Baby shower gifts

I'm going to a baby shower for my cousin-in-law today, and even though I didn't get the Sleepy Monkey Blanket finished on time, I did manage to whip up three pairs of super cute booties, and a seed-stitch bunny with removable dress for the baby-to-be.  I'll finish the blanket, and present it after she's born.  Take a peek:

Baby Cashmerino booties with flowers knit in lace-weight alpaca

Baby Cashmerino Saartje's booties with mother-of-pearl buttons

so tiny!

Baby Cashmerino 'Sandals' with mother-of-pearl buttons

Baby Cashmerino bunny with removable pink dress

The perfect gift for a little girl :)

Alex has stressed me for the second time in a week, narrowly avoiding stitches in his right eye on Wednesday and almost poisoning himself today when he found a way to get into my purse and get out my tin with the pain killers and band-aids.  He took some of my Aleve, and I had to call poison control to see if I had another emergency on my hands or not (turns out not...they have to take 15+ to be in danger).  I'm a nervous wreck right now and I'm trying to force him to eat his lunch before going to the baby shower (he's pretty much stopped eating lunch since he started taking his iron).  I need a nap, and a break from the kids.  It is Sunday yet?

Radio Silence

I've been pretty busy as usual, but that's nothing new.  Since I last posted, I got the results back on Alex's blood test and confirmed that he is anemic.  We've started him on the iron supplement and he'll have his blood work done again in 3 months.  I'm hoping this will help him get into a normal sleep pattern soon, because this morning he was up at about 5am and climbed into my bed...so I've basically been up since 5am...and I went to bed at about 2am.  I only have so many of these days in my before I'll snap, lol.

The sale at work has been fantastic!  We only do one sale a year, and when we do, we do it right.  I've acquired enough yarn at this years sale to knit 8 sweaters!  I just went through my que on ravelry and added the yarn to my stash so that I could put those yarns in with the patterns that I had in mind for them when I bought them.  They are the first 8 sweaters in my que...actually, the first 12 sweaters in my que have the yarn hiding out in my stash somewhere and I hope to get them knit.  If I want to, I could join 'knit a sweater a month' and actually make that happen (except for when school, work, and kids interfere).  And I still have a full bag of yarn coming that I ordered when we did the Fall ordering!  I think I've finally lost control, lol.

In knitting news, I'm still plugging happily away at the sleepy monkey blanket but I'm not going to have time to knit the back piece before the shower next Saturday.  I'm thinking that I'll either buy a piece of fabric to attach to the back and give it to my cousin-in-law, or I'll knit a quick pair of baby booties and include a photo of the blanket as an IOU gift.  I really want to knit the full blanket as written, so I'm thinking this is the more likely solution.  I've also finished the Night of the Lepus sock sample and pattern for the Super Sock Scarefest group.  I emailed the PDF to Yarnyenta yesterday and I'll be notified of when the pattern will be released.  If you want to join up and knit this pattern (plus several others), go on over to the Super Sock Scarefest group on Ravelry and join up.  We start knitting on September 1st, and sign-ups close on the 5th.  Come on...you know you want to knit socks designed around scary movie themes...give in to the pressure. 

I've been designing on the fly again, and I've come up with a chart for a robot-head blanket that looks promising.  It's inspired by the comforter on Alex's bed and I'm thinking of knitting it up for him since he really likes robots now.  Maybe I'll even get around to knitting the Mr. Roboto kit that I ordered just for him and promptly had to put on the back burner.  But not before I finish the shawl for Garner's bride.  Totally off topic, but I love it so much that he married a 6' woman.  As a 6' woman, I think he has fabulous taste, lol.  Maybe I'll even get to meet her in January when I go out to help my mom after surgery.

In school news, I received an invite to join the Golden Key International Honor Society!  I accepted.  The invitation said that I was in the top 15% of my class at Kaplan, and my GPA is 3.95.  That's the highest I've had in my life and I was so excited.  (If I've posted this already...just scroll down, lol.)  Somehow as much as I'm not enjoying my statistics class, I'm still pulling an 'A', and I earned a perfect score on my last homework project (which I was sure I'd bombed).  I also have 100% in my research methods class (although this last project could change that...) and I just don't care for that class very much at all.  I should totally be doing school work right now but it's hard to push myself to get it done because I just don't enjoy the subject matter, although my new status as a Golden Key member is certainly a motivating factor.

