PATTERN: The Margaret Square

 This free pattern is for an afghan square that I named the Margaret square: Daisy was a popular nickname for girls called Margaret, but this square seemed a little bit more demure and less whimsical than the name Daisy merited, so it goes by the more formal Margaret instead. Using a 5 mm (H) hook, it creates a 15 cm / 6 inch square. Using a worsted weight yarn and a larger hook, this square would measure close to eight inches.

The pattern can be downloaded as a PDF from the Ravelry pattern store for free (you don't have to be a member of this site to download the PDF.) download now

Me and the Y Chromosome

I have a husband and two sons. This greatly influences my crafting endeavors, primarily because of all the (cough) "help":

"This is MY street!"
"No, this is MY crochet."
"NO, this is my STREET!"

"Wheeeeee!"

Craft basket hemmed in by vehicles. I waded through a sea of Matchbox cars to take this photo.

Thanks, love.

Surrounded as I am by cars, tractors, diggers, front-loaders, trucks, trains, helicopters and planes, it's very nice to make things that are ... more feminine. I recently knit my niece a jumper - more about that in another post, but here's a picture for now, because we all need a bit of colour:

In my defence, she wanted "a jumper in rainbow colours" 

 ... and that blanket in the craft basket? It's a new, free pattern that will follow before the weekend is out!

Tutorial: Lo-So Crochet Tote Bag

While rooting through one of the large bags of yarn that I keep hidden stored in the bedroom cupboard, I found a bag-within-the-bag that is - cringe - my Bag of Shame. Therein I found my little stash of started projects that had been abandoned in favour of something more exciting. Including a bunch of neat little cotton squares, bordered and stacked and ready to go:

They were supposed to be a cushion cover but upon looking at them again, I thought they might make a nice bag ... but the sewing! Bleurgh: sewing a lining for a cotton bag is just so much hassle.

Then I had a brainwave: instead of sewing a lining for a bag, why not sew a bag for the lining? And the Low Sew (Lo-So!) crochet tote bag was born. I wish it were a No-Sew (No-So :-) ) bag, but I haven't figured that one out yet.  

You need - 

- crochet squares in a pattern of your choice
- a linen shopping bag (even one that has a printed logo: the logo will be covered by your crochet work. I bought plain linen bags on Amazon for 99c.)
- a darning needle
- a sharp sewing needle
- strong sewing thread in a colour close to the colour of the bag

 
I simply sewed the squares together (but you can crochet them together or use the join-as-you-go method) and placed them on the bag to determine how much bigger the bag was: 

Toy car not necessary, but apparently helpful

You want your panel to be slightly bigger than the linen bag, so I crocheted two rows of double crochet at the top and bottom, and one row of half-double crochet on each side. I did this on the front (pic on the left) and back (right) panel.

I then turned them face to face and sewed them together on three sides, leaving the top open. I turned the crochet bag/cover right-side out, and slipped the linen bag inside.

Taking a sewing needle and strong sewing thread (I simply doubled mine), I sewed the top of the crocheted bag to the top  of the linen bag, so that the linen bag became the lining of the crochet bag! Sneaky, eh?

Please look closely at amazing sewing technique and do not look at unmanicured nails. Thank you.

To stop the linen bag from wrinkling up inside its crochet cover, I simply turned the entire thing inside-out again and stitched the crochet bag and the linen lining together at the corners - just a few strong stitches to anchor it, that's all.

The last thing I did was to crochet a small strap to close it at the top and add a button. That's it. Easy-peasy!

 

 

Weight Now

My true love.

I love cake.
I really do. A few years ago I met an old friend and over the course of our chat, he told me that his abiding memories of yours truly were of me asleep and eating cake. At this point, let me just say that I used to sleep a lot. I can't count the number of concerts, parties and films I slept through. I slept on epic bus rides across Europe and down Asia. I could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position - a bit like a cat. And as I haven't had a good night's sleep in nearly three years, I do not regret a single snore. As for the cake eating ... well, let's just say that he astutely summed up the essence of my twenties.

Of course, all that sleeping and eating of cake eventually catches up with you and, meanly, it's often not in your twenties but in the decades thereafter. I've had two children in nineteen months and it's left me two clothing and one shoe size bigger. Now, I don't really believe that size matters. I think a person who feels comfortable in their skin exudes a certain kind of radiance: I've known very svelte women who wear their size like an itchy hairshirt; I've known large women - very large women - who manage to look jaw-droppingly fan.tas.tic in a way I can only envy because they wear their size like an expensive coat.

