Midwife in Training

November 26th, my midwife came over for a homevisit.  We went over all the homebirth supplies and did the usual exam and chatting stuff.  Sprout was confused to see her in our home at first, but quickly warmed up and started showing off.  He helped give her a tour of our home and brought her toys to make her more comfortable. :)  He even brought her his monster slippers to put on him, instead of letting me do it!

When it came time to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, he was by her side pretending to use the doppler while she used the fetoscope.  When she was done, he grabbed the fetoscope and tried it on his own for a bit, while I got her to grab the camera.  Well, he wasn’t hearing what he needed to hear I guess, so he switched to the doppler (which, we typically have to do because of my anterior placenta.)  Sprout was quite serious about this baby monitoring business.

Yes, the house looks a wreck.  On the island, you can see most of my homebirth supplies.  Sprout’s jacket is the white thing on the couch.  Finally, some of the midwife’s equipment was on the floor near Sprout.

Blessingway and other updates

Last weekend I had my blessingway.  It was amazing.  We read poems, did some inspirational art, tied ourselves together with hemp (lol), and created a wonderfully supportive and loving atmosphere to help me prepare for the work of labor and birth ahead.  I was gifted with things to help me through labor and beyond: a soothing music cd, a soy vanilla lavendar candle, plenty of things to help ease my labor, some frozen homemade meals, laboraide to drink for strength, hemp slippers, nutritious snacks, gorgeous flowers, a wreath that we all made together, and the gift of having my closest friends (save 1) by my side to lend me their support.  Blessingways trump showers hands down.  I think if more women had blessingways, they would also have more confidence in labor and may be more prone to attempt the natural route.  I feel ready for my homebirth now and am pretty excited about it.  I have my supplies ready and waiting.  I have a lot of extra things to help me through labor that I didn’t have before and wouldn’t have thought of on my own.  I even have candles set up behind my bath tub with my other labor aids, to create a nice ambience for the herbal bath afterwards.  (I can’t pretend that I would care about them much in labor, lol.)

Aside from that, I’ve been knitting like crazy.  I knit one of my BFFs a slouchy beret from a pattern on ravelry.  I didn’t get a good outside shot, so an inside pic with flash will have to do.  I have to say, it looks great on her.  I’m really happy with how it turned out.  I gave it to her as part of her hostess gift for the blessingway, along with some fair trade soap and chocolate.

I’ve also cast on for Sprout’s presto chango sweater.  In fact, I’m nearly finished!  The expresso Blue Sky cotton is knitting up beautifully.  I’ve got the full body finished.  I just need to knit the front panel and then do the seaming and add buttons.  I’d love to make buttons for it out of tree branches, but my impatience may get the best of me on that one.  If anyone has some 5/8″ tree branches hanging around, please send me one.  I need enough for about 10 buttons.

Entrelac

So, tonight Sprout took a late nap/early bedtime and I thought it would be a good time to start on Lady Eleanor.  I cast on 56 stitches with my Bamboo Cotton and got to work.  Then I realized that maybe some practice would be in order since I’ve never actually done entrelac before.  I’m glad I stopped.  I recast on an 18 stitch pattern with three 6 stitch triangles to create a headband.  Well, I figured it out and I’m pretty sure I could follow the entire pattern just fine.  I did learn, however, that I don’t like the way my variegated yarn looks with entrelac.  It turns out that I need a longer striping yarn to make the perfect little patchwork blocks of color.  The variegation in this yarn just goes on and on and sort of hides the squares.  That means, that this yarn will ultimately be used for what it was bought for, the lovely Clapotis.

I did learn of another yarn that is vegan and pools just right for entrelac.  It’s called Marble and it’s 100% acrylic.  I’m really not sure how I feel about an acrylic Lady Eleanor.  She deserves a yarn that isn’t derived of petroleum.  I am going to give it a try as a headband, though, to see how it knits up and how it feels on the skin.  By that time, I’ll have plenty of practice with entrelac and possibly give Lady Eleanor another look once I find the right yarn for her.  /sigh  I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to remove that gorgeous scarf from my queue.  Until we meet again, Mrs. Eleanor…

Ravelry

I’m addicted.  I joined back in May - which was pretty late to the game, but I’ve only just started using it now.  I can’t believe what an awesome resource I was missing out on - well, had I been knitting.  It is absolute perfection.  I can easily keep track of things that I want to knit, keep track of my stash, needles, hooks, patterns, notes about gauge swatches, etc.  It’s also very visual, uber user friendly, and has a nice clean layout.  It’s simply genius.

