First things first

The winner of my birthday contest is Amy at Knit Think! She’ll be getting this box o’ knitting mathoms and other goodies.*

Thanks, everyone, who entered this contest. I really enjoyed reading about your favorite knitting!

(*Before I took this picture, I put everything in the box to make sure it would all fit, then spread it out on the table. How much do you want to bet that when I try to put it all back in the box again it won’t fit the second time?)

The baby birds took flight this morning. As Jan was heading out the door, he called out that a few of them had left. Sylvia and I rushed downstairs and watched the nest for a few minutes, but the two birds that were left didn’t do anything interesting, and she got bored. So we went back upstairs, and by the time I was done with my shower the nest was empty. I wondered if the babies might return to the nest at nighttime, but it looks like they’re gone for good.

Have happy lives, little baby birds!

Sylvia turns three today.

One birthday gift she received a few days ago was Ladybug Girl, by Jacky Davis and David Soman. The friends who gave it to her were inspired by a ladybug shirt Sylvia likes to wear. It’s a wonderful book, and Sylvia adores it—so much so that between us Jan and I have read it to her (by request) at least a dozen times so far. Seriously.

Yesterday morning when she woke up she decided she wanted to be Ladybug Girl for the day. She chose all of her own clothes: ladybug shirt, polka-dot legwarmers, orange shorts, ladybug ponytail holders. I substituted a playsilk for the “ladybug wings” (and she’s pretty happy with that).

Here she is, shouting “Ladybug Girl!”

Happy birthday, Sylvia!

Our new neighbors are growing like gangbusters! Jan’s mom thinks they are house finches. That’s the best guess so far, though both of the parents who frequent our porch have near-identical coloring.

In a matter of a few short days, the babies have lost almost all of their baby fuzz and are now sporting adult feathers. They’re practically crowding each other out of the nest, and I’m sure they’ll be taking their first flights any day now.

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May 5

Thanks so much for the happy birthday wishes, everyone! (And yeah, Jan is really great!) Here’s a photo of one of those cupcakes. To answer the question Chris posed on a comment on the previous post, Jan did not manage to hide the tell-tale smells. I just didn’t figure out what they were.

After I got Sylvia up and dressed on Tuesday morning, we were ready to head downstairs when I thought I smelled some sort of baked goods. I called Jan and asked him if he’d had cinnamon-raisin toast for breakfast that morning. He, of course, denied this and added that I must be imagining things and how weird it was that I would call him to inquire about his breakfast.

There were other signs, too. In the kitchen a little later, Sylvia pointed out a brown smudge on the floor near the dishwasher. “That’s from the cream puffs,” she announced. (She and Jan had made chocolate-covered cream puffs a couple of weeks earlier.) I thought, “I can’t believe that chocolate spot has been there for two weeks, and I haven’t noticed it until now.” Yup, I had no clue whatsoever.

Last night, my local knitting group met at 7 p.m. for our weekly get together. At about 7:45, I felt someone poke me on the side and looked down to see Sylvia standing there. I did a double-take. Maybe it was a triple-take. She’s usually in bed by 8. What was she doing there?

Then I saw Jan appear with some boxes in hand. My friends were grinning madly, and Jan said, “Happy birthday!” Sylvia, unable to contain the secret any longer, shouted, “Cupcakes! Cupcakes!”

With help from Gina (who communicated with the other knitters), Jan had planned a surprise birthday celebration for me. My birthday is still a little over a week away, so I had no idea this was coming. He woke up at 4 a.m. yesterday morning to bake (and clean up afterward, to hide the evidence), and I slept through it all—even the KitchenAid mixing!

We enjoyed the chocolate cupcakes with chocolate glaze and mascapone icing (Jan is a terrific baker, and everything he makes both looks and tastes great), had a little video chat via Skype with one knitting friend who’s in Belgium for a couple of months, and (once Sylvia headed home to bed after inhaling her cupcake) even did