See, it took me a long time to align Outside Me with Inside Me, so finding Outside Me out of kilter with Inside Me again is a bit disconcerting. I don't carry too much extra weight well, I don't look like a curvy goddess, I tend to look like a strudel-scoffing Hausfrau (which, I suppose, I am.) More alarmingly, I never realised that childbirth can make your feet stretch - and they don't go back!!! - so I not only have a wardrobe full of clothes that don't fit, I also have half-a-dozen pairs of beloved pick-me-up shoes (hello high-heels! Toots to my suede boots!) that I can't even get my feet into. Sartorially, I feel like an ugly step-sister.

I caught sight of myself in a mirror three weeks ago and realised how ill-at-ease I look. Two days later (after a day of eating chocolate and banoffee pie - seriously, I'm not a martyr) I started a diet. I don't want to be skinny, I don't even want to be thin: I want to be comfortable. No, more than that: I want to be powerful. I want to be full of energy and dynamism ... preferably in that nice skirt I bought five winters ago.

I'd never dieted before, so some of the things I learned about myself were a little shocking, namely:

1. My idea of a portion size and a nutritionist's idea of a portion are entirely different. Fancy that! I, apparently, like to eat a Brontosaurus' portion of pasta, rather than a human's.
2. It takes about twenty minutes for my sated feeling to kick in. Until it does, I feel hungry and continue to eat, but I'm actually not. I think my stomach and my brain need counselling because they don't communicate very well.
3. I love sugar, but it hates me. It really does and I don't know why, because I have loved it dearly since early childhood. It makes me hyper, gives me headaches, encourages cravings and it has cost me at least one second-hand car in dentist's bills.

Three weeks later, I'm 4 kilograms / about 9 lbs lighter. I'd like to lose the same amount again. At which point, I'm going to put on my nice winter skirt, squeeze my feet into my high-heeled boots ... and eat half a banoffee pie. 

Rainbows

 

 A friend asked me to make blankets for a friend of hers, who's expecting twins. I was told that the mother-to-be wanted "rainbow blankets". Rainbow-coloured blankets, I asked, or blankets with rainbows? It's always hard to guess what will appeal to someone you haven't ever met, so I made this pair of blankets in the hope that she'll like them.

  

World Breastfeeding Week

My next post will actually be about crocheting. And it will be soon. I promise. Pinky swear.

This photo has made me realise that my child has extraordinarily large ears.

The first week of August was World Breastfeeding Week, which - in blogging terms - I missed because I was busy breastfeeding. My son had an inkling of the week that was in it and decided to attach himself to me like Superglue. Not that I would've done much to celebrate, to be honest, not least because this year's slogan was 'Breastfeeding: A Winning Goal - For Life!'. I really don't know what to do with a statement like that; it leaves me feeling a bit bewildered and slightly edgy, as in did-I-just-see-a-mouse-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye edgy or what-do-you-mean-you-just-put-your-tarantula-down-for-a-second-but-now-it's-gone? edgy. I don't know why. The slogan is a bit meaningless, really. Or it might be the excitable exclamation mark.

But on matters of punctuation I digress.

Just after the birth of my second son, another new mother rang me for breastfeeding advice. I am possibly the worst person to ring for breastfeeding advice because I am one of the (I suspect) many women who breastfeed because they can and they feel they should, but don't derive the astronomical pleasure that Good Mummies get out of it. What do I mean by that? Well, in the context of WBW, many intrepid bloggers pounded the keyboard to showcase breastfeeding in a positive light, bearing in mind that encouraging new mothers to bare the nipple is often a battle. To my astonishment, I discovered other mothers referring to breastfeeding as "a delight", or "delicious" or likening it to the high achieved by smoking marijuana. For me, it often feels like someone is chewing my nipple, which is essentially what it is. I don't feel delicious or blissed out on a natural high, although I sometimes feel very sleepy - and not in a good way. I have occasionally passed out on the sofa in a deep-phase micro-sleep, awakening seconds later to the infant hanging onto the nipple by his gums and the toddler drawing tractors on the carpet.

Of course, it doesn't help that I (have) had circulatory problems and vasospasms (don't ask, they're horrible. Imagine someone sucking glass splinters out through your nipples. There: that's all you need to know. Thankfully, though, this has subsided and my extremities are behaving themselves again.) Added to this is the sad fact that my children frequently do/did not latch on to the breast in that gentle Madonna-and-Child way: often it's like trying to get a feral cat to suck your bosoms. Apparently you can be hungry, impatient and incredibly interested in your surroundings at the same time and the way one expresses this is with flailing limbs, scratchy nails and twisting your mother's chesticles about so you can suck AND watch your older brother jumping off the sofa at the same time.

