You might say it was a cake walk

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Every year my elementary school would have a big carnival. It was great, I loved it. It was a small school and thus a pretty small carnival, but then again, it had everything it needed to have: Moonwalk, dunk tank, karaoke, overpriced carnival food and 8 or 9 games of chance to win some crappy prizes.

We didn’t have a lot of money for tickets, and they always seemed to go fast. My main goal at the carnival was to maximize my profit: what was the most economically advantageous way to spend my tickets? For example, buying a personal pan pizza from the Pizza Hut truck cost like 7,000,000 tickets. So, even though I desperately wanted a personal pan pizza, I knew my mom wasn’t going to let me starve so it wasn’t really worth using up every single ticket to my name. The Moonwalk was like 5 tickets for 10 milliseconds or something. This was somewhat worthwhile, because a Moonwalk is awesome, but you still didn’t have anything to show for it when your 10 milliseconds were done (other than a stitch in your side, because bouncing in a Moonwalk is hard work!)

Then I discovered the cake walk.

For some reason on this particular year, the cake walk just wasn’t that popular. I don’t know if people didn’t know it was there, or if it just wasn’t considered cool to devour an entire cake all by yourself, or what. In any case, I had that baby to myself. For the low price of one ticket, you were entered into the cake walk. Numbers would be drawn until a winner was chosen, so if nobody was on the number, they’d pick again. In other words, if you are the ONLY PERSON DOING THE CAKE WALK, you were guaranteed a cake.

Like taking candy from a baby.

Even if there were 2 or 3 or even 4 people participating, your odds of winning an ENTIRE CAKE are pretty good. So while my friends were bouncing their heads off in the Moonwalk, or winning tootsie rolls on the spinning wheel of chance, I spent every single last one of my tickets on the cake walk and took home in the neighborhood of 5 cakes.

Carnival – 0, Shane – 1

Slowly Goes the Knitting

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Okay, so when I said it was going to take years and years to make our Bee Keeper’s quilt, I didn’t think I was talking about just the first honeycomb!

This is turning out to be a little trickier than I thought. Things that are new for me:

  1. Double pointed needles (I keep stabbing myself!)
  2. Tiny needles (my fat fingers aren’t nimble enough!)
  3. Knitting in the round (there’s a whole extra needle just flopping around and getting in my way!)
  4. Knitting with fuzzy wool, rather than cotton (it’s so hard to see what’s going on!)
  5. Increases and decreases (actually, these aren’t too bad)

It has been a lot more frustrating than I expected. I lost count of the number of times I would spend hours on a honeycomb only to have to take it all out and start over. I am surprised at how much more delicate and difficult the tiny needles make everything. And of course, since it takes so much of my concentration to do it right, I knit everything waaay too tight.

However, my hard work was not for naught, because here is my beautiful, perfect, first honeycomb:

Although it took me several weeks, it turned out really good and I think it is better than Sara’s first honeycomb was, if I do say so myself. That doesn’t matter much, however, because she’s knit a few since then. You might say she’s kind of winning, if you keep track of things like that.

In fact, if we’re being honest, Sara, having already secured her lead in the honeycomb race, left to go knit a sweater.

Yeah, okay. But still, even through knitting this one honeycomb, I’ve already gotten noticeably better as I get practice. The first 10 rows took 100 times longer than the entire rest of it. So I’m sure I’ll be an old pro by the time I knit 50 or so more. That’s the nice thing about knitting: you improve so quickly, that you really get that positive feedback, like “Hey, I did it! I can see that I’m improving!”, which is encouraging. It’s a lot better than something like playing accordion, where you have to practice and practice and practice and even then you can’t really tell if you’ve improved or not.

I definitely think I am going to enjoy having a “go to” project. I don’t like to have down time, so it’s nice to know that I have something I can fall back on whenever I need something to do. Even if Sara is a little disappointed with my progress so far. However, this project is a marathon, not a sprint, and I don’t give up easily.

Onward and upward!

Ollie Bites the Big One

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Oliver has now had his first injury requiring a trip to the hospital.

Last Wednesday, Oliver was running in the park and tripped over his own feet, falling just so that his chin slammed into a bench, causing him to bite deeply into his lower lip.

Now I wasn’t there, so I’m telling all of this second hand. As you can imagine, a deep lip wound bleeds like a gusher. By the time Sara got to him, his hands were covered with blood. He calmed down pretty quickly, but he wanted to be held. When Sara managed to get a look at it, she was pretty sure it would need stitches. Unfortunately, they were about a mile from the hospital with no car. At least Sara was with a co-worker, so she didn’t have to deal with this all by herself. Sara called me at work, so I left for home, but by the time I got there most of the excitement had died down.

The good news is that Sara has the hospital connections, so we actually avoided a trip to the emergency room. Sara planned to go to the ER, but she wanted her boss to take a look at it first, to get a second opinion. I felt like it was definitely worth having him take a look. A trip to the ER would have been very painful, slow, and expensive and having to sit and wait and have his wound poked and prodded, not to mention having his blood pressure and temperature taken, etc. would most likely be a lot more traumatic for Oliver than the actual stitches.

