Category Archives: The Boy

The Boy’s New Cello

This past Monday we took a day trip to Ottawa to visit the Canadian Museum of Nature (or “the dinosaur museum,” as the boy calls it, but he also calls the ROM the same thing so it’s city-dependent) and we’re very impressed with the renovations. The new Queen’s Lantern in the front is surprisingly beautiful for a modernist structure of metal and glass, housing what they call a butterfly staircase (which is essentially a divided staircase that goes up two different ways from floating mini landings) and the whole thing is actually suspended, not built on the lower part of the tower so as to avoid placing weight on it (the reason that the plans for the original tower had to be abandoned). It was a beautiful day for a drive, too.

The other reason we were in Ottawa was to see the 1/8 cello I’d seen listed on Kijiji a month ago. I told the gentleman who listed it that if he sold it in the meantime I would completely understand, but he kept it for me against several other inquiries. He was so kind that I’m very grateful the cello was in great condition and we could buy it. It’s thirty years old; he bought it long ago for his daughter who played it for a year before switching to piano, and he’s kept it all this time, hoping that he’d eventually have grandkids who would play it. He and his wife are selling their house (which was a lovely older semi-detached cottage-style house dating from the 1940s, I think, and if we were in the Ottawa area it’s just the kind of place we’d love to move into) and it was finally time for them to let the cello go.

It’s in very good condition for something that’s been stored for thirty years. There are a couple of cosmetic scratches, but other than that it’s very sound. The strings are dead, dead, dead, but I tuned them as best I could and the boy had a go at it to see how it felt, and the tone wasn’t bad. It will need new strings and bow, as I expected, and the tuning pegs may need to be reshaped (although I got them to stop slipping with a couple of dabs of peg dope — yay, I finally got to use the stick of it that Emily sent me!). I don’t doubt my luthier will want to reshape the bridge, too, because it seems very thick and heavy. The endpin is clunky and dates back from before the fashion was to be as light as possible, so it may be replaced at some point too. It desperately needs a new case, as the bag it’s got is vinyl backed with some sort of mohair-like man-made material that shreds onto the bridge and doesn’t open very well. But the instrument itself is in great shape, and all these other little things can be done one by one, starting with the strings and case, since we’re still using our teacher’s tiny Twinkle bow. And seriously, when one was renting at $170 for two months at a time, this will still come out cheaper only four months down the line. (I’m not kidding: this cello cost $150; updating the accessories will cost about $300. The only local 1/8 listed is $850. New, we’d be paying $1400.)

Most importantly, I asked him if he liked it, and he thought about it seriously before saying that he did, and that it felt comfortable. Did he want to buy it, I asked? Yes, he said firmly, he rather thought he did, which charmed the seller and his wife. So his decision was final, and we paid the gentleman, and the boy now owns his own cello.

(Oh, the forehead in the photo? He walked up to me this morning and said, “Mama, I want you to draw a maple leaf with a lightning bolt on it on my forehead.” “We have no face paint,” I told him. “We can use marker,” he replied cheerfully. Oh, no, we can’t, I thought darkly, because his so-called washable markers have proved decidedly non-washable lately. “Let me Google facepaint recipes,” I sad, and found one that I kitbashed (cornstarch, flour, honey instead of corn syrup, hot water, food colouring), outlined a maple leaf in eyeliner, and painted it in. In related news, we were awoken early this morning by the boy burrowing into our bed, where he proceeded to sing the national anthem to us.)

More recent good news:

– My largest freelance cheque arrived the day after the mail started moving after the government’s heavy-handed back-to-work legislation, so we have money again. For a limited time, of course, because now I get to throw money at utility bills that have been piling up, car insurance and registration, and reno materials, and cloth diapers, and obviously 1/8 size cello accessories that cost the same as full-size ones, a fact that I find extremely unfair… but this is what it was earmarked for, so I’m just thankful I’ve got it. (Which reminds me; I need to call QPIP and struggle through the red tape of initializing maternity benefits for a self-employed entrepreneur. Pray for me.)

– HRH and his dad finished laying the floor in the attic yesterday. This is huge, because it means all the other steps can happen.

