Random Catchup Post

Just a list of random because writing an actual coherent post kindof makes my head hurt right now.

1.) I am 13 weeks and 3 days pregnant. Yes, I’m still puking. Yes, I know that should have stopped by now. It hasn’t. But it’s less frequent so let’s move on.

2.) In other pregnancy news….Our kid is the size of a peach.

3.) My fantasy football team kicked serious ass this week. Like 120 points of solid ass whooping. I now in first place in my league. Matt’s in first place in his league too but his team isn’t anywhere near as awesome as mine is (120 points!!! Michael Turner is my hero)

4.) Vampires rule. If you don’t have HBO and haven’t seen True Blood you have failed at life. Go get it now and try to catch the pilot before the next episode on Sunday. It’s totally worth it. So far show is amazing – every bit as good as the books. Although I’m reserving my complete judgment until a few weeks from now when we get to meet Eric. Mmmmm… Eric.

5.) The new 90210 was AWFUL. As my friend texted me “The only use I have for this show is to find out who Kelly’s baby daddy is, otherwise it’s terrible.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the baby daddy will be whoever they can convince to make a guest appearance first.

6.) I’m a bit obsessed with the Large Hadron Collider. It’s fascinating. And it worked! Crazy. Makes me want to be a physicist. The most hilarious article I’ve found on it is here:

The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World

7.) Despite my best efforts to kill it my garden isn’t doing too terrible. Since for the past few months I’ve been asleep or puking going outside in the heat to weed and water was not on my priority list. So we have a pathetic amount of homegrown produce this year – It’s sad, really.

But my flowers are actually surviving quite well. Especially the sunflowers:


Zinneas:

And Cosmos which are as tall as the sunflowers!:

My Dahlias are blooming like crazy:



And I’m pretty sure my morning glories are too although I haven’t been outside in the garden in the morning at all to enjoy them … I’m hoping that next year I’ll be able to get back into the garden thing.

8.) We went camping last weekend with about 30 of our closest friends. It was SO much fun. But I’m going to try to write a whole other post on it… that may or may not happen.

9.) I have been feeling well enough to do a bit of dying… so a shop update and new colorways should be coming soon!

10.) Dexter continues to be Sultan of the Couch.

And that’s about all I’ve got for right now…

Details and Pictures!

Thanks so much for all of your well wishes!!! And can I just say how excited I am to finally tell you guys? Having something that huge going on in my life and not being able to blog it was really weird. Glad that part of this adventure is over now. So to answer some of your questions…

1.) How far along are you?

As of today I am at 12 weeks and 3 days (according to the voodoo that is pregnancy math). So according to some of the books I’m now in the second trimester… although according to others I still have a week to go so who knows.

2.) When is the baby due?

My official doctor sanctioned due date is March 15. The Ides of March. Which makes his very geeky parents happy. Also all of my friends have taken to calling him/her Caesar which is pretty hilarious considering it’s hard to rule the entire Roman Empire when you’re only a few inches long.



Other fun potential birthdays:
March 9: Matt’s b-day
March 17: St. Pat’s – which would make my Irish grandma very happy
March 22: My brother’s birthday

Overall I think March is the perfect time. While it means I’m out for ski season this year I won’t ever have to be huge when it’s hot out. Let’s just hope that there’s no big mid-March blizzard this year!

3.) How have you been feeling?

Pregnant. Yucky and pregnant. I’m hoping that I’ll get the second trimester energy burst soon and that the puking will stop but so far none of that has happened. I spend most of my time either throwing up, asleep, or knocked out with a migraine that I’m not allowed to take anything good for. Also knitting makes me dizzy which makes coping with spending most of my time on the couch just about unbearable. I’m starting to come out of it a little bit, though. At first my after work naps were 3-4 hours long. Now they are only an hour or two. And some days I can survive without napping at all! So perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel…

4.) Is it a boy or a girl? Will you find out?

Ok even though we have had an ultrasound we can’t find out yet. The pieces parts are just too small to see. We won’t be able to find out until our next ultrasound at around weeks 18-20 (sometime in late Oct).

