Here’s some stuff I’m absolutely loving right now:

1. WALKS. I love walks. We went for a walk today and I feel SO GOOD. Meli slept pretty much the whole walk, which kind of sucks because she woke up as soon as we got home so I didn’t get to work or anything, but still the walking and being outside felt so good! I had a nice chat with Margene (because I also LOVE my bluetooth headpiece) and got to walk pretty fast and even though it was a tad cold and a bit windy it was GREAT. SPRING IS COMING!

2. Music Choice Party Favorites. I love this music channel. I’ve taken to putting on the music channel on the tv while Meli and I play (or Meli plays and I get five minutes here and there to, say, blog.) It’s always songs I know and they’re usually upbeat (it’s the PARTY channel) and there’s a great diversification. For instance, in the past half hour we’ve heard The Brothers Johnson, KISS, Right Said Fred, Blondie, The Beach Boys and Gloria Gaynor. Nice mix, no? And when a really good song comes on I scoop up DJ MeliMel and we dance dance dance! The best though is when she’s playing by herself and all of a sudden a new song comes on and she starts bopping her head and shaking her little tush and she’s just so cute!

3. Pyrex Glass Storage Containers. One day I was in the supermarket and passed these storage containers. On a whim I bought a bunch of them in all different sizes. I’m so tired of using plastic storage containers and having them get gross after you put one leftover spaghetti dinner in them and with all the news these days about how bad plastics are I thought this might be a really nice alternative. I love them for heating up stuff for the baby. They’re glass. I don’t have to worry! And they get clean. Really clean. No matter what you put in them.

4. Corolle Dolls. For the holidays, Meli received two dolls. Both Corolle. One Babipouce, and one Sorbet Melodie. While the Babipouce is very nice and we’ve been playing with it a lot more lately (she has a plastic face and Meli likes to point to her nose and mouth and smells like vanilla), I just adore the Sorbet Melodie doll. It’s so soft and so well made and it comes in this great box and it’s colorful and bright and really I can’t say enough good things about this doll. In fact, I love it so much I bought the other Melodie doll – Pink Melodie. I resisted it at first because I thought Sorbet Melodie was less girlie and it assuaged my feminist guilt at buying my daughter a doll (and not, say, a dump truck) but I saw Pink Melodie in the store and thought it was so beautiful that I gave in. (Sorbet on the left, Pink on the right.)

The pictures do NOT do these dolls justice. They are perfectly floppy with limbs Meli can grab and go. Unfortunately, as much as I’d love it to be the case, my daughter is not a lovey type. So far anyway. I, on the other hand, still sleep with my blankie. Every night. I even found the same blanket I have and bought her a bunch but I haven’t been diligent about making her love them and honestly all she wants is the boob. But maybe one day she’ll love one of these dolls, and if not, I can love them. Which brings me to

5. Nursing. I’ve been loving nursing lately more than ever. Maybe because she’s getting so old so fast but when we nurse she’s still my baby. It’s so freaking easy now too, she practically nurses herself. Yes, it’s annoying sometimes to still wake up a bunch of times at night but I don’t care. I know that at some point it will all end and even if we both agree that it’s the right time, I will still be very very sad.

7. Sesame Street. Cliche, I know, but there’s this one episode I taped off of On Demand and it’s something like Sesame Street Sing-a-long episode and every skit is a song. Meli LOVES it. Loves it! If I put it on when I need to chill for a minute she’ll dance along and squeal and we sing all the songs together. If she’s being particularly ornery or cranky and nothing I do will calm her down I can put it on and she’s quiet in seconds. Maybe not the best parenting, but whatever. It’s a miracle. Oh and add to this Thomas the Tank Engine. Specifically the episodes narrated by the late great George Carlin. Seriously. It’s like the most perfectly perfect thing ever. (Although, I just read that Ringo Starr narrated them at one point. I would love to hear those! We just watched A Hard Day’s Night the other day and Ringo might be my favorite Beatle. At least today.)

6. Knitting. Knitting. Knitting. And Monkey Socks. And Socks That Rock sock yarn. There will be much more coming on this but for now I think that says it all.

What are you loving these days? Share, please!

Some people think they have the Tiger Beat set covered. I beg to differ!

This song came up on our cable music. Baby and I were rocking out! Who else remembers taking the plastic cover off the Tickle deodorant bottles and using it as a microphone? Not to mention my brother on the (flash) lights while my sister and I choreographed our dances. Ahh the 70s!

Incidentally, I started a new project. 😉

Have a SUPER Sunday!

Well, dirtiness, if we’re going to be honest. The bathrooms are clean, as of 10:30 PM last night. I took lots and lots of breaks. No knitting though, unless you count casting on a new monkey sock. I knit 2.5 rounds too.

These are the products I currently LOVE:

— Mr. Clean Magic Erasers
— Anything and everything called KABOOM
— Tilex (ROCKS!)
— Anything and everything called SWIFFER (especially the dusters – those things are AWESOME!)
— Windex
— The attachments on my kick ass vacuum (Which I bought INSTEAD of a Dyson. Real life reviews turned me off, even if it looks nicer. I’ve never looked back.)

I cranked the radios all over the house and set to work. It sucked. Please don’t tell me about environmentally safe cleaners – I know they’re out there and this is the stuff I like. Besides, there’s nothing environmentally safe about the disgustingness that is my house.

