James M. Bennett, BA, MA, MAT

James graduated from Westminster on Saturday with a master of teaching degree. I am proud of his hard work and talent. Congratulations, Sweetie.

This little chair is 20 years old now. I made it in high school crafts class. I'd envisioned the back design to be more tulip-shaped, but my teacher convinced me that I didn't want to make the design too delicate. Which has turned out to be true, considering how rough this little guy is with it:

While I was making the chair, I envisioned my child using it. I don't think I could have imagined how adorable he would be in it, though. I'm glad I didn't paint it pink.

I'm thinking of painting it red. What do you think?

Atty Update

It's official: Atticus is still the cutest boy in our universe. And he's good and sweet and funny. We are AWFULLY fond of him. That's not to say he doesn't drive us crazy sometimes. Or every day.

He's just coming out of a phase where "on" was his favorite word. Every light--in the house, in the car, on other cars, in a streetlight, EVERY light he passed--brought on a chorus of "on! on! on! on! on!" "On!" could mean, "Hey, that light is on!" or "Hey, I want to turn that light on!" or "Hey, there's a light!" In any case it wouldn't stop until you acknowledged that either yes, that light is on, or no, that light is off, and we're not going to turn it on right now. Just saying "uh-huh" or "yeah" wasn't enough.

He now knows the word "off", which is a huge relief to my ears, and he's mostly accurate in his descriptions. And although I hear "on!" and "off!" a bajillion times a day, it's not nearly as obsessive as it was. The other day I heard him talking to himself, saying, "On? No, off. On? No, off."

His other new word is "poop." We're not ready to start full-on potty training, but I try to call attention to the times he's pooping so he makes the connection between the feeling and the result. I heard him grunting in the kitchen, so I asked, "Are you pooping?" to which he responded, "Yeah." Then when he was done he came and sat in front of me and said (with a little pride?) "poop." So we changed his diaper and dumped the poop in the toilet with much praise and excitement.

He still loves to play at the Little Gym--the boy is in constant motion from the moment he walks in the door. And he's getting more daring, crossing the balance beam (with help) and swinging on bars and doing somersaults and running in circles on the big mat.

He gives us lots of kisses and hugs, and he still likes to snuggle. I've started watching a friend's baby three times a week, and he gives her soft kisses on her cheeks. He asks about baby when she's gone. This kid needs a younger brother. I guess we'd better get working on that...

He's learning and growing so much every day, it's hard to keep up with him sometimes. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to try.

This makes me happier than it should

I am so thrilled with my latest accomplishment: a consolidated pantry! I'd had half here and more of the canned goods in the back room, but both areas were ineffecient and cluttered, so I weeded out the old stuff and rearranged the shelves and lo and behold, it all fit.

But more than the joy of a completed task, having this store of food satisfies a deep need in me. I've never gone hungry, and I'm not all that worried about an impending disaster, but having food storage makes me very, very happy.

This is just phase one of a much larger project to purge and reorganize all my clutter spots: the living room closet, the back room, and the craft room. I took "before" pictures of each space, but I'm not ready to post them. I don't want to unveil my disaster areas until they're pretty. But trust me, they're completely out of hand.

To keep from getting too overwhelmed, I made the goal to get rid of one load of stuff each week. One week the stuff went to DI, the next week we took all the glass and cardboard to the recycling place. Last week I put some larger items on the "neighborhood cleanup" pile, and scavengers had picked them all up by that afternoon. That made me happy, because it was mostly scrap wood that was perfectly usable, just not for someone like me without tools and woodworking skills.

Eventually, it will all be as pretty as my pantry. I hope.

It's a Sweater!

Voila! My first colorwork sweater! I am so pleased with how it turned out. Here's a closeup of the color work. The yarn for the pattern is a slightly different weight from the background, so there are a few puckers and overall tension problems, but they're not so bad that I wanted to start over. And Atty couldn't care less, so we're calling it good.

I had to reknit the body and sleeves after I discovered that I couldn't get anymore of the yarn I'd purchased, even though the lady at the store said that they were getting more and that the dye lots were pretty consistent. Apparently she doesn't do the ordering and has no idea what she's talking about. So I went to a different store and bought yarn that I liked so much better anyway, and bought enough to actually finish the sweater. Lesson learned. Now I'm looking for a cute vest pattern for the first set of yarn.

The pattern is officially size 4T, so it's a bit big on him now. The hope is that he'll get more than one season out of it.

Overall, I've decided that knitting with two colors isn't all that bad. The trickiest parts were the two rows where I was trying to hold three colors in my hands and keep all the floats tacked in place and not getting tangled. Yikes. But it was only two rows, so we survived.

Dancin' Fool

The boy loves to dance. He bops his head to the radio, any songs on TV, and even commercials. For anyone who sees him only when he's shy and sedate, here's proof that the kid can move.

In this next one he's starting to get tired, and he makes sure you know not to play with the buttons on the TV and that there's a big light attached to our ceiling. Just so you know.

Belly Dance Video

It was too big to upload to the blog, so you can find it on YouTube here.