So when this other mother rang me for advice, I dolled out all the practical bits: drink non-alcoholic beer for milkflow. Put cabbage leaves in your bra for sore nipples. Feed on demand to regulate milk production.
"Can I ask you one more thing?" she said.
Fire away, I replied.
"Did you actually like breastfeeding?"
You mean, did I like smelling of sour milk and cabbage, with scratched breasts and inflamed nipples? Did I like sitting underneath a snoozy baby for hours at a time, looking at all the housework that needed to be done and holding in a need to pee in case he woke up again? No, of course not. It's horrible. There are times when I feel like my body is a dairy and little else. I'm sick of milk stains on my clothes, either through leaky nipples or regurgitated by an over-excited baby (because his sofa-diving older brother is just too exciting for his digestion). I want to wear an underwire bra again! And I'm aware I'm breaking a huge taboo here, because you're supposed to breastfeed and LOVE IT. You're supposed to feel CONNECTED to your childer in a way a plastic bottle and latex teat could never bond you. If you don't breastfeed or if you belong to the quiet minority that does and isn't exactly a fan, you are somehow an INSUFFICIENT MOTHER. And this other mother just ... didn't like it. It was painful, it made her emotional and tense, the baby cried with too much milk or because he wasn't getting enough, and her midwife told her that bottle-feeding her child when she could breastfeed him was just lazy parenting. I, apparently, was the only breastfeeding mother who told her that it quite often, literally, sucked and it nearly made her cry in relief to hear it.

Truth be told, I don't actually mind breastfeeding. I don't love it, no. I won't shed a tear when my youngest weans. But I don't hate it either, or I wouldn't be doing it. Let's take all the positives about mother+baby's health benefits as a given and look at the other (superficial) pluses: it's immensely practical. You can breastfeed anywhere you feel comfortable, and plenty of places you don't feel comfortable, too! (I know, because I've had to breastfeed everywhere but would much rather do it in my rocking chair at home.) It allows you to eat A LOT after birth (this is important. I'm not joking: I left the delivery room with a raging appetite and it hasn't abated). And - most importantly - you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to make bottles. If La Leche League wanted to persuade teenage mothers to breastfeed, they'd only have to arrange for someone to wake teenage mother-to-be with a recording of an angry baby, drag them out of their deep slumber and make them shuffle down to the kitchen in the bitter cold of a winter night to make a bottle at 2 a.m. Then again at 4 a.m. And maybe at 6 a.m. for the laugh. Voilà: problem solved. Next year's World Breastfeeding Week's slogan would be 'Breastfeeding: You won't know how much you love it until you realise you don't have to get out of your bed to do it!' Even with an exclamation mark, I think it has a broad appeal.

And there are other pluses as well, the ones that recompense you for your angry boobs: my child, for example, has started laughing at my nipples. He falls asleep, mid-feed, and wakes up to chuckle at my chest. It's one of motherhood's highlights and I don't mind occasionally smelling like rotting cheese just to see that sight. You are forced to abandon dirty dishes and/or social media and/or shopping lists to sit down with your little one and look at his fluffy head and wriggling ears as he chomps away determinedly at your breasts. Nature plugs your baby in to make you turn life down and sit still for a while. Because having your baby this close is a finite experience and, who knows? Once it's over, I might even miss it.

Cabbage leaves and all.

Stuck

I'm a language teacher, so I've been following my older son's language learning process avidly. (He's twenty months. I was recently asked by a 15-year-old why people refer to small children's age in months - I guess it's because every month brings a huge jump forward in terms of ability, so you have to be accurate when you're boasting at the playground, or whatever.) Watching a child learn language is really interesting and all the more so if more than one language is being learned. With enormous efficiency, children learn the words that are most valuable and important to them: for example, young John has learned that 'Please' ('Peas', actually, but we're happy with that) gets results, but 'thank you' is an irrelevant chore that only features after he's got what he wants. Pleases are abundant, thank yous are sparse. But we persevere.

He has an extensive vocabulary and often shocks us with what he knows. "Silly Mama," he said to his truck the other day, "silly Mama." I don't think he believes the truck gave birth to him, but he was obviously practising his new vocabulary for a more opportune moment. He knows how to ask for most of the things he likes to eat, in both languages, so if "Cake, peas!" fails, "Kuuuuuchen!" might work its magic. One of the most useful and used words in his repertoire is 'stuck', which reflects shockingly badly on our parenting skills as it's used a LOT. He tends to get stuck quite a bit (toddlers don't really know how big they are) and he has a lot of toys that are remarkably clumsy. Tom, for example.

This is Tom. He's a helicopter pilot on one of his favourite television shows, Fireman Sam (no, he doesn't watch television. What kind of bad parents do you think we are? He watches it on my iPad. Haha. Yes, I know, but you try to change a newborn's dirty nappy while your toddler attempts to climb up your IKEA bookshelf - he needs to be anchored somewhere safe for ten minutes and Sam kindly does the job.) In any case, Tom and his helicopter are his most beloved toys; sadly, Tom is a bit of an eejit and tends to get stuck on a daily basis.

For a start, he has difficulty with the concept of doors:

 

He seems to nosedive into the laundry basket a lot. Very disturbing - my smalls might be in there.  