– Tonight is the annual Canada Day concert given by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and although I’m still not feeling fully prepared (the inability to remember if I’m supposed to be playing A flats or sharps is one issue that comes to mind, and no, looking at a key signature doesn’t help much on the fly). Also, we suddenly have a full brass section, part of the magic of hey-it’s-the-week-before-the-concert. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a gorgeous day for Canada Day festivities, too.

– I hit 35 weeks yesterday, and am still very proud of the Owlet for hanging in there. One more week and my hospital will deliver her without stopping labour or transferring me to Ste-Justine for imprisonment. (Just kidding, Ste-Justine; you are a remarkable hospital, and I love you and your staff and everything you have done for us in the past, but I really, really want to work with my own hospital of choice for this delivery.) She is getting really cramped for space and I am near the okay-enough-of-this point, so any time as of 7 July is a go. We are not committing to a date, but we suspect the third week of July.

– My cousin and his family stopped by for the afternoon on Tuesday on their way to Nova Scotia and we had a wonderful time with them. I hope they stop by on their way back in two weeks, but I think they plan to drive straight through.

Right; time to give my music one last once-over in the hopes that anything that hasn’t yet stuck manages to make its way into my brain, then pack a sandwich and snacks and stuff to eat after warmup and before the concert, otherwise I will fall over dead around eight-forty-five.

Farewell To Kindergarten

Yesterday afternoon all three kindergarten classes got together and presented a little concert for their parents, got certificates, and then there was cake.

It’s the boy’s last day of kindergarten today:

It seems like only yesterday that he was off to school for the first time…

I’m a wee bit wistful, and tremendously proud. His teacher told us his reading skills were far beyond his grade level (which doesn’t surprise us, because we read to him all the time, and he will read any text he can; if we put cereal boxes on the table he’d read them, but we don’t, so he reads things like CD spines and flyers that come in the mail and the company information on passing trucks as well as books). He’s doing addition and subtraction, things I didn’t grasp until the middle of grade one, and, perhaps most of all, I am proud of the thoughtful, sensitive little citizen he’s become.

Potpourri

1. I had another prenatal appointment yesterday. Everything is spot-on. My doctor was so excited about me going past the 31-week mark that I had to laugh at her.

2. HRH has finished the stairs to the attic, and they are beautiful. He has also temporarily cleared out all the insulation so we can lay the floor. We have been able to revise the flooring plan because we discovered when he cut through the ceiling that the existing attic floor/first floor ceiling was made with tongue-and-groove strips, solid enough to be walked on. Seriously, this gets better and better; first, actual windows existed up there under the siding, and now a floor? The attic was genuinely designed to be another room that the original owners just didn’t tell the builders to complete.

3. After today, there are only two days of kindergarten left for the boy. He has a kindergarten celebration tomorrow afternoon, where the parents will go in and watch them sing songs and that sort of thing, then they will get certificates, and then there will be cake and juice for everyone. Where did this academic year go? Didn’t he just take the school bus for the first time?

4. As the end of the school year approaches the boy has been bringing home workbooks and folders and artwork. I had no idea they wrote and drew journals as part of their curriculum, but he sat down with me yesterday and read me all his journal entries, about one a week since they began in January, and I was stunned. They don’t teach formal reading or writing in kindergarten, or so they say; they encourage sounding things out and phonetic spelling as steps toward it. This means that yes, there are letters missing and incorrect letters, but the sounds are mostly there. I now have a six-year-old who sounds out every written word he sees with ease, reads above his theoretic grade level, and who does a pretty impressive job of writing words down just from listening to them or saying them. I can read his journal entries without referring to his teacher’s interpretation below. I find this kind of evolution of how to read and write absolutely fascinating. Here, here’s an example from two months ago; I’m giving you this one because I recognised it right away. This is a pretty precise depiction of Ceri and Scott’s basement from where you’d be standing if you paused in the archway into the TV room and saw Scott and Liam playing video games together. I even love that he drew Scott’s computer desk off to the right.

