conversations with invisible pigs and sheep

The beginning of this week was BUSY, culminating yesterday in Jim’s preschool graduation in the morning and a group outing to the Phillies game in the evening.

I don’t have any good photos of Jim’s graduation itself. I was running the video camera, and I should have brought the telephoto for my digital camera, but I can’t manage both, especially since I lost one of my lens covers.

Colin’s First Phillies Game:
This was taken in the 8th inning — he slept the 2nd to the 4th innings, woke up and was happy until he got in the car to go home. And then WAILED the entire car ride home (while Jim slept).

And then, something else:
The drawstring handbags I made for Jim’s teachers.

I LOVE the color combination of the one on the left — the brown is leftover linen from the skirt I made (and actually wore to graduation), but I should have interfaced it. I lined it with fleece instead. But the stripes were awesome. The bright one is better constructed, because of it’s all home decor weight fabric. I just prefer (for myself) the look of the plain fabric with the one pattern, rather than the mix of patterns.

New Hobby:

(My mother’s day present, a crochet pattern book. I’ve started an elephant and an apple.)

New Garden:

(Pictured l-r is zucchini, green peppers, plum tomatoes, regular tomatoes, basil, mint, and sunflowers. The sunflowers may not survive the heavy rain we got.)

New Glasses:

(Picked them out last week, picked them up today. No more headaches!)

New Haircut:

Had to go in the downpour yesterday, so we took advantage of being out, and finally got Colin’s hair cut. After his bath, I could re-create the fauxhawk!)

New Purse:

(Started this a couple weeks ago, working on it in bits and pieces. Finished it up Saturday. Like it alot, except I should have put a second pocket inside. I may go back and do that. Pattern is Wasp Bag from Machen Machen. I changed the way the handles were done, slightly, sewing them up then inserting them and topstitching. I left out her interior pockets and put in a zippered pocket for my phone.)

New skirts:

(The blue one needs ironing. Blue and pink were my first attempt, and are quilting cotton. The brown is linen I picked up on the cheap — $14.98. All are elastic waist a-lines.)

So, last week I found out I have inherited my family’s tendency towards high cholesterol. There’s that tendency, plus the list of foods the doctor told me to cut down on? Well, that’s been the makeup of my pregnancy/post-pregnancy/feed the kids diet for the past three years: eggs, cheese, red meat, fried food.

So, it’s high, and my LDL is also high, but the doctor thinks we can change it with diet. Since this is the family of the future, I downloaded some software to track my intake of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol, and found out what my intake of these should be, to reduce my cholesterol numbers.

So, of course I have put in in my height and weight into the software to calculate my caloric intake, and I’m told that I need to lose weight (duh?). So this is a new diet on many levels. Family now have an added challenge of either offering a low-fat option for me along with what the family eats or sometimes having a new low-fat meal. So for Colin’s birthday dinner, I made chicken cacciatore (not an authentic recipe, for sure) to go along with the lasagne that everyone else got to eat. Last night it was chicken stir-fry, and the night before was pot roast, but I only had one piece of roast. The good thing is that with all this cooking, there’s leftovers for lunch.

It’s kind of like being on Weight Watchers, but less strict. I’m not limiting my calories as much as if I were trying to “diet”, because I’m still nursing. But I also think that I’ll be able to cut down on calories as my appetite decreases. I’m already having an easier time today.

In the the “nothing much but” category… With all the cooking, there’s more veggie preparation too. Last night I cut my finger making the veggies for the stir fry. It hurts like crazy, and the cut is right where I rest the needle on my finger when knitting. So, I have to stop knitting on Jim’s sweater for now. Which bugs me because it’s so close to being done — just the neckline and seaming.

So, with no knitting, I picked up a sewing project. Which means cleaning up my office first. I got that done (amazingly), and I’m working on some aprons for two little girlfriends of Jim’s, and maybe one for me, too.

yesterday was pretty successful. We got Jim and Colin another set of matching shirts, some pants for colin, and one romper. and jim picked out a shirt and pants.

Today I barely got a 9m romper on Colin — the wrists and ankles are too short, and the ankles are too tight. I’m once again disappointed in the selection of boy’s clothes. The other romper choices from O.N. were too cheeky. There were nice ones in Gym-bor-ee, but pricey. But the online place that will have rompers are even more expensive. And L.E. is disappointing — their baby sizes are supposed to go to 24m, but the selections I was looking at only went to 9m or 12m. There’s Car-ter’s, which is my last option before going back to the pricier choices.

For the past two nights I’ve brought Colin into bed with us around 3am. He’s been eating like crazy, so it’s keeping me sane. I hope it’s not going to set us back. It’s also been a turnaround, since he’s also fallen asleep without crying these two nights too. He just won’t go back to sleep after waking in the middle of the night without eating.

Hopefully, I’m taking the kids out to the sewing store today, to look at halloween costume patterns.

Oh, and geeky me made an Excel spreadsheet to track the progress of my christmas project, and I’m 42.18% done right now. And because I’m looking for some other projects that don’t require so much concentration, I pulled out the sweater I started for Colin a while back. It needed the shoulders sewn together before the collar could be started, and I was having a problem with the shoulder seams. I slogged through, and I’m now in the process of binding off the collar — got most of it done in the library yesterday, with Colin asleep on my shoulder. All that’s left after that is sewing the rest together and adding buttons. Then, my next brainless project will be a sweater for Jim. I went through all the yarn and patterns that I kept out of storage, and this is what I kept out. The rest I put back into storage, although it’s accessible.

Dateline: Saturday, March 11

I had to get into the shower by 1.30 to give me enough time to dry my hair and dress, and then get Jim up from his nap at 2.00, so that we could get to the baby shower one time.

At 1.29.59, I sewed the last button on this:

When I was out of the shower, waiting for my hair to go from very wet to not-so-wet-but-not-yet-damp, I wrapped it up in a receiving blanket that I made for the baby as well.

Here’s a pic of the sweater and blanket together. The facts on the sweater and a view of the buttoned shoulder seam are here.