 

He requires a lot of tissues:

 

 

But, on the plus side, has proven to be a very capable babysitter. He hasn't become stuck here yet, and we dread the thought that he might.

 

 

Football

 

Happy 4th July, American readers! And belated Happy Canada Day, Canadian readers! Your official leaders had the good sense to place national holidays in the middle of summer, unlike the Germans (3rd October) or the Irish (17th March - I mean, come on. What are the chances of a dry day in Ireland, much less a dry day in March?)

Over here, we're in the midst of the World Cup, the football World Cup - or soccer, as people call it in places where football involves men in very tight trousers and Dynasty-style shoulder pads. This evening, Germany qualified for the quarter finals and a spontaneous street party erupted outside my house. The noise of cheery revellers aside, I'm very glad to see it: Germany has an uneasy relationship with displays of national pride. Their history makes it difficult for many Germans to discern an appropriate amount of patriotism: overt displays of love for the Vaterland often make people embarrassed or uneasy. Like a person who can only show emotion after a couple of drinks, tearful flag-waving often only comes after a victory in one of the big football championships.

And it's taken very seriously over here. Aside from the fact that people have flags hanging from their houses - which is probably utterly unremarkable to a lot of American readers, but extraordinarily rare here -

- news channels  report daily on the players' constitutions. Yesterday, we were breathlessly informed that seven of the players - yes, seven - were suffering from colds. Goodness! The big media groups are given a daily update on the team's schedules, thus we all know that they start training at nine and have a break after lunch for Kaffee und Kuchen. Yes, they might be training in tropical Brazil. but that's no reason not to stop for Schwarzwälderkirschtorte and Donauwelle at 3.30 in the afternoon. 

Were that not exciting enough, an octopus called Regina was appointed the official World Cup oracle.  I don't know what qualified this particular octopus to forecast match outcomes - I wasn't aware of octopuses' footballing talent in general, though having eight tentacles does suggest a certain advantage - but the sight of her flailing around her aquarium warrants a good 20-minute report on many TV channels and a terrible number of newspaper columns. (She predicted a draw for the Germany/USA match, by the way, which might have attributed to the rise of a new fortune-telling star, a pig - as yet unnamed - which is apparently having good luck picking out the winners. We wait and hope.)

  

 

 Worst of all, however, are the bandwagon fans, of whom I am the leader. You know who we are - you might even be one yourself. I know nothing about football, neither the tight-trousered nor the baggy-shorted variety. I never watch a football match from one end of the year to another, except when there's some big tournament, like the European Championships or the World Cup - and luckily they only come every four years, because 90 minutes of football at a time is exhausting. All the more so, because I have to support Germany, my adopted home, and Ireland, my real home. Being a supporter of the Irish team is just pure heartbreak: we seldom qualify, we're better known for our ability to sing than to play football. Our fans are universally loved, but our football team seldom qualifies. But when the Germans play, I mutate into the kind of smart-alecking back-seat football player (mashing idioms there, for the laugh) that must make anyone who knows anything about football rolls their eyes.

And I have this from my mother, who - on the rare occasions when Ireland do play - turns into a raging fury: "Come on! COME ON! What the heck are you doing? PASS THE BALL! PASS THE BALL! For the love of God, that was a foul! Is the referee blind?" (alarmingly, in real life, there's a lot of bad language, too. From my mother. Good job it's only every four years.) She knows as much about football as I do, we could fill the back of a postage stamp with our combined knowledge. 

All of which I will proudly demonstrate when shouting at the television next .. um  ... weekend, when Germany plays ... eh, another team. Oh, okay, I promise I'll know a bit more by then. In the next few days, though, I'll make important-sounding noises about the team's form and how well their opponents ... eh, ... France, yes, of course, France - played.

Ahem.

Birth and Other Business

 

Birth.
I don't want to insult anyone's deity or anything, but I happen to believe that there are a few basic design flaws in the female body, vis à vis procreation. For starters, pythons manage to dislocate their bottom jaws to accommodate the eating of much larger prey - wouldn't it be spiffy if women could pop their pelvis open a few inches to facilitate the exit of their very large offspring through their nether regions? This would be quite wonderful because - and allow me to put this delicately - giving birth is inconveniently painful.

Such is the inconvenient pain, that one has brief moments of lucidity when one can ponder the ludicrousness of the situation. At one point I looked down at what was happening below my navel and at the assembled crowd of strangers looking expectantly at parts of me that normally never feel the breeze and wondered what on earth I was doing. Five total strangers, to be exact. And, of course, the sixth hovering by the door - who was that? Oh, that was my Dignity. I dumped that before I crossed the threshold of the delivery room, it turned out that I didn't need it at all. It sat outside and drank coffee with Care, who occasionally made an appearance in the delivery room to mock me:
 "Do you know how gruesome you look right now?"
"I don't, Care."
"Do you wonder what all of these people are thinking about you at this moment?"
"Seriously? I don't, Care."
"And what about that noise you just made - do you know you just screamed?"
"Honestly, I DON'T, CARE!"
The pair of them probably twittered updates to Self Control and Modesty, who didn't come anywhere near the building.

