In which I make popsicles!

Rachel brought Maddy over tonight to play in the sprinkler. It's pretty funny to watch Maddy with the sprinkler, because she doesn't so much play in it as she skirts around it to avoid the water. The first time she played in it, she was more excited, and she happily ran over and put her head right up to the water, but she is more wary now.

I called a plumber to come and replace the missing faucet from the side of the house that has been gone since forever (actually since about the first year we moved in, but it's a long story involving freezing temperatures and elderly neighbors that I don't feel like getting into), and now we have a faucet! Then I bought a hose, and Rich found the old sprinkler in the garage, and now we are ready to entertain children! Except the ones who don't like to get wet.

Scott and Carolyn are coming to visit, and bringing Soren and Carl! The boys are going to stay with us for a couple of days while their parents go to get their nerd on at GenCon in Indianapolis, and that is why I'm making plans for children, the entertainment of. We're pretty excited!

Another brilliant idea that I had was to buy a popsicle maker. I read about it on one of the knitblogs, and it sounded very cool - it makes popsicles in just a few minutes, using Koolaid, or yogurt, or whatever. I immediately ordered one, and then the day before it arrived, I was in W@lmart and saw that they had a similar product, only theirs was much less expensive.

So anyway, my popsicle maker arrived, and I put it in the freezer overnight to get cold, like the directions said, and the next afternoon I made some Koolaid popsicles for Maddy! That was when Rich found out how much a popsicle maker costs and how steep the learning curve is for making them, and began to mock me for the whole briliant idea. He keeps asking me how many boxes of popsicles I could have bought for the price of my amazing popsicle maker. He needs to shut up.

So I am going to show him how fabulous my popsicle-making skills are! Diana told me that Jello makes better popsicles than Koolaid, so today I used Jello (and I also have instant pudding, for future pudding pops), and while Rich and Rachel got the sprinkler set up and dressed an angry, kicking baby in her Hello Kitty swimsuit, I was making popsicles! I made a bunch of them, and put them into freezer bags and stored them in the freezer, so next time Maddy comes over, we have popsicles!

She didn't actually get a popsicle today, though, because after she spent 5 minutes outside avoiding playing in the sprinkler, we brought her back inside and she was sitting on my lap eating a peach and watching a Youtube video of Elmo, when I saw the clock and realized I only had 10 minutes to get to my yoga class!

Rachel has been wanting to go to yoga, too, so we dropped Maddy off at the Y's daycare center (which Maddy is familiar with and she loves it!), and we went to yoga. Laura is out of town, but Shelley was there, and we put our mats down by her. It was a good class, and Rachel loved it! Yay! I'm so glad, because I love it, too, and I want to go more often! So we're going to see if they have two classes a week for the next session. We would like to go every day, but the Y doesn't offer that many classes, darn it!

What I'm knitting today:

I'm trying to finish two little tunic sweaters with hoods for Soren and Carl. Laura told me that this style - which is commonly seen on college students, more so a couple of years ago, but you still see them occasionally - is called a Drug Rug. So we refer to these sweaters as the Drug Rugs. Anyway they are cute and simple, and I'm making one with some blue/gray/brownish Noro that I bought from the sale table at the yarn shop, and the other one is made of a wool blend called Coffee Beenz, in olive green. The pattern can be seen here.

It was a day. A long day.

It's been a long day, but overall a pretty good one, minus those 45 minutes of my life I spent trapped in the car with Maddy screaming furiously in the back seat and there was nothing I could do that made her happy!

On Fridays I get up in the morning, having slept in my own bed the night before because I have Thursdays off, so that is nice. I almost always go out to breakfast with RA on Friday morning, but when I accidently woke up at 6:30, I thought it was too early to go out to eat.

I went back to bed for a while, and woke up again at 8:30 when I got a text from a knitting friend asking if I would be at knitting group in the afternoon. I texted back that I would be there, and then I went back to sleep.

When I woke up for real, it was 10 a.m. RA was ready to go out for breakfast, so I took a fast shower and was ready to go! We usually go to one of two restaurants, and each of them has their good points and also their bad ones, so we go to one for a while until the bad starts to outweigh the good, then we switch to the other.

Today we were tired of both of them, so we drove through McDonalds and got a breakfast sandwich. I hadn't had one in a long time, but today it was delicious. That and a large Diet Coke was a perfect breakfast.

We drove around in the country (it looked like a postcard, Diana!) so as to find the location of an outdoor wedding reception RA is invited to. We didn't find it this time, but we still have a couple of weeks.

We stopped at the health food store to get some Wheatgrass powder for Rich, as recommended by a friend for the cough and congestion he still has after the bronchitis in May. In the parking lot of the heatlh food store there is a farm stand in the summer, and they have the best peaches, so we bought peaches and sweet corn. I looked at the cantalopes, but they were so huge that I couldn't get excited about the idea of cutting them up, so I didn't buy one - this time. Maybe next week.

