. And new found determination to make us get through this phase of utter shit. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

I've started patching her baby doll. I talk about how important it is for baby doll (she really needs a name) to wear her eye patch so she can have two good eyes.

So far, Ruby just laughs when I put the patch on her. 

Then she takes off the patch and runs to daddy to give him the patch so he can be the hero daddy and rescue her and baby doll from the evil patch.

I also decided that eye patch = iPad time. I downloaded some fun toddler apps. She has zero interest in them. I also downloaded several episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba (all my mom friends swear this is the most adult tolerable show. So far I've seen about ten minutes of an episode and I think they're all smoking crack. This is the tolerable show? Oh lord....)

The other night, armed with my new tools and confidence, I put Yo Gabba Gabba on the iPad, put Ruby in front of it where she was immediately mesmerized by whatever those dancing things are. And then after a few minutes, I put on a patch, held her hands and helped her dance to the music. At first, it was working! She was watching the show, dancing and laughing! I was thinking OK, I did it! We can do this! We can patch! We can have two good eyes! 

And then two minutes went by and Ruby had had enough. Enough of the patch. Enough of me. And probably enough of Yo Gabba Gabba. After a long struggle with her to keep the patch on, she won, ripped the patch off and ran to daddy.

Not ready to throw the patch in, I let her calm down. Put the patch on baby doll. Talked about how important it was and then put the show back on the iPad and waited for her to come back over to me. She did. And I got her with another patch. This time she was on to me. We struggled, cried, wrestled and she ripped it off. Then she ran over to baby doll and ripped it off of her. 

Then, to give me a piece of my own medicine, she came back to me and stuck the patch on my eye and I swear she giggled.

She's right. Wearing the patch does suck.

But I'm sorry my dearest sweet baby girl. You have to wear this patch.

You can do it. We can do it together. You, me, daddy & baby doll.

Luscious Lemons

My in-laws recently came for a visit shortly have their trip to Southern Arizona (ah...the retired life). They brought us a big bag of fresh citrus from their families backyard! Knowing how much I love oranges, they thought it would be a fun treat for me! (Notice how there aren't any pics of said oranges? Yeah...that's because I scarfed those bad boys down so freakin' quickly. Seriously. Love. Oranges.)

But now, I've got these great big lemons that are beautiful to look at and smell even better.

So what should I do with them? 

Cutting them up and putting slices in my water seems like such a waste.

I feel these beauties are destined for something so much better.

Ideas? I'm ready.

Go.

this moment

Over at SouleMama, she has a Friday ritual called this moment - a single photo, no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor & remember.

I thought I'd start doing it as well.

Have a photo from your week you'd like to share? Leave it in the comments section, I'd love to see it.

A hand knit kind of day

I've always loved the Anouk pattern from the Yarn Harlot. When I found out I was having a girl, I pretty much went from the ultrasound appointment to the yarn story to get yarn for this sweet dress. But as life with a baby is pretty messy and now life with a toddler is also messy and much more mobile, the dress got shoved to the back of the closet. Until the recently.

I pulled it out and decided today was a hand knit kind of a day. And you know what? The wee one agreed with me.

Then she decided my hand knit hat Foliage would be the best choice to complete her look.

She was right.

Details of both projects can be found on my Ravelry page.

Mini Muffins

Now that I have a wee person who's wanting real food to eat all by herself, I have to be a wee bit creative. She's hungry when we get home from work & daycare. I'm not. But I have to have something healthy for her dinner. And it needs to be relatively quick. I've become pretty good at making big batches of stuff & freezing it for her. Then lunches and dinners are ready & just need to be popped in the microwave and voila - a yummy dinner!

And the same I'm happy to report goes for one of her favorite treats: muffins! She gets one for a morning snack every day and she loves them! I love that these are made from scratch and I know exactly what goes into them. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients - also key for me.

I try to make a different batch of muffins each time she's running low. Plus, variety is the spice of life! 

Or something like that.

While I always try to vary the recipes, I always seem to have bananas going bad around here. I've got some chopped up and frozen for my smoothies, but there's still more going bad. So I did a little Internet sleuthing and came up with this gem of a recipe: Banana Oatmeal Muffins. There are several variations on the web and I'm going to try some others some day. But so far, this one is my go-to-always-generates-a-smile-recipe.