Friday night I had a good cello lesson. We cleared up some fingerings in the Beethoven symphony, then I said I wanted to work on recital stuff instead of my lesson stuff. I’d been playing on Thursday night with the practice mute (a good hour and a quarter of practice, hurrah, although it meant I didn’t sleep well) and was struggling with making an Air by Bach sound properly smooth, and I’d worked on the Mozart duet and Ashokan Farewell too. I also finally said I needed to walk away from the Berceuse, because I was fighting it so much that it was causing more problems that it was solving. My teacher said that leaving it wasn’t a problem; we’d revisit it later. Although, she added, I’d been making progress on it, even though I couldn’t tell. The Mozart duet had good parts in it, and I have notes to help me focus on string crossings and smoother shifts. We worked out better fingerings for the Bach that made it so much easier, so I’m feeling better about that too. I don’t feel as overwhelmed by it all any more.
Saturday morning I took the boy out to run errands with me. We dropped some books off at the Melange and bought two candles, one for Thanksgiving (the boy chose ice blue) and one for Halloween (the boy chose orange, naturally). Then we went to our local yarn shop, and I’d mistimed travel slightly; we arrived just on the stroke of eleven, and it hadn’t opened yet. The boy stood there and burst into tears, and wouldn’t listen to me when I said the we’d just sit and wait; he thought we were going home. (Yes, my son gets upset when the yarn store is closed. Of course, there is a toy fire truck there, and he loves the spinning wheel and the containers of yarn, but still.) I’d managed to get him to sit on the step with me and look at the new drawing app on my iPod when MA arrived with her keys and let us right in, bless her. “Are we going to be here for a long time, Mama?” he asked hopefully at one point. I told him that I hadn’t brought knitting or spinning to work on, and that we’d have to go home eventually for lunch anyhow, but I love that he was hoping we’d be there for a while. (It may have been directly connected to the fun he was having pushing one of the wheeled storage containers of yarn around like a train, of course.) We got all the fibre I needed to spin for various projects, plus a skein of yarn for another Yule gift and one to knit a hat with earflaps for the boy. Somehow my list of things to make for Yule has tripled in the last two weeks. I officially have what Ceri calls a Knitlist. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Saturday morning was overcast and gloomy, but the clouds were swept away for a bright though windy afternoon, beautiful weather for the wedding we were to attend on the south shore. Weddings of friends are always wonderful, because you get to see people you love in formal dress, something we don’t do enough of. I had the pleasure of handling the cufflinks for both the groom and best man, and assisted Jan with boutonnieres for the wedding party. (We were both on site early because t! was celebrating the wedding with assistance from HRH.) Lovely ceremony written by t!, sat with excellent people, touching speeches made by the best man and the maid of honour, and generally an all-round pleasant time. I want copies of the pictures others were taking because my own camera sat in my bag under the table. I think I was photographed more than I’ve ever been photographed at a wedding that wasn’t my own. Or maybe I was just standing with members of the wedding party a lot. We left around nine once the lights had gone down and the loud music had begun. There had been somewhat loud music throughout the meal as well, and I found myself kind of shouting to people across the table. Something irritated my throat in the middle of the meal and I had a coughing fit, which ruined my voice for the next day. All in all, though, we were with excellent friends celebrating a wonderful day, and it was a good time.
Sunday morning went out to Chapters to pick up the new TMBG kids’ album. I had deliberately waited a month and checked stock online to make sure it would be there. Well, it wasn’t. They looked on shelves, they looked in back, they finally concluded that it was somewhere in one of the ten pallets in back that had technically been received (i.e., someone had entered ISBNs, titles, and quantities from an invoice) but not unpacked. And the senior clerk I spoke with admitted that they were behind, and that it would take some time before those pallets were opened and shelved properly. I was thoroughly unimpressed. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into the “in stock but not on the shelf” issue at this shop, but it’s the first time they admitted to being so far behind that they couldn’t find it in the warehouse.
So the boy was disappointed (as were HRH and I, because we love TMBG’s kid stuff, too). Another book I wanted was also not on the shelves, despite there being twelve available according to stock check. I did pick up the copy of Amy King’s Spin Control I’d intended to come home with, though. From now on, I will call in advance, as much as I hate phones.
We did the grocery shopping, then I chatted with my mum and spun up another ounce of the yarn for my goddaughter’s Yule gift. We made cookies late in the afternoon, then I put the tiny cross-rib roast we’d bought in the oven for a somewhat unplanned Thanksgiving meal at home. It turned out perfectly, meltingly smooth, served with roast potatoes and carrots from the garden, drizzled with a separately-made onion gravy. Before we began to eat we lit the ice blue candle the boy had chosen for Thanksgiving and I asked if he wanted to say anything special. “No,” he said, “just Happy Thanksgiving.” I said I was thankful for food on the table, family and friends, and the roof over our heads, and the ability to enjoy our many hobbies and activities. And then we swooned with yum at the incredibly delicious food on our plates. The boy patted my hand during dinner and said, “I love you, Mama. Thank you for making this dinner for us.” He had seconds of potatoes and carrots, and ate every single piece of roast beef on his plate, impressing both of us. Oddly enough, he refused gravy. Once upon a time he wouldn’t eat anything unless it had gravy, so lo, we have come so very far. We’ve also come far in the successful roast beef department. Pretty much every roast I’ve done in the past few years hasn’t turned out the way I wanted it to for some reason. In fact, this one nearly didn’t; after roasting it for twice as long as I was supposed to it still wasn’t cooked through, so I hacked it into three pieces, laid the less cooked sides up, and roasted it at a higher temperature for ten minutes. The result was sheer perfection, so hurrah for my experience and instincts working together to actually get dinner on the table.
