this moment

~

Over at SouleMama, she has a Friday ritual called this moment - a single photo, no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor & remember.

~

Have a photo for this moment? Put it in the comments, I'd love to see it!

FO: Rusbud Hat

Pattern: Rosebud Hat by Jared Flood

Yarn: Brooklyn Tweed Shelter

Not yet on my Ravelry page. Took me this long to get it on the blog...so...yeah....Ravelry is up next!

Easter Fun

We had a lovely Easter. Just the three of us. 

There were eggs to find.

With lots of treats inside! 

Eggs in shoes! What a funny Easter Bunny!

The sunshine led to a walk.  A hike through the woods by our house. Just down to the beach. 

And some swings. A walk that ends with a trip to a park and swings is the best kind of walk ever!

(Note her knitted hat; it's the pumpkin hat I made her before she was born. She's out grown it but refuses to wear the one I made her this winter. She always grabs it when I say, get your hat. A lady today thought she looked really cute in her carrot hat. I went with it. Maybe next winter she'll wear the one I made her this year. You know, when it's clearly too small for her.)

I hope you had a lovely day too!

Happy Easter!

What's missing from the blog?

I've been looking over my blog lately and I realized what's been missing from Meg's Knitting Knot: the knitting.

I entered 2013 with just a few goals: do more writing (such as getting my blog going again) and to knit for myself. While the first goal is going somewhat well (I'd like to post more but due to lack of time/energy/mostly nothing that interesting to say I don't), the second isn't going that well. But I am knitting.

I'm almost finished with a baby gift for a dear friend who's expecting her first baby (a girl) in early May. I'm making the Baby and Toddler Tiered Coat. It's pictured here in a rare moment of quiet. The wee one was asleep. The hubby was out of the house. And I either finished the chores or chose to ignore them and sit in the sunlight on the couch. It was glorious. I'll post a photo once I'm finished with the gift.

Oh, and my hat obsession may have come to an end. I finished Rosebud by Jared Flood. It's gray, it's slouchy and I love it. I just haven't taken any photos of it. I'll work on that for you all. I know you can't wait!

this moment

~
Over at SouleMama, she has a Friday ritual called this moment - a single photo, no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor & remember.
~

I thought I'd start doing it as well.

Have a photo from your week you'd like to share? Leave it in the comments section, I'd love to see it.

Patching, bracing & another guest post

I've written another guest blog post for Little Four Eyes, a great blog and resource for parents of children with a variety of eye issues.

This post is particularly important to me as it is heart wrenching: to brace or not to brace Ruby's arms in order to keep her from ripping off her eye patch after 25 seconds of wearing it. It's a tactic that does work. It's just one I was hoping to avoid.

I've been showing Ruby that her baby doll (the blue one) needs to wear her eye patch in order to see well. Each night when we come home, we patch her doll and give her a big kiss and a hug for being so brave. Now she's beginning to think all of her dolls have eye issues as well. This is going to be an expensive training lesson. 

A little "eye" obsessed

A while ago I started teach Ruby about body parts. 

We started with "Where's your nose?" and quickly moved on to "Show mama your toes."

She got pretty good at it. She can tell you where her head is. Her ear. Her tummy and of course belly button. She'll show you her teeth and pucker up her lips when you ask her. She knows her knees and she did look at me funny yesterday when I started explaining where her elbow was.

But, boy is this girl ever good at finding her eye.

Perhaps it's because we pay more attention to her eye than pretty much any body part in the house. And she knows it too.

She'll just look at me now and point to her eye and say "Eye!" She has no problem walking up to you and sticking her finger in your eye (when one is at her level) and letting you know that's your eye.

She points out eyes on all of her dolls and her teddy bear. The other night, as I read her a book, every time I turned a page we had to stop and point out all of the eyes on the little duck and little goose as they went on their merry way to find a pumpkin. (It's a holiday book but she loves it so much we keep it out all the time.)

The thing that gets me about this is, she only points to her right eye. The bad eye. The eye I'm always fussing over. 

Is the contact still in her eye? Is it actually over the pupil so we can patch? I now have eye patches in easily accesible places on both floors of the house so I can just grab one (or 5) and start the fun once we've looked at the eye.

I wonder if she knows she has two eyes since only one really works and we're always fussing over the other?

Now, if I can only teach her to say, "Mama, my contact has popped out of my eye. We must stop what we're doing right now and look for it."

