Quick finished object

One of the things we accomplished by stopping in Columbus on the way out, besides spending time with my best bosom friend Sarah, was that I was finally able to give her the wedding present I finished last October, and that means I can finally share a picture of it:



It's not blocked yet in the picture, but the designs still come through well. The central raven design and Celtic wavy bits around the edges are from a book called Enchanted Knitting: Charted Motifs for Hand and Machine Knitting, a book of gorgeous knitting charts of pictures to put in any sort of knitting project you like. They're intended to be machine knitted, but they're not really that bad once you actually get into the project. I designed the blanket to go around them more or less on the fly. To get it to be large enough, I cheated a bit by using thick yarn and big needles, so it's very thick and warm. It's meant to keep a couple warm as they cuddle together on a cold night and I hope it serves its purpose through years of happiness.

Home

We arrived home last night around 8. We all slept horribly last night (between the cat and the child, there was nearly a double homicide at 5am in my bedroom) and we all have a cold in various stages of progression.

But we had a wonderful time. The convention went very well - our department is consistently one of the smoothest-running of the con and we all have fun working together, the food was pretty good and I actually got a decent amount of sleep, which I have discovered makes a huge difference in my ability to cope four hours into a work shift.*

After the con, we drove back to Michigan with my brother and a good friend in tow, to reunite with our no doubt grandparent-spoiled child and work on getting whatever we wanted out of my mother's house before it goes on the market. It is to my eternal regret that I wasn't able to get pictures of some of the better treasures from the basement Box of Horrifying Toys, such as the kangaroo puppet with half of its face rotted away and the doll that I think was a Christmas tree ornament, with its head pulled away from its neck and hanging disturbingly low to one side. An ornament for Jack Skellington's Christmas tree, maybe.

On the non-horrifying end, I pulled out my old large doll cradle (large enough to put a human baby in) and trunk full of doll clothes for K. I engaged in a ruthless washing machine Darwinism on the clothes by sending them through the washer and dryer and surprisingly, pretty much all of them made the cut. I discovered an astounding number of unmatched doll booties and socks - not a single pair in the bunch. K has adapted to this without blinking - currently her doll is wearing one white bootie and one blue bootie on its feet, and is doing her best to put a larger bootie on its head as a hat.

Eventually, we packed up a stupendous amount of stuff in our car and drove home, stopping in Champaign and Lafayette on the way. It was so good to see our friends. I miss them dreadfully.

I am astonishingly tired, so I will end this here so I can chase K to bed and collapse.

*Since it occurs to me that no one reading this blog would have been reading since I last did Acen in 2005, a quick translation: we have worked as staff at Anime Central, an anime convention in Chicago, for several years. We normally work in the video rooms, where hot and cold running anime is on tap 24 hours a day during the con, doing stuff like checking badges, changing dvds and making sure nobody steals the dvd players. If this doesn't sound like much fun, the draw is that several of our good friends run the video department, so we get to have fun hanging out with them while we work. Plus we get to watch lots of anime as well as get into the convention for free.

Midwestward ho!

So did I mention we were going to be travelling this week? I meant to leave a more formal "We will be on the road and away from the Internet for the next two weeks" message up last Saturday, but I was too preoccupied with freaking out over our slowly dissolving carseat.

So yes, we're no longer on the East Coast, but instead back in the Land of Corn. At Acen as a matter of fact. We've fallen into the old familiar Video room groove, which makes it feel like I never took a two-year maternity leave from working here. Lots of work, not enough sleep, lots of anime, all while surrounded by hordes of exotically dressed anime geeks.* The main difference is that when we went over to the dealers' room, we spent most of our time looking for presents for K instead of things for ourselves.**

K is apparently doing pretty well without us, being thoroughly entertained by all three of her grandparants. I have enjoyed my first nights away from her in her life, but I'll be happy to see her tomorrow. She's been behaving pretty well this trip, despite or perhaps because of the frequent stops. We only went as far as Columbus last Sunday, and stayed until Tuesday to visit with as well as B's cousin and her 10 month old. Then we had lunch in Yellow Springs with B's uncle, dinner in Indianapolis with more college friends and were at my mother's in Michigan by 11 on Tuesday. It's almost restful to be here despite, since we get to stay for a whole three and a half days before we have to drive anywhere again.

Must go - due back on shift soon.



*When we arrived Thursday afternoon, we sat in the atrium before dinner, amusing ourselves by watching the crowd slowly turn from businesspeople in suits to people lugging swords, catgirl ears and Mountain Dew, obviously here for an anime convention.

**There's a tragic lack of Miyazaki things this year, which is annoying because K is a huge fan of Kiki's Delivery Service.

