I can't believe my baby's 3!

My youngest turns 3 this Saturday. Where did the time fly to? I still remember being in the hospital having him - in the middle of the night, with his brother in his jammies since we had to wake him up to drive to the hospital. He ended up falling asleep in the delivery room and all the doctors and nurses whispered throughout his brother's delivery! They joked that it was the quietest delivery they had ever had! lol! Until he showed up and started screaming his head off! But big brother still slept through it all :-).






And I'm in denial that my oldest would have started kindergarten this last Monday (if we weren't homeschooling that is!). I'm very glad that I don't have to go through the emotions of putting him on a bus and sending him to school, but I'm experiencing all the other emotions - like disbelief that he can possibly be old enough to be in school! :-(




On the knitting front, the Ravelympics are over! And I did pretty good with 4 projects crossing the finish line! 3 gift knits and one wip. I won't post the gift photos here, but here's the wip scarf that had been hibernating since 2006!It's a very cushy cashmere/wool blend yarn. It knitted up into a very warm and soft scarf - I can't wait to wear it this winter! The pattern is a reversible cable - very cool. Essentially you work groups of K2, P2, K2, P2 rib, and then cable the groups of K2, P2 across each other. The purls end up hiding to the back with the knits popping up in front, and it looks totally reversible! This one is 6 sets of K2, P2 - working 3 cables offset from each other (the outer two cables are worked on the same rows, and the inner cable is worked in the middle of those outer cables.) Did I make sense there? I hope so. It's a great way to do a scarf, since it makes the cable section even denser than normal cables, which gives you a nice thick fabric to keep out the cold!

There's a local natural baby products shop opening up, and the owner wants to sell wool diaper soakers/covers - and she's asked me to supply her! (If you don't know what soakers are, they are knitted pants for babies to wear over cloth diapers. They help to soak up any extra moisture and wick it away from baby's skin.) So I'm busy knitting up a shop sample (and coming up with the pattern at the same time!), and then I'll chug away at knitting up some soakers to sell. Hopefully I'll make a little extra yarn money! :-) Wish me luck!

We're off to King's Mountain for a camping weekend! Let's hope the rain stays away!

Catch you on the flip side! Have a great Labor Day!

When will we know?

So my DH and I have been sitting on the edge of our seats here for the last few days, waiting to find our who Obama will pick for his VP running mate. I am hoping it's Wes Clark. I know he's not listed as being on the 'short list' but he seems to make the most sense to me. He would counteract (and then some!) any percieved benefit that McCain has because of military experience. He's a 4 star general, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander - I think that trumps McCains time as a POW. I don't think that any of the other choices for VP would benefit Obama as well as Clark would.

From what I hear, the theme for VP day at the convention is a Veteran's theme, and the speech to be given is entitled something like "Securing America's Future". Wes Clark is a veteran, and his webite is called "Securing America" - coincidence? I don't think so.

Anyway, I hope we find out soon!! We're bouncing off the walls here!

Wes Clark's website: http://securingamerica.com/

Ravelympics Progress, among other things.

So the Ravelympics is well under way (and those other Olympics too). I've crossed the finish line with one of my projects, but I won't put a pic here because they are a Christmas gift (even though I'm pretty sure the intended recipient doesn't read my blog, but you never know!) And I'm about 3/4 of the way done with my second project (another gift!). Then I'll just have three more gifts to knit, and then 4 wips to finish before the Olympics end! I'll maybe finish one of my wips, but it's pretty much a forgone conclusion that I won't finish all 4. I'll do my best, though!

I don't enjoy the Summer Olympics as much as I do the Winter Olympics, but man, they are addicting! We've been staying up past midnight the last several nights watching the swimming and the gymnastics competitions. Man, am I tired!

We got an electronic drum set the other day. Rock Band did it. It gave me the drumming bug. I'm having a blast learning to play, though. Hubby has a new electric guitar (an early birthday present), so we've been learning a couple of songs that we could play together. Granted, he already knows how to play the guitar - but I'm a total newbie at the drums! I love the drum set - it has a ton of options for the drum sounds, and it even has a hand drum option that is perfect for the boys. You can never have too many instruments in the house, in my opinion! We even dug out my old trumpet, and William is learning how to make noise on that too. :-) Now we just need a violin, a xylophone, maybe a flute and a clarinet, and we'll have all the instrument types represented! Overkill? Us? No way! It's all homeschooling material - that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I've really stalled on the Master Knitter program. All these things keep popping up that I "need" to knit instead! I'm determined to do more swatches once the Ravelympics is over, though. I was wanting to be finished by my birthday, but that's come and gone now! Now my goal is to be done before the end of the year. That should be possible, if I have some resolve and don't let the siren call of other pretty things to knit draw me in. It doesn't help that I have this pretty sock yarn in a basket on my desk.....

On the Homeschooling front, William is almost done with his Kindergarten level Math and Phonics programs (I'm using Saxon Math and Saxon Phonics). He'll be 5 in October, and he'll be done with Kindergarten before all the public school kids even start school! I'm so proud of him - he's reading 5 letter words now, and on the brink of reading independently. We started a Word Caterpillar on the wall several weeks ago, (with all the words he can read on circles to make a long caterpillar) and I'm running out of room on the wall!! There's a good 80+ words up there now, and I have a stack of about 30 more that need to go up. I ordered a blank lined dictionary book/journal from Starfall (love that website!) and I think I'm going to have him write the words he knows in there instead of putting them on the wall from now on. (Maybe I'll just put the bigger words that he's reading on the Caterpillar). Right now he's also learning about the Oceans, and Dinosaurs, and Ancient Greece/Olympics/Greek Myths. He loves school - and bugs me to get started every morning - which I'm very happy about.

Speaking of school - I have to get to it, so that's it for now!