My obsession with True Blood continues full force.  I'm reading the books like my life depended on it, and I own the first 2 seasons on DVD.  I even converted a friend and she liked it so much that she got HBO so now I can go over to her house on Sunday evenings and watch the episodes in real time!  It's great!  I bring my knitting, but I don't touch it because I'm afraid I'll miss something.  And my love for Eric, Pan, Lafayette, and now Franklin keep me from being able to concentrate on my project lest I should miss the most minute facial expression or turn-of-phrase.  It really is out of hand.

Well, I think I've fooled around long enough.  Back to statistics.

Hot and tired

I know it's been quite a while since I've taken time to post, but as you may know...it's been pretty hot and I've been pretty tired.  Things are basically good.  The sleep study found that Alex may be anemic, which might be part of the reason for the excessive leg movements in his sleep.  They didn't find a cause for why he gets up most nights, but did say that it's a symptom of sleep deprivation.  That at least proves what I've been saying for so many years now.  So we're making some adjustments to his bedtime routine and trying to see if that helps at all. 

School is school.  I have four weeks to go before I finish math for the rest of this degree program and I'm looking forward to it.  I've been trying to fit in reading my books, and knitting on my various deadline projects and it's getting to be a bit much.  Actually, I've been trying to fit school into the other things because I'm having a tough time forcing myself to stick to my studies.  I'm just burned out with these classes.  But my scary sock design is done and I need to tweak the pattern a little bit.  I'm working on the Sleepy Monkey Blanket for Nicole's baby and loving it.  The monkeys work up so fast!  I still have to finish the Bridgewater shawl for Garner's bride, and then I have a pair of toe socks to knit for Aaron's counselor.  After that...I have 7 sweaters-worth of yarn to knit through that I picked up at the Bella Yarns make room for more sale!  You read that right.  Seven-sweaters-worth.  I will never have to buy yarn again at this rate, but I already bought some this week when I ordered a chart-keeper for a buddy, just to make the shipping worth it.  I need a new scarf and hand warmer set so I bought a kit and got some extra yarn for this pair of hand warmers I want to knit for myself.  This will be a pretty little set to wear when I don't feel like wearing the same tired old red scarf for the 5th year in a row.  Now, if I can just keep from getting side-tracked by the new fall yarns when they come in.

Sometimes things work out

Today, after church I went with the boys to my In-laws for a bar-b-que/party for Dante's birthday.  He will be 13 tomorrow and I've been busy trying to wrap my mind around that one.  School has kept me busy enough to ignore the reality until now, but it's here and there's nothing I can do about it anymore...nothing but accept it and roll with the punches.  So, I brought over a half-sheet cake from Sam's Club and we hung out with family.  It was great!  It was the first time that I've ever had a large party for Dante.  With his birthday being the 5th of July and all, most people are away on vacation and we just can't get anyone together.  Well, Weina knew how much this meant to me because I cried to her on the phone for 30 minutes when I thought Alex's play-date party wasn't going to get off the ground, so she called her family and told them in no uncertain terms that they were to change their plans and be there for Dante...and they did, and they were.  She even had her brother fly in, and some of his cousins dropped what they were doing to come by.  The only let down was that it was fast-Sunday and Dante and I were fasting (in our own way...Dante isn't allowed to fast so he gives up junk food) so I didn't eat until pretty late and Dante didn't get any of his cake till dinner time.  But that was a minor inconvenience given what I got in return and I was happy to do it.  Alex had a great time, everyone was in a good mood, Aaron came (!), and we stayed until about 6:30pm when I finally decided that I needed to get Alex in the tub and into bed.

Right now Dante had a friend, that he met when he was at his grandparents' last weekend, over to stay the night.  We'll be taking them to a movie tomorrow and they'll hang out for Dante's birthday.  His friend (Ike) is exactly one day younger than Dante so I'll be getting him back to spend his birthday with his Grandfather.  This is Dante's first sleep-over, and the boys are having a great time.  I'll be sad to see Ike go back home, but it does make me feel much better to know that Dante can make friends so easily and to see that he was pretty into the idea of having him stay the night.  This is good stuff, given that my son spent most of the school year in a depressive fog caused by his ADHD meds.  So tomorrow I have to cook breakfast for these boys, send them out with Aaron to the movies so that I can work on school stuff, and then take them all over to Nana's for another bar-b-que.  Today was over all one of the best days ever, and I'm just content.  I hope that I get more just like this one.