To be sure, there are women who have orgasmic contractions and feel empowered by the experience: good for them. Really: well done. I can't talk myself into loving childbirth, I really hate it - and that's despite the fact that I, apparently, am really good at it. I've had two uncomplicated, epidural-free natural births with no injuries to my person of any kind and was walking around, without a care in the world, within an hour of each delivery. Midwives keep telling me that I should have more babies. I laugh my hollow laugh and keep telling them that they're nuts: I've beaten the odds twice, I'm not going to push my luck. Having a healthy child is like winning the lottery. Having a healthy child without great difficulty or lasting distress is a bonus.

See, I hate the word blessed - and it's an irrational hatred. It makes me feel like you've been picked out by Someone Upstairs for being extra special, a reward for your all-round goodiness. (I'm also not keen on it because, to my mind, its opposite is cursed - which is just as random and lightning-bolt-struck as blessed. I know - but I just can't help not liking it.) I prefer the more down-to-earth lucky: I know that my good fortune is random, not a pay-out for my being a better person than anyone else, I appreciate every minute of it and recognise that many other people are much less fortunate. I am extremely appreciative of my two sons and my husband, our good health, our togetherness.
I hope it lasts.
I take nothing for granted.

 

Barbecues, DIY and Divorce

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to the DIY store on a rare, but cherished, child-free shopping trip. I had a short list of things to buy and, mindful of the fact that our toddler was probably in the process of wrecking our kindly babysitter's house, I set about gathering my bits and pieces on one of the over-sized trolleys.

In the gardening section, on my way to purchase any plants that are to be found in the Easy Care section, we passed a display of barbecues. Now, I have a rather nice balcony and a husband with pyromaniac tendencies, so the purchase of a barbecue seemed (at the time) like a no-brainer.
"You go and pick out a barbecue," I said to my husband, "I'll get a few pots of herbs and meet you back here."

Oh, readers, I am so naive. My husband is the worst shopper ever. He's a ditherer, and any household purchase is treated with the same level of earnest marathon dithering, regardless of what it is. He has spent the same amount of time vacillating between new toasters as he has between new cars. It's exhausting. It's exhausting because it always follows the same pattern and I allow myself to become embroiled in it every single time. When I came back from the plants section twenty minutes later on this Saturday evening, my trolley loaded down with a Scarborough-Fair-like selection of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, my husband was in the midst of Phase One, a look of concentration on his face. I whipped out the phone and sent the babysitter a text: we were going to be delayed.

Phase One: Establish That All the Goods Are Of Shoddy Quality
Phase One involves going up to every article on display, shaking/pulling/poking it roughly till it trembles and wobbles, then declaring that these articles are of inferior quality and will not last a single month. They were made by clowns. They'll be on the rubbish heap within the year.
"They will if you keep bashing them about like that!" I shriek, as he violently shakes the barbecue to reproduce the hurricane conditions he seems to think we will be using it in.
Reluctantly, he stops, looking disappointed that the little €29.99 hasn't fallen apart and proved his point.

Phase Two: Rhetorical Traps
Having systematically mauled all of the barbecues on display, he stops at one.
"I think we should probably go for one of these round barbecues with a lid. This one looks good," he says. Finally. A decision has been made, praise the Lord!
"Grand," say I. "They don't take up much space and a lid is handy."
"The thing is, you could burn your fingers on the lid. Do you really think it's safe?"
"Well, barbecues by their very nature tend to be hot. But didn't you want a lid for storage purposes? And I thought you said you wanted a round barbecue because they don't take up much space?"
"But aren't they a bit small?" he wonders sadly. "Do you think they'd be big enough for us? I don't know (shakes barbecue violently) ... this seems a bit on the small side, don't you think?"
At this point you might have noticed that I, apparently, am the one who wanted a round barbecue with a lid, this one specifically. Readers, I do not give a flying fig about barbecues, round or otherwise. I would agree with him on anything, just to get the heck out of there fast. But he outsmarts me every time by making me agree with him and then disagreeing with me. It's dizzying and costs a lot more energy than I care to expend.

Phase Three: Philosophical Klugscheißen with Shop Assistants
In German, klug means smart or clever. Scheißen, as you might guess, means, um, pooping. Together they mean something similar to smartalecking. At some point, my husband will be approached by a bored shop assistant, launching the third and final phases of the shopping expedition: Competitive Smartalecking with a Layer of Philosophical Meandering.

