This is gonna be a long post. It’s like a blog debt that I’m paying back.
Sometimes I have so much to say and it’s all written in my head but when it comes to typing it out, I don’t know where to start!
I’ll just ramble along and insert the appropriate/ matching pictures. They may or may not appear in order of the events that have happened. So much has happened in the past month that I cannot remember what happened when exactly.
It’s been rather cold lately. Snow fell on the mountains which we can see from our front door/window. It only stayed a couple of days before melting. This winter hasn’t been as wet as the last. I’m worried because our backyard badly needs rain. We’ve been carting out bath water and since there’s a fly screen on the bathroom window, we can’t pass buckets of water through the window to the backyard so we have to cart bucketloads out of the bathroom, through the length of the living room and through the kitchen/backdoor, walk the entire length of the house before we’re able to douse the lawn with water. Very exhausting.
And yes. Grass is dying. Especially the spots where Chiyo pees on. Grrr.
However, Sakuras are blooming all over town. We love the white ones most but the pink ones are more common. We even cut some branches for our kitchentop!
And yes, we don’t have a vase so an ex caffiene bottle would have to do.
The buds opened after a few days and it really brightened up the room. Unfortunately, it also started to shed the petals like ezcema and I had pink petals in my food. So the flowers are sitting on our front step now. Most of them are gone though.
The reasons why I’ve not been updating my blog is because of the mountain of homework I have to wade through. I barely get much sleep nowadays, averaging on 5 to 6 hours a night.
I know to some people, 5 hours is a luxury. But to me, I need sleep. I become very cranky when I don’t have enough sleep. But yet the wee hours of the morning is really the only time I can do any form of study without interruptions. Sometimes I would hear my neighbours starting their car and going to work at 5 or 6am and I’m still struggling with my essays. All these and I’m still very very behind especially with my Biology.
I’m 3 chapters late for Bio!
When I’m not up in the weird hours of the night doing school work, I’m busy preparing updates for the store. My recent fibre update went really well and most of the braids were snapped up within a day or two!
I also enjoyed designing the labels of the braids.
Like this ewe is spinning wool from her back so her top is naked. Tee hee hee.
Now I’m busy sewing bags. Expandabags and smaller project bags for the store. Progress is painfully slow though.
I enjoy sewing and knitting and dyeing yarn/fibre a lot. I love bright and saturated colours. I love being creative and I love my yarn store (mainly because I get the first pick of the lovely Malabrigo yarn that arrives!!!) Thoughts have passed through my head if I should just sod (pardon the french) the whole school thing and just relax and enjoy my hobbies. I have one less issue to deal with in my life.
However, I cannot see us surviving on the yarn store. It started as a hobby business and it will always be a hobby business. It can support my stash acquisition and perhaps pay for some groceries here and there but it will never become a main source of income for my family. I am more than happy for it to be a hobby business and I like it the way it is right now. It’s not overwhelming me (it’s the juggling of my multiple lives that’s killing me) and I like that I can ‘work’ any time I want to.
To have foresight, my studies is the only way that I can support my little family, inclusive of my dearest mum. To have foresight, we really really want to eventually own a little farm. To have foresight, would mean that I have to plod on with my studies. I don’t want to earn ‘big bucks’. I just want to earn enough to afford the kind of lifestyle we want. Not that we are lavish or anything like that! A simple, humble little farm would be great!
So the only thing other than whine about my lack of sleep to my poor husband now is to bite on my lower lip and plod on. 5 more years. I hope I make it till the end.
Not all of the month was bad for me though! I got quite a bit of knitting done:
I casted this on when Sunshine was a little baby. It hibernated for a very very long time and I finally decided to get on with it or else it won’t fit either kid.
Horror of horrors, this wool was discontinued. It’s Cleckheaton country 12 ply from Spotlight and I had 7 balls each of white and black. I needed just ONE more ball of each to seam the jacket up. Lucky for Ravelry, a very kind lady sent me a ball of each so I could complete this jacket.
Then I got a shock when I saw this:
Can you spot the colour difference? There’s a line running through which you can see- one side is whiter than the other.
At first, I was really shocked. “WHO PEED ON MY DONKEY JACKET???” But I realised the ‘pee line’ was tooooo straight to have been a pee line.
I’ve actually run out of wool for this project once before. I ran into Spotlight few years back to grab more balls of yarn but I must have failed to look at the colour. I must have grabbed a few balls of off-white instead of white.
Never mind. It’s the lining of the jacket and unless I point it out, people don’t notice! 
Ohh, check out the cute carrot buttons!
How apt for a donkey jacket!
We also went fishing with our close friend and her teenage sons one very nice day. I took my knitting of course.
We enjoyed ourselves. Especially the little ones.
The waters were so clear!
Nad was teaching Sunshine how to skim pebbles but it looks like this one would land on his head……..
We seldom ever get a family portrait so I love this picture to bits:
I was wearing my favourite hat:
Knitted with Malabrigo Twist, Paris Nights and Malabrigo Worsted Oceanos. My two favourite colourways from Malabrigo. I wear it everywhere I go now! Not at home though.
Sunshine also had a lot of fun as she tried her hand in baking.
All under tutorage from our close friend, Lena. (The same one we went on the fishing trip with.)
