Month: April 2009

Getting smarter

I’m having fun working the first front of the Sunrise Circle Jacket. You knit the sleeve up from the wrist, and then in addition to decreasing as usual for the shoulder, you start increasing to form a steadily growing semi-circle for the front.

It’s an interesting design, but it takes a fair amount of attention to knit. The designer made the increases appear at random (a very pretty effect, so you don’t see spokes radiating out across the chest), which means that the increases are in a different spot on each row of the chart. I’d been counting as I went, but that was going poorly since I tend to knit while reading and I kept flying past the increases. Finally, I got smart at row 47 and started marking the increases with white stitch markers in advance before I knit the row. Now it’s going much faster, since I only have to stop and count once at the beginning, instead of several iterations of counting and ripping back. Here’s a closeup of the semi-circle forming, with randomly-spaced increases, and my white stitch markers waiting for the next row.

I’d love if I could ever finish the sweater this week. I’m in great shape on maternity clothes except for long-sleeved shirts. All of the maternity sites I know only seem to sell short sleeves and ¾ sleeves, made of surprisingly thin fabric. Since it’s still in the forties most days, that just isn’t sufficient. I’ve been just wearing a few loose pre-maternity sweaters, but all but two are suddenly too short and I’m in dire need of new options.

Bonus Yarn

I bought three skeins each for the Peapod set and the Baby Surprise Jacket (which I’ll get completed photos of as soon as I find buttons), and then only ended up using one and a half skeins for each project. The Acorn Street Shop, where I bought the yarn initially, has a sixty day return policy, and I realized on Wednesday that I still had four days to trade in the yarn for a new projects’ worth. I headed over Friday after work, and was quite pleased to be able to buy yarn for not one but two projects with the store credit:

That’s Stork in yellow and light blue, for a newborn sweater and hat (a going home outfit?), and two skeins of Cascade 220 Superwash in light blue for the Debbie Bliss ribbed baby jacket in the 3-6 month size. I’m trying to finish my Sunrise Circle Jacket before I go cast on, since I’m having a hard time finding long-sleeved maternity shirts and I’m down to two sweaters that fit for work. But it’s a tempting little bag of fun projects.

The Name Game

By far the leading question so far about the pregnancy, even beating out gender, is about what our leading contenders are for names. It’s a hard question to answer, especially since everyone has strong opinions. Quite the loaded topic! This week at the Brown dinner, our friend Stacy showed us the best baby name website.

It has the cleverest way of graphing name popularity over time. You can search for specific names, and it updates the page as you type (for the screenshot above, I’d typed an S so that we could see that nice peak in Susans in the 1950s, but as you keep going it shows all names and variants that made the top 1000 since the late 1800s). You can narrow down to boy or girl names, and if you mouse over the graph it shows you the name’s rank by decade. You can click on names for more information. It’s an incredibly fun thing to play with.

For a flat list of popular names, the best (no-nonsense, ad-free) option is the SSA site. This one lists popular names and the various spellings (though I can’t decide if that’s helpful or annoying).

And, no, we don’t have a name yet, or even a list of favourites. We gave ourselves a reprieve on even considering names until we had the 20 week ultrasound. Now that we know it’s a boy, we don’t have any strong opinions yet but it’s definitely a topic of conversation. 🙂

Sunny

We woke up a bit after eight today to the third morning in a row of sunlight streaming into our bedroom. This is such a novel, wonderful experience. Since moving into the house, we’ve had only a handful of days that any direct sunlight made it into the room, but between taking the trees down, the clouds disappearing for a few days, and the angle of the sun at this time of year, the light is amazing and lasts for about two hours. What a great way to wake up! (So much better than this!)

This photo was taken from our closet, partly to show the sunlight, and partly to show our “new” mirror:

The wall of our closet has been so empty since we moved the shoe closet over a year ago. The craigslist cabinet helped, but when we deconstructed the old bathroom, I kept the mirror and painted the frame black. I was afraid that glossy black would be too much of a contrast with all of the pale, blond shelving, so I found paint that matched the wood and used the mouths of old jars to stamp circles. I’m very pleased with how in came out. Here was the mirror in its prior incarnation:

I love its new look and spot!

Exciting Fish News

We had a huge tank event tonight! The clownfish spawned!! Kevin was starting a water change and saw the eggs!!

We’ve had the clowns for more than four years, and kept hoping they’d mate. Clownfish are hermaphrodites: they start out male, pair off, and then one fish becomes dominant, quite a bit larger, and female. Clack has been the bigger fish for years, and they’ve displayed lots of the typical clownfish pairing behaviour, but no spawning until now!

