Category Archives: Photographs

Friday Fibre Photo

Yesterday after I’d returned a project to a client, I sat down to spin. I left the cotton in my spinning basket to consider the error of its ways and pulled out a 50 gram bump of Fleece Artist fibre BFL instead. Despite having five braids of Fleece Artist roving, I have never actually spun any, so this was an experiment as well as a soothing of the injured spinning soul.

Just ignore the uneven bobbin; that’s what happens when you spin and try to watch Castle at the same time. You forget to move hooks regularly, even when your usual practice is to move a hook every time you pick up a new piece of fibre. (Speaking of which — Castle, not spinning — I want a shirt that says, “I’m just saying whoever killed her also murdered the English language.”)

It’s lovely to spin, nice and soft, but then, it’s BFL and I would expect nothing less. And the colours are just lovely; the golden ochre sets off the plum and the lavender beautifully. HRH kept looking over and saying, “I really like those colours.” Fleece Artist doesn’t identify colourways on their skeins and fibre because they’re aren’t perfectly repeatable; there’s no dyelot or colour code or anything on the tag, so I’m not certain of the name for this. It could be Red Fox, or it could be Sugar Plum. (I think the braids I bought in Mahone Bay are Mahogany and Ireland or Hemlock, but who knows? The colours are just pretty.)

This is only half the bump; I’ll spin up the other ounce today, and then chain-ply them to preserve the colour changes. I’m alternating which end I spin of the stripped roving, because the brown is comparatively short as compared to the purple ombre, so I’m putting brown ends together to make a longer brown stretch in the single.

(For future reference: I split the roving into two equal one-ounce halves, then split each half lengthwise into about eight or ten strips. Each strip was predrafted, and spun on the middle ratio with a semi-woollen longish draw, brake band completely off.)

ETA: And now having spun up half of the second half I’m seeing a problem. On the next braid of Fleece Artist I’m going to split the whole thing down the middle lengthwise and not break it into halves, because the first ounce shown above is now covered by the second ounce, which is a different set of colours (the burgundy/deep violet), and when I ply it the first half of the skein will be the burgundy/plum, and the second half the gold/lavender. The pooling will be kind of yucky in a knitted object. Not well planned on my part. Live and learn.

Fifty-Six Months Old!

There aren’t many photos this month. That’s part of what took so long; I couldn’t find pictures to accompany the post. I cheated and used some from just after the eleventh of the month.

There are some delicious phrases popping up in the boy’s conversations. The most recent one that slayed both HRH and I was, “Are you crazying me?” Another favourite exchange of mine happened at dinner, and went thusly:

    MAMA: So, what did you do at school today?

    SPARKY: I can’t tell you.

    HRH: …or I’d have to kill you.

    MAMA: He evidently goes to a ninja super-spy preschool.

The naps are down to every two days, and the days without naps are becoming more secure and less fraught with overwroughtness around dinner. It’s really quite a relief to know that if we miss a nap on the weekend it finally isn’t the end of the world; we can actually schedule or participate in activities that happen between noon and four now, like the rest of the world.

Bread and Jam for Frances is his new favourite book, slipping in under the wire this month. He was very interested in The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body book, which we took out of the library when he was home sick for a week. And he’s being very sneaky and not letting us know he’s reading; it only slips once in a while when he says things like, “Can we play the hide and seek game?” while pointing to an online icon with those words that he’s never seen before.

It’s been very Star Wars-y here. Apart from the action figures and spaceships he’s been focusing on, he and HRH have been co-playing through Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox, and I’m very impressed with how quickly he’s picked up buttons and combos to move around and do certain actions. (I still have to look at the buttons in order to know which ones to press; he doesn’t.) Then again, sometimes he just likes to play Artoo and fly around in circles while HRH struggles to hold off a horde of Lego stormtroopers on his own. His building with toys like Lego and Knex is getting more elaborate and imaginative, too. I love watching how intricate his playtime gets. He narrates complex stories about Jedis, Transformers, spaceships, cars, and trains, and a lot of it is internally consistent. And finally, on the toy front, Blackie is beginning to stay at home more often. He stills joins the boy for the occasional car trip to school or out on the weekend, but he gets left in the car.

