Knitting in the Round Lesson 1:

Knit the outside, not the inside.

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2A:

When picking up your newly free needle, make sure you grab the right one.  From which follows:

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2B:

How to pick up and repair dropped stitches.  (Useful for all knitting as well)

Well, it’s now permanent.  On October 11, we asked her if she’d like her bed moved into her room, and she most excitedly said yes.

Pictures and more details after the jump:

Here’s her bed on its way out of our room.  It had previously been in the corner just behind it.  At this point when the pic was taken, I had already moved the chair into the corner and pushed the dresser over a bit — which was necessary in order for there to be enough space to get the bed out the door!

All the laundry everywhere had been piled up on her (unused for nearly 2 weeks) bed, and has since been put away.  Honest.

Taken apart, the bed makes its way easily into her room.

Here it is all moved into place and made up.  One big advantage of the move is that this bed has a smaller footprint than the floor mattress did.  So she now has more floorspace, as well as underbed storage!

Pomme christens her new sleeping arrangements by jumping on the bed, of course.  In high heels, no less.

One last pic, the bed is now all made up and properly covered and surrounded with stuffed toys and dolls.

We love this bed, it’s an Ikea Kritter.  It’s larger than a typical toddler bed, but smaller than a twin size.  So it’s great for a toddler, great for saving space, but is still big enough to last her well into childhood.  The only real drawback of it is, in fact, its unusual size.  Only Ikea’s own sheets fit — and we only have the fitted sheets.  We use no top sheet at all for now, and we have to fold a twin-sized comforter in half and place it sideways, or else stuff all the extra comforter down the back.

Still, it’s a small price to pay, it’s such a great bed otherwise.

As for her sleeping itself?  Well, I have to say it’s mostly good news.  There are, of course, nights where she still takes hours to go to sleep, fussing and whining the whole time, while hubby and I take turns sitting with her.  And there are nights where she drifts gently off to sleep while we’re still reading a story.  Most nights are somewhere in the middle.  She’s generally calm, but squirms and fusses quite a bit when it’s actually time to settle down to sleep.  Until she holds still for a few moments, then she’s out like a light.

But, even with rough nights where she just doesn’t want to actually sleep, she has never, ever, tried to just keep getting out of bed, or whine that she doesn’t want the bed in her room, or cry that she wants to sleep in our room instead.

These problems seem to mostly be in the realm of the child who has been made to sleep in their own room since birth.  I won’t be so presumtuous as to say it never happens with co-sleeping “graduates.”  But I do think it’s not an unreasonable observation, that children who have had their needs for dependence and security at night met in infancy and toddlerhood, and not rushed into sleep independence, are therefore more secure and confident when the time actually comes.  The need, once filled, is no longer an issue.

On the other hand, babies made to sleep independently from the beginning, often with “cry-it-out” methods, learn that bedtime is a scary time, a confrontational time, a battle of wills between parents and child, a time of parental withdrawal and abandonment.  As soon as they’re old enough to “fight back”… well, they do.  Over-generalization?  Maybe.  But often seen.

I just was given a warm thank you by a regular reader, while chatting on a thread at MDC, who called my blog ‘inspirational’.  Then I realized I hadn’t posted in over two weeks, and there is so much to blog about!

So I’m going to try to catch up over the next few days.  For the sake of brevity and to keep from boring you out of your skulls, I’ll break things down into separate posts rather than putting it all together into one massive e-tome.

In this post, I’ll just mention my 2 biggest big news.  First: I’ve got a new job!  I’ve been accepted as the new Music Director at Gibson Memorial United Church.  (The website ’staff’ page isn’t updated yet, so don’t fret if you don’t see me there.)  This means I play organ and piano for Sunday services, as well as weddings, funerals, etc, and I lead the church choir, as well as any other musical events that may arise during the year, such as children’s choirs.

I have previously done a shared Music Director position, split 50/50 with another musician and dear friend.  She did all the ‘grunt work’ in terms of selecting choir music, serving on committees, etc, so I just had the fun part.  This will be the first time I have to do all the work, all by myself.  It should be a lot of fun, though, it seems to be a good group of people, and it’s a lovely little organ.

The other big news is somewhat related.  Before the job was even confirmed, we… bought a new car.  A brand new, new new new, 2009 Hyundai Elantra.