For the record, when we took our baby sign language class I did ask the instructor to teach me to sign contact and she looked at me like I was nuts. I was the first parent in her 15+ years of teaching baby sign language that had asked that question. Come to think of it, she never really taught me the sign for "where's your contact?"

What the crock?

You know those food blog posts where people praise their cooking abilities? How their recipes turned out just perfectly? 

This is not one of those posts.

By a long shot.

This post is this:

This is what I came home to one night last week. It was supposed to be Asian beef. But instead it was burnt crap. And the house smelled like burnt tomatoes and vinegar. It was so disappointing. Not only was I looking forward to another crock pot success, but I had actually told people about this great new recipe I found, how I had it cooking while I was at work. Yup, I had this working mama thing down people! 

And then I came home.

I think we ended up ordering pizza.

I can't remember. The rest of the night was a blur.

And it took two days of soaking in sudsy warm water to get that crap out of my pot.

Any crock pot winners you'd like to share? I could use a few good recipes please!

Patching update: little victories

Little victories.

That's what I'm savoring this week.

I've got a new eye patching plan. Two new boxes of patches. And new found determination to make us get through this phase of utter shit. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

I've started patching her baby doll. I talk about how important it is for baby doll (she really needs a name) to wear her eye patch so she can have two good eyes.

So far, Ruby just laughs when I put the patch on her. 

Then she takes off the patch and runs to daddy to give him the patch so he can be the hero daddy and rescue her and baby doll from the evil patch.

I also decided that eye patch = iPad time. I downloaded some fun toddler apps. She has zero interest in them. I also downloaded several episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba (all my mom friends swear this is the most adult tolerable show. So far I've seen about ten minutes of an episode and I think they're all smoking crack. This is the tolerable show? Oh lord....)

The other night, armed with my new tools and confidence, I put Yo Gabba Gabba on the iPad, put Ruby in front of it where she was immediately mesmerized by whatever those dancing things are. And then after a few minutes, I put on a patch, held her hands and helped her dance to the music. At first, it was working! She was watching the show, dancing and laughing! I was thinking OK, I did it! We can do this! We can patch! We can have two good eyes! 

And then two minutes went by and Ruby had had enough. Enough of the patch. Enough of me. And probably enough of Yo Gabba Gabba. After a long struggle with her to keep the patch on, she won, ripped the patch off and ran to daddy.

Not ready to throw the patch in, I let her calm down. Put the patch on baby doll. Talked about how important it was and then put the show back on the iPad and waited for her to come back over to me. She did. And I got her with another patch. This time she was on to me. We struggled, cried, wrestled and she ripped it off. Then she ran over to baby doll and ripped it off of her. 

Then, to give me a piece of my own medicine, she came back to me and stuck the patch on my eye and I swear she giggled.

She's right. Wearing the patch does suck.

But I'm sorry my dearest sweet baby girl. You have to wear this patch.

You can do it. We can do it together. You, me, daddy & baby doll.

Luscious Lemons

My in-laws recently came for a visit shortly have their trip to Southern Arizona (ah...the retired life). They brought us a big bag of fresh citrus from their families backyard! Knowing how much I love oranges, they thought it would be a fun treat for me! (Notice how there aren't any pics of said oranges? Yeah...that's because I scarfed those bad boys down so freakin' quickly. Seriously. Love. Oranges.)

But now, I've got these great big lemons that are beautiful to look at and smell even better.

So what should I do with them? 

Cutting them up and putting slices in my water seems like such a waste.

I feel these beauties are destined for something so much better.

Ideas? I'm ready.

Go.

this moment

Over at SouleMama, she has a Friday ritual called this moment - a single photo, no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor & remember.

I thought I'd start doing it as well.

Have a photo from your week you'd like to share? Leave it in the comments section, I'd love to see it.

A hand knit kind of day

I've always loved the Anouk pattern from the Yarn Harlot. When I found out I was having a girl, I pretty much went from the ultrasound appointment to the yarn story to get yarn for this sweet dress. But as life with a baby is pretty messy and now life with a toddler is also messy and much more mobile, the dress got shoved to the back of the closet. Until the recently.

I pulled it out and decided today was a hand knit kind of a day. And you know what? The wee one agreed with me.

Then she decided my hand knit hat Foliage would be the best choice to complete her look.

She was right.

Details of both projects can be found on my Ravelry page.

Mini Muffins

Now that I have a wee person who's wanting real food to eat all by herself, I have to be a wee bit creative. She's hungry when we get home from work & daycare. I'm not. But I have to have something healthy for her dinner. And it needs to be relatively quick. I've become pretty good at making big batches of stuff & freezing it for her. Then lunches and dinners are ready & just need to be popped in the microwave and voila - a yummy dinner!