I also love that he wrote and drew about something important to him each time: spending the day with a special friend, building in his Lego City that lives on a board under his bed and is pulled out to play with, visiting grandparents, the best part of a field trip, and that sort of thing. We’re going to keep up the journal exercise weekly over the summer. He seems excited about it, it’s a great way to keep working on practising his letters, and I love the idea of tucking it away in a memento box for him to look at years from now.

(Have I mentioned that I find how kids learn fascinating? I do. I find the stuff they don’t learn just as fascinating. Like how the boy still can’t grasp riding a two-wheeler bike.)

5. I am currently struggling with internal tension about the postal strike. I fully support the CUPW’s right to demonstrate, call for collective bargaining, their requests for proper contracts and the pay scale and benefits they’re fighting to keep, including maintaining pension details for existing and new workers that got hit when the economy tanked. (It drives me up the wall that CP keeps saying mail volume is down and that’s why they’re not agreeing to the union’s requests to maintain what was in their last contract because they’re “unrealistic,” but they’re neglecting to acknowledge that to make up for it they’ve been accepting more paid admail to be delivered over the past few years, which has made up the shortfall in lettermail in both volume and profit. Admail; you know, the unaddressed stuff that the postperson sorts, carries, and puts in everybody’s mailbox that you take out and put right into the recycling box.) The one-day rotating strikes slowed things down a bit, but that was fine. When Canada Post cut operations to three days from five, effectively going to part-time for everyone, it slowed things down more and I chafed a bit, but at least things were still moving. But when Canada Post locked their workers out completely to create a national situation, things went badly for me. I have three (no, four by now) rather important freelance cheques coming to me from the US that are now stuck in the system. They were due to arrive the second week of June at the earliest, and we budgeted accordingly. Now that budget is screwed and have been scrambling to rebalance things; money originally scheduled to go one place is being diverted to go others and things are being left for a later date that ought to be paid now, and buying the last few baby things we need keeps getting shuffled later and later. The attic has taken a hit, too, because we were going to use part of my biggest cheque to buy the initial round of supplies, timed to happen with the beginning of the month-long vacation HRH had booked. (Although things look brighter in that department due to parental generosity, so at least HRH won’t be sitting here off work, twiddling his thumbs and wasting time, waiting for the cheques to arrive in the mail so we can get building.) So yes, things have been rather stressful and unhappy around here money-wise for the past two weeks. And just as bad, important outgoing mail got stuck in the strike as well, like our taxes and my application for cord blood donation, which needs to be received by Hema-Quebec before I get to 36 weeks. The life of a postal service-dependent freelancer is not a happy one. And it really annoys me to read comments like “We don’t need the post office, everyone should go to e-mail billing and direct deposit!” on news articles, because that demonstrates a really poor understanding of how businesses function (and also assumes everyone has internet access, which is also erroneous).

6. The boy went to La Ronde, our local Six Flags amusement park, for the first time this past Sunday, on a free pass with his best friend, her mum, and HRH. They had a fabulous time. I am shocked at the expense of these sorts of things, so a free pass is pretty much the only way it could happen. (Although HRH told me that season passes for a family are less expensive than a single admission for said family, if purchased before a certain date, so we may look into that as a gift to him next year since the boy had The Best Time Ever.) They spent the day mostly in the family ride area, the majority of which seems to have been installed in 2005. I am jealous, because he got to go on the Belgian carousel built in 1885 and bought for Expo 67, which runs on electricity right now but is being restored to run on steam power again, complete with its steam organ:

7. Tomorrow is the boy’s last day with his rental cello, then I take it back to the luthier. We couldn’t renew the rental even if we wanted to, with this stupid cheques-stuck-in-the-mail issue. But hopefully practice will be back to normal as of Tuesday morning, because on Monday we are taking that day trip to Ottawa to see secondhand 1/8 cello at a steal of a price, see the newly redone Nature Museum (which we last saw a couple of years ago in the midst of renovation) and also walk past the Parliament Buildings.

8. There’s a post with knitting and spinning and stuff to come, I promise.

I think that’s it for now.