The biggest problem these days is getting dressed in the morning. Like me he seems to need a lot of time to settle into the day, and getting him to have breakfast then get dressed before using whatever time is left to play is frustrating for everyone. It’s specifically the getting dressed part that stalls out, because he wants to play right after eating. I’m considering getting a timer from the dollar store and setting it to give him an independent marker to show when a certain time period set aside for an activity is up, because he seems to tune out HRH and I telling him he’s only got X minutes to do something. It’s worse when he’s sick or headachey, of course, but there’s still a bit of dawdling on a regular basis. Sometimes we can turn it into game or a race to see who gets dressed first, but we don’t always have the energy for that.

When he and HRH get into the car to go to school I wave, and when they pull out of the driveway they pause and wave again before the car pulls away. Lately, the boy has had his nose stuck in a book, and has waved without looking out the window at me to watch me wave back. He’s such an individual, and it’s so much fun to watch him grow.

Weekend Roundup, Imbolc Edition

Yes, I missed last weekend’s roundup. I’ll do it eventually and backdate it [It’s done, here.] The most important bit was the spinning 102 class, and I have that in note form written to people who asked about it via e-mail.

This was a fun weekend, but draining. Friday I went out to lunch with MLG, where I had truly delicious braised lamb shanks and a pint of cider, and then as the weather was lovely, I walked him to class. It was a tutorial, actually, but wow did that feel odd; I’ve been out of school for a decade (my shiny new MA is no longer so very shiny or new) and the university neighbourhood has been polished and reworked, and two new metal and glass buildings have sprung up where there were once boarded-up lots.

(Many joke intros ran through my head on the way home. “So a cellist and a drummer walk into a pub…” was one of them. So was “So an EngLit MA and an MBA guy walk into a pub…”)

On the way home I stopped to deposit Emily’s second cheque (so close to the end of this project!) and pick up immediately necessary groceries, and I swung into Winners to do a quick look round because I could, and I so rarely do. While there I saw a pair of burgundy shoes on for half-price and wavered for a moment, but then told myself sternly that I shouldn’t even try them on and left.

Saturday morning we all went out on errands. While out we finally found an Anakin figure as well as an Ahsoka figure, and the boy was thrilled to finally have people to fly his starfighter. We also picked up a new Scrabble game, as ours has gone AWOL (most likely to people who love it and use it frequently), as the boy saw me playing an online Scrabble-clone game on the iTouch with Emily and various other people, and was frustrated because he couldn’t play. I promised that a real board would be easier to use, and it was. He loves it, and calls it Scramble, and we got about five rounds in before he decided he’d had enough.

Saturday afternoon Ceri called and asked if I wanted to go over and play, so I packed the spinning wheel, my Phat Fiber box to show her, and my cotton, and off I went when the boy went down for his nap. We had lots of fun, although spinning the cotton continues to elude me. I tried shredding it and spinning from a cloud and it sort of worked, but it keeps drifting apart. I’m trying to find the sweet spot between overspinning it and getting it to hold together, and it’s just not happening. I saw another video where a woman was long-draw drafting right from the unsplit roving; I think I’ll try working on that again, since the cloud doesn’t work, and the splitting roving to narrower pieces doesn’t quite work either.

I soothed my annoyed spirit by making my first foray into the Phat Fiber samples and spinning a quarter-ounce of lovely dyed Merino wool from Ambrosia and Bliss. It was my first experience with Merino, and I suddenly see why people like or hate it it so much. It’s very spongy, with lots of tiny crimp; quite unlike the smooth BFL and Corriedale I’ve been working with. It made a lovely chain-plied 20 wpi yarn:


Why, yes, 20 wpi is heavy laceweight/really light fingering weight, thank you for noticing. And for noticing that it’s chain-plied, too, which means there’s three strands in that plied yarn. You’re very kind. I draw ever closer to confidently spinning the gorgeous Lorna’s Laces fibre Ceri bought for me my spinning wheel when I got it. And while taking pictures of the yarn on the bobbin I accidentally discovered a setting on my camera that I dubbed Awesome Yarn Shot, which does excellent close-ups. It’s so much better than the so-called macro setting, which just gives big blurs. Both those pictures are taken with the Awesome Yarn Shot setting. Go on, click View Image to embiggen the picture of the skein and see how lovely the yarn is. That’s a standard-size business card with it. (Yes, there’s a bit of variation in the grist of the yarn but hey, it’s my first Merino.)

