Thursday, December 25, 2008

Thanks.

Holy stocking stuffers am I ever excited for Christmas!

I always assumed that my parents were exhausted in the morning because they'd stayed up into the wee hours of night playing eggnog rummy with Santa and scooping reindeer turds off the back porch, from where they'd rolled off the slanted roof...and then later I figured it was because they'd stayed up late covering for Santa when he decided we were too old for such things. Even after figuring out a thing or two, and going to bed with a little sigh of regret that there were no more surprises left in life, now that the truth was out, I'd still wake up in the morning and dash down the hall to see that Yes! He came! Whoever he is! The stockings would be so fat with surprises that they'd crawled down from their places on the mantle and lay sluggish, hungover, by the fireplace. The gift pile, which I'd been keeping careful track of since the first of December, would have exploded to twice the size, having decided to produce offspring after all. We were spoiled rotten, we were blessed. We also had to wait. For Mommy and Daddy to get out of bed.

"GET UP SANTA CAME!" I'd yell at the top of my lungs, I'd bounce on the bed. And you know what those lazy grownups did? They pressed the snooze button.

"Just give us a half hour and then we'll get up." One of them would mumble from a drool covered pillow, and I'd groan, and complain. It wasn't fair. All those beautiful shiny wrapped packages crying out to be opened, admired, and played with, and these two heartless creatures just lay in bed, snoring like it was any other day. No, any other day they would have been up, drinking coffee, bickering, making breakfast. It seemed that Christmas day was, for them, the one day out of the year when both parents would sleep in to the tortuous hour of nine. NINE! Can you believe it?

One year my mom said I could open one present while I waited for them to get up, and I misheard her. They found me surrounded by discarded wrapping paper and toys - all of them - and I held up a doll. "Look what Grandma gave me!"

Another year my sister tied me in bed and promised to free me at seven o clock. The torture! She actually had the nerve to go down the hall and come back, reporting matter of factly, "Santa came, and the stockings are so full they're sitting on the ground."

Another year I shared a room with my brother - he was about three or four, and I was a disillusioned teenager. He would not go to sleep. "Go to sleep or Santa won't come," I reminded him. He was silent for a little while, and then my dad walked down the hall outside our room.
"Did you hear that? I think it's reindeers on the roof!"


Anyways...a new truth has surfaced. Santa has come and gone, and I am still awake. Why is this? I am so excited for Edie to open her presents! I think I might be more excited for Edie to open her presents than I ever was to open mine. Is it possible? Probably not. But still, I can't sleep. I am a geek. I went to RadioShack today to replace the batteries in the old Minolta Uncle Lee gave me. The Pentax has black and white film in it and the Minolta has a roll of Fujicolor. I finally tracked down the camcorder charger and it is plugged into the wall. As I type this, I realize how fortunate we are, how spoiled. Sorry for complaining about the snow. Sorry for being jealous. There are people spending their holidays inside of an airport, wearing the same clothes from last week, I hear. We are warm and well and with family and there is a homemade stocking full of goodies waiting out there for Edie to wake up. She'll be sweaty headed and rosy cheeked and bright eyed and I'll get to be surprised all over again.

Did you hear that?

Kenneth and I had some "decaf irish coffee" which we strongly suspect may not have been decaf after all. His dad prepared the grounds, and I'm not sure Grandpa Hopper even allows "decaf" into his paradigm. There is a jar labeled decaf, but for Grandpa Hopper it probably appears all pixelated, like a censored face on Cops.

We were laying in bed, grinding our teeth and whispering about Christmas, and I told him about my brother listening for reindeer. "Did you hear that!?" I repeated, to demonstrate without saying as much that I was, in effect, as excited as a three year old boy listening for signs of Santa.
Kenneth was getting irritated, though, because he wanted to try and get some sleep.
"That's just the rain, dear. Now go to sleep."
"The reindeer!?"
And he laughed, because he hadn't even meant it like that. Random stroke of genius.


Good night, sleep tight. Don't let Donner or Dasher bite.
And Merry Christmas.

Love,
Kendal

Friday, December 19, 2008

Snow day...

More like a No Day.

I'm trying to be positive about LA but dangit why does the first big snow storm in YEARS have to happen the one winter I am away from the Northwest? My daughter's first winter?

Sure, it's cold here. It's even so cold I can finally wear socks with my shoes, and gloves on my hands. We even have the heaters on. But I miss the snow. Everybody I talk to tells me about the snow! the snow! the magical beautiful wondrous snow! I am getting jealous. I am worried that it may never snow again. My daughter will have missed her one chance to experience snow because we made the dumb choice to live in LA for a little while...just long enough to miss all the good stuff.

