It's like a blast from the past

Wow, this blog is like a little window into the past.  Which I guess is what a blog is supposed to be, right?

I haven't written since over a year ago, and a lot has happened in that year.  Most notably - Charlie!

Who now looks like this:

Our third adorable little boy arrived on March 8, a week overdue, at 7lbs, 8oz, making him my smallest baby by an ounce.  He looks SO much like Oliver, but as I keep being told, they all look really related, anyway, so it's all good.  He's got Elliot's strawberry blond hair, Oliver's dark brown eyes, and a personality all his own.  His big brothers are totally smitten with him, which is nice.

Not much going on in the knitting world.  I'm working on a marigold sweater and I've got the back done.  I've been spending too much time online in the evening (Facebook, I'm shooting a nasty look at you) and not enough time knitting, so I don't have a whole lot to show for myself knitting-wise.  But I'm hoping to remedy this situation with less screen time, more needle time.  Sheesh, that makes me sound like a junkie or something.  More *knitting* needle time, I mean.

Yay for yoga!

I haven't taken a yoga class in years, but I really enjoyed it when I was doing it, so I thought "why not?" and drove my happy to be out of the house self down to School House Yoga in the Strip (which I apparently ran past on Sunday in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon) to partake of the Tuesday night ashtanga class.  Back in the day when Madonna was doing ashtanga and everyone was trying to get those fabulous cut arms, you could find an ashtanga class at every yoga studio within spitting distance.  But now it seems like my preferred yoga class is not so easy to find, meaning School House has cornered the market.  It also helps that they're so close to me.  This was an intermediate class that I took, but I figured that since I'd done ashtanga in the past, I'd probably be ok.  

I gotta say, this was probably the fittest yoga class I've ever taken.  There were at least three of us who had run the half on Sunday, and I was probably the chubbiest person in the room (and I'm not all that chubby anymore).  The girl facing me had some pretty spectacular technique, I was kind of mesmerized watching her get into these positions that I'd never seen before (we never actually got through the whole primary series in any of my classes before, so maybe I was a *little* underprepared for the class).  Actually, pretty much everyone in the class was pretty impressive, which was cool to see.  And I think I did pretty good for having been out of yoga for so long.  All that pilates and all the running has definitely made me a lot stronger than I was the last time I was doing yoga, so I was able to do some poses that I'd never been able to do before - bakasana (crow pose, I think) and headstand.  Well, I did headstand for maybe 45 seconds, before I fell over and made a resounding thud that probably scared the crap out of the other people in the class, but that's the best I've ever done before, so I'll count it as a success.  My arms are going to be killing me tomorrow, though, I'm sure, since we did the primary series the *real* way, vinyasas and all.  Good thing I don't have anything to do tomorrow!

In knitting news, I'm almost done with my Owlet sweater, one of which I've donated to Oliver's preschool's fundraiser.  I'm not quite sure how to price it, I'm thinking $60.00 for a handmade child's sweater, and they can start the bidding at $30.00 then (it's a silent auction).  I've got about 50 things I want to make, but I always end up on the computer in front of the tv.  I think if I had like four more arms I could get so much more done.

Lame, lame, lame

The title is an adjective that obviously describe me, as I'm not even cool enough to keep up a blog about my kids and other randomness.    I could try to claim that I've been busy, which might be an ok excuse for like a month or two, but over a year?  Jeez.  What's lamer than lame?  Super lame?  Mega lame?

Anyway, I told my friend Susan that I would update my blog, as she claims she would read it if I ever updated it, but I find myself at a total loss about what to say.  The four of us, Haakan, the kids, and I, took a trip up to Cleveland yesterday to pick up Haakan and Elliot's passports from the Swedish Consulate.  I find it kind of hysterical that Cleveland has a Swedish Consulate, but I find it fairly amusing that there are Swedes anywhere but Sweden, since there aren't all that many of them and I never think of there being a concentration of them heavy enough to necessitate a consulate.  So after we picked up the passports, which took all of like three minutes

 (they managed to do the whole exchange of info while I was in the bathroom), we took the kids to the Great Lakes Science Center, which I highly recommend for people with kiddos who might not be as thrilled by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as their parents would be (it's right next door, so theoretically one could go to both).  The kids had a great time, it was almost completely empty and for quite a while they were the only kids there, meaning

 that Oliver could bounce around in the bounce house to his heart's content.  Unfortunately, there was also an attendant on duty, so I could not take a nap in the bounce house, like I wanted to, but it's all good.  As usual, the "car" was the big hit with Elliot, while Oliver was old enough to really play with just about everything there.  Haakan and I just kind of trailed them around the room, trying to make sure no one fell off of anything.  And not entirely successfully, since Elliot tipped off the back of a boat display and wacked his head on the ground.  But that was the only major accident of the day, and he seems none the worse for wear (though I'm sure he can blame us in 10 years when he can't do long division).