Sunday morning we headed over to the Preston-LeBlanc household for an Imbolc brunch. Things were a bit rocky because the boy woke up at 4:30 and decided to come snuggle with us, and I didn’t have the energy to march him back to his own bed. I should have, because he squirmed and kicked and played with cats and talked and made everyone tremendously grouchy, so when he said at 5:30 that he was hungry and wanted breakfast both HRH and I had had quite enough. HRH fed him a piece of bread with some juice, and told him to go back to bed. The deal was he could sleep with us if he slept on HRH’s side of the bed and not the middle, and lay very still so that he’d actually fall asleep. This happened, thank goodness, and we all got another hour of dozing in. Once up, I made a fabulous pesto-cheddar quiche with a homemade pie shell, and off we went. I also packed up the wrap I’ve been working on for my eldest goddaughter since, what, October?, having sewn the buttons on the night before. We were greeted with mimosas and happy people, and the morning was subsequently wonderful. Our plates were full of raspberries, blueberry scones with crumb topping, and bacon, and quiche, and it was all fabulous. We made Brigid’s crosses with pipe cleaners afterward, and then we gave my goddaughter her wrap. She loved it, and I wish I’d been less tired by that point so I could have made more of a fuss over her. The new batteries I’d put in the camera that morning turned out to be dead, so I took photos with their camera and will post them when they get to me.

When we got home we fed the boy and then we all napped. After the boy’s nap we went out to pick up the groceries we needed for the rest of the week, and thanks to the encouragement of fellow Twitterers I went back and tried those shoes on. They’re so incredibly comfortable, and both HRH and the boy approved, so I bought them. And finally, we went to the library, where I collected the new Tracy Chevalier book Remarkable Creatures and the latest 44 Scotland Street book by Alexander McCall Smith, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. And I snagged the Clone Wars Visual Dictionary for the boy, which interests both HRH and I so much that we may have to own a copy of it.

The boy clamoured for Scrabble game before dinner, so all three of us installed ourselves at the kitchen table at his direction and we played a really solid game. The boy did lose interest again after five rounds, but he brought toys into the kitchen and played while HRH and I kept going, and we played his turn for him too.

It was, overall, a lovely weekend, although I was wiped by Sunday noon.

Phat Fibery Goodness

I got my Phat Fiber box yesterday. The original plan was to get together with Ceri and open it together, but she is currently swanning about LA overseeing voice recording for the A-list video game script she wrote, so I had to open it all by my lonesome.

The Phat Fiber project is very exciting. You get a box full of samples and coupons from a variety of independent artists and fibre suppliers. And there’s the added excitement of there being a limited number of boxes each month, which sell out in about 46 seconds after they’re posted for sale, so if you get one you’re really lucky. Every month there’s a theme for the suppliers to follow, and the January theme was For the Love of Books: the suppliers were to use inspiration from the realm of literature to guide their designs and colours. There are three different kinds of boxes: Stitches (yarn), Fluff (fibre), and a mix of the two.

I managed to score a Fluff box last month, on my first try for one ever, and I’ve been waiting anxiously since January 17 for it to arrive. Yesterday, it did.

I opened it last night after the boy was in bed. On the top was an envelope designed like a library card envelope (the ones that used to be in the back of a library book to hold the card stamped to show you when it was due back, remember those?):

Inside were all the business cards and coupons of the suppliers involved this month. Some of them are great, offering 20% off; others are just business cards. Although the designs on some of them are really impressive. Three had stitch markers attached to them; one was an entire bookmark:

Then I got to the fibre itself:

For reference, the contents are:

“The Giving Tree” mini batt: Twiggy Knits!!
“Yum Yum” (The Cat Who series, Braun) combed Polworth top: Rule Out Fiber Addiction
“Corfu” (My Family and Other Animals, by Durrell) Merino top: Ambrosia and Bliss
English Herdwick wool top cupcake – From Ewes To You
“Tales of the South Pacific” – Cozy Cove
“The Very Quiet Cricket” mini batt – Xtreme Spinning
“Here Comes Peter Cottontail” angora cloud – Plum Crazy Ranch
“Purple Haze” (cotswold/Romney/mohair) – Fleecemaker’s Fibers
“Emerald City” batt – Counting Sheep Farm
“The Royal Scandal” (Holmes oueuvre) Corriedale/Lincoln/bamboo/silk thrums/sparkle combed top – Blue Mountain Handcrafts
“Wuthering Heights” Merino lamb/silk batt – Natchwoolie
Red dyed mohair locks – Wonders Mohair
“Series of Unfortunate Events: The Wide Window” superwash wool roving – Dawning Dreams
“Good Earth” domestic wool top – Lapoli’s Fibers
“Brisinger: Glaedr” alpaca/merino/superwash merino/silk/bamboo mini batt – It’s a Colorful Life
“Queen of Hearts” wool/angelina mini batt – Kathleen’s Spin