Ugh. Gotta stop thinking this way. There is a Ray Bradbury story which has haunted me ever since I read it long long long ago. I think we even saw a made-for-tv adaptation of it in Mrs. Cotton's fourth grade class. It's awful. It takes place in an elementary school on Venus, where it rains ALL THE TIME. The children have to take daily treatments of artificial sunlight to avoid rickets or jaundice or whatever diseases spring from having no vitamin D in the body. The thing about Venus is that the sun only comes out once every 7 years, for just a few hours. None of these kids are old enough to remember what the sun is like, except for one girl who moved to Venus from Earth more recently, and can therefore remember the sunlight. She talks about it to no end, and it really pisses the other children off. They think she's bragging, or making it up. So they play a cruel trick on her. They lock her in a closet on the day the sun is supposed to come out, just for a minute. They just want to scare her a little bit, but then the sun comes out and they all get distracted and run outside to play. In the TV program, suddenly blooming flowers surround happy, laughing children as they run through green fields in the sunshine, then cut away to a girl screaming and pounding on the door to be let out, then back to the happy laughing children, until the sun goes behind a cloud, a thunderclap claps, and all the children then remember their classmate, locked away, and they run to let her out but it is too late.

She is broken when they open the door. Seven more years of rain.

So yeah, I can be overdramatic about things, certainly. Sure, it'll probably snow again next year, and maybe it will even stick. If we're lucky, it might even snow when we come up in January for Edie's birthday. But I can hear you all up there, laughing and throwing snowballs and cozying up under blankets by the fire. I see your pictures, of your loved little ones all bundled up for their first big snow day. Meanwhile, we'll put on our sunglasses and drive to the beach to catch some chilly rays of sunlight...just because we can. We probably won't even need scarves. How about THAT, Seattle, Portland, and New York? There's still leaves on our trees!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

When parenting advice from strangers comes in handy

"Those bloomers are so great...especially when she learns how to take her diaper off." - random stranger.

Well, she figured it out. Just a little elbow grease applied to the velcro tab, and voila! Naked Time!
And those bloomers...they really are so great. Someday Edie may figure out how to get the bloomers off, but I'm hoping that by the time she does, she'll be too exhausted to pull off the velcro tab.

and also?


Happy Holidays!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I forgot to mention



Edith Emily is in the habit of practicing new words upon waking, every morning. One morning she woke up, rolled over, smiled, and said, "Grah....Pah," a bit shyly. She is reticent with her new words, they tend to be a bit fragile until strengthened by repetition. But in the calm of morning, after everybody has gone off to work and the house belongs to us and the animals, new words are free to float out of her mouth, syllable by syllable. It is so fascinating to see how she breaks everything down into simple syllables, building blocks of English. A couple of days ago I was reminding her, not so gently myself, to be gentle. "Gentle, Edie, gentle! PLEASE!" while fending off miniature slaps to the face. She recently learned how to give a high five, but not that the high five is best limited to another person's hand only. She high fives my face, my chest, my belly, and then tugs my hair for good measure. After being headbutted in the mouth one too many times, I found myself yelling, "GENTLE! GENTLE! BE GENTLE WITH THE MAMA/CAT/BOOK/etc!"
And she tentatively mouthed, "dehhhh...teh," which sounded just like the way we say gentle, drawn out while we show her what a gentle touch looks like.

Today was my favorite new word day so far. She woke up, stretched, and rolled over to find Siddhartha heating the bed beside her. She patted his fur and said, "Dah...tha."
She said it several times more, and when we went out to tell Grandpa, who stayed home sick from work, the news, she demonstrated her new prowess with language by swaying her hips in rhythm with the word. "Dah....tha. Dah....tha. A-Dah....tha."

What a joy to know this little person, and watch her grow, tumbling out from herself in new directions every day. Thanks, Life. I am lucky beyond measure.
There's more here...

hmm.

Okay...Maria inspired me. She just blogged about how she hasn't felt like blogging lately but that she'd at least try and I have been feeling the same way but I also should at least try. Another thing? Her blog is called Kicking Ass and Taking Temps and I think I may have unwittingly lifted the rhythm and syntax from her blog title for mine - Lemon trees and dirty streets. Sorry, Maria. It was the first thing that popped into my head when I was setting up this blog. It's kind of like writing a song and getting excited about it because it is so good, and then you realize that it's already a song, written by somebody else. I just hope that my blog posts are mostly original thoughts, beamed directly in from outer space.

Yeah. I haven't felt much like blogging lately, but I should at least try. Wait....that sounds familiar. Dangit again! We all do it once in a while.

I've been knitting a lot. Although, it doesn't seem like I've finished anything lately. Oh wait. Here it is.

The Christmas Stocking before getting hotwashed, as a cozy sleeping bag:
And here is The Christmas Stocking, after being shrunk in the wash, smelling of a day at the sheep pen, still damp.