A PSA

Our current carseat (Graco Comfortsport) has what's called EPS safety foam, which essentially means it's lined with what looks like styrofoam. Tonight, in preparation for our trip tomorrow, I was cleaning out the car and decided to shake the disgusting layer of toddler debris out of the carseat. Taking off the cover, I discovered that a large section of the foam had cracked and then COMPLETELY BROKEN OFF.

Um, not exactly safety foam now, is it?

This is not a "don't buy the Graco Comfortsport" message. I don't know that this is a problem specific to them. I don't even know that our carseat is unsafe now, although I'm buying a new one first thing tomorrow morning anyway because I don't have time to find out before we leave to drive 500 miles. I'm just telling this story as a way to urge you to periodically give your carseats a good going over to make sure that pieces aren't about to fall off. It's never good to be surprised by these things.

To balance out the complaining in the last post

K's new word for rabbit, which I will be very very sorry to see go:

bunnyhop

K's new word for baby rabbit, AKA the killing blow of cuteness:

babyhop

Work notes, plus sleep despair

* I created a science fiction section in the library on Friday. Our adult fiction collection consists largely of romances, manly thrillers, cat mysteries and James Michener, so it always shocks me when I go dowsing through there and suddenly come up with a Star Trek novel or the complete Foundation series. And if it surprises me to find science fiction, I'm sure our patrons don't know it's there either, so it seemed worthwhile to pull it out and bring it blinking into the light for everyone to see.

This might have stayed a laudable yet unmet goal since one thing I don't lack for at work is projects, but then we got a huge donation of sci fi and fantasy. It was also largely two authors (Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks, not exactly my first choice, but beggars and all...), so adding them to our pretty tightly packed stacks would have been a nightmare of reshelving. Instead, I used it as an excuse to mine our stacks for science fiction and set them up on an empty set of shelves. Some of the gems included all of the Star Trek readers by James Blish (favorites of my childhood) and some particularly groovy Lando Calrissian novels from the early 80s.

I got a start on cataloging the new books, although I'm not sure if I'm going to add all of the Piers Anthony. It's fantastic that they gave us the entire Apprentice Adept series and the early Xanth books are cool, but there's also a glut of late Xanth books, from after it turned into a skeevy children's series with rather disturbing dirty old man tittering over the underwear of young girls. I am a staunch advocate of free speech and as a librarian strive to always serve the information needs of my patrons without judgment. This means I have cataloged any number of books that I didn't like or even found utterly antithetical to my beliefs. But I'm not sure if I can bring myself to catalog a book called The Color of Her Panties. I'm just not sure I have it in me.

* I briefly had thoughts of taking my mother's 1988 Britannica home with me to donate to the library, but then I discovered that we in fact already have an Encylopedia Britannica. From 1988. Something of a lateral move. So much for beefing up the reference section through family charity.

But yesterday, I reaped the benefits of nepotism when B called me up to let me know he was withdrawing a three-year-old World Book, which is now free for the taking by any other city agency. Like mine, just to pull an example out of thin air. An encyclopedia for the children's section! From this century even! Well, we do have the Charlie Brown Encyclopedia, but it, um, lacks in intellectual rigor.

* It's after midnight. K is STILL awake. I don't know what the hell is wrong with her these days. Either she falls asleep late and sleeps through the night, or she falls asleep at a reasonable hour and then wakes up for a couple hours in the middle of the night. I would think that it was a sign she needed to give up her nap, but it hasn't worked so far. I tried several times to skip her nap only to have her fall asleep on top of me at 5 after a major meltdown. She skipped her nap a couple times last week and fell asleep right at 8, only to wake up at midnight and stay awake until 3. Tonight, it's like someone slipped her speed. We've alternated between letting her play quietly and taking turns going in to try and get her to fall asleep. I almost had her down a couple times, but those eyes will. not. stay. closed.

Okay, she's finally asleep. At 12:30 in the fricking AM. We've tried helping her fall asleep, which doesn't usually work until it's late at night. We've tried letting her play in her room until she's ready to go to sleep, which usually lets her keep herself awake. We've tried melatonin. Short of clubbing her over the head, I don't know what to do any more.

Education

After no small amount of effort, I managed to assemble the paperwork for K's preschool application and got it in the mail in time. It wasn't a hard application, per se, just long and a bit eccentric. The only things K really needs to qualify for preschool is to 1) be three by the time school starts, and 2) live in Philadelphia (check and check! Whether or not she gets in is an issue of space, and preference is given to older children), so there was only so much paperwork to fill out relevant to those issues. But government paperwork can never be simple, so they had to hit me with some mildly bizarre social development and nutrition questionnaires. On the nutrition questionnaire, for instance, they were asking how often we fed K various kinds of foods. But the lists were a bit odd; one was "Green vegetables, carrots, broccoli" for instance. Um, isn't broccoli a green vegetable? Why did pasta and tortillas get put in one question but bread in a different one? Like I said, slightly bizarre.

