Archive: May, 2011

Parenting is a lot of trial and error and learning as you go along.  I think Jeff and I have been pretty successful in rolling with the parenting challenges over the last year.  This newest challenge - the pacifier situation - really has me at a loss on what to do.  Simon has started chewing through his binkies and at an alarmingly fast rate.  Case in point - I bought some binkies on Monday night when we first tried to get rid of them.  Today is Wednesday and they already have punctures in the sides of them. THAT'S 2 DAYS!  He's literally biting the tips off them.  Jeff made an interesting point in his recent post that with Simon's early teething (got his first teeth at 3 months), he used his pacifiers as teethers more than something to suck on.  Hence the dilemma - all my research on how to break the paci habit all deal with a child who sucks on them.  

Simon only uses them in his crib, so it's not a point of weaning him slowly.  He's clearly not ready to give them up completely, so we thought that maybe we could switch brands to the soothie style which would be a bit more durable.  It's apparent that Simon wanted nothing to do with plan A.  I figured that only left plan B - going cold turkey.  Well, plan B isn't going so well either.  Tried it for nap today and 2 hours of hysterical crying and I had to cave and give him a binky.  Simon's been known to get himself so worked up that he throws up and I just couldn't let him get to that point.  I then made a call to Jeff telling him to make a target run and stock up on pacifiers.  He brought home 4 packs - that's 8 pacifiers.  Given his chew rate of 4 days to destroy them that buys us about 2 weeks to come up with plan C.  Or keep spending a ton of money on pacifiers every few days.

Patience is something that I sometimes lack, but not when it comes to knitting.  Knitting IS patience.  It always surprises Jeff when I've been working on a project, get close to completing it and decide that something isn't right so I rip it out and start over.  It happened twice on a pair of wrist warmers that I was working on (and I'm considering ripping them out a 3rd time and starting over since they don't fit right) and recently on a sock that seemed a bit too tight at the calf.

My current big project is a baby blanket that I wanted to make before Simon was born.  It's a cot blanket pattern by Louisa Harding. I had ordered the yarn from a recommended company but they shipped it without an apartment number and I never received it.  They reshipped it but it still never arrived so after 5 weeks of trying to get the yarn I just disputed the charges and put the project on hold.  A few weeks ago I ordered some yarn again (different company) and started the blanket a week and a half ago.  It's supposed to be knitted up in 12 separate squares that you sew together but I loathe sewing knitted items.  It's a pain in the butt.  So I decided to knit it as one continuous piece.  There was a recommendation to add a separation stitch between the squares when knitting it in one piece so I did.  I was 2 rows away from completing the first 3 squares and I didn't like how the extra stitches seemed make 2 of the squares uneven.  It might not be terribly obvious to others but it was glaringly obvious to me.  So I ripped the whole thing out and started over today.  Why, if it wouldn't be noticeable to most people?  Because I'd know.

Simon has a phone that he got from his Grammie for Christmas.  One of the buttons plays a busy signal and it made me realize that I haven't heard a busy signal on a call in a long time.  Maybe 2 years now?   With cell phones, voice mail, call waiting, etc. will kids growing up now even know what a busy signal is?  Or is it in the same category as the sound of dial-up internet connections?