Eyelet Twist Pullover pattern – K Designs
Dual sized stitch marker – In Stitches
Harry Potter bookmark and stitch marker – Winemaker’s Sister
Infinity stitch marker – The Twice Sheared Sheep

The majority of the samples are about 0.25 oz. The quality is generally impressive: the batts are airy, soft, and well-blended, the hand-dyed roving is even and soft, and the presentation is very nice on most of them. There is lots of sparkle, some really wonderful deep and rich colour, and I am really impressed with the blending on the batts. I’ve never spun from a colour-blended batt or roving (other than bits of top I’ve dyed myself as experiments), and I want to work on my understanding of how colour blends in the spinning process.

While I was impressed individually, overall I was a bit disappointed. The beauty of the presentation on a few really overshadowed some of the others. I was mainly disappointed because I didn’t get the three particular samples I had previewed on the Ravelry Phat Fibre forum and really hoped to get, the Outlander merino locks cloud from WoolieBullie, any of the Animal Farm silks from Fiber Fancy, and the Peter Rabbit or Flopsy Bunnies Merino blend colourways from Beesybee. And finally, I’m a wee bit disappointed that there weren’t more children’s books involved in my box; there were so many picture books mentioned as inspiration on the January sneak peek thread, and I was hoping to share the box a bit more fully with the boy. (He loved the Very Quiet Cricket batt, though, and I did show him my copy of The Wide Window to point out how close the colour was to the cover of the book and he asked me to read it, but I think it’s just a bit beyond him at the moment. Maybe in a few months. And he did like the colours and the softness of a lot of the batts.)

A few other Canadians and I have been discussing the cross-border thing on the Ravelry forum, and we’re wondering if it’s worth it. On one hand, it’s a great way to be exposed to a variety of sellers and suppliers, and to actually touch samples of their work before you invest a lot of money in it. However, from a financial point of view, with the taxes applied at the border (which totalled $4.25, but there’s a $5 handling/processing charge attached to it, bumping it up to $9.50) on top of the box price plus exchange rate… financially it’s not something you’d want to do on a regular basis, because the border crossing bumps the price up from just over $38 CDN (that’s box plus shipping plus the current exchange rate) to $48. The only reason I allowed myself to do it this time is because the dollars were almost at par.

This was a lot of fun, and I certainly have an idea of the quality offered by each supplier, but I probably won’t be doing it again. I have very firmly learned that presentation counts. I’m looking forward to experimenting with some of these lovely batts, especially after my first batt experience at Sunday’s class was so positive. These are sample-sized, though, so they’re not going to be big enough to do anything specific with, really, unless I use them as decoration or trim on another project. A lot of the suppliers whose samples are really impressing me with their feel are sellers I’ve already bookmarked on Etsy. The coupons and discounts and the password-protected list for Phat Fibre participants is valuable, in that once there’s room on my credit card again I’ll be ordering one thing from one seller as my Fibre Thing for February (my Fibre Thing rules are: support one new independent fibre artist a month in 2010, and the order, including s&h and exchange, has to be under $20; this is part of my exploration as a spinner). And chances are good it will be a seller whose batts or top I’ve had the chance to handle and spin from the box this month.

So there you are: My summary of the Phat Fibre experience. Fun, pretty, but overall too pricey for me and my budget.

Friday Fibery Update

Here’s what I’ve been working on.

First, a photo of the silk scarf I did for my mother as a Christmas gift, now known as Mum’s Orchid Silk Scarf:

I had third of it done for Christmas day; I wrapped it anyway, needles and all, so Mum could at least open it. It was three-quarters finished by the time we left (so much easier to knit something when you can do it openly), and then I ran into a big old wall about sitting down to knit the last bit. (Having to frog the last five inches not once but twice contributed to that.) The silk is lovely, but the lack of stretch means it’s a bit unforgiving to work with. Anyway, I finished it last weekend, and blocked it this week. Blocking solved a multitude of the things I didn’t like about the yarn I’d spun, and it looks so crisp and even!