She enjoyed herself and I would, one of these days, bake with her too. Only I’ve never baked muffins in my life before. I’m sure I can follow instructions though!
I also squeezed some time to make some soap:
The ones on the left are Oatmeal. My favourite scent! The ones on the right are Aussie flavours – Lemon myrtle, Tea tree and Eucalyptus. They make the house smell lovely.
The oatmeal was made hot processed so it could be used immediately. The Aussie one was cold processed but I don’t think I can wait a month before using it. It smells too nice! So shhh, I’m going to use it tonight (it’s been curing for a week now).
The oatmeal batch was made with a swap in mind. I’ve sent out the soap and scrubbie yesterday to my partner.
A few weeks ago, Chubbs started to have purplish and flakey toes. We didn’t know what to make of it. Applied Eucalyptus oil and aloe vera cream on them and changed fresh socks for him everyday. Then, his ring finger on the left started to become red/purplish and swollen as well. We thought it was an insect bite.
Then 3 nights ago, the swell spread to his middle finger and his pinky. That prompted a call to the after hours service and the nurse advised us to bring him to the hospital.
A hospital trip it was, at midnight! Both Chubbs and Sunshine slept blissfully through the whole time we were there. We waited about an hour or two and he was finally diagnosed with fungal and secondary bacterial infection – cellulities.
He was given a course of antibiotics and fungal cream. We reached home at 3am and crashed into bed. That was the earliest I’ve slept the entire week.
For the first two days, Chubbs willingly drank his medicine. Now, we have a huge struggle and our wardrobe has been updated to ‘retro pink spots’. Most of the pink, nasty liquid ends up outside his mouth! Urgh.
There’s still no marked improvement on his fingers although his toes seems a little better. Pray that he gets well soon. Sigh, poor boy.
We have been constantly amazed at his level of understanding lately though. A few days ago, Sunshine was sitting on the toilet and she said to Chubbs to bring her the ‘Hungry Baby’ book.
He walked past my sewing room into the living room and walked past again holding the correct book!
A few moments later, I saw him wearing the kitchen slipper (one side) so I said to him, “Can you put the slipper in the kitchen please?”
He looked lost for a moment until I bent over and pointed, “Slipper”. He immediately took the slipper, walked the length of the house and dropped the slipper into the kitchen, over the baby gate!
Ho ho ho… this little boy knows more than he lets on!
He’s starting to say Eh Pa (apple), Nana! (Banana), Bye bye! and he’s also responding to our questions.
“Chubby?”
“Ya ya!”
“Do you want water?”
“Ya ya!”
Sunshine has been a good girl. She is toilet trained now (like, finally!) and we only put her diapers on when she sleeps. She is reading new words with little difficulty now. The other night when I was ironing on interfacing unto fabric, she read the words on the iron, “Slip Stream!”.
She doesn’t get it all correct though as she has an idea of phonics. So she pronounces the first few letters if she is unsure of the new word. Sometimes she gets the word right. Sometimes she only gets the beginning of the word right. But she’s getting there! She’s also writing most letters in the alphabet now.
There was once I read on a forum (not Ravelry!) and some parents have very adverse criticisms on babies who can read and write (aiming the attack at the learning program that we use for both Chubbs and Sunshine). They believe kids should be playing and not be forced to read or write.
Well, little do they know that kids are NOT FORCED to ‘study’. Learning can be fun and enjoyable too! Both kids of ours love their learning DVDs and Sunshine regularly (read: everyday) wants me to put the disk on for her. She takes out her exercise book on her own free will and writes in it.
We ASK if she wants to do ‘some writing’ or ‘some reading’ and only proceed to do so when she replies in affirmative. I don’t think anyone can force a young child to study or to learn. But one can always make learning a fun process.
Our kids still get to play in the sun, go for walks in the park, play in the playgrounds, feed the ducks etc… but rather than spending time at home watching mind numbing TV shows, why not encourage them to learn something? A good foundation and a boost at the start is always a good thing.
Yes, while most kids would reach the same level of understanding when they reach a certain age, there’s nothing wrong with giving the kid a boost at a younger age, when their brains are most like sponges and when whatever they learn stays in their memories better. We’ve never forced any learning upon the kids. They are happy, healthy children who do not neccessarily have exceptional IQs. I believe all children have this same potential in them and it’s up to their parents whether they want to unleash it or not. 
On the knitting front, I’ve casted on a Huntington Castle Pullover with Rowan Summer Tweed which is a Cotton/silk blend. I’ve never smelled such strong cottony smell from yarn before!
It’s one of my first stranded (a kind of knitting with 2 colours.. not that it’s stranded on an island or anything like that) projects. I casted on the second size but it was too huge so I ripped back (I was about 5 rows into the pullover) and casted on the smallest size. I know this is cotton and won’t be as stretchy as wool so I have to be careful that it’s not too small or I won’t be able to squeeze in! It’s looking good, though!
I’ve also wound 3 Malabrigo Sock yarn into yarn cakes, ready to design my first shawl/stole.
From top to bottom: Caribeno, Impressionist Sky and Abril. What lovely colours. No wonder I’m keeping Yarnandkisses alive. Hehehehe.
Alrightio… off to take a warm shower! Thanks for hanging around.
(taken on the way up)