We were not planning to do this.  My old car, a 2002 Kia Rio, still had lots of life in her, but needed some work done.  Some expensive work.  And until the work was done, it was very unreliable, stalling randomly, not starting half the time, making funny noises… We occasionally looked through used car listings, but didn’t find anything in our price range that suited our needs.  Hubby agreed that I should have a reliable car, for carrying the kids as well as getting to my jobs.

Then we got the fliers about the dealer year-end sales, with 0% financing and deep discounts.  It was worth a look, even just as a fun “date night” to go do some test drives.  We tried some Kias first, and while I really loved the feel and drive of the new Rio, hubby dearest (all 6′5.5″ of him) didn’t fit!  Strange, because he fits very well in the 2002 model.

Then we tried the Hyundais.  We had an Accent before, which we loved, until some idiot drove right into hubby’s lane — and totalled our car.  So we were checking out the new Accents.  And you guessed it, he didn’t fit.

The salesman wanted to show us the Elantra, which is like the “next size up” car.  We thought it was way too much car, more than we could possibly afford.  He convinced us to give it a try though, and we did, just for fun.  It was great.  Tons of room, great dashboard panel, comfortable and a good drive.  But too expensive, right?

Well, maybe not.  The discount was so deep, that it was only a thousand or so more than the Accent!  And with the low financing, the payments would actually be comparable to getting a cheaper used car — which has much higher financing.

We had only 2 days to decide, since the sale was ending.  We crunched numbers, and came up with the figure we could afford.  We had to haggle quite a bit over the Rio as a trade-in, but in the end, they were able to come in under our maximum, and we were sold!  When they were able to find our choice of colour — deep blue, in the base model with standard transmission — and it was the only one left in the province, then I knew it was kismet.

So I have a New Car.  We have never before had a new car.  All our ‘new cars’ have been used.  In general, we still think that’s the best way to buy cars.  It was only the low interest rate and deep discount that changed our mind this time — honestly, the price we’re paying is about the same as you’d pay for a 2007 model second-hand!  It’s like the first two years’ depreciation were already taken off the price.

We did some more math, and realize that the cost per year of the old Rio — including purchase price (in 2006) and yearly repairs — worked out to be about the same as what we’re paying now for the Elantra payments.  Which is under warranty, so major repairs won’t be $$$ for us.  Hubby had still been a bit nervous about the decision, but when we realized this bit of number magic, he relaxed.

So you can understand that we were both VERY relieved when I did, in fact, get the job.

Here’s hubby and the sales guy, as we transfer our belongings from the Rio to the Elantra.  Which you can’t really see, other than the open trunk.  Oh well.  Better pictures later, I promise!

After googling about WordPress media upload problems, I browsed lots of irrelevant (about WP 2.5) or inapplicable (about blogs hosted at wordpress.com) or incomprehensible (change security settings to 777 — huh?), I did the simple(and overdue) task of upgrading my WP 2.7 installation to 2.8.

And uploading works now.

So here we have a picture that’s about a month old now, my first strawberry from my backyard.  I planted 25 strawberry cuttings in pots and hanging baskets, 2 died mysteriously but the rest have done very well.  None are huge, but it’s only their first year.  This variety — Seascape — can be harvesting in its first year, whereas most varieties, you’re supposed to pinch off the flowers in the first year and only harvest fruit begining in the second year.

As you can see, the first fruits of the first year were a very good size!  That first berry was the biggest, none have approached it since.  But they’re all beautiful.

Seascape is also an all-season ever-bearing day-neutral variety, so we’ll still be getting berries into the fall.  I’ve noticed the berries are getting smaller as the season wears on, and we only get one or two each day.  Even though we can harvest fruit the first year, it’s not a plentiful bounty.  Just little snacks for my daughter.

It’s also been a terrible year for strawberries.  It has been raining at least 80% of the days all summer, and it’s been below usual temperatures.  My peppers are suffering as well, they’re just not growing much in this cool weather, though my greens are doing great and even my tomatoes are thriving.

But since it’s bad weather for berries, I’m grateful to get any at all, and greatly looking forward to their second season. 

I stopped into the Superstore this morning for some groceries, and popped into their garden center as I needed more compost for my potatoes.  I have been getting “good stuff” from the “real” garden center, but since I was there anyway I thought I’d see what they had.

At first, I saw just some no-name cow manure and a brand of sheep manure I’d used before and been very unimpressed with (for some reasons, there are large pieces of sea shells all through it).  Then I saw something I wasn’t expecting to see at all — mushroom compost!