In Which She Writes Up A Cello Recital Report For Posterity

A belated cello recital entry! I’ve been putting bits of this down as the week goes on. There’s been a lot to catch up on.

The boy went up to take his place with confidence, watched his teacher carefully, and played his piece with gusto. He got a big whoop at the end from all of the cello families, who know that the first recital is a big thing, and also from his godfamily who had just made it in time to hear him. (The grin on his face in the picture to the left is him hearing his godfamily, in fact.) The Suzuki mum in me is very proud of his confidence in his bowing and his poise. The cellist in me is very proud of how good his sound was – no wishy-washy sound from this boy! – and of his steady rhythm. In the interest of full disclosure, his piece was a pre-Twinkle piece called ‘Carnival in Rio’ from Joanne Martin’s Magic Carpet for Cello, a series of pieces that use the Twinkle bowing variation #1 on the open A string, so he was focusing on rhythm and sound alone, not fingering. This was, you may remember, a last-minute change from his descending scale pattern with the same bowing, AKA ‘The Monkey Song,’ which he’d been preparing; his teacher asked if he’d be more comfortable playing a duet with her instead of playing alone. It was a perceptive and sensitive suggestion, and I think the substitution was very successful in building his confidence in his ability to survive and enjoy a recital. I’m so thankful he had a positive first experience.

As for my own piece, I have never been so pleased with a recital performance before. I played the first two movements of the ‘Suite Française’ by Paul Bazelaire, a piece that no one knows, but let me tell you, a bunch of cellists asked both me and my teacher for the music after the dress rehearsal and the concert! My teacher introduced it to me during our last chamber orchestra session, where she showed me how to pizz an arpeggio or double-stop with the thumb away from me, then immediately hook back with the forefinger to catch the quick note following. She demonstrated with the series of pizz chords and single notes in the first movement of the Bazelaire, then played a bit of the theme for me. It’s a piece she played back when she was studying at school; she said that I might really enjoy playing the whole thing, perhaps for the recital, and we looked it over at our next lesson and decided it suit my study very well for a variety of reasons. (Cellofamily: If you’re interested, the first two movements are also found in Carey Cheney’s Solos series, in book four, I think.) I love this whole suite; it’s kind of stompy, which is a style I do not usually play, and it has some terrific folksy themes. I was planning to do the first, second, and fifth movements, but we ran out of time to properly prepare the fifth.

The ensemble pieces had ups and downs. Four of us pulled off the ‘Elfintanz’ from Cheney vol. 2 as a tight ensemble piece, which was fun. The Goltermannn ‘Romance,’ in which I played first cello, sounded okay to me when I was playing it (possibly because I was focusing so hard on my part, which wasn’t terrific but was passable), but came off as a garbled tangle in the recording, one of the perils of live performance where your ears tell you one thing and the more balanced recording tells you another. The Schubert ‘Impromptu’ arrangement was okay. The pieces that brought in the younger kids were better: ‘A la Claire Fontaine’ was lovely, for example. After missing his entrance cue in the previous kids-only canon song because his eyes were wandering, the boy played air cello or open strings in this one, swaying back and forth as he watched his teacher play, and it was really charming to see how into it he got. The video shows him looking back over his shoulder at me to see how he was doing in this piece and me smiling back at him, something I would have forgotten if it hadn’t been captured on film. (He may have missed his cue in the canon preceding it because his eyes were wandering, but also possibly because his partner, a six-year-old girl, had fallen asleep on the front pew of the church during the adult solos, and didn’t appear in the ensemble half of the concert as scheduled; they had partially relied on one another during the dress rehearsal for their entrance cue.) The finale was a full ensemble of Joanne Martin’s ‘Calypso’ from More Folk Strings in which the boy played percussion, counting and watching his teacher very carefully.

We were thrilled to have most of the special people and families he’d invited to his debut there. Thanks go out to both sets of grandparents, the Preston-LeBlancs, Marc Mackay, and Marc Leguen for sharing the experience with us and cheering him on. I have to thank my dad for taking pictures (these are all his), HRH for videoing parts of the recital, and Scott for lending us his digital video recorder for the purpose, too.

