wrap up

my baby in love and warm clothes - recovering from croup and ear infection. It was a horrible couple of days there but all's well now he's on the mend. Exactly 24.5 hours after the first dose of anti biotics he stopped screaming and writhing and sat up and went "da" with a big smile and toddled over to the high chair ready to eat for the first time in 3 days. D and I looked at each other and said, he's back.

My girl in layers of pink. She's totally in love with the new a line tunic vest now that it is finished. Knit in the round with kitchener stitch shoulder seams (I so get it now) and a crochet edging of double/treble/double. Made using my hand painted yarn from the last craft weekend, it is 8 ply silky wool. Lovely to touch. Anyone need the pattern? If so I could write it up. Next mindless commuter project cast on will be the 4ply silky wool for a rib vest for Wil.

A new baby in handmade goodies.Piles of fabric waiting to become the lightest of cotton wraps for a hot climate. Our adopted family in Thailand has been blessed with a sweet little boy - congratulations Art and Aor! Not ideal recipients for handknits and hats so I'm putting together a wrap and a wee reminder of Australia.
And now off to catch up on reading for work. Missing 1.5 days to care for ill child when you only work 2 days a week wreaks havoc on your schedule! I have a whole new policy area to work in as of this week so I got a lot of discovery ahead.

One of the things that surprised me about becoming a mother was the way my brain started to compartmentalise things.

Most importantly the way I felt about my daughter - fierce, steady, unconditional and bottomless love - was not influenced by the things I found really difficult about being a mother. Before motherhood I approached most complex situations like relationships or jobs with a kind of see-saw balance between good and bad, pleasure and pain. When the balance was out of whack, the winning side started to infect the other.

When I fell in love all problems and downsides were dismissed as trivial, or indeed embraced as a kind of glorious and enjoyable challenge. When the balance started to shift the other way everything that had once seemed so good now became tainted with an overlay of sufferance. All complex and contradictory feelings eventually obliterated into a monochromatic view. Generally bad!

So I fully expected that when faced with too little sleep and days of mundane and dirty jobs I would have moments where I would utterly resent my child. Where my predicted grief over the loss of my career and independence would discolour the rosy view of my sweet baby. In the abstract I could fully understand how love for a child could be eroded, even destroyed by a sense of personal sacrifice.

No one was more surprised than I to find that through the hard times when Amy was a baby, when I wondered how the hell I had managed to find myself in this place, when I wondered what the hell I was thinking when I signed up for this, that I never felt negatively towards her.

No, surprise is the wrong word for it. I was confounded. It just didn't make sense to me that my intellectual recognition that becoming a mother had come at great personal cost did not create a corresponding emotional resentment towards the cause of that cost. I didn't see myself as buying into the social stigma associated with admitting such resentment which (I believed pre child) must surely exist.

At first I thought it was something intrinsic to the mother child bond. That the way I felt about the product of my own body was not to be understood through rational means. There was no choice here in the way one chooses a partner or a job or a vocation. Once made, the child cannot be unmade and while some manage it, I never felt that I could ever have chosen my own freedom over my bond to her.

I guess it is that very lack of choice that started this compartmentalising. If something must be endured I suppose you can't afford to let a virus of dissatisfaction, anger, grief and frustration to run rampant. Not if you want to stay sane anyway. So somewhere along the way I managed to find a way to recognise and feel my discomfort as well as feel my besotted joy all at the same time without one removing from the other.

I've often tried to express this contradiction to people and I'm not sure how well I convey it - since no one seems to find it as peculiar or revelatory as I do. Perhaps for other people life was always like that. They've always managed to hold those two conflicting positions at once without needing to side with one or the other. Though often enough I've observed people slide down that tunnel where their view and emotional response to something becomes increasingly singular and unbalanced.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks since I've started back at work in earnest. When people ask me how it is I find myself gushing about how marvellous it is, how much I absolutely love it. Love the work, love where I work, the people I work with and the very act of being at work. I love the commute and buying my lunch and doing the quiz out of the newspaper in the lunch room with my colleagues and the complexity and urgency and drama that comes with political life.

And then in the same breath I can tell them that for 2 days of every week I am mental with exhaustion, rushing for every moment I am awake, cramming every second with activity while I try to hit one critical time goal after the next, juggling kids and pick ups and drop offs and meals and readers and bathing. And then a third day in recovery where I pick up all the domestic tasks I ignored to get through the work days and try to recover some nutritional goals for the family, suck up to my feeling neglected daughter, entertain my over tired son and tend my filthy house, read the two day old notices from school, pay the overdue bills and return old phone calls.

People look at me kind of funny, like they can see this is all honeymoon and soon enough it will come back to me why they call work work and not, say, fun, and all that joyful gushing will be replaced by the general litany of complaint you hear from most working folk.

Perhaps it will.

But I am kind of hoping instead that this is a sign that motherhood hasn't just made me love my kids, but has taught me to find the joy I can and keep it safe. To acknowledge and respect the hardships that come with the things I love and allow them to coexist without the need to find and hold a definitive position, to try and make something all good or all bad.

and the winner is...

Lilli boo has won the Friday Night Knitting Club! If you can drop me an email at soozs.com@gmail.com with your contact details (snail mail please) I can pass it on to the very generous publishers of Kate's book who can shoot you over a copy.

To all those who missed out - stay tuned. I believe in the coming months we may be hosting some more reading delights.

nope dope

today

A whole day without children.Lots of plans.That don't include a long blog post. Though lots of thought for men lost and with them the dreams, hopes, loves and happiness of many.

