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While being home for the past two months, we have faced different challenges.  One of the challenges we tackled this week was David’s hair.  It’s been driving him crazy so he decided that maybe he could cut it himself.  He started studying numerous YouTube videos.  He studied for almost a week, and finally he decided that with my assistance, he was ready to try it.

Here’s the before picture:

Afte…

Back to the Blog

I titled this “Back to the Blog” because Davey noticed that this is a frequent title of my blog posts in the last few years.  Apparently I’d write a post that I was back to blogging, and then I’d not show up again for quite awhile.  So the other day for some reason, we were talking about my blog, and Davey started reading it.  He read on it for a long time.  It goes back to 2007, and I used to…

This is Just to Say

I have started reading poetry with Davey.  It’s so fun sharing the poems with him that I used to read with my classes when I taught at RMCAD.  I love teaching 2nd grade, but I do miss talking about poetry with the college students.  So it’s so fun to start reading it with Davey.

I started with William Carlos Williams.  He is one of my favorites.  His language is so simple, but I love that…

It’s August.   I am working on getting my classroom ready.  Davey is preparing for the beginning of his last year of elementary school.  David still has some time left before he starts back, but he’s busy organizing and packing as we get ready to move to a new house.

My knitting has slowed wayyyy down.  I have not completed many projects over the last year.  This pair of socks may be one of the…

Davey: My Start at Knitting

Hi! I’m Davey! I just started knitting so I am not too great at it but I am excited to learn! I am trying to knit a tealish color scarf right now and I am really having fun. Knitting is VERY relaxing! After I finish the scarf I plan to donate it to the cold weather shelter. By the way I want to write on this blog as I start to knit and my mom will start blogging again too! Bye! (Davey is doing…

I have been on Spring Break this past week.  It began with Easter weekend.  David, Davey and I went and had brunch at this fun restaurant in the canyon along the Yakima River. Davey is just growing so much!  We were looking up something on my blog this morning.  It has become kind of a reference over the years.  We’d made a salt dough map a few years ago and were thinking about doing another…

We are settling back into the routine of school days.  Last week we had our 90th day of school.   We have been tracking the days as we count down to the 100th day of school.  I am over halfway finished with my first year of teaching!  It is hard to believe. I’ve begun a pen pal project with a good friend from Oklahoma.  We grew up in the same little town, and he teaches 2nd grade in Oklahoma…

It’s New Year’s Eve, and on every New Year’s Eve of my life, I have had herring salad.  I guess that’s not literally true.  I am not sure at what age I started eating it.  I do remember liking it though even when I was pretty small. Herring Salad is a German dish and part of our New Year’s Eve tradition. The primary ingredients are potatoes, herring, beets, pickles and mayonnaise.  It’s very dark…

I realized today that I haven’t blogged since two days before my dad died.  My world is now divided into before and after him dying.  On August 5th, I wrote a post and had no idea that two days later everything would change, and that it would be terrible. But Papa enjoyed reading my blog, and he’d be glad that I was going to continue writing.  He’d love my stories about teaching.  I wish I could…

Last Christmas, I got some yarn to make David a scarf.  I began knitting on it here and there throughout the year since then, and I actually finished the scarf last week!  I made it with this amazing worsted weight squishy wool yarn which I am almost 100% sure is Madeleine Tosh (but which might be Malabrigo).   This is not a great picture, but you can kinda see what an awesome yarn this is. I…

The other day I posted a little about getting my classroom ready.  I had painted wooden letters spelling the word  – READ.   I finished them off by putting them on some Memo/Photo alligator clasps.  I love how this turned out.  It’s really simple. I have it on the window sill in my classroom.  I tried to take a picture of it, but the sun was streaming in from behind and I couldn’t get a decent…

Back to the Blog

It’s time to get back to my blog.  This was my longest stretch in awhile of not blogging.  It has been a busy year of student teaching, substitute teaching and then a thankfully relatively brief hunt for a job.  In the meantime, I have still been knitting and now I hope to spend some time on my blog documenting both knitting, family and some my first year of teaching. In September I will start…

So almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how I was going to complete some projects. One of them was a mitten. This is the picture I posted then: So that was last March.  Today, I got the mitten out again.  Here is how it looked almost a year later: Who knits almost an entire mitten and then puts it away, unfinished, for almost a year? So today I finished the mitten.  I was supposed to do…

I have started knitting a cowl in herringbone stitch.  It’s a free pattern from Purl Soho called “Big Herringbone Cowl“. I am knitting with Malabrigo which is such fun.  It’s such a soft wool, and the colors are always so rich and beautiful. Herringbone is such a neat stitch, but it feels like one step forward two steps back with each stitch.  It’s not quite that extreme, but each stitch is knit…

Azel Pullover and Davey

I just finished knitting the Azel Pullover.   I have had my eye on knitting this pattern for awhile.  I have seen pictures of it posted on pinterest and facebook, and it looked like such a fun pattern. I used the same kind of yarn that I just used to make the Christmas stockings:  Plymouth Encore Mega.  It is such a squishy soft bulky yarn.  The pullover is knitted all in one piece with the…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some really fun socks that I made.   They were from the pattern Anelmaiset. My cousin had asked if I could make them for her, and I am glad she did, because I had a lot of fun making them and I learned some new things. She received them the other day, and she was so nice to model them and take some pictures!  They are so darn cute on her that I had to write…

Pottery Barn Inspired Christmas Stockings

I just finished knitting four Christmas stockings.  The pattern is from picket fence knits. I knitted the stockings with Plymouth Encore Mega which is a great squishy bulky yarn.  The pattern was well-written and easy to follow, and it was also interesting enough that I didn’t get bored making four of them.  It’s not often (unheard of really) that I knit four of anything.  I haven’t had a whole…