The colors turned out being a little bit silly. See the stripes on the right? Those were supposed to last for the entire stocking. But they didn't. That stocking consumed every last bit and then demanded more. MORE! So I fed it the last of my very soft, very cozy, Glazed Carrot Malabrigo Worsted Merino, but still it wanted MORE! I tried to feed it that recycled sweater wool, but the color was funky, the texture all wrong. An emergency trip to the Yarn Store never hurt anybody except for my credit card debt. There, I decided not to try and match the original colors, but instead went with a deep blue and grey that looked good with the orange. (I thought.)

Here is a funny excerpt from a web show that a friend of mine just linked to on Facebook:



All that's left for me to say is that don't ever feed the seagulls at Hermosa Beach. I learned the terrifying way. It was like a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. All I remember was throwing a chunk of croissant to one gull and the rest is a beaky, mangy, squawking cloud of greed and desperation. Thanks, California. I can check running from seagulls, in absolute terror, while screaming for the baby's and my life, off of my list of things to do before I die.

I hope you are still reading. Thanks for hanging in there. Hope your holidays are shaping up, despite everything, to contain nuggets of joy. We here at the Inglewood Hacienda are slowly collecting the cheer, giftwrapped surprise for Edie by rediscovered vintage holiday postcard collection by cup of contraband hot chocolate.

What special moments are making their way into your holidays?

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

funny baby, funny dog

Emily's new game is going into Grammy's room and getting on her treadmill, then trying to walk in place, with varying degrees of success. (while the treadmill is off, of course)

Peggy Dog's new game, apparently, is hide and seek. We were hanging out in the back yard, just picking up pinecones and sticking them in our mouths and stuff, pulling Gertrude's tail, you know....and I realized that Peggy wasn't around. I thought I could hear her barking though.

"Peggy!"

"Bark bark bark!"

"AAAAAAH!" says Emily.

"Peggy!"

"Bark bark bark!"

"AAAAAAH!"

and so on until I realized that Peggy was not going to come running in answer. That is unusual for her. Maybe she was trapped on the other side of the fence in our neighbor's backyard, somehow. That's what it sounded like. I ran into Grammy's bedroom to call Peggy from her bathroom window. Peggy answered from right outside the window. So I ran back outside, scooped Edie up and went to the front, to see if Peggy had gotten into the neighbor's yard. Their gate was locked, though, and when I peeked over the fence I could only see squirrels. That only left one place we hadn't actually checked, the narrow area between our back yard fence and the house on the side. We went back through the house and walked around the side of the house to check. No dog.

"Peggy!"

and in answer, she came bolting out of a square hole in the bottom of the house, pushing aside a loose screen and bouncing with excitement. She'd been under the house, and I would almost think she'd been trapped there if she didn't seem so excited when she got out. She tore around the yard a couple of times and ran up to me playfully - I've never seen her like that before. I think she had been playing a game with us. Hide and Seek dog.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

take two

well...nothing is as easy as it seems at first. It seems that I was engaging in some wishful thinking when I read the label of the sweater that said 70% wool, 20% mohair, and 10% nylon. I was thinking that perhaps the 10% nylon referred to the band of fabric knit from a narrower yarn which formed the collar of my thrifted sweater, and not a percentage of nylon present in the yarn that makes up the entire sweater. I unraveled most of both sleeves until the yarn broke and I threw one cuff in the washer to see if it would felt. It wouldn't. It got a little bit shorter, but aside from that it seems perfectly machine abusable. The yarn also untwisted into a flimsy four parallel strands. My recycling enthusiasm went too far here, as I realize that the sweater probably would have made a better sweater as was than as is. At least I can use the handfuls of sweater ramen that I gathered for some Kool-Aid testing, since my first time dying yarn will surely not be as easy as I expect. Plus, I think I need to get a nice brown to compliment Edie's blue and purple stocking. There is no brown flavored Kool-Aid so I'll have to muddle some flavors together until they make poop soup.