Yup, President’s Choice (Loblaw’s proprietary brand) has bags of mushroom compost. It’s not cheap — $5.99/bag, whereas the unimpressive sheep manure is just $1.99/bag.  But this stuff is black gold. It’s worth twice that, in my opinion.

I only wish I’d known about this back when I was making all my Mel’s Mix.  It’s now too late to really mix it in to all the beds, since they’re all planted and settled in their ways heh… But I can use it to finish the potatoes, and for any topping-up and re-filling needed in the existing beds.  I have a bucket of Mel’s Mix left over which I’ll be using for topping-up as well (some of the beds compacted more than I expected so I’ll add more mix as the plants grow, especially so that the carrots will have more than 3.5″ to grow in…) so I think I’ll go ahead and mix some mushroom into that.  It will throw the mix a little off 1/3-1/3-1/3, but that’s okay.  It’s MUSHROOM COMPOST!!

It seems that post REPLACED the garden one.  Whoops.  So many words, just gone… sigh…

No time to re-type it right now, I’ll have to do it all over again later.  But I’ll do it with pictures next time, so it will be worth the wait… I promise…

But then the kids woke up — at 10:30 — and after breakfast (can you still call it breakfast when it’s nearly 11am?  I guess if McDonald’s can, then we can!) we headed out for some errands.

Wednesday is errand day.  In our school district, elementary school students get a half day on Wednesday.  It’s been like this since time immemorial — or at least since I was an elementary student growing up here twenty-odd years ago.  It seemed weird when we were living in Ontario, to learn that kids did NOT get Wednesday half-days there.  What kind of crazy, backwards place was that?

Anyway, there’s no half-day for Flipper, but it’s still a reduced schooley-stuff day, since we turn it into our errand day, and it’s nice for him to have time in the afternoon to play with his neighbourhood friends who are actually home.

Today, along with the usual bagels (discount dozen day!) and a trip to the library (only $15 in late fines this time…), we hit the Home Depot for some garden supplies and also stopped at Flipper’s dad’s, to pick up a fishing pole his dad got him for his birthday.

While we’re there, Flipper’s nana (that’s my ex-mother-in-law, for those keeping score) asked if I happened to like rhubarb.  As a matter of fact, we do.  Quite a lot, in fact.  They have a rather large patch, and as she said, “I just can’t seem to get rid of the stuff.”  Nobody wants all their extra rhubarb.  This boggles the mind.

So grampy and I went back to the patch, and he started pulling stems — he knew which ones he wanted taken out — and I’d cut off the leaves and put them in a bag.  By the time he stopped handing me stalks, I had 75 in the bag.  Yessiree, 75 stalks of fresh, home-grown, beautiful rhubarb.

I was hoping to at least get my strawberry plants into their pots tonight, but after making supper, practicing for the recital I’m playing for this weekend, and starting to deal with at least some of this monstrous heap of rhubarb, there just wasn’t time.

Rhubarb count:  1 batch (12 large and 12 mini) rhubarb muffins.  3 cups frozen.  App. 65 stalks remaining in the fridge.

Plans for tomorrow: rhubarb-apple-blueberry crisp, 12 more cups frozen, leaving about 40 stalks.  Hm.  Plant strawberries.  Practice for concert.  Arrange babysitting for Friday.  Write something for Eco Child’s Play… Hm, perhaps I should get up early…

I had bought all the wood last weekend:

… and stacked it neatly according to their destined boxes.  The bigger boards on the right are for the potato box, which is 10″ deep.  All the rest is just 6″.  All the boards are 1″ width — narrow, I know, but it should do the trick.  The six smaller boxes are 4′x4′, while the potato box is 4′x6′.

You can also see my baby plants on the deck getting some fresh air.  Hardening off is not going well, but we’re getting there.

I had also managed to acquire all the required ingredients for over 60 cubic feet of Mel’s Mix:

This is, of course, not all of it.  The rest, which includes five 4-cu.ft bags of vermiculite, more peat, and more manure, is inside the shed.  I was able to get four different kinds of compost: cow, sheep, marine, and chicken.  Couldn’t get my hands on horse.

So today, I dug out the drill, the wood screws, measuring tape and hemp twine, gloves, scissors, and a couple big pails.  And I built the potato box first:

Notice the tent in the background?  We got that second-hand for $100, it’s 10′x12′ with two rooms, worth $300 new, and has only been used for one weekend.  It was a birthday present for Flipper, to use as a backyard play tent, but we’ll all use it and it will be great for “real” camping too!