We are tremendously proud of our boy. Most of the time he was cheerful about the whole idea of the recital, but a couple of times he had small crises of self-confidence and worried about what would happen because he had no idea what to expect from the experience, or indeed any kind of similar experience to which to compare it. In fact, at his second to last lesson he got upset when I moved to sit in front of him and pretended to be the audience, because that wasn’t where I usually sat. We switched things up at home after that, playing in the kitchen, for example, to show him that you could play anywhere and didn’t need to rely on the same setup in the same places every time. The group dress rehearsal on the day before the recital was very helpful too, because he sat and listened to all the other kids do their pieces as well. (Group lessons have been fabulous for him. He so admires the older girls he’s watched grow from book 1 pieces into book 2; in fact, when they brought out their Suzuki books and tucked them under their chairs for reference if necessary during the last group lesson, he instructed me to do the same with his book, despite the fact that we’re pre-Twinkle and don’t use book 1 yet.)

I love helping him discover things. We took Monday off from cello practice and let him sleep in a bit after a later bedtime on Sunday night, but Tuesday morning I gave him his ten-minute call for cello. “I thought cello was over,” he said, puzzled. Ah, no, small child! If you take the entire summer off, you will be very, very upset in September when lessons begin again and you have to start from scratch! So he played a couple of exercises, and then I set him a musical riddle. I told him to play his Twinkle bowing variation #1 on the D string; then again on the A string; then to put one finger down on the A to play it on a B (which he has already encountered in an exercise); then to play his Monkey song, which is a descending four-note pattern of G, F#, E, D on the D string, with the same bowing rhythm. He repeated the sequence aloud to make sure he had it correctly, then played it. “Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve just played the first two lines of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’” I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. “I didn’t know I could do that!” he said.

This has been a wonderful introduction to music-making for him, I think. Not every five-year-old will cheerfully settle down for fifteen minutes of practice every morning at seven-thirty before school (most days it’s cheerfully, anyhow!). He may get discouraged sometimes and say it’s hard because he can’t match what’s in his head, and he wishes he’d never started, or when he forgets about his left elbow being up a bit when he’s focusing on his right one dropping, but you know what? Learning any new instrument is hard, and you still have trouble with those little things after years and years (and years) of playing. I wish I could explain to him how much he has already learned, all the tiny muscle movements and balancing and timing required to just get sound out of the instrument, and get him to understand how proud he should be that he has come this far already. Although he did say “I am very proud in myself” with well-deserved satisfaction when we asked him how he felt after the recital, so maybe he does have some idea. And he is very, very excited about the possibility of acquiring his very own cello for him to keep always, too.

Six Years Old!

Six years ago today, during a humid heatwave, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready well till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

SIX!

Six years ago he was born nine weeks early, and we’ve been trying to keep up with him ever since. (That thing about preemies sometimes being slower at milestones and having to adjust gestational/chronological age expectations? Totally untrue in our case.)

Our boy can read; there is no keeping anything secret in written form any more. He hangs over the back of my desk chair and reads forum posts or e-mails I write aloud ( “Why did you say that? What does that mean?”). His Nana and Granddad bought him a subscription to Chickadee magazine, and he reads the joke pages to us with great gusto. He is a wizard with Lego kits (particularly with the 8-12 range) and also with designing his own stuff. He runs, jumps, climbs, asks insightful yet difficult questions, eats a lot (two breakfasts are de rigeur in our household), and grows about an inch a month, or so our eyes and the jeans we had to roll up a few months ago and now show his anklebones tell us. He writes very well and clearly, and his drawing skills have exploded this past year.

He is cheerful, positive, and optimistic. He has a very healthy sense of self-worth and justice, for which I am very grateful. At the same time, over the past year we’ve seen him develop a different kind of self-awareness that has led to uncertainty about some of his skills, something I think is due mainly to being in school and comparing himself to others. He very definitely has a tendency to not want to try something at all if he thinks he’ll fail at it, which is why he still can’t successfully ride his two-wheeler bike alone. We support him and encourage him as much as we can, but ultimately he has to feel ready to take a new step himself.