I need to read up on more about exactly what happens (since clownfish are one of the most successfully captive-bred fish, there’s a lot of information out there), but Click (male) and Clack (female) did alternating passes of circling around the eggs. They bind them to the rock (I think that’s Click’s job?), lay eggs (Clack) and fertilize them (Click). They chose a spot right behind the leather, which makes sense as usually Clowns lay eggs on rock near the base of their anemone.

There are many steps, special food, and extra tanks involved in raising fish fry into baby clowns, so we’ll probably let things take their course (ie, either the eggs or fry will be eaten by other creatures in the tank), but Kevin was having fun brainstorming baby clownfish names: Clickety, Clackety, Yakkity, and Yak were leading contenders. 🙂

I got a few videos of them as they spawned. We were so captivated and delighted. The first has reflections from the kitchen light (oops! sorry!) but you can see well how first one circles, then the other. They repeated this for ages (We watched for well over a half hour, and only saw a portion.)

At first I was disappointed by the second video because Click stopped mid-circle and seemed to lunge at Clack. I wasn’t paying enough attention to the other creatures in the tank though, since the shrimp had decided to come check things out. I might not have noticed him, but the Clowns definitely did and they chased him off.

Suburban wildlife

This morning was wonderful. The light woke me up early (not something I usually can say!), and I had breakfast and noodled around on the internet before heading to prenatal yoga for the first time. The class was great, especially after a somewhat uncomfortable week, and I stopped at the bread store and the library on the way home. The afternoon was sunny and low key until Kevin called me into the kitchen around five because he’d spotted this enormous guy in our neighbour’s backyard.

Cleaning himself like a cat, and quite the grooming and scratching session, but he was enormous. Despite the tail, I was still somewhat disbelieving that such a big creature could be a raccoon until he left his spot in the sun for a stroll across the yard.

Definitely a raccoon. :-/ He wasn’t acting disoriented or odd, but I really didn’t think that they were sunshine sort of creatures? Maybe the Seattle variety gets confused when the days start really lengthening? Or he was as delighted to see the sun as the rest of us? In any case, I was decidedly less than pleased when he hopped over our fence (only five feet, no big deal) and started hunting in our rock wall. I don’t know quite what he was eating (those beetle larvae? Worms?), but his technique was very efficient: dig away, and then wipe the creatures off on the lawn before consuming.

I was mostly just fascinated as he dug up whatever they were in front of the wall, since we try to keep that area weed/plant-free. When he started moving around in the beds, though, we decided that was plenty of a good thing and when to go throw things at him. He was very skittish, and scared easily, but unfortunately chose to scale one of our pine trees instead of just hopping the fence. The sound of his claws on the bark was the creepiest thing. You can see him way, way up (there’s an orange arrow, and you can see his tail hanging down off of the branch).

He finally came down and then Kevin succeeded in frightening him over the fence. I’m hoping his usual haunts are many miles away and he was in an exploring (but not settling) kind of mood.

The first baby purchase!

Two weekends ago, we stopped by a baby store on a whim in between other errands. It was surprisingly fun, and since then we’ve both been steadily reading about cribs and other baby things. A few days later, our ultrasound revealed that we’re having a boy, and the game of envisioning the baby’s room stepped up a notch. At the crib store, we’d tried out several rockers and gliders and thought they were quite lovely but exceedingly unrealistic (the price tags of the “cheap” options were over $800 – right). In any case, I started stalking craigslist for the brand of rocker, and after dismissing many posts (ugly wood color, ugly chair model, very ugly fabric, etc), I found one on Sunday that looked just about perfect. We drove to one of those gorgeous Wallingford craftsman houses and brought home an allegedly eight year old chair that’s in perfect condition.

It’s incredibly comfortable. It will live in the family room for the time being, in the sunny corner by the windows. I keep smiling to see it there.

Singing the praises of the sewing machine

Probably the most persistent pregnancy symptom that I’ve noticed is near-constant hip and lower back soreness. I’ve been stiffer than normal for months now, and sitting in most chairs is difficult after about fifteen minutes. On the whole I’ve adjusted, but after the afternoon of gardening on Sunday I was too sore to find a good spot.

I thought of the microwavable heating pads I’ve seen online. This turned out to be one of the highest payoff craft projects ever. The entire thing took seven minutes to make, and that included scrounging in the kitchen for a good filler (we didn’t have enough lentils, so I used white rice), choosing pretty fabric and thread, and both ironing and pinning the fabric before sewing. I used a fat quarter (folded in half, it wraps around the base of my back perfectly) about a pound of white rice, and a lavender sachet (I bought mosaic mirrors from Etsy as a bridesmaid gift, and the woman who made them included a few sachets of the lavender she grows. I love Etsy.) I double-rolled the edges before seaming to make them sturdier. It gets nice and warm after about 3 minutes in our ancient microwave, and the heat lasts for a good half hour. Blissful. 🙂