Let me tell you that, by this point, I will have said, clearly and concisely, that I want to go home at least four times - as in: "Please make your mind up. I would like to leave in the next ten minutes." However, overcome by the plethora of shoddy, second-rate barbecues, my requests are disregarded. I have no other option (well, no other option that's any fun) but to resort to passive aggression. When the shop assistant arrives, I heave my pregnant self off and begin a slow perambulation around the store, waiting for Phase Three to finish.

The first time I wandered past my husband and the shop assistant on this particular Saturday, they were trying to figure out which barbecue is most likely to withstand extreme weather conditions and not burn fingers. The second time I puff-puff-puffed past the duo (I am nine months pregnant you see, there's a lot of huffing and puffing involved), they were bemoaning the downfall of German manufacturing and listing the shortcomings of the barbecues made in China. Third time around, they had long since left the realm of reality and were fantasizing about the perfect barbecue, painting pictures in the air of a grill set-up that could survive a tornado, flash-flooding or a blizzard, be easily storable yet kind to sensitive fingertips. I lowered my pregnant bulk on to a stack of charcoal sacks and glared at my husband evilly till he returned to earth.

"Pick - one - out!" I hissed. " I don't care which one. I don't care which shape. I don't care what price. Pick one out in the next five minutes or I will clock you with this pot of thyme and leave you unconscious among the charcoal."
He picked one out - quickly, after all - and hauled me up off the display. At this point I was hot and tired, my feet hurt, my plants were wilting. He, on the other hand, was exhilarated by the thrill of his purchase and on the high best known to bargain hunters and coupon users.

As we drove home, our car jammed with plant pots and the barbecue, it started to rain. And it has more or less rained since then. The barbecue hasn't even been unpacked yet: it sits in its box, looking gloomy on our balcony. But never mind: my husband has decided we need a new sideboard! A shopping trip is eminent.
Readers, I can't wait.

Where Did You Go, Gingerbread Lady?

Nowhere.
Nowhere exciting, that is. I hung around Exhaustionville for a bit, then I moved on to Pregnancy Grumptown and finally took up residence in Denial. It's been a busy time.

I'm now nine months pregnant and three days overdue. I've reached the stage where people greet me with "Oh, no!" or "Are you still here?" My 19-month-old brought me his football the other day and tried to stuff it up his jumper, saying "Big belly! Big belly!" Yes, son, I know.

But aside from the fact that I'm in a limbo of waiting and am living like someone under house arrest (because husband and concerned friends feel the need to accompany me everywhere, lest my waters should break in line at the bank or next to the frozen foods at the supermarket), I'm doing well and I hope you are, too. Your lovely comments in the past few months have been dearly appreciated and I plan to get myself back on track soon, baby or no.

Never Again

When I was making this blanket, I started crocheting little colourful squares to use up bits and pieces of yarn that were left over. I began to accumulate a lot of squares. And a lot more. And even more.

So I started to sew them together. And at some point, I had a larg-ish blanket that needed to either be made smaller and turned into a baby blanket, or made larger and turned into an adult-sized blanket. Why take the easy way out, you ask? Exactly - just make more squares.

When it was finally finished, I was happy to swap it for ... a rocking chair. The giver of the rocking chair wanted to buy it off me, but how do you put a price on a blanket made up of over a hundred little squares, each with five colour changes, all of that end-weaving and sewing? In monetary terms, you just can't. But a rocking chair is a fair deal.

My assistant.

 "What's the name of this pattern?" a non-crafting friend asks.
"Never again," I say. "It's called 'Never Again'. Or just plain old granny squares, if you prefer."

Christmas Is About the Turnips

On Christmas Eve I found myself in the kitchen, looking out on the shadows in the garden in the Christmas darkness, listening to a radio documentary about church bells. My husband was chasing the baby - well, he's not a baby any more, a toddler, really - in an elaborate game that involved, amid much shrieking and Daddy Bear growls, a dash around the dining room table and a brief dart into the kitchen to circle my knees.
"Goodness me," I thought, turning the radio up so I could hear when the bells of Cologne cathedral were cast, "I'm listening to a programme about bells! I'm really getting old!"

I looked down at my hands, peeling the turnips, amidst the potato peelings and the discarded leaves of the Brussels sprouts and I suddenly saw my mother's hands. I realised that I was doing what I'd seen her do on Christmas Eve for nearly forty years, and my husband, pottering around the kitchen, not finding kitchenware that has been in the same cupboard it's always been, was just what my father always did - albeit, my father was usually attempting his one and only culinary foray of the year, his perfectly engineered sherry trifle, whereas my husband was just trying to find the teapot. Oh, and with a noisy child clambering between us.