The social development questionnaire stymied me for a while. They wanted to know when K passed certain milestones, except the milestones they chose were very difficult to pin down. Like "Understands language." Do you mean when she first began to understand simple words, or when it became clear that her receptive language had expanded to the point that she understood a lot of what we said to her? Or the really hard one, "Feeds and dresses self." First of all, those are two completely different milestones, accomplished at wildly different ages. Babies can often start feeding themselves finger foods by 8 or 9 months, while many children can't still can't completely dress themselves without help by the time they're three. Second, what you mean by feeds self? The first time she was able to rake a piece of food into her mouth? When the majority of her meals were self-fed finger foods? When she started using a spoon?

Gah. I hope the preschool itself will be worth the hassle. I'm quailing a bit at the thought of my baby starting full-day school, but at the same time, this is a golden opportunity for a large chunk of free child care. I passed on the opportunity to apply for three part-time jobs this spring because when I crunched the numbers, I would have wound up working 30-35 hours a week to take home $300 a month after paying for daycare. That's just not worth it. I'm sick of being caught in the trap of needing two incomes but not being able to afford working outside of the house. I'm so burned out on Ebay, but nothing else makes money without having to pay for daycare. Maybe we could actually get ahead a bit financially if we can get K into a free preschool.

Trip planning

It has suddenly snuck up on me that we're leaving on a long road trip in TWO WEEKS. And how have we prepared so far? We've bought an 18 pack of Horizon vanilla milk boxes that are vacuum sealed so they'll be safe in the car. Clearly this is the sort of strategic planning and ruthless efficiency that let the pioneers of old settle the west. Of course, we don't have the option of tethering a cow to the back of the car in case we need milk during the journey like they did, so the milk boxes were definitely a good purchase. But I don't think milk alone, organic or not, will carry us through 750 miles, so we should get on the stick (although milk will likely be cheaper than gas if the current trends continue).

So: renew AAA membership, get oil changed, attempt to find the perfect algorithm for packing as little as possible so we have plenty of room to carry stuff from my mother's house home yet enough to keep K thoroughly entertained and occupied while we're driving (and not just the portable dvd player), attempt to find inflatable travel bed for K that doesn't have a Disney character on it, try not to go slowly mad on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, etc. We can get food for Acen once we're in Michigan. Yay Acen! I'm giddy with anticipation. I'm sure that most parents don't spend the first nights away from their child in nearly three years working at an anime convention while sharing a hotel room with two other people, but it's going to be fun for us, albeit in a slightly masochistic kind of way.

I've made four - no, five t-shirt dresses for K now. We now have dinosaurs, froggies, dragonflies, whales and a lovely little flowered number with yellow eyelet fabric. They're such a satisfying little project. Half an hour of work for a great looking little outfit, if I do say so myself. It helps that K is an extremely gratifying person to sew for. I don't think I've made anything for her yet that she hasn't loved and immediately tried to put on. K and I went to the fabric store yesterday to get yet more fabric and she could barely contain her glee as the fabric she helped choose was cut and slid across the counter towards her.

I'm feeling particularly happy about the latest dress, ladybugs:



It started life as a lace-trimmed henley from The Children's Place, with ladybug fabric from Joann's. The pieces de resistance were the cute little ladybug buttons I found to replace the originals. I think this one is definitely my favorite so far.

Next up: doggie dress! Another dino dress! Butterfly dress! And work out a pattern for shorts so K can wear all of these dresses without flashing everyone and their brother on the playground.

Monkey on my back

I think I have come to the conclusion that at the moment, one of my body's reactions to depression is to crave sugar. For most of the past year, I've been struggling with the easy availability of Wawa's donut case and cappuccino machine, replete with chai and Cinnamon Delight cappuccino. This has never in my life been a problem before (I'm typically more of a salty than a sweet craver), but I've never had a year quite this bad either.

But with the advent of spring, I've been feeling better. Time marches on and starts to heal wounds, our social life is starting to come to life a bit and the return of sunlight is almost always good for what ails you. And so I felt the siren call of Wawa less and less, until a couple weeks ago I got a donut and coffee before work, only to discover that I didn't particularly want either. I finished the donut but it took me most of the day. And I drank a third of the coffee and then poured it out and filled the cup with water instead. Since then, I've practically been a culinary monk when it comes to eating healthy.

Until today, when our daycare situation turned sordid as I discovered that my daycare provider has been lying to me in a rather underhanded way (not that any lying is really aboveboard, I admit, but this was a sort of two-facedness that seems particularly egregious). I don't want to hash out the details right now, because mostly I feel like crawling in a hole over the entire situation. Mostly I mention this because I find it notable that along with the sting of betrayal came the almost immediate siren song of fat-laden sugar.

I gave in, just for tonight. But my waistline doesn't thank me for this particular coping mechanism, so tomorrow we will start to try to unravel the daycare mess and I will attempt to find a better way to drown my sorrows.