Later Laura picked me up for knitting, which was pleasant. Rachel met us there, and it was fun to see everyone. We had planned to leave together to go to Rockford for shoe shopping, so we picked up Maddy from Rachel's place, and took her to Shoe C@rnival, the happiest place on earth.

Maddy and I just walked around the shoe store while Rachel tried on shoes. Maddy was wearing her monkey backpack, with a tail for a leash. She looked at herself in the mirrors, and she found out that pushing the shoeboxes in is fun. They are all stacked up and she just shoved random boxes inward as she walked by.

We went to @ld Navy next door and bought cute shoes for Maddy, and a very beautiful new sweater for Fall. She found a tub full of soccer balls, and she really wanted to take one home, but she had to leave without it, and that is where things took a turn for the worse.

Starting with being mad about us not buying that ball for her, which looking back, I so wish we had done, she was mad about the cashiers, mad about getting back in the carseat, furious when we offered her some crackers, and she just screamed and flailed all the way home. Even her favorite Ben Folds and Cake songs didn't make her happy. By the time we got home I was ready to cry myself.

Rachel dropped me off and took that angry baby home, and I went into the house, where Rich had been enjoying a quiet afternoon of dogwalking and watching a Star Trek movie. He had also bravely drank a glass of wheatgrass powder mixed with, I think, water. He reported that it was disgusting. I didn't mean for him to just drink it like that, I was planning to make him a smoothie or something! I'll try that tomorrow and see if I can make it taste better.

I was so tired from the screaming car ride home, and I certainly didn't want to watch Star Trek, so I went up to my room and got into bed, planning to take my evening nap before work. I had a message from an old friend on my phone, so I called her and ended up talking for an hour! So that was a better end to my day, and now I'm at work.

Rachel says that poor baby was cranky all evening. Maybe she is getting more teeth?

In which Maddy has a lot of teeth and she knows how to use them.

I wasn't going to go to Knit Night because for the last two weeks it has been so crowded, and when there are too many people it isn't as much fun. It's just too big a crowd and then someone brings three little girls with her, and one of them eats a lot of sugar cubes from the coffee table, and gets a little too energetic, but it wouldn't be a problem (because she's not my kid) except the group is just too big.

So tonight I was thinking of not going, except that it really is nice to go sit and knit with everyone. Rich wanted to go to the movies to see Green Lantern, and I thought about going, but then Laura came over and we both almost swayed over to the idea of going to the movie and at the last minute, decided to go to the yarn shop instead.

It turned out to be a good night! There was about half the amount of people that were there last Tuesday, although the Annoying One was there, but when she was really shooting her mouth off, I ignored her (Personal Growth moment!) and texted a message to Laura's sister, instead of thinking about how very annoying the Annoying One is. And I was glad I went.

What I'm knitting today:

I finished a very cute little short-sleeved shrug for Maddy to wear with her black tutu. It was small and easy to make, and it took less than one skein of a random fuschia-colored wool I bought off of the sale table at the yarn shop. That pattern was fun and went fast (because of its small size, and also because it was knitted from the top down, my favorite way), so I bought another pattern from that website, Knitting Pure and Simple, and I started a hooded sweater for Carl. I think I will probably make one for Soren, too.

What I bought at a garage sale today:

I don't usually go to garage sales, ever! because I have plenty of stuff of my own, thanks, but today Rachel and I were out in the car and drove by a garage sale that had a little dog on wheels for a toddler to ride on, and we stopped to try it out for Maddy. It was just the right size for her, and then the guy who was running the sale brought out another little scooter for her to try, so we bought both of them.

We took the scooters back to my house and taught her how to sit on them and walk her feet to move them and also how to say "Wheee!" when she rides! She thought it was good entertainment, and Rachel took one of them home and we kept one at my house.

Why Maddy's breath smells like dog food:

I'm sure you can guess why Maddy has Alpo breath, but here's the other thing that she tried to eat - stitch markers! She snatched one and shoved it in her mouth, and then grabbed the other one in her pudgy fist! They are small rings of rubber, and it wouldn't hurt her to swallow one, but dammit, I wanted my stitch markers back!

It was easy enough to pry the one out of her hand, but Maddy has a mouthful of teeth like a shark, so you have to be pretty brave to go in there after something. I tried holding her upside down and shaking gently to make her laugh, hoping the stitch marker would fall out, but she was determined to keep it in her mouth.

Finally I cowboyed up and put my finger in her mouth and she bit down on it, but I didn't yank my hand away - I felt around and got that marker out of her mouth! I had a deep dent on the top and bottom of my finger where she sunk her little chompers in! Tonight there is still a faint pink mark, but I got my markers back, so I win!