And I started to cry, which is not a good idea with a sharp knife in your hand.
"Are you okay?" my husband, said startled. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened," I said.
"Are you sad?"
"No."
Incredulous: "Are you crying because you're happy?"
"No."
How do I explain it?
"I'm crying because we're all safe and well and content and at home. And I'm crying because I'm doing the same thing my mother did on Christmas Eve, peeling the turnips."
I blew my nose into a wad of kitchen roll and he patted me sympathetically. More like a you're-a-weirdo-but-I-love-you-anyway kind of pat.
"I'm really sorry," he said, "but I can't get emotional about vegetables."

See, Christmas isn't really about the toys and the glitz and the food and the Important Traditions we think we have to uphold, like family photos and turkey dinners and filled stockings on the mantelpiece. Christmas is about the turnips. Christmas is about finding yourself unthinkingly doing the thousand tiny things your mother did and your father did: leading a one-year-old to a little pile of toys and saying "Look what Santa brought you!", even though you know that child has no clue who Santa is. It's about wiping down sinks and countertops to wake up to a kitchen that will be clean for about ten minutes on Christmas Day. It's about lighting a candle in your window on Christmas Eve or lining up the Christmas cards just so. It's about being part of a bigger cycle, a small cog in a clockwork of Christmasses that stretch over decades. It's about the turnips.

 

And in that sense, I hope you and yours spent a peaceful day today, doing whatever it is that you always do to keep you safe and well, and make you content.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

P.S.: This morning I opened my Christmas present from my husband, a pretty silver ring with little diamonds. I spontaneously clapped my hand to my chest and drew an intake of breath.
"Oh God," he said, alarmed, "We're not going to have a repeat of The Turnip Incident, are we?"
Dear me. I have a feeling it has already become part of family legend.

More owls!

So aside from reeling in shock at the expansion of my midriff and, consequently, our family, what I have been up to, you ask?
(there seems to be an inordinate amount of commas in that opening question but I don't think I can do without them.)

Well, for a start I succumbed to fashion and started producing little owls of my own. The reason for this was peer pressure - yes, it was. A colleague saw my owl keyring and asked if I could make some for her Christmas Bazaar in aid of our local children's hospital.
Of course, I said, in a fit of benevolent do-goodery and crafting madness. I was directed to the pattern on the BunnyMummy blog by Amjaylou (-> check out her Christmas tree decorations!) and sat down with hook in hand to try to recreate them.

But here's the thing: Anna, who made mine, has clearly got the patience of a saint and the delicate fingers of an angel. She crochets these in thread - in thread, readers! -  I could barely manage cotton without using salty language. So I had no choice but to come up with a pattern of my own, cheat wildly and use sock yarn (because ... changing the yarn ... weaving in the ends ... tortured sigh.) I tried one:

Finger provided by John, my Constant Assistant.

And they were a success! They sold out within an hour! People had actually placed pre-orders for them, in fact, there were requests for more. Owls certainly rule the roost this year.

If the light allows for photos, I'll write up the pattern in the coming days and you can try your hand at them, too.

Mytherhood

There are a lot of myths surrounding motherhood. Women have babies and some of them are wont to say things like, "It changed my life." Well, it changed mine, too. "It fulfilled me," or "Having a baby made me realise what my purpose was". Or "having a child finally defined me as a woman." Or some such statements that must fall somewhere along the line between 'bewildering' and 'hurtful' for anyone who has not had a child.


I can't really relate to any of those. I was perfectly fulfilled pre-baby, thankyouverymuch. I had lots of purpose and I didn't need a baby to become a woman. I was nearly 38 when my first was born and I'd certainly enjoyed my life up till then. I'm just not the type of woman who describes herself as A Mother, as in:
Gingerbread Lady - who are you?
Why, thank you for asking. I'm the Gingerbread Lady. I'm a Mother, a crafter, a teacher, a learner and a ... oh, goodness, I've already run out of inspirational titles.

My son was born with A Personality (jazz hands). He came into this world as his own person. He joined our family and it felt like we had suddenly got a new flatmate, a third person in our house, a little tyrant that dictated how everything should be and made his feelings known when he was displeased. He was not a passive little being upon which we could project our hopes and aspirations. John was John from the minute he was born and I am his mother. I love being his mother but have no great desire to be A Mother in general: vast swathes of motherhood are quite horrific and I really cannot recommend them. Do I exaggerate? Maybe, but when you're in it, a little exaggeration is allowed.

See, it takes a village to raise a child and, for the most part, our village has been my husband and I. We don't have family close enough to call up to come over to take the baby for an hour, and all of our friends work. It has just been us, often it has just been me. And it has been hard - relentless, in many cases. One night, crying, I handed my husband the baby that had been howling without a break for the previous three hours and said, "It's like some cruel form of punishment." I meant it: with too little sleep and too little relief, I felt like the infant was just draining me of my last dregs of energy.