Instead of talk here's some pics of dye foray #4 and #5.

From this

To this (in order).
Have a great day.

polygamy

I've never really been one to play the field, to fool around on my chosen one.

But lately my mind and hands have been wandering.

My problem is that sometimes I just find that the one to whom I am sworn just doesn't fit with a certain situation. And then I feel like I deserve more. Surely I can juggle? Compartmentalise?

I ignore that voice in my head, that voice that has always kept me on the straight and narrow. The voice that says this can only end in tears. Neglect, exhaustion, slip ups. Betrayal.

I have totally ignored my own rule, never more than one at a time.

I have cast on and am knitting three separate projects at the same time. Madness.

There's the mindless stocking stitch but stuck at home due to tangly yarn project.

The highly transportable but requiring excellent light and concentration project.

The almost no counting and I can knit and walk at the same time commuter project. Admittedly I am designing this pattern myself so it is not entirely brainless, but I get to absorb any errors and call them design concepts, which will most certainly not wash with the Hanami (which is proving a tremendous challenge even with full concentration).

So forgive me knitting gods and goddesses for turning into a knitting tart and please don't turn them all into disasters for my sins. I am full of good intentions and attentive to each one when I am with them so it's not really betrayal is it?

Friday Night Knitting Club giveaway

I don't get to read much. There isn't much time, and the free time I do have is hotly contested. I could read on the commute to and from work, but that would seriously cut into my knitting time. I could go to bed early, but then I'd cut into the rest of my knitting time, my TV time, my everything but the kids time.

Almost all the reading I have done this year has been craft related. A kind of two for one use of my time when I can't decide between reading and making. And it disappoints me that pretty much all that craft reading is non-fiction. It saddens me that people like me don't feature much in fiction. I mean I might identify with a character's issues, emotional state or intellectual ponderings but any similarity stops there. They aren't juggling, and they aren't shelving other things to make time to make.

So it was with great joy that I picked up The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs. A book about people who knit. About knitting as a form of pulling things together and crafting a life. About running a business and a family and making friends and sitting around a table sharing.

I don't want to give you a review of the story, to me the specifics were not as important as the feeling I got reading a book in which it was so easy to imagine myself stumbling in the door. Becoming a regular at the Friday night knit sessions held at Walker and Daughter. I'd be swapping recipes with Dakota and commiserating with the recently unemployed KC. I'd be fingering all that yarn and starting projects and wanting to just finish a row before I packed up and went home.

I'm hoping Kate's next novel, COMFORT FOOD, out from Putnam in May, will be similarly based in a world in which I can visualise myself. I might find it easier to squeeze in a little extra reading time if I felt I was vicariously planning a menu in the way the Friday Night Knitting Club almost made me feel like I'd finished knitting a whole outfit in the reading.

But the really exciting bit is that the publishers of Kate's book have offered up a brand new copy to one of my blog readers absolutely free - how cool is that? All you need to do is leave a comment on this post by the end of Sunday 27 April 2008 (aussie time). I'll select a winner at random.

Please please please make sure you either leave an email address or have your email address enabled in your blogger profile or select the option to be kept informed of follow up comments. I'll post the winner on Monday or Tuesday.

Good luck!

knit knit

Very pleased with my risky yarn choice. The two skeins have worked beautifully together to produce a very dense fabric and a mottled black and blue effect with no pattern repeats but a stunning array of colour effects. The hat looks funny in the pics, it is way too small for Amy (it's the 1-4 size and it is small in that scale), but I couldn't get any cooperation from Wil for a photo shoot. The pattern is also excellent. The side ear flaps, formed using short rows (good practice for socks let me tell you) and shaped ribbing in the band sit much better on Wil than Amy and give an overall kind of medieval helmet look I find strangely appealing. I'll definitely be knitting this again.

And suddenly I find myself with no knitting for the commuter journey (the Kusha kusha is still in process but so commuter unfriendly). It almost killed me to travel all the way home last night with nothing to with with my hands whilst I listened to Craftypod.

I'd planned to start the Hanami on the homeward journey (I just knew the hat would be done on the way to work) but I haven't got the required beads for the cast on edge. I'd fantasised that I might get out at lunchtime and pick some up but work has been a second by second total absorption exercise (which, by the way I love love love but which totally exhausts me and the rest of the family).

And anyway, perhaps all that charting and stitch counting might challenge my stand and walk whilst knitting habits?

So I decided to start on the vests I'd planned to knit the kids for this cooler weather using the silky wool I dyed at the retreat. But now I just can't find a pattern that excites me. I don't want some daggy old rib band job. I'd been thinking about this vest I saw a few winters ago that was knit entirely in a 2x1 rib and had no bands and kind of funnel neck, but I can't for the life of me find a pattern even in the same ball park. And the pattern that I used to knit this vest for Wil last year appears to have walked out of my pattern library. What the hell did I do with it?

So now I'm thinking I'm going to have to write a pattern which is really kind of time and energy consuming and again, not exactly a commuter project. So I've been looking over my Rav queue and in my UFO basket and really nothing is working for me for this particular knitting opportunity and since I have some waiting room time in line for this afternoon I am beginning to feel desperate! Being without transportable knitting is like going away for the weekend without your toothbrush. Sure you can survive it, but who would want to?

And to much self congratulations the boy-o has learned to walk. Way to go Wil!