Wednesday I did some dye tests on the oatmeal (a fancy name for pale greyish brown, really) Blue Face Leicester fibre that Ceri and I bought for her sweater. I used my new Jacquard acid dyes, and was kind of flailing in the dark about blending them. I blended a green from blue and yellow, which ended up quite piney, and tried a straight vermilion red, which ended up a mauvey/old rose colour. The I spun a bit of each and chain-plied them to show Ceri what they’d look like in yarn form.

This was the first time I’d tried dyeing a solid colour on the stovetop, and it worked brilliantly. It will be great for solids. I hadn’t done it yet because I usually hand paint my fibre at least two different colours, and set it in either the microwave or the oven.

Yesterday I spun 54 yards of two-ply Aran-weight from 2.3 oz of 70/30 mohair-merino blend of fibre. It’s nice and fluffy:

It’s slated for dyeing; maybe lavender. (Which I could do by screwing up my blue dye again, stabbity stabbity stab… see below.)

And today, I finished spinning 57 yards of a lovely squooshy Corriedale single. I decided to try crockpot dyeing, as it is a technique I haven’t tested yet, and decided on cornflower blue and willow green. Everything looked just beautiful… until I added more vinegar to the crockpot. At which point the blue broke spectacularly and went purple:

And I was so careful about adding the vinegar, too! Just a wee bit! And not directly on the fibre! But alas, disaster nonetheless. Once it’s dry I’ll reskein it and it may not be as awful as I think it is now. But it probably will be. On the other hand, that’s a very pretty green. Without any blue in it, it may be even nicer.

ETA: It is much nicer after rewinding it on the skeinwinder, because the purple is spread throughout the skein. Still not my cup of tea, though. Once it’s fully dry I’ll reskein it and post a pic for the alien Muppet yarn fans.

ETA: Much easier to take once reskeined. Et voila:

First Finished Yarn of 2010

It’s a 36-yard sample, but still; finished yarn, yay!

Half-ounce of oatmeal BFL (which seems to be more of a grey-brown, really) spun as a single, semi-woolen draw on the 1:5.5 ratio, around 11 wpi after blooming. I expected it to be thicker than 11 wpi; it looked loftier on the bobbin, less so after skeining. I really did think I was spinning a thicker than heavy-worsted single, so I’ll be trying again. I must draft even less. The yarn is nice, soft, and bouncy, though, and certainly my best single so far in that it stays together. It was fun deliberately trying to shock it between hot and cold water while setting the twist, and agitating it to felt it ever so slightly so that it would be less likely to drift apart. It does vary a small bit between thick and thin, though; I’m not as consistent in the self-contained single department as I am in the thinner-single-to-be-plied department.

Why does damp BFL smell better than any other damp wool?

Fifty-Five Months Old!

It was Christmas, which always kind of decimates the January monthly post. The boy had a terrific holiday season, ranging from Santa to various parties at school and with friends, such as the godfamily singalong. He helped make cookies and pies, and to prepare meals, and was very helpful in general. He really got into the spirit of things, and having a four-year-old child in the house means you can’t help but get into the spirit along with them. He’s still a little unclear on the concept of a secret, though, and was so excited that he would often run up to people and say, “We got you a present, and it’s [insert gift here]”. Fortunately we did a lot of clapping hands over ears or mouth, and what bits of information managed to escape were either missed by the giftees or were about gifts the recipient already knew about.

He was terrific about opening gifts this year. Last year he was ill and lost interest in the process, and at recent birthdays he’d been more excited about ripping the paper off and seeing what was inside before jumping immediately to the next gift. This year, though, he returned to his previous behaviour of opening and playing with the item inside, exploring it thoroughly before moving on to the next thing. Unless it was clothes, of course, which didn’t interest him much at the time, but he was been enjoying them very much as we take new shirts and socks out of the drawers come time to get dressed of a morning. He got piles of new books (we had to remove the basket of toys on the bottom shelf of his bookcase in order to make room for them), clothes, and a few very carefully selected toys. This was a Star Wars Christmas in a couple of ways: we got him the Clone Wars animated movie, and the local grandparents gave him a ship from the Clone Wars line. It was also a Lego Christmas, as he got kits from the upstairs neighbours, the Oakville grandparents, and MLG.

