Knitting and Kidlets

I asked for blog suggestions on Facebook this morning and thus far, I've gotten only one response.  "Knitting??? What's going on the with the kiddos?"  So here you go, Kelly...

Knitting:
The vast majority of my knitting in recent days has been gift knitting.  That's why there's no real update or information about it.  I will say this - the project I'm putting most of my effort into is made with yarn from recycled pop bottles and is crazy soft.  It's also deep charcoal grey, which I'm absolutely loving!  The pattern is simple enough that I can knit it without looking at my needles, but interesting enough to make a pretty finished fabric.  That's really all I can say - I'm not sure if the intended recipient is a reader or not.

I have one other gift knit in progress - it's green, a wool blend and has cables.  The recipient of that one is a reader, so that's all you're getting there, too. 

I did spend a few minutes last week learning how to make a ballband dishcloth.  For those of you who don't know what that is, here's a link to a photo.  I've always been afraid of working with two colors at once and have only done it in one project (but in that project I was making stripes, so I just carried the unused yarn up the side), this is different.  I've spend a lot of time on Ravelry and other sites looking at these cloths and waiting until I felt ready to try them.  But then I realized what I was doing - I have a tendency to put off anything I'm unsure of and I know myself well enough to know that if I didn't just jump it, it was never going to happen.  So I grabbed two contrasting yarns from my stash and set to work.  Remember a few sentences ago when I said I spent "a few minutes?"  Yeah, that's not an exaggeration.  It was super easy and I felt like a colossal fool for being so nervous about it. 

I did rip out the one I started, but not because it wasn't going well.  I ripped it because I'd just grabbed two yarns from my stash and they didn't work well together.  But I bought orange and black yarn this past weekend, so I'm hoping there's a Halloween colored ballband cloth in my near future. 

As far as the kidlets, there's not a lot of change going on.  The Boy has been itching to find someone to play D & D with, so we're looking into a game store nearby that hosts lots of groups for everything from Magic games to D & D and everything in between.  I'm hoping to get him involved either there or a youth center around the corner.  He has a hard time meeting people and socializing is not his forte, so I have been pushing him to pick something to get involved with.

Scooter has decided to learn Draconic (the language of the dragons) and has been studying a lot.  We found and printed a Draconic alphabet, as well as a list of over 100 common words for her to work with.  I'm sure that'll be a great asset to her when she's applying to colleges...

Pibb has been reading a series called, "The Last Apprentice" by Joseph Delaney.  The books are between 200 and 400 pages each and there are seven or eight, although he's not finished with the series, so I imagine there will be more.  He spends most of his time either playing with Legos and Bionicles or reading.  It's very gratifying to see him enjoy reading - it was extremely difficult to teach him to read.  He was convince he couldn't do it for a really long time. 

Midge is struggling with the same thing.  He knows the letters and he knows some words, but he's sure he isn't able to do it, so he barely tries.  We've just started a program of learning 10 new Dolch sight words each week.  Every day he has activities with the words (one day he gets to play with my alphabet stamps and "write" each word in his word journal, one day he gets to write the words with colored pasta, etc...)  The idea is that by the end of each week, he'll have learned 10 new words, learning all 220 Dolch words and 95 commonly used nouns by the end of the school year.  He's also had more interest in reading lately, asking for two or three chapter books each day and I think that's a good motivator for him.  He wants to know the stories, but I don't have time to spend 5 hours a day just reading to him, so he's having to try to read them on his own. 

Pookie is sweet, as always.  His main focus lately seems to be Legos and following his brothers around.  He's been paying attention when the bigger kids do school and has started recognizing letters and sounds without my formally teaching them to him.  He also knows all the numbers 0-9 and can write them on his own.  He loves to pretend to visit the ice cream store and is constantly bringing us pretend ice cream to eat.  Maybe I should take him to Cold Stone again....

And now I need to go make breakfast burritos (for lunch), but I'll be back tomorrow with a recipe!