We go back and forth on the finding out/not finding out thing. On one hand it would be nice to know… but on the other it just doesn’t matter. Happy and healthy is what matters not boy or girl. On one hand it would be fun to be a surprise but on the other it will be a surprise no matter when we find out. The big sticking point is that everything – even the big ticket items like strollers and cribs and stuff – seems to be geared towards either a boy or a girl. That makes us not want to know. Because – God willing – this will not be our only child. And it seems completely ridiculous to rebuy everything for the next one because it’s not the right color. So we’d much rather stick with neutrals for just about everything. But I’m afraid that once we tell everyone “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy” suddenly the floodgates of pink or blue will open. And we’re really not down with that.

We do have a little time to decide on this and I’m sure whatever conclusion we reach will be the right decision for us.

5.) How was your first ultrasound?

So. Much. Fun. So much fun. Once we got over the “is everything ok?! please just tell us everything is ok..” thing, that is. And so far everything is great. Check it out:

That’s our kid!!! It was taken on August 20 – so two weeks ago. I’m sure they’ve grown since then…

At the ultrasound the baby was doing a little happy dance, squirming around like crazy. At one point he/she stopped dancing and waved one arm at us as if to say “Hi guys!” and then went back to their bouncy little dance. The doctor got a shot of the baby waving at us – and even added a little caption to it:

Heh. Nice to prepare the baby for the inevitable captioning that will happen on this blog.
How about another shot:

At this point the doctor commented on how long the baby’s arms are. So our baby is fidgety with long arms? Doesn’t sound like anyone I know at all… or you know...exactly like Matt.

Here’s where they measured the baby’s heartbeat:

It was 184.6 which sounds insane but apparently they start out that fast and slow down later.

And one last picture for good measure:

Blurry but adorable.

Ok I think that about catches me up. Hopefully I’ll be back to the blogging/knitting world soon!

Our next big adventure

So as you guys probably know by now Matt and I have been on many, many adventures together. We’ve climbed to the top of mountains:

Dead woman’s Pass, Inca Trail, Peru – Sept 2007

And lived in places where we didn’t speak the language.

Copenhagen, Denmark – June 2001

We’ve driven across the country and back:

Arches National Park June 2002

Skied ridiculous mountains

Vail, April 2006

And eaten ridiculous things

Ceviche, in Lima, Peru – Sept. 2007

We’ve even survived more mundane adventures such as college:

Studio freshman year. I'd comment on how young we look but this photo was taken 10 years ago. We were young.

Thesis

I wanted to put a pic of us at MArch graduation with our pretty hoods on here but sadly I couldn’t find one. I’m going to have to keep digging, though because this is a pretty important thing we conquered together.

Home renovations:


Building our patio – May 2006

Football Season:

Pittsburgh after the Steelers won the superbowl

And 3 plus years of marriage:

Picture taken the night we were engaged – Aug. 2, 2003


October 9, 2004


October 9, 2006

But something tells me that of all the things we've done and all the places we've been our next adventure is going to be way crazier and way more rewarding than anything we’ve ever attempted before:

We’re going to be parents!!!

Terrible picture of us taken at 6:30 in the morning about five minutes after that line turned blue. We’re half asleep and unshowered but you can tell how excited we are.

I think this will be the best adventure yet.

Olympic Update: Silver? Bronze?

So I had a grand plan to not post until I was modeling my finished shrug – preferably I would post this on Sunday… Yeah. That clearly didn’t happen. The one two punch of being sick and being uber busy pretty much ended my Olympic dreams. Here’s where I’m at:

Soooo close! I honestly probably could have finished on time but after knitting the sleeves the first time I realized that I had a lot more hanspun yarn left… so I ripped back and made them much longer.

Oh well. In the end it’s more important that I have a shrug that I love than one that was finished on time.

I’m happy with my choice of the Medieval Red, though. I think it offsets the red bits in the hanspun really, really nicely. Thanks for all of your opinions on that!

Basically I only have about 10 more rounds to go. And I probably could have done it, too, but I just do not have the dedication of an Olympian. I got distracted by things such as a party and my fantasy football draft.

So here are my final stats:

Dying – 1 lb of fiber dyed.
Spinning – 8 oz of fiber spun and plyed into approximately 300 plus yards of yarn.
Knitting – about 80% of a shrug knit.

Not too shabby for 17 days. Perhaps I should get a silver or a bronze?

In other knitting news I finally finished the Odessa I’ve been working on:

It’s a Chemo Cap for a family member of Matt’s who needs it.