Do I feel good about what I did? I guess. Except now I don’t want anyone to ever use the bathrooms again. They look so nice and clean. I think I would be happier if the rest of the house wasn’t awful and I didn’t have so much work to do. But, such is life. Georgie asked me if I wanted something special for dinner because I worked so hard and I said YES! PIZZA! So while I completed the task I set out for myself today, I totally blew the diet. And I felt sick after the pizza (even though it tasted great while I was eating it.) Should’ve gone with a Lean Cuisine instead.

A couple things I wanted to point out –

I feel incredibly guilty that I received so many supportive emails in the last week or so and I haven’t responded to ANY of them (at least you can’t say I’m playing favorites.) Please know – I got your email and I appreciate it so much I can’t tell you. I could send out a cut and paste email, but that’s not what I really want to say, and I’m afraid if I really start answering them I’ll never get up from my computer. Thank you thank you thank you! I’m not sure I can say it any better than that anyway. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your taking the time to reach out. (Doesn’t really assuage the guilt, but it helps a little. Trying to be grown up here people.)

Last night I bought the most expensive pattern I’ll ever buy. Right here. Annie Modesitt, a popular fiber artist, is offering her Red Carpet Convertible pattern as a way of accepting donations to help offset the costs of caring for her family and her husband, who’s been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. I do not know Annie. I’ve never knit one of her patterns. But I know all too well that cancer sucks harder and longer and not in the good way than anything else out there. Consider downloading the pattern. The minimum donation is $4.50. That’s not asking much from us, and it’s a small price to pay to help give peace of mind to this family while they try to heal. (Thanks to Deb for the heads up.)

And then there’s Liz. RIP. Thanks for making a great pair of pants and for giving me my dressing room miracle.

Back to work. One day I’ll knit again, maybe even for reals and not just in my mind.

or…Part This Muthafucka!

Happy holidays everyone!

Today Lene wrote about how happy she is to be in the middle of her projects. To say I’m jealous doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel. I’m not in the middle of ANYTHING. Not work, not a book, not my knitting (well, technically that’s not really true, but…), not my spinning. Blah. Which has left me in an icky mood and I’m not sure what I want to write about so I’ll tell you some of the options:

— I could write about the socks I have on the needles that are just not doing it for me right now. I could talk about how I think about starting fifty bazillion NEW projects, like the Anemoi mittens, about a thousands times a second and then I get too tired thinking about it to even LOOK at the yarn, let alone wind it up.

— I could write about how I did too much work the other day and now I’m in between processing shoots and how my computer is making me nuts (just when eveything was finally working great) and it’s taking forever to get things going on the next job. I could write about how I was feeling like I had so much work going on and now I don’t have any on the horizon and how in about a half an hour I’m going to start panicking that no one will ever hire me again. I could also write about how I’m about to embark on a whole new work project that will hopefully do great things for my business and how I’m working with other people on this so I have to wait for them and spend lots of money and how I dream about how good it’s going to be but then I get scared that it won’t work and I’ll have wasted money and this business stuff is really scary. I’m finally getting to a place where I sort of kind of know how good I am and the potential there is for my business but I don’t know all the things I should do to grow it and then I think I’m a fake after all and it’s quite overwhelming and exciting sometimes!

— I could write about how I’m trying very hard to knit Am Kamin. I’m trying hard to love it and everytime I try to knit the freaking swatch I feel like a complete idiot because I’m trying to read the charts which aren’t even in Japanese, they’re in KNIT, which is a language I’d like to think I can speak but so far I can’t even tell which are the right side rows and which are the wrong side rows. Positives: I love the yarn I might end up using. I know how to do a tubular cast on now. I can make great photocopies of charts. Whoo HOO!

— I could write about how the Am Kamin thing is really depressing me because I NEED to knit another sweater and all signs point to this one but it’s just not working out and I think I should move on to something else but what else is there and then I could write about how there are 87,419,532 sweater patterns out there but I don’t like ANY of them.

— I could write about how my 20th High School reunion is this May and how there’s a website that I check a few times a day (which, by the way, I don’t think makes me obsessed. I know that each and every one of you – if there was a website where people you went to high school with were posting pictures of themselves now and telling you how many kids they had and whether or not they’re married and what they do for a living that you would be looking at it a few times a day too!) Yesterday I put myself on there (I used a picture from the CPH photoshoot) and how I have incredibly mixed feelings about the whole thing. I don’t speak to anyone I went to high school with and save for one friend, I never talked to ANY BODY after I left home the summer of graduation. So I’m pretty sure I’m not going to the reunion. I’d love to be a fly on the wall but unless they knit, after the obligatory what have you been doing for the last 20 years? I really don’t have anything to say to any of them. But the whole I’m 20 yrs out of high school – how did that happen because I still feel the same inside – albeit wiser and happier – as I did then thing is kind of freaky. Time flies, huh!

— I could write about the fact that I’m so not in the middle of anything that yesterday I washed the sheets on my bed, folded laundry, and vacuumed the disgusting carpet in my dining room. Yes. I did housework. Ann wanted me to check for alien probe entry points.

I hope you’re in the middle and it feels oh so good!

PS – Tell Margene happy blogiversary! Three years and counting!