He hopped into our bed at 5:45 this morning to open his presents. The baby gave him a Thor action figure. He was awestruck and wanted to know how the baby (a) knew he liked Thor (we are all big mythology fans as well as comics fans) and (b) told us to buy it when she was still inside me! We gave him a copy of Lego Clone Wars for the Xbox, which he had put on his Official Birthday List.

Both sets of grandparents are coming over for a family party in about half an hour, and everything is either prepped for supper or being handled by other people so I intended to sit back and have a nice relaxed afternoon. I made an ice cream cake at the boy’s request (designed by him, too: Oreo cookie crumb crust, a layer of vanilla ice cream, a layer of homemade peanut butter sauce, a layer of chocolate ice cream, homemade chocolate ganache on top, and there will also be whipped cream dolloped atop each slice), so I’m looking forward to that as well.

Also, this morning we had a fabulous dress rehearsal for our cello recital tomorrow. It’s been a really good day so far, and I imagine it will only get better.

Away Time

I am swamped with work and countdown to this weekend’s recital, so I haven’t been here and won’t really be for the next week, either. I’m late on my Books Read in May roundup, and that has to wait, too. Short form:

– Lovely weather, but as is expected the humidity rising, so there are good days and bad days.

– The boy turns six on Saturday, and has a school field trip to a local national park for frog and butterfly exploration on Friday. They had caterpillars in class to observe in the latter half of May, and the kids saw them make chrysalises and hatch into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies, which the class released last week. Very exciting.

– The boy finally realised what playing in a recital meant at his lesson last Saturday, and there were some tears because it would be different from his usual environments of lessons and home practice. His teacher worked with him sensitively and they changed his piece to a duet with her; we also scheduled him to be second, so he isn’t playing first and alone.

– Owlet is doing fine, and passed her brother’s gestational record of 31w2d this past weekend. Go Owlet! I am exhausted and in pain a lot of the time, which isn’t a surprise considering the stupid amount of growth that was accomplished in a very short time on top of my pre-existing fibro and scoliosis issues.

– Also this weekend, there were suddenly a half-flight of stairs, a landing, and a big hole in the ceiling to the attic. Next up: Plywood floor, framing walls, vapour barrier and ventilation layer, lifting insulation, plasterboard. Windows have to be installed in there somewhere, and wiring run to be certified by an electrician.

– Did I mention I am swamped with work? I handed in the copyediting gig, but now it is all bird book rewrites all the time, and I am having panic attacks at the amount of work that needs to be done by Friday night. Technically I have to hand it in on Monday morning at 8 or 9 AM, but I won’t be able to work on it all weekend because of dress rehearsal, guests, birthday party, and recital, so Friday’s the deadline.

– We have a lead on a secondhand 1/8 cello for the boy at an insanely low price. It’s in Ottawa, so we’ll trundle down there for a day trip the last week of June and check it out, as well as visiting the redone Museum of Nature and walking through the Parliament buildings. Even if it needs new strings and a bow rehair (both of which I fully expect) it will still be less expensive than the other secondhand one listed here in Montreal.

Right; back into the fray. Wish me sanity and an even head.

Busy (Or Apparently Bed Rest Only Covers Physical Activity)

1. I have a new copyediting assignment due 9 June. It’s the companion book to the one I edited two weeks ago, which drove me moderately mad because there was no bibliography or sources listed and I had to track copyright info down. Why do people think it’s okay to not cite sources, even if what they’re using is public domain? It still came from somewhere.

2. The edits for the bird book I wrote came back, due 10 June. And they’re extensive. I expected this — told them, in fact, to expect it themselves what with all the major changes in direction on their end throughout the project — but apparently the timeline is tight (when is it ever not tight?) and I have to turn it around in two weeks. I have the official cover as well, and I’ll get around to sharing it at one point, when I’m not handling six trillion other work things.