And holy cats, the progress he’s making on following directions in those kits. On the harder kits we’ve been getting him to sort the blocks and help put together the simpler parts while we assemble the bulk of the unit, but he got a kit of small work vehicles on Christmas day and he pretty much followed the pictograms to assemble one on his own, being talking through the harder bits by myself or HRH. It’s thrilling to watch that kind of thought process, the ability to turn a picture into a fine motor process with actual three-dimensional items.

He got very upset about our Christmas tree. You see, we left on the 23rd, and there was no point leaving it up while we were gone; for one thing, it would be prime cat disaster material, and for another, it would be a fire hazard. We got it early in order to enjoy it for two weeks, planning to take it down the night before we left. The boy cried and cried, and said that he wanted to keep it, and that Santa had to put presents under our tree. (He was going to put presents under the tree at the house we’d be in on Christmas, we pointed out, but this did not calm the angst about whose tree under which Santa would be placing whose presents.)

It’s winter, and there’s snow, which means he’s ecstatic about being outside and rolling around in the stuff. Back when the local grandparents bought him the wagon for his second birthday, we asked them to get one that could be converted to a sled of sorts by switching the wheels for skis. For the first time this winter HRH swapped them out, with the boy’s help, and the boy has been gleefully dragging it all over the yard. They took it down to the corner store, and while it bumps and scratches on the barer patches of the sidewalk it really flies when it’s on snow. It’s like a new toy. Also in backyard news, the slide from the back deck has been built again, this year with extra banking so that when the boy goes down on his saucer he really zings around the perimeter of the yard and ends up pretty much at the base of the stairs to the upper apartment. He only has to get up, grab the saucer, and drag it a couple of feet to the deck stairs, drag it up the steps, and he’s ready to launch himself off the back deck again.

His nap is officially being phased out. He naps only twice a week at school now, otherwise staying awake through the general rest time in another room with an educator and his best friend at preschool, working on letters and words and reading. Unless, of course, he very obviously needs a nap, in which case he has a lie-down. At home we’re playing it by ear. If he’s running on high, then we do the nap thing in order to give him a break. If he’s fine, then we carry on without it.

With zero surprise to any of us, the new TMBG album has been a super hit. So much so that after owning it for three days he was singing a good chunk of the songs and acting out the videos. They’re doing a dinosaur unit at preschool this month, and he informed one of his educators that he was going to be a paleontologist when he grew up. “Ah,” she said to the educator who had been running the material, “so you’ve gotten to the paleontology part of the unit?” “No,” said the dino-unit educator. “We haven’t.” And they both just looked at the boy, who went on to burble happily about what paleontologists do.

We’re about to embark on the kindergarten open house merry-go-round, which terrifies me to a small degree. I happened to see an ad in the local paper for one this past week, so I casually looked it up and discovered that kindergarten registration happens at the beginning of February. In two weeks. With education being a provincial responsibility, and children being on the civil roll, one would think the government would think to point out the necessity of upcoming registration via mail, but apparently not; one is supposed to pick this up by osmosis or something. Perhaps daycares generally mention it, but the other kids in preschool with the boy have siblings so everyone else knows, and mentioning it to us may have slipped his educator’s mind. We’ve already missed the open houses for the more exclusive schools (last November, how helpful), so now we get to catch what we can. And there’s the added tangle of moving at an undetermined time this summer to be closer to HRH’s job (and oh, the money we will save on gas alone) so will there be problems registering for a school in anther zone and under another school board’s aegis while we’re still living here? The Internet is remarkably unhelpful in this respect. Actually, the Internet is remarkably unhelpful about the whole kindergarten issue; I am mostly directed to contact individual schools. Which makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, but isn’t comforting at all for someone who likes to research intensively before walking into an actual person-to-person encounter. I hate not having information. I’m also told by the Internet that I should have obtained a certificate of eligibility for instruction in English a year ago to make sure we have one on time in case there are bureaucratic issues, which is not constructive in the least. If I don’t know I have to do it, I can’t do it. It will all work out, I’m sure. I’m just going to quietly deal with anxiety attacks here in the corner until it is.

And finally, the other big news of the month is the removal of the back of the car seat to make it a booster seat only! This is a huge relief for everyone. The boy is at a height and weight where it’s possible, and it’s much less fuss. We’re all thankful.