Sleeveless sweaters have their merits

Things sneak up on you when you're a parent; the kids change so quickly and all of a sudden you realise that they're into a whole new phase of development. Jess thinks she can talk now, and to be fair, she's come a long way. A few months ago she had a toy that Katie wanted, and Katie asked me if she could have it. 'You need to ask Jess if you can have a turn after her,' I said. So Katie turned to Jess and said 'Gaa gaa goo goo ba boo?'. Jess, unsurprisingly, looked at her blankly and wandered off. Katie turned to me, terribly aggrieved, and said, 'She didn't even answer me, and I even asked her in her own language!'. Lovely! But Jess now mostly speaks a variety of English, although you'd have to be a mother to understand. Not necessarily her mother sadly: my sister does a much better job of interpreting than me. The bitter and twisted part of me mutters that that's because she's emotionally and intellectually closer in age to Jess. This is not kind I know but you get that.
On the knitting front things proceed apace... I now have a sleeve for each jumper. My tension seems to have gone haywire on the garter stitch so I'm encouraging Katie to hang from the monkey bars as much as possible. If her arms don't stretch at least she'll build up the strength to wear the cable one: all that bulky cabling means she's going to have to walk around with her arms held straight out to the sides. Hey ho...

Books books books

Went to the library to look for books on the Muriwhenua treaty claim and came home with three knitting books, as you do. It's this terrible innumeracy I suffer from - I set out to find the 993s, get confused, and find myself surrounded by 746s. Damn that Dewey!
Having not finished either sweater yet, I am, of course, thinking about my next five projects. (This always happens: halfway up the back of a jersey I get this ok-I'm-so-over-this-one feeling and have to force myself not to begin yet another. Does everyone do this?) One of the books I found is so good that I may have to buy it... Hand Knitting: New Directions by Alison Ellen, who you can find here. Gorgeous gorgeous book with a fascinating potted history of knitting and fabulous clear instructions for all kinds of interesting techniques.
The second book I brought home because it had very clear instructions for doing a crocheted edge on a knitted garment, which is something I'm thinking about for one of my next things. Apart from that, all I can say about Clever Knits by Kristine Clever is that she should be very very very glad that YouKnitWhat.com is no longer adding new items. I joke about punishing my children with hand knits (although the purple, lime green and pink feather and fan jumper I made for Jess really was against the Geneva Convention) but this woman!!! Her poor children not only have to wear these sweaters but she's published pictures of them wearing them in a book!!!!! Years and years of therapy ahead...
The other book was the Readers Digest Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Stitches which means poor old Jess may get a sweater that combines 47 different stitches, cables and colours. It'll have to be Jess, because Katie is now old enough to fight back dammit.

If I could cartwheel I would

The front of the garter stitch jersey is finished!
The essay is finished - ok so it sucks badly and it's 750 words over the limit, but it's finished!
The girls are both asleep, and what's more, in their own beds!
I am eating all their Easter eggs to celebrate! (I'm a mother, I'm entitled)

I'm putting off procrastinating till later...

Have finished the back of the cable jersey, and am about 3 cm off finishing the garter stitch one. Of course I shouldn't actually be knitting, or blogging, at the moment. What I should be doing is writing 2000 words on the ways in which Maori demonstrated their understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi in the period 1840 to 1872, and the ways in which the government accepted or refuted those understandings. Or something like that. I (foolishly?) decided to return to university part-time this year to complete my i n t e r m i n a b l e bachelor of arts (begun in 1990). Studying with small children around is harder than knitting with small children around I have to say!
Katie (4) is very intrigued by my being back at school. She suggested that I take something I'd knitted and stand up at the front of the class and show everyone. I like this idea - could I hand in a cabled jersey in place of an essay? Could we call it a post-modern interdisciplinary interpretation of the question? With the separate strands of wool represented the separate discourses that developed around the Treaty, and the cables representing the ways in which those disparate discourses came together before moving apart again? And the rows representing movement over time? And the bit I buggered up and cabled the wrong way could be a visual and tactile representation of the hostilities that arose when the differing interpretations of the Treaty clashed. It's tempting but I don't know that my tutor would buy it...