Once he was in bed I checked e-mail and discovered that I’d won… a copy of Amy King’s Spin Control in an online draw. (Insert whacking of forehead here. I am very pleased, of course, but also abashed.) So I will be returning the copy I bought and using the refund against the purchase of The Intentional Spinner, which they’ll need to order in for me. Not only that, I got a message from Aurora saying that she’d been in Vermont for Thanksgiving and had found a case of Vanilla Coke, and was bringing it home for me. An embarrassment of riches!
Monday we lazed about in the morning. HRH and the boy built a fort with a quilt and some chesterfield cushions, and the boy set up a Thanksgiving dinner inside it for all his stuffed animals with great enthusiasm. While he napped I spun up another ounce of yarn for the wrap. After his rest we went to HRH’s parents’ house for the official family Thanksgiving dinner, where I got another six inches of lace scarf knitted before dinner. Dinner itself was spectacular. The boy ate a staggering amount of turkey, half of it from the carving board before dinner itself, and the other half from drumsticks that he brandished like a pirate. He tried the stuffing and the purple cauliflower and passed on both of them, but ate several carrot sticks.
All in all, a lovely holiday weekend. Now we turn to winterizing, putting plastic over the windows and making things as efficient as possible. HRH put in the second outside window in our bedroom, and took out the screens in the boy’s room. We’d turned the central kitchen heater on last week and used the ceiling fan to circulate the warmer air when it went on, but yesterday we set all the room thermostats at 15 degrees, just to make sure things didn’t get too chilled. The outside gardens need to be fully cut back, and the compost spread over the beds, too. Snow has been spotted in the air not too far north.
The boy has become quite the Lego expert. He builds wonderful little vehicles, my favourite of which was the steampunk car that had a propeller on top. He completely gets this from his father, because I think very poorly in the cube-based three-dimensional manner Lego requires.
He’s still interested in cooking, and will drag his chair over to help me use the stand mixer. He is especially enthusiastic about cracking eggs. (The success rate is about fifty-fifty. We’re getting there.) We made cookies for our at-home Thanksgiving dinner and when we put the first tray into the oven he went and got his little chair and set it in front of the oven door so he and Blackie could watch them bake.
Naps are still happening, thank goodness, although he misses one now and again. They’re down to an hour and a half. He’s still sleeping about ten hours at night. The bad cold he had this past month had him waking up at least once a night for a good two weeks straight, and lately he still has a tendency to wake up around three or four in the morning. Then again, we all do these days, so it’s not so surprising. He gets put back to bed, and while he is upset at the time he falls asleep quickly.
Reading: he knows more than he’s letting on. This is frustrating for us. I understand that he doesn’t want to lose the closeness of an activity like reading together, but nothing we say or do seems to convince him that we’ll keep reading to him if he admits that he can read on his own. His language skills are noticeably developing more and more. His inflections and sense of humour are really emerging. He’s starting to engage in wordplay, which is hilarious. There are a lot of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes going on, which are funny because they’re not funny, if you know what I mean. ( “Because his knitting was on the other side!” will kill your audience because you’ve missed the point of the joke.)
First, a pretty picture: I’m currently spinning some Louet Northern Lights in the Cactus Flower colourway. It’s my first foray into spinning dyed fibre, and it’s fascinating me. I probably wouldn’t have chosen this to spin, but it was a test done with fibre on hand, and it turns out it works rather well for a project I had in mind. More on that later, though. Show and tell first!
Originally planned as a weekend away in Alexandria, this weekend was revised when two of the original hosts had to bow out due to health issues. Ceri hosted it instead, we tweaked the meal plan a bit to reflect fewer people, Mousme couldn’t join us till Sunday due to what began as alternate plans and was revised to a shoulder injury… but we stayed true to the original vision of the weekend and had much fun. 
Four loads of laundry done (okay, the third’s drying, the fourth’s in the washer), the freelance polishing is almost complete, and the sun is actually out today. I feel slightly more human, though folding the first two loads of laundry wiped me out for a good half hour.
Like it says, the boy’s monthly post has finally been finished and posted 
I am working my way through polishing the freelance thing, taking plenty of breaks because I’m exhausting myself thinking through sentences. One of my breaks was to engage in a meme going around called the Handwriting Meme. I’m not big on memes and quizzes, but this struck me as really interesting. We read e-mail and people’s online journals all the time, and we rarely see their handwriting. I wasn’t specifically tagged by anyone (and good thing, because I hate that) but at least two people whose journals I read threw it open to anyone who wanted to play along. So here, for the record, is mine. Click it to embiggen so as to make it readable.