I love the Odessa pattern – it’s my fav. chemo cap by far. The bling is just so perfect... But man is it a pain in the ass to knit. Something about the lace and the beads makes it take for-ev-er. That and the cotton fleece was really hurting my hands so I could only knit a round or two at a time.

So it grew in baby steps and took way longer to finish than I had planned. I think the finished hat is completely worth it, though!

Tomorrow? Something way funner than the Olympics. No, really.

Olympic Update: Decisions, Decisions

Ok. So I need to make a decision on this contrast color thing stat. I did some serious stash diving yesterday (can I just interject that it feels awesome to have a stash that is actually useful in times like this? It took years to build up the yarn reserves and I’m just thrilled I don’t have to buy anything else to complete this project. I don’t know if that makes me cheap or thrifty but either way I’m happy.). Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Some green possibilities:


Some purple/pink possibilites:


A brown possibility:


And a burgundy red possibility:


The brown is what I initially thought I would like but it’s just too…brown. The darker colors in the handspun are much more red:

So I think that’s out.

So then I tried the pinks/purples… This pink one is waaaay brighter than in the picture:

I don’t think I can pull off a bright pink and bright green shrug. One bright is plenty for someone who is in their late 20’s I think.

I like the color of this pink/purple:

But Matt thinks it clashes and he has a good eye for these types of things.

The dark purple seemed to be close:

Although the darks in the handspun are much more red than purple. Not sure that matters, though, since the deep purple looks good with the bright green.

None of the greens really did it for me except for this one:

But as Matt put it “the olive would work but it’s just not that interesting.” No. No, it’s not. But how interesting does a shrug need to be?

The one we both kept going back to was actually one I pulled out thinking “there’s no way this will work”:

But it totally does. It’s called medieval red and it’s honestly the same exact shade as the reds in the handspun. I think it picks those up quite nicely…

So basically I’m deciding between those last three:

Dark purple - I like it but it might not be quite right with the handspun
Olive – while uninteresting is still nice
Medieval Red - matches the handspun yarn perfectly but might be a bit much with the red and green

What do you guys think?

Oh and I decided defiantly not to do the ribbing in handspun. I think the smooth commercial yarn will set off my less than perfect spinning in a really nice way…

Olympic Update – taking your advice

So first of all thank you guys so much for your reassurance that my yarn looks ok! You’ve made me feel so much better about this little experiment. Also making me feel better? The way the swatch came out:

Me likey.

Before I could even pause to blog the swatch I cast on and started the third event of my Fiberman – the knitting. Most of the weekend (except for Friday night – then we went to the Feast with my brother to help him carbo load for Pedal to the Point. He rocked that btw. Both legs. So 150 miles in one weekend. Pretty awesome accomplishment if you ask me. Oh and if you want to donate his website is here – no pressure, though.) was spent happily like this:


Yes that would be Madden in the background. Matt recently hooked up the 360 to the internets and since then has been thoroughly enjoying beating the crap out of his buddies in various games. Also I’m not sure that last picture accurately shows the cuteness that was happening there:

Dexter cuddled his little head into the ball of handspun and fell asleep. Completely adorable. Anyways! Check out all I have accomplished:

That’s the entire body! It knit up super quick. Mainly because the yarn I spun came out to be much bulkier than worsted weight. So I ended up doing some math and adjusting the pattern to be knit on 10’s at a gauge of 3.25 stitches / inch. Anything would go quick at that gauge.

I think the math is working out ok so far… and honestly, I’m really liking the yarn now.

I had some issues with pooling at the beginning so I ended up winding up the other 4 oz that I spun and alternating on every other row. That seemed to solve the pooling issue:


I know I have plenty of yarn left to finish the sleeves but not enough to do the ribbing for the collar and sleeve edges. I haven’t decided if I want to do those in a commercial yarn or more handspun, though. I think a contrasting collar would be nice…

So I’m going to go stash diving and see what I come up with. Part of me is eying the remaining fiber that I have yet to spin and thinking, hmmm… I kindof want to overdye it with the same dye solutions to make fiber that’s maroon with green bits instead of green with maroon bits and use that for the collar. That would mean I might not make the deadline of next Sunday, though…. Decisions, decisions.

Hmmmm….