I spent the drive up and back knitting a fabulous Owlet sweater for Elliot, and it's coming along pretty quickly.  No pictures (because, referencing the title o

f this post, I am indeed lame), but I'm using Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and really liking it so far.  I've got the body done and now need to do the sleeves, which I can do now that I've got some needles (and appologies to the staff at Natural Stitches, where my children literally ran around the store screaming while I tried to pay ).  They asked me to do something for Oliver's preschool's fundraiser, so I'm going to donate a child's sweater for the silent auction, and I think Owlet is going to be it, so I need to make a sample for them to put on display for the bidding.  I'll take some pictures when it's all done, hopefully by the end of the week, but you can see the grownup version that I made for myself:

And a fabulous closeup of the owls that you can't see all that well on the sweater (obviously taken by Haakan, being that he's a man and all).

I'm really pretty tickled with it, the fit is great and it's super super cute, and it was FAST to knit, too.  But in retrospect, it kind of sucks to have made a sweater that isn't going to be able to be worn for a couple of months, being that the hot weather is upon us.  Oh well, good thing I'm making Elliot's in fabulous breathable cotton!

I was chatting with a friend this evening, and somehow, through the way the conversation meandered, I found myself thinking about a guy who was in my writing program at Governor's School. We weren't close, didn't even get along all that great, and I literally hadn't though of him for years, but when I Googled him, I found that he died 5 years ago. What an odd feeling it is when you discover that someone you knew years back died, and you didn't even discover it until years later. It was 14 years ago that we were at Governor's School together, and I remember that he was the only guy in our poetry poem. And we all spent the first half of the summer wondering why he was there, because he didn't produce anything at all, good or bad. And then, one day, he just knocked our socks off. Started churning out these poems that totally floored us and just bew us all away. It was crazy. While I was looking at the web pages that mentioned him, I saw that he was a musician and even that an album was released after he died. I can't remember if he had a guitar with him that summer, I assume that he did. I just remember that he wrote a poem called "Look at me, I'm howling" that was a send up of Allen Ginsberg, and how truly impressed I was at how clever it was. Obviously it made an impression, because 14 years later, I can still remember it. And I vaguely remember getting into an argument with him over something, though I have no idea what. I think he was much cooler than me. I was still an insecure fat girl and he clearly had his act together.

So, Flynn Eckenrode, I'm sorry to read about your passing. And sorry I didn't think to look you up sooner.

A plague of locusts

We've had a bit of a run of bad luck here the past month or so. Nothing too serious, though absolutely exhausting when things just come one after another the way they have been. We had a nice family vacation in Florida planned - Haakan made all the arrangements, gorgeous hotel right on the beach, weather was lovely and warm, it was all just wonderful. And then, five days before we were supposed to leave, I got the bright idea to do some laundry.


Now, laundry in and of itself is a fine and necessary thing, but no one ever thinks about the danger involved. and on that fateful sunday, I stepped funny while taking the laundry down into the basement and managed to break my fifth metartasal on my right foot. I didn't even fall, just stepped onto it funny. I spent an hour or so after I did it wondering if I should go to the emergency room, and then persuaded my sister to take me. Luckily we made it in before the post-church accidents and bagel cutting injuries, so it was a pretty quick trip. They sent me home with crutches and Vicodin, and an appointment with an orthapedist for the next day. The good news is that the foot ended up being the least of my worries and it's now pretty much totally healed (or at least, it's not hurting much anymore, though I'm still not supposed to be doing much high impact activities).

So, broken foot, crutches, children, husband, luggage, and everything else, we haul ourselves to Florida for a week of relaxation. Now, I had misgivings about this trip even before the broken foot, call it a hunch that things would go awry. So, about 15 minutes after we take off from Atlanta, Oliver crawls into Haakan's lap, looks at me greenly, and proceeds to vomit more than I ever thought it was possible for him to have in his stomach. I'm talking "Exorcist" type vomit here, like the kind that necessitates a whole lot more cleaning up than was possible on the plane. And it was all over both of them. So Oliver spent the rest of the flight pantsless, wearing socks and babylegs and a t-shirt, and Haakan had to wear the stinky barfed-on clothes, but ok, whatever, we figured it was airsickness. It was not. The virus went through the whole family, except me, hitting Haakan the hardest on the night that Elliot was awake crying ALL night long and I had to walk him up and down the long hallway in our suite ALL night long to keep him relatively quiet. Horrible. We came back a day early, lest our luck go from bad to worse and someone actually end up in the emergency room.