Anyway, to build the box I rotated the corners, kept the warped sides concave into the box (cheap pine boards, some of them are pretty curvy), and since these are 10″ deep I used three #8, 2″ wood screws at each corner.  I drilled pilot holes for the first few screws, but they went in so smoothly and easily that I tried one with no pilot hole, and it went in just as easily.  This happy discovery saved me quite a bit of time!  I had no issues with the wood splitting, even though it’s very narrow, except for one minor crack when I screwed directly into a knot in the wood.

Spurred on by this success, I built one of the smaller boxes.  The only difference was that I used only two wood screws on each corner:

These are all the boxes going in this area beside the house, so I stopped building for now and set to work filling these ones.  First, I opened my package of weed barrier cloth and cut a couple pieces to size.  I had contemplated stapling the barrier right to the boxes, but decided to try just laying them underneath and see if that worked.  So far, it seems to work fine.  That done, I started pouring compost into the potato box — since they’ll be growing in pure compost, I didn’t have to worry (yet!) about mixing any Mel’s Mix.

I did, however, pour the last of the Mel’s Mix I had previously made for the indoor seed starting into the smaller box.  And Pomme helped to spread it around.

Once I had about 2″ of compost in the potato box (that was 2 bags of sheep, and one bag each of chicken, cow, and shrimp), I added the grid by tying hemp twine to little nails along the edges of the box.  Since I am only growing potatoes in this box, I thought about not doing the grid at all, but then I decided it would help me to space the seed potatoes evenly.

I cheated a little bit though.  I made the grids 2′x1′, since I’m basically dividing the box into thirds for the three potato varieties I’m growing (Kennebec, Onaway – both white – and Norland, a red)  and that was enough to give me clarity for even planting.  I put two potato pieces in each square foot, then covered each piece with a scoop of cow compost.

The trick that I’ve learned in reading about SFG, is to start the potatoes near the bottom of the box like this, and as the plants appear above the soil, continue to cover them up again with more compost, until the box is filled.  At that point, you let the plants grow.  This gives a nice long underground stem — which is where the potatoes grow from.  Apparently, it maximizes yield in a small space.  I’ll alternate which kind of compost goes on each time so they’ll get a nice mix.

After a well-deserved break, and with Pomme down for a nap and Flipper playing next door, I started working on filling the smaller box.  I’ve read about mixing the ingredients on a big tarp, or mixing in a big plastic tub (several batches needed per box), but I decided I’d try mixing it right in the box.  We don’t currently have a wheelbarrow and I was on my own for the mixing, so it seemed worth a try.

First, I did the math and calculated that I’d need about 2/3 of a cubic foot of each type of manure, plus 2-2/3 cu.ft. each of vermiculite and peat moss.  I was able to find a plastic tub that held 2/3 of a cubic foot, and a larger one that held just about 2-2/3 cu.ft.   Using them as “measuring cups”, (and with my dust mask on when working with vermiculite) I poured the ingredients into the box:

… and promptly started to doubt my math.  It’s hard to tell from this picture, but it was an AWFULLY large pile of stuff.

But my Mathlete of the Year award in grade 9 and pile of medals for math competitions throughout high school (I know, I am such a geek) were not for nothing.  Once I smoothed out the pile things looked much more… accurate.

This hasn’t been mixed yet in the photo, I just wanted to verify the quantity before starting that job!

You can see in this photo that the potato box is already in shade.  This area gets sun first thing in the morning but is in shade by suppertime.  The back yard is partially shaded until about noon, then has full sun until nearly sunset.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other…

Mixing it within the confines of the box was a bit tricky, since there wasn’t any extra room.  But I scooped from around the edges into the center, turned the center, folded and mixed and shuffled, until it was pretty uniform.  Then I watered the whole thing down (using my thumb on the end of the hose because we don’t have a thingie for it yet!) and added the grid lines:

Success!

All that now remained was the actual plants.  This box is for greens and “renewable” crops that can be replanted (either with more of the same or something new) or maintain a continual harvest.  Carrots, spinach, summer savory, thyme, broccoli, leaf and romaine lettuce, and green onions.  The herbs, broccoli, and romaine were already started indoors.  The broccoli was strong and seemed hardened, while the romaine and herbs are still new sprouts but I figured I’d take the chance.  The rest of the veggies were planted with fresh seed.