The good news is that the perfect sweater sent me a mental telegram today, asking me to please come and pick her up from the thrift store. I dragged Kenneth and the baby out of the house, and Kenneth helped me sift through all the 100% acrylic sweaters until he got bored and wandered off into the baby clothes. I found two mens sweaters made of 100% lambswool, too fine to unravel but perfect for felting. I can use the felted sweaters to make something like this or whatever. Edie has an adorable dress made from a felted purple sweater that I found at Lily Toad in St. John's. Then I found the perfect sweater. 100% wool, chunky enough to see every stitch, hand knitted and seamed, and well loved by somebody who knew how to treat a sweater. It wasn't until I was happily unraveling one of the sleeves that I felt a pang of guilt - the sweater was well crafted, with bobbles and cables and panels of moss stitch and wooden buttons and ribbing. Who am I to say that Edie's first Christmas stocking is worth more than all that hard work? Actually, I rescued it from the thrift store for four dollars and I knew where not to cut this time and so I guess it is up to me to decide that this wool is done being a sweater and ready to become a holiday tradition. It's just that from the smell of things (smells just like my mom's old doll clothes that I used to love playing with), the sweater has been a sweater for a long long time. Life goes on. It really does! As I was pulling the crispy loops out of one another, it occured to me that the sheep who gave its coat to make this coat has been dead a very long time. How amazing that a piece of that sheep's life can live on in a sweater, and then change color and become a stocking (and probably some toys too, since one sleeve is about all I need for the stocking) long after the sheep itself has been repurposed into somebody's dinner, and that somebody probably also has become something else by now. I wonder what things will outlive me?

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

oooh anticipation

I just returned from Vons with roughly 20 packets of Kool-Aid with which to dye portions of my as-of-yet still un-unraveled white sweater. As soon as I figure out which strings to cut I will make piles of sweater ramen, gather them into loose skeins, and make candy out of them.

knitting and knitting and walking.

I have been knitting so much lately that my hair resembles handspun yarn. I thought that was so clever that I set it as my Facebook status. In case you are reading it for the second time.

I'm working on a felted Christmas stocking for the Wee One. Silly me, I've never felted wool before and so there are a few things I might have done wrong. Felting is actually called Fulling, and it means you accidentally shrink something woolen in the wash, on purpose. Because it's going to shrink, you knit it up to be ENORMOUS before you shrink it. Really a silly thing to do, but when it's all done, you have a nice felty fabric, which is sturdier than a knitted fabric.

First of all, I started out with not enough yarn. I am using a gorgeous blue that goes from light to dark as you knit, and a really squongy skein of handspun, handdyed, handfound yarn that Kenneth rescued from a busy street for me as I watched him from the sidewalk, hot cocoa and hotdogs in hand, baby in belly. It was all dirty and decorated with little bits of dried brown leaves, so I didn't recognize it as being a nice pretty bit of mauve yarn until beginning this stocking project. Well....I am almost out of yarn and I haven't turned the heel yet. So far it is an ankle warmer, which everybody ought to know won't hold any of Santa's treasures unless his elves affix some velcro to the toys. I'm racking...wait, is it wracking? I'm wracking my head to find a skein of 100 percent animal hair in a nice color that will go with forget-me-not/hydrangea bush scheme I've got going, and then I remember a sweater that I bought at the local thrift store for five bucks. It's huge and white and has the right kind of seams for unraveling into piles and piles of yarn. It's part sheep and part rabbit. So I finally went online to see if angora will felt along with wool, and sure enough it does. But then the nice lady in the website goes on to tell me that a smart felter only uses yarn from the same company, to ensure even felting. And that a smart felter uses needles way bigger than the ones I am using. Oops, and oops. So I guess we'll see how it turns out. But first, I have to unravel a sweater and learn how to dye a skein of yarn.

In other, more interesting news, Edith Emily Amargosa Pants is a certified WALKER! We took her to her Grammy's favorite doctor yesterday, even though he doesn't see children anymore. Grammy pulled some strings and got us an appointment. Secretly I think she just wanted to show off the grandbaby to the family physician. He was cut from Family Physician cloth, alright! If you could go deep inside your psyche, riffle through various archetypes and stereotypes, and find your first idea of "doctor", you'll find Dr. Peterson. He's white-haired, wry, witty, and before the exam he sits you in his wood paneled office to talk. Wooden shelves filled with carved wooden ducks, and a regal portrait of a dog with a dead duck in its mouth oversees business. The only thing missing was a pipe filled with cherry-vanilla tobacco, but you know the rules....California and smoking. Anyways, we were waiting in the room designated for such activities as browsing National Geographic, filling out paperwork, and waiting, and I was admiring the carpet, which was a lush green and brown plaid, and which Kenneth assures me has been there since before he was born. (Dr. Peterson delivered both Kenneth and his brother Joseph) Edie passed the time by standing up and taking one step, then another, then wobbling a bit as she decided whether to continue or to fall, then two more steps as both of us watched! The kid has excellent timing, whether it's heading for the birth canal just after her auntie arrives in town, or waiting until both of her parents are present and attentive to take four steps on her own.

Since then, she's crossed rooms with her newfound confidence. It is such a joy to see the light blink on behind her eyes as she realizes that she can do this thing that has for so long eluded her. It's as if she could do it all along, and she just had to realize it.

Of course, I can't find my video camera battery charger, so another milestone gets recorded in words, and on the pages of her journal instead. We did take a couple of short movies on the camera.