They managed to have several doctors look at it. It was sort of a borderline case; it wasn’t too deep, but it was right on the lip line. One doctor said, “20 years ago I would have said stitches for sure, but these days I’m not so sure.” Finally, Sara’s boss and one of the doctors applied liquid stitches in his office. For Oliver’s part, he was content to let whomever do whatever they wanted to his lip. He never cried after the initial injury and sat still and quiet while they stretched his lips and applied the glue.

The liquid stitches were kind of gross. They’d probably be okay on your arm or something, but between the glue starting to peel off and bits of food getting caught up into it, it kind of seemed worse than having nothing at all.

When Sara called, my first thought was, “How is Evie taking it?” She worries about Oliver so much, and is so protective over him, and is so sensitive about him getting hurt, that I know she would be absolutely freaked out. She certainly was. Afterwards, she made a card for Sara’s boss that said, “Thank you for saving Oliver’s life.”

Anyway, now the glue is mostly off and everything looks a lot better. I’m not sure if he’ll have a very noticeable scar or not, but it’s definitely going to heal. Unfortunately, it hasn’t stopped him from running face first into everything he can find like a human bowling ball.

Evie’s First Ballet Recital

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Over the weekend, Evie had her very first ballet recital. She performed the frog dance.

She had a dress rehearsal on Friday, which meant that I was responsible for hair and makeup that day. Eek! You have no idea how stressed out about that I was. I practiced a little, and I have to say, the ballet bun turned out much better than I expected. I didn’t go full on makeup mode, just stuck to a little blush. All in all, not nearly as scary as I thought it would be!

Evie was very excited about the recital. She didn’t seem nervous at all, and I kept wanting to ask her if she was nervous, but I didn’t want to then make her nervous by bringing it up. It seemed like it hadn’t occurred to her to be nervous. But then again, of course it didn’t, because there’s nothing she loves better than performing for a crowd.

In fact, as I mentioned on facebook, that morning she was lying on the floor crying, “I need some attention!” I said to her, “Evie, in an hour you’re going to be on a stage with a whole audience watching you.” She got this slow, luxurious, evil smile on her face that looked exactly like:

It was almost creepy. My brother saw it too, and he said it put goosebumps on his arms.

Her recital was the day of Baconfest (posts to come next week), so my brother and I wore our Baconfest shirts. I wasn’t sure if I was a little *too* dressed down (hey, the shirt was pink!), so I was nervous, but it ended up being okay. At one point I saw a dad in a Captain America tee shirt sitting in the row behind us and marked his location. Always good to know who you can count on in case trouble goes down.

I saw the costumes at the dress rehearsal, but Evie made Sara promise not to look at the pictures so it would be a surprise the day of. I thought the costumes were pretty awesome.

The day of the recital, Sara took care of the makeup and hair preparation, and (not surprisingly) she did a much better job than me. I’m not sure how I feel about requiring makeup for 4 year olds. I know it is part of performing, and part of what makes the whole thing feel special, but it had me feeling a little “Toddlers and Tiaras“, you know?

I was pretty excited to see her, but then something strange happened. Almost immediately, as soon as the first performance began, I started to get a lump in my throat (frog in my throat?). It was very strange, and unexpected. I mean, in retrospect it makes a lot of sense I guess, but it really had never occurred to me that I would get choked up. And it wasn’t even Evie performing yet, the girls on stage were like 15. Next up was a group 3 year olds and I totally lost it. I was taken completely by surprise! I looked over at Sara and she was wiping tears from her eyes too. “Are you crying?” I mouthed. Sara nodded. “Me too,” I said. The extra funny part was that I apparently got it all out of my system, because I didn’t get choked up during Evie’s actual performance.

I was pretty impressed that, through the entire performance, none of the kids freaked out or froze. Considering parents aren’t even allowed to sit in during practice, I thought an entire auditorium full might throw at least the 3 year olds. Not so. Kudos to the dance teachers!

Oliver was so proud of his big sis. He’s really excited to do ballet when he gets old enough. Evie was really on cloud nine afterwards. I bought her a flower from the farmer’s market, and she got another from her teacher. She seemed so old, with her flowers and congratulatory hugs and pictures with her friends. All in all, it was pretty awesome, and I’m glad she did an activity that she really enjoyed. It really seemed like the performance was one of the highlights in her life thus far.

Quote Monday is a worrier

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Sara: “You’re not the mother, you don’t have to worry about him.”
Evie: “But I am the sister who worries about him!”

Oliver: “Do hip hip hooray, da da!”
::Me throwing Oliver up in the air::
Me: “Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!”
Oliver, speaking very firmly: “That’s enough!”

Oliver, yelling: “That’s Dabu, that’s Dabu!”
Evie: “That’s not Dabu, that’s the Mona Lisa.”

::Me discussing a difficult person::
Sara: “Tell him you’re only allowed to have one difficult person in your life and you chose me.”