But here's the very weird thing about motherhood - as opposed to Mytherhood, where everything is always sunny and women gush about how they never knew the reason for their lady bits until they popped a baba - certain amounts of it are utterly joyful and they make the rest of it bearable. Sometimes this joy is wrapped up in physical pain, like when you are woken from deep sleep by getting your eye socket battered with a plastic fish - you wake up to the sight of a smiley, gappy-toothed face shouting "Mumma! Mumma!" And there is nothing I have been prouder of in my adult life than seeing my son take his first steps. I doubt I would've been that proud if I had taken them myself. He falls asleep holding my finger but when he falls asleep, I actually hold his heart.

Despite the fact that it's been tough, tough, tough, I would do it again in an instant.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Which is how I feel now, three months after finding out that I was unexpectedly pregnant again. My first reaction - and feel free to hate me if you're struggling with fertility issues, I'd probably hate me, too - was to cry. And cry. And cry. A full day of crying and wondering how on earth I was going to cope with two children under two. How were we going to manage financially? With our jobs? How was I going be able to care for two babies when I had often felt exhausted and drained from minding just one?

Then we did what you have to do  - what we did when John had bronchitis and we spent every night for two weeks walking him up and down the living room so he could get some sleep - we just darned well got on with it. We adjusted to it, we rearranged ourselves around it and we accepted it. And soon enough, we were cautiously happy about it.

So was I Destined To Be A Mother, as the Mytherhood would leave me to believe? I don't think so, but I was clearly destined to be the mother of my children, because they came to us when we didn't even realise we were missing them. Maybe that's my mytherhood.
Who knows?

2013: The Year of the Owl

What's going on, people?
There are owls everywhere:

 However, real owls aren't quite as cute and cuddly. In fact, they can be downright snooty:

This, though, is my favourite owl of all. It's a gift from a talented Polish lady called Anna, and I just love it.

When a friend saw it, she excitedly said: "You could make these!"
Yes, I probably could - but they'd never be as nice as Anna's.

Magic Ball Afghan

 

This is a true scrapbuster. I randomly strung (does that word exist? Well, it's not being underlined by the spellchecker - which, ironically, is underlined - so I'll keep going) pieces of yarn together, knotted them with long tails, crocheted my hexagons and triangles, crocheting in the tails as I went along - and this is what I ended up with, a variation on my Stars and Flowers afghan:

 It's a dark September day, can you see? How sad! Autumn is here already ... in other words, blanket season has begun!

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

"What? I have to share? Get lost!"

Yesterday, John - that's my son's name, by the way. I think I should stop calling him The Baby - and I went, as is our wont, to the playground. However, our daily trip to Baby Paradise was marred by a jarring discordance in John's universe: the baby swings were occupied! Yes, the horror: when we arrived, both swings were being merrily swung on by other children. What is a baby to do?  - other than wriggle out of his mother's arms and march over under the swings, mother in tow, angrily scuffing new shoes on the asphalt, complaining loudly and waving fat fists of fury in the air.

I used this situation as a teaching moment. I squatted down to his level and explained that the swings were for everyone and we had to share. That we could play on the roundabout while the other children were finishing up and then it would be our go.

Now, that's the Nice Version. The Sanitised Version. The one that could appear as a segment in Sesame Street.

This is the reality:
I pulled my son back from walking in front of the swings, hunkered down to get a grip on him and briefly explained - in a gentle and reasonable manner - to a young soul not yet capable of anything close to logic, reason or comprehension of consequences that he could not get on the swing yet. He roared in my face and shook an angry fist at the swings, and when I extricated myself from his sharp little claws, standing up slowly, he grabbed my knees and pulled sharply on my jeans, almost causing me to inadvertently moon a bunch of preschoolers on the slide. By the time I wrangled him over to the roundabout, I was dripping in sweat and my hair had escaped from its ponytail, plastered over my face and caught in the frame of my glasses. All the time I was smiling casually at the other mothers in an "oh,-I've-got-this-under-control" way.

That's parenting for ya. You could argue that he's only a little baby and doesn't understand these things yet - but when do you start? You start as you mean to go on. And it's hard, gentle readers. As the months pass, I can begin to understand how easy it is to produce an indulged and spoiled child. At this age, their little temper tantrums are actually quite funny: watching a puce-faced Rumpelstiltskin throw a hissy fit because he doesn't want to have his nappy change really would make you smile. And it's so much easier to just give in. But you can't: there are some battles you have to fight and learning to share the swings - sharing anything, really - is one of those battles.

I'm sure Big Bird and Grover would agree.

When Scraps Take Over

 

Sometimes, the blanket you make to use up your scraps (thrifty crafter here) takes on a life of its own, and it's no longer a little side project but starts to grow out of proportion.

So here's the blanket that created the scraps:

And here's the scrap blanket.

 And here's the scrap on the scrap blanket.