And there is the finished product!

Now I only have to do this… five more times.  Eeps.

            ]]> http://motherbynature.ca/2009/05/my-square-foot-garden-building-day-1/feed/ 4 http://motherbynature.ca/2009/05/saturday-morning-breastfeeding-comic/ http://motherbynature.ca/2009/05/saturday-morning-breastfeeding-comic/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 13:00:50 +0000 heather http://motherbynature.ca/?p=595 I follow a lot of online comics, one of them being “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.”  Before you go scampering over to check it out, be warned — the topics are usually very offensive.  Part of the humour is in the dark and twisted switcheroos on dark and twisted situations.  Adultery and murder are commonplace, as well as any number of sexual perversions.  Usually it’s a one-two punch, with the comic itself implying a particular bizarre situation, then the caption switching it around to be something completely different (but equally — or even more — disgusting).

Okay, it doesn’t sound too appealing from my description here… but it really is quite funny and clever.  You just have to appreciate dark humour and the cleverness of the switcheroos.

Today’s comic is one without a caption, the joke is entirely within the comic.  It shows a graph measuring “Topics You’re Willing to Address in a Pickup Line” versus “Age” — indicating that as you get older, you’re going to use more and more bizarre topics for pickup lines.  I guess out of desperation, is the implication.

The rest of the comic shows an example of this.  A middle-aged man is approaching a woman on a bench.  The woman has a baby in a sling and is nursing discreetly.  The man says “I don’t believe in public breastfeeding, so… how about we go back to my place?”

I really, really like this comic.

First of all, in the SMBC universe, this man is definitely being portrayed as The Jerk.  We are not supposed to be agreeing with him or sympathetic to him.  His desperate pickup line is inappropriate and ludicrous.  Therefore, the association is that “people who disagree with public breastfeeding = jerks”.

Secondly, as the foil, the woman is being potrayed as the “normal” person, the regular person just going about her day who gets set upon by this oddity.  In other words, nursing in public is “normal”, and wearing your baby in a sling is “normal” as well.

I think part of what excites me so much is, in fact, that the baby is in a sling.  Just a simple over-the-shoulder variety, possibly a pouch, possibly a tied shorty wrap.  Whatever.  Just the fact that it’s there means that the artist (who is just a regular joe, science student, young fellow) is aware of them.  Where so many of us still get funny looks and “gee, that looks interesting, what is that thing?” it’s nice to see it just pop up like this in an online comic like no big deal.

It’s also notable that the woman is not portrayed as some super-crunchy hippie chick.  She’s just a regular woman, nursing her baby on a park bench.  Thanks, Zach, you just made my day!

After nearly two months of care and concern and pampering, the time had come for the hardening off.  Our last frost date is next week and we’ve been having beautiful weather, so it seemed good.

I have two flats of beautiful tomato seedlings, 3 varieties, some heirloom, grown from seed. Also some peppers, red, chili, and jalapeno.  Monstrously large (already!) cucumbers.  And a hodge-podge of herbs and greens.  They were healthy and strong and gorgeous.

The first day they went outside for about 1/2 hour, the next day about an hour. They seemed fine. Then we had like 5 days in a row of RAIN or else it was really, really cold, so they stayed indoors.

Then the past few days it’s been gorgeous again so I set them back outside.  They got about 2 hours one day, and they seemed a little wilty… a few plants had some fading in their lower leaves. By the next morning those leaves were curling up. That day I left them out much longer than I had intended, about 5 hours. Mistakenly, I thought that was probably okay because it was such a warm, summery, sunny day. They should love it!  Right?

Wrong. Eeps. So only now, today, looking up stuff online about hardening off and wilting, I read that seedlings should start out in the SHADE, or partial shade, so they don’t get SUNBURNT. And then only gradually move into the sun.

You guessed it, I had them in full sun right from day one. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. I don’t recall ANYTHING I’d previously read about hardening off mentioning this rather important point!  Either I was reading the wrong sites, or I just wasn’t paying attention…

All is not lost.  The newer leaves on the tops of the plants are still bright green and healthy, and many of the plants are only mildly affected.  Worst case scenario, I lose a few, but I have so many it won’t be a terribly loss.  Most likely scenario, they all survive and recover, but I lose a couple weeks of growth and harvesting time.  Fortunately, I think there’s enough buffer time that I’ll still get a great crop.  And… well… lesson learned.