Step Into My Thimble

Tie dye has never been my thing (OK maybe for a few months in high school). But when you have piles of plain white baby onesies, and some crappy Rit dye that has been sitting around for a long time, and a big drawer full of rubber bands saved from the newspaper, and (most importantly) a fascination with crafts that have unpredictable results, what do you do? Tie dye!

None of the sizes of shirts are quite right for miss Maeve at the moment–some are too big, some too small (those will be gifts). Here she is daydreaming about the day she can fit into her funky shirts.

This weekend we are going to Chicago for a visit. We’ll be the jerks on the Amtrak with the screaming kid, for a change…

Peaches for me.

It’s Rodney who truly loves the peach, but I’ll eat them in cobbler form any day. This is Spiced Peach Cobbler (vegan-style with soy milk and soy margarine) from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone.

And hey guess what!! A knitting finished object. Here we have the Everyday Cardigan, my very own design for Briar Rose Fibers. It just needs some buttons and a bit more steaming and then it will truly be my Everyday sweater for fall 2006.

The Michigan Fiber Fest…a pleasurable activity every August despite the guarantee of wretched humidity. I went with a local friend and her little girl who is one month older than Maeve, and I got to meet Chicagoland knitting pal MP from OP, as well as her husband JP, and the star of the day, their baby boy FP. He is so so cute. Maybe Maeve can grow up to be his penpal if anybody’s still writing letters in 2025.

All us moms hung out and publicly breastfed, slingified, and cloth diapered our kids on the lawn during the 2:00 dogherding demonstration, and later in one of the vendor barns a woman congratulated us for the nursing. She pointed to her teenage son and said “I nursed him until he was four.” Oh the teen humiliation, but he looked so healthy and great. I used to think extended breastfeeding was an unusual lifestyle choice, but now that I am a nursing woman and I know the power it holds, I will be happy to nurse Maeve as long as she wants to. So there you go, now that is out in the open.

As for the Fest, ordinarily I seek out the booth for Tintagel Farms. I love their variegated colorways; you may recall my Kepler being made out of their Artichoke plus a solid. The woman who runs the booth shares with another fiber artist whose business is called Persimmon Tree Farm–more beautiful yarn but at a slightly higher price. This year, my one yarn investment was from Persimmon Tree, a lovely warm pinky pastel colorway that just yelled Easter–which as you may recall was Maeve’s day of birth this year.

Of course it wouldn’t be MI Fiber Fest without a visit to Briar Rose Fibers in its lovely tent. I’m so happy to see that business was booming and that I got 30 seconds to say hello to Chris and Christy between customers. Maybe next year when Maeve isn’t crying due to teething pain (will it ever stop) or her dislike of the sling, I’ll be able to browse to my heart’s content and check out the new stuff in person.

And I saw a woman with a black T-shirt that said “Knitting Librarian.” Who are you? Are you in my web ring? Where the heck did you get that F*&#%g awesome shirt? I should have had the guts to tackle her and find out.

New YouTube of Maeve’s goofy gargling noise is here.

OK this doesn’t quite capture the futuristic thing I was imagining while I took it. Maeve likes to practice sitting up in the boppy, and we just recently put in that paper lantern over the bed.

Things are a little better now that I cut out dairy (even though I can’t imagine ever liking soy milk or any other dairy alternative permanently), and we’ve had two good nights of sleep. Trying to make sure she gets in a long afternoon nap seems to help everyone’s mood as well, even though a lot of intervention is required for the first hour or so of the nap. Once she’s completely out, she can sleep for up to four hours, and then she is just so unbelievably pleasant for the rest of the evening.

Tomorrow she is four months old. Time does fly with a wee one!

This has been one of the hardest weeks of parenthood so far.

Last weekend Maeve started having blood in her diapers. Scary! But more common than you think. Her behavior is otherwise normal, with plenty of cheerfulness and giggling all day, and nursing is still just fine. So what is it? Sources point to a food allergy, probably milk, as the most likely cause. So that means I have changed my diet, which I really never have done in my life. I don’t drink milk, but once you start reading ingredients you learn that it is in a lot of foods in some form or other. So now I am keeping a food and baby poop diary. Those last five or ten pounds of pregnancy weight are sure to disappear without cheese or ice cream on the menu…

Maeve is also rolling over, back to tummy, except she always gets one arm stuck under her and then wakes up. We are now on the 10th night of this constant waking, and for whatever reason getting her to go to sleep on her tummy is not working as well as it used to. Dr. Sears has a few things to say on the subject, which make sense to me, especially #8. My mothering instinct says that this waking up all the time is definitely related to learning new physical skills, which are obviously not quite perfected yet. And maybe, just maybe, there is some teething because it is Drool City in these parts.

The worst of all this is that even when she has been able to sleep, I have not. I don’t know if it’s due to the full moon this week or what, but my insomnia is out of control. Even now, I just got up from lying in bed with her for more than an hour, during which I could not go to sleep. I have hit the wall, and I just keep bouncing back against it. It makes everything so much more challenging, especially thinking clearly. I’ve got the in-laws on their way here this weekend, and I have to stay on top of the no-dairy diet, monitor my baby’s health even more closely, clean my house, and just generally remain somewhat coherent and it’s getting really hard.

My mom and I did manage to put up a bushel of corn, a half-bushel of peaches, and peach jam this week though. Some of the peaches weren’t quite ripe, so we have floaty fruit in the jam, but it’s going to taste great anyway.