And the same I'm happy to report goes for one of her favorite treats: muffins! She gets one for a morning snack every day and she loves them! I love that these are made from scratch and I know exactly what goes into them. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients - also key for me.

I try to make a different batch of muffins each time she's running low. Plus, variety is the spice of life! 

Or something like that.

While I always try to vary the recipes, I always seem to have bananas going bad around here. I've got some chopped up and frozen for my smoothies, but there's still more going bad. So I did a little Internet sleuthing and came up with this gem of a recipe: Banana Oatmeal Muffins. There are several variations on the web and I'm going to try some others some day. But so far, this one is my go-to-always-generates-a-smile-recipe.

Embracing the crock

The crock pot that is.

Being a full time working mama, I'm always looking for things that make my life easier (and really who isn't!)

I adore grocery delivery services (thank you Amazon Fresh!)

I'm all about running errands on my lunch break (when I can).

And I really need to be better about using my crock pot. I love the idea of coming home from a busy work day and smelling something warm and delicious wafting through the house, like my personal cook was busy there all day long. But I haven't tried too many crock pot recipes aside from the standard pot roast.

But this past weekend was different. In the mail I received my supplemental EveryDay Food magazine (I'm still so sad that magazine no longer exists!), but I was thrilled when they published a small version of it this month. I immediately flipped through it folding down pages like crazy. Then I stumbled onto this gem: Italian braised pork. Cooked in the slow cooker. Yes please!

(photo from EveryDay Food/Martha Stewart)

I made it first thing Sunday morning while the wee one entertained herself as my sous chef with some plastic measuring cups, a wooden spoon and basically anything I could hand her that gave me 10 minutes to chop, saute and dump into the crock pot. I made this over quinoa and it was a hit with my family! We had the left overs last night and it tasted even better the next day.

I would have posted pictures but I was working on borrowed time to get it prepped. And it was so tasty it was gobbled up too fast for a photo once it was done.

This recipe is a keeper! I highly recommend it! Once again, thank you Everyday Food & Martha Stewart for another fabulous recipe!

i am: an imom

I am many things.

A woman. A wife. A mother. A writer. A TV producer. A sister. A daughter.

But I've also recently discovered that I'm an imom.

What is an imom you ask? It's not a mom who's super handy/techy with all things Apple related. It's a mom whose child has a serious eye condition.

I didn't know these imom were out there as I stood holding there wee one when she was just 3 months old & we were in a pediatric ophthalmologist office. Or when, just a few short days later I was again holding her, crying (me, not her) at Seattle Children's Hospital as they explained (again) what it meant to be born with a pediatric cataract and what was in store for us.

But I'm grateful I've discovered these other imoms. They are support. They are encouragement. And they are going through - or have already been - where I am and where I'm going. And they are here to tell their tale.

It's not an easy journey. I've shed many, many tears over this battle. And I feel like it's only just begun. I've learned there's no shame in asking for help. I've learned there's no shame in crying hysterically at the doctors office. I've learned there's no shame in coming home from these doctors offices and making a very strong gin & tonic. And then making another one.

I recently shared our story on an eye blog that I follow (they fit right in with my knitting and cooking blogs). The site is called Little Four Eyes. I shared the wee one's story here. Please take a moment to read about it.

Then take a moment to schedule an eye appointment for your wee one. Or yourself.

One of my current obsessions: The Pioneer Woman

Every once in a while I tend to get a wee little obsessed with something. From running, to a particular lunch place, a TV show, it happens from time to time. Lately, it's The Pioneer Woman (but just in case Ree Drummond is actually reading this, she doesn't need to worry. I'm no stalker. Plus it really does look like she lives in the middle of no where, thus making stalking a wee bit difficult.)

I've heard of her blog before. And seen her cookbooks around, but never paid much attention to it. Then recently the Food Network changed their Saturday morning line up giving the PW (as she's abbreviated on her blog) an early morning time slot. I know this because Saturday is the hubby's sleep in day, thus my morning to get up with the wee one. However sometimes, the wee one doesn't want to waste one minute of the weekend sleeping so we're up bright and early and ready to play. So play she does while mama lays on the floor with the Food Network on. 