So, back in the winter wonderland of Pittsburgh, I began to feel like, "ok, the worst is over, now we're home, things can get back to normal." Right when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, I got hit with the mother of all stomach viruses. No throwing up, just nausea and diarrhea. but it lasted for three weeks. You read that right. Three. Whole. Weeks. I wanted to die, it's the most misearble I think I've ever been. Nausea that would wake me up around 4am and last until afternoon, then start to lift. And the whole thing would repeat. My docs kept saying it was a virus, though I was skeptical. And it's hard to really express just what being sick did to my mental state. It threw me into a depression the likes of which I haven't experienced since my adventures in post-partum depression after Oliver was born. And of course, I had the misfortune of Haakan being out of town during the tail end of this, so I was alone with the kids for a week, still feeling pretty crappy, and with no one to relieve me, since my mom was out of town, but then came back home with the flu!

The only redeeming aspect of being sick for so long is that I lost 11lbs, which I'm trying to keep from putting back on (though being largely unsuccessful, now that I'm not on the Gatorade dehydration diet), but truly, I wouldn't wish that kind of illness on my worst enemy. And in the midst of all this, my grandmother fell and broke her leg in two places, which majorly shook up the family, since she had been living alone but now, obviously, cannot. And our car had to get 4 new tires. And Inky had to go to the emergency vet because he was peeing all over the place (he had an inflamed bladder, which is now better, thank goodness). So now you can probably see why I titled this post "A plague of locusts", as I keep scanning the skies to make sure that one isn't headed our way. Of course, that would be pretty phenomenonal, being that it's winter and all, but you never know. I'll keep my flyswatter handy, just in case.

Every now and then

My children actually DO interact together! Granted, those moments of blissful laughter from both of them at the same time are usually pretty short - it's only a matter of time before Oliver starts whining "Don't want Elliot to smile at you! Don't want Elliot to touch you!" (we're still working on his pronouns). But Oliver seems to be more and more warming up to the idea that Elliot can be a lot of fun, if he just gives him a chance, and that being a big brother doesn't mean giving up all his toys and attention.

Anyway, here's some photographic proof.

And both of them looking silly and tres serious (though it was Oliver's idea to hold Elliot)

It's kind of interesting that Oliver is such a photogenic kid. My mom and I almost lament that the's so NOT a reliable performer. Kid could be making his fortune doing gap ads otherwise!

You'd think I'd remember

My younger sister was born when I was 3, and I remember having a very volitile relationship with her when we were little kids. Once we hit like high school and middle school age, it was an outright hostile relationship and we were agreed in our mutual dislike of one another, but when we were little kids, we ran very hot and cold. I remember being very jealous, since people talked all the time about how cute she was, how sweet, blah blah blah. This all sounds pretty standard, doesn't it? We get along fine now, but it took about 25 years to get there.

But being that I'm the older sibbling, you'd think I'd remember more about what Oliver is going through. You'd think I'd be able to muster up more sympathy for him since I know what it's like. But the thing is, I keep hearing that little voice inside my head saying, "But your sister wasn't the little sweetheart that Elliot is." But I'm sure that she was. Which means that I was a pretty rotten little kid to be so angry at my sweet little sister. It wasn't her fault that she was born, after all, and in the beginning that really was her only crime. I just wish I had the magic right words to say to reassure him that just because there's another child in the family doesnt' mean that we love him less. If anything, we love him more because we get to go back and do the baby thing again, and we remember how cute he was as a baby, and we see how cute he is now, and we get excited about seeing Elliot grow, too. But all Oliver sees is that Elliot cries and we pick him up, that he smiles and we smile back, and that he doesn't have our undivided attention any more. And it's too scary to blame mommy and daddy for that, so the only person left to blame is the little smiling interloper who doesn't know what he could possibly have done to have won Oliver wrath (and truthfully, doesn't seem to care all that much, since he is only 6 months old, after all).

And not that it's all tears and terror, we're just having some pronounced bad times. I know it'll all pass and we'll get new challenges and such. I just wish I knew the right thing to do to prevent my boys from having 25 years of bad feelings, like I had with my sister.