3. I spent last Friday in the hospital because of unidentified bleeding on Thursday night. To make a long story short, I was admitted to the hospital for five hours of observation and examination to be told that my baby is wow super healthy with a strong heartbeat whoa who is very energetic (I could have told them that), I have zero contractions (I did tell them that), and my body was nowhere physically near demonstrating that premature labour was imminent (that’s what I couldn’t know and was worried about, because this is how it started last time: blood, then two days later wham, sudden labour). The doctor I saw theorizes that a blood vessel in or near the cervix was weakened and finally burst after the physical strain of violent vomiting during the gastro I had last Tuesday/Wednesday. She stressed that I did the absolutely right thing in going in, considering what happened last time. I would say that I at least got a free lunch out of it, but it was awful and I didn’t eat most of it. (Note to self: Pack a box of Twinings’ Lady Grey in the hospital bag, because ugh, their orange pekoe tastes like coffee grounds. Not that I am a fan of orange pekoe to begin with.) The Owlet had great fun kicking the fetal monitor for the hour and a half they had it on. They finally took it off. They told me that if anything untoward happened again to call them, but that otherwise, they’d see me in six to ten weeks.

4. I have been swatching for a lace cap for the Owlet to wear. (No, I have no idea what has happened to me.) The lace pattern was totally defying me until Ceri and I figured out that my understanding of the PSSO abbreviation and its explanations was not the same as what experienced knitters understand it to mean. Also, the pattern had different abbreviations in the intro material than were actually used in the body of the pattern, a copyediting thing that drove me mad. Anyway, I finally mastered the lace pattern with Ceri’s e-mail support, and I am now spinning some dreamy BFL/silk blend in off-white for the light fingering weight two-ply yarn I want to use for it. And because I love the yarn so much, I am further considering a longish coat in a simple lace pattern done on biggish needles out of the same weight of yarn, for a larger lace effect. Obviously, pregnancy has done something very odd to my brain.

5. I finished shoe #2 of the adorable origami garter stitch shoe set, and when I put them side by side I saw that because my tension was so very different between shoe #1 and shoe #2, the first would fit a 3-6 month old and the second would fit a newborn. Obviously the answer is to knit another set of squares to fold, because it will most likely match one or the other.

6. Instead, though, I found a new pattern, and knit this:

It’s another knit-a-shape-and-fold-it shoelet. My cast on, and therefore the upper edge of the shoe, seems a bit loose (I used the two-strand thumb cast on for its tidy edge), so I’ll probably need to tack the upper vamp together about 3/4 of an inch up from the toe. Blocking may help, though. Now I need to knit another one, which shouldn’t take me more than an hour like this one did, but apparently you can suffer from Second Shoe Syndrome the way people suffer from Second Sock Syndrome.

7. I have come to the very sad conclusion that I am not going to be able to weave the Manos Clasica blanket. It’s too much physical activity and standing up and bending over for someone on bed rest. I swatched a double moss stitch/seed stitch on size 15 needles though, to see if I could knit it instead, and while I could, I’m not sold on it. I think I’ll return to the idea of weaving it, but do it after the baby is born. She isn’t going to need a Manos Clasica wool blanket in July and August, after all. And she has handknit blankets coming her way from her Auntie Cate and her Nana anyhow.

8. Speaking of the baby being born, I looked at HRH the other night and said, “We have to start thinking of this baby arriving in about a month instead of two. That way we’ll be mentally prepared whenever it happens.” “Sure,” he said, “but not till it’s a month away from 36 weeks.” “That would be on this coming Thursday,” I said.

9. The boy turns six years old in two weeks. Be very afraid. I somehow have to plan a family birthday for him as well as a friend birthday two weekends after that, as well as prepping two cellists for a recital on his actual birthday weekend. I am kind of tearing my hair out, as bed rest is supposed to be low-stress, and having to juggle all this stuff like two work things in the space of one plus all the planning and prepping isn’t physically taxing, but is still energy-consuming.

10. More stress: If Canada Post goes on strike, then my freelance cheques that are due to arrive in mid to late June will probably be held up. That is bad, so very, very bad, because that money is desperately needed, or the renovations don’t go forward. I am crossing my fingers that the impasse between the (very reasonable plea for better work conditions/against slashing benefits and wages, read up on it) demands of the postal workers union and the corp itself is solved ASAP.