Now, say what you will about having the TV on and kids in the room. That it's bad for them...blah..blah.. blah... did you not read the part that it's 6 a.m. on a Saturday?! OK, judgement aside, the wee one and I enjoy the FN early in the morning. And now we really enjoy the PW. Some people have raised an eyebrow when I mention something from her show, or give me a funny look. I defend her and say she's a genius and seems really down to earth, like she and I could be friends (and this where the stalker part may come into play.) She's on TV, but she talks like I talk. She makes jokes, movie references and some of them work...and some of them don't. But she just laughs it off.

But her recent post about the season 3 finale of Dowtown Abbey really cemented why I love her so. While she and I are both (spoiler alert) broken hearted about dear old Matthew, she made one comment that just made me laugh. I had to share it:

Okay, let’s grieve together. Share, vent, mourn in the comments. Please tell me it’s just a dream or that Stefano DiMera has just abducted Matthew and is keeping him on a remote island in a cage.

GENIUS!!! A Days of Our Lives reference from way back in the day! I remember that episode! Anyone remember who Stefano DiMera kidnapped and put in a cage on a remote island?* And why was he never arrested for that or any of the other shit he pulled? Considering half of the Brady's were/are cops, what's up with that? OK, I'm digressing. 

Anyhoo...back to my point. To sum it up:
1. I love the Pioneer Woman. You should totally check her out.
2. I can't take the heartbreak on Dowton Abbey anymore. I'm now convinced that in season 4 Alfred will start cooking and accidentally blow up the manor and kill them all. And that will be it.
3. Why did the Brady's never send Stefano up to the big house?

Oh, and if on the way, way off chance that the PW herself is reading this, um, hi. And really, I'm cool. Not stalker like at all.

*It was Hope. Not to be confused with the many, many times Stefano kidnapped Marlena.

A little post for the heart

In honor of Valentine's Day this week, I thought  I'd share a little something for our hearts: education.

Heart disease is one of the top killers for women. And the symptoms of a heart attack are different for women then they are for men. But sadly, not a lot of women know that. And worse, these issues aren't discussed in their doctors offices. As one who is known to be a bit of um, shall we say, a "squeaky wheel" I think it's important to talk about these things.

So in honor of all the heart celebrations this week - both the chocolate, candy and other kind, here's a little video from the lovely and talented Elizabeth Banks. I'm sure we've all had mornings like this (minus the heart attack hopefully).



Hope you had a great Valentine's Day!

Dusting off the blog

Hello, is anyone still out there?

I hope so, but I wouldn't doubt you if you weren't. To say that's it's been a while is an understatement. It's been more than a year since my last post. But to say that I've missed blogging is also an understatement. But I needed the break.

I needed the break to be a new mom. To be a working mom. To get the hang of things. And I'm here to report back that I so don't have the hang of the whole "working mom" thing but basically I miss blogging so here we are.

So what have I been up too? Let's see. Lots of diapers. Sleepless nights. Lots of baby giggles, snuggles, hugs and very drool-y kisses. Lots of work stress, meetings, errands, etc. Way more take out & ordering in than even when I was in college.  Not a lot of knitting, but I'm also hoping that changes.

I've missed everyone. And I'm glad to be back.

Stay tuned. There's more to come.

A real head scratcher...

Before Ruby was born, I made her a knitted Christmas stocking. Not just any stocking, one that matched mine and the hubby's. I picked out the yarn, I made it before she was born so that I had plenty of time to get it done. I finished it. It looked great. Then, like the good knitter I long to be, I blocked it.

And then something odd happened. It got spots all over it. Little pink spots.

Was it mold?

 Was a weird color transfer from the gray yarn to the cream yarn?

Seriously, what the $#%& was it?

Nothing got it out. Nothing. I know because I tried it all.

So here I was. New mom. Exhausted mom. All my knitting & planning gone. So what's one to do when one is obsessed with having a finished perfect Christmas stocking for baby's first Christmas. A Christmas, mind you that baby won't even remember? Well, what all good knitters do around the holidays: I stayed up way to freakin' late and knit another damn stocking.

And I loved it.

And I'm pretty sure Ruby did too!

BTW...if you have any ideas what the hell happened to stocking No. 1, please let me know!

(This photo was taken w/ my cell. I can't figure out how to turn it the right way, but you get the idea....she loved the stocking! Or thought it was something that she could fit into.)

My best F.O. (that's finished object for you non-knitters)

Here it is. Or rather, here she is:

Ruby Harper

Born Oct 7 (hence the long & much needed blogging break).

She's a bundle of joy, energy and laughter! She's brought so much love & happiness into our little family it's like we were just waiting for her.

Although, instead of a finished project, I'm thinking this is one that's still ongoing. And I don't mind at all.