So, my queue right now looks like:

2 Star crossed slouchy berets - one gift, one for me - both in blue sky cotton - 1 tomato, 1 graphite
1 Presto Chango sweater for Sprout - blue sky cotton - expresso
1 Lady Eleanor scarf - pour moi - Great Adirondack Bamboo Cotton - old english
1 Sleepy Sarah - an amigurumi practice pattern that I want to try, but this is really low on the list.

Of course, the queue on the actual ravelry site has links galore and photos and places for notes, etc.  It’s likely to change as I think of other things to knit for gifts.  I’m so tempted to start on the lady eleanor scarf, but it’s going to be a long knit, so I definitely have to get my gift knitting done first.  I did do a test swatch, though.  :)  Plus, I don’t have the right sized circs for it, so maybe they can be a gift from family who never knows what to get me - if I can wait that long.  I doubt it.

Why do I want to learn to crochet amigurumi?  The adorableness could kill a person.  I have a book with super cute patterns in it, but this turkey is simply AMAZING.  I would so love to crochet this up for a gift for Sprout for Thanksgiving, but I’m just not that skilled or fast, yet.  I will be purchasing the pattern, though.

My knitting bug is back!

I don’t know if this could be considered nesting or not.  I get together with two lovely ladies for craft time nearly every week.  They decided they wanted to learn to knit, so I think I can accredit them with giving me the knitting bug again.  We all have toddler boys and decided a good first project would be scarves for them.  I finished mine today and you should have seen the way Sprout strutted down the hallway modeling the finished project for me!  Here’s a pic of him checking it out before I had a chance to weave in all the ends.

Garter stitch scarf knit on 8’s with Rowan Calmer in discontinued color Amour and Pakucho organic, fair trade, color grown cotton.  The gauges weren’t exactly the same, so I faked it by doing 3 increases across each color change to Calmer and 3 decreases for the organic cotton.

November 5th

I’ll spare you all the gushing I did in my livejournal about Obama and America.  Let’s just say that I’m overjoyed with the results.

Black-eyed peas

No, not the group.

Tonight I ate black eyed peas for luck.  I plan on staying up as late as I can to watch the election results.  I really wish that I could attend or host a watch party.  Unfortunately, things like that are hard to manage with a toddler and when most of your friends have toddlers.  If I could have this fantasy party of mine, I’d have both virgin and regular drinks, plenty of goodies and snacks, hopefully some silly political hats, and some sort of games.  Back in reality, I’ll have a celebration of one.  I’ll likely make myself some hot chocolate to enjoy after the boy is asleep.  I’m nervous and excited and hopeful.  GOBAMA!

Happy Halloween!

Today was Sprout’s second Halloween, but the first time he went Trick or Treating.  The little lion caught on pretty quickly and by the third house he was reaching out and grabbing candy or holding out his bucket.  He still doesn’t talk much, but his adorableness won everyone over.  I think his favorite part, by far, was meeting all the neighborhood dogs.  The first few homes we went to had dogs inside and he kept trying to go inside to pet them, lol.  He actually cried when we left the first house, our neighbor to the right, because he didn’t want to leave their little poodle named, Pooh.

His daddy carried him around for the most part.  We didn’t want to walk too slow because the mosquitos were so bad.  I’m really glad he had long sleeves and pants on.  The weather wasn’t as cool as I would have liked, but he didn’t seem too hot in his costume.  When we were done walking around, we sat outside to hand out candy for a bit.  The mosquitos were just terrible, so we left the candy outside and let people help themselves.

Overall my little guy had quite a busy day.  This morning, we went to the chiropractor and both got free adjustments.  Then I took him to the Children’s museum to let him play a bit there.  We hadn’t gone since we’ve moved.  He wasn’t able to wear his costume during the day because of the heat, but he did get to wear his cute tie dyed shirt and his batty crocs.  By 9:30 he was conked out and sleeping peacefully.

132 bpm…

… is apparently the perfect drum beat for Sprout to break out the jam.  My midwife couldn’t hear the heartbeat with the fetoscope because of my anterior placenta.  I told her it was fine to whip out the doppler, so she did.  Sprout was standing nearby and couldn’t resist the beat when she got the doppler on target.  It was the most adorable thing ever.  My firstborn was dancing to his sibling’s heartbeat.  I was melting inside while I was dying with laughter.  It was so sweet!

As an aside, Sprout’s heartbeat was never that low.  It was always high 150s or somewhere in the 160s.

Breastfeeding

I’m not a big celebrity watcher, but I did come across the cover pic for the November 2008 issue of W magazine.  I think this is the most beautiful photo that I’ve ever seen of Angelina Jolie.  This can only be good for getting more people to consider breastfeeding their children if they hadn’t already.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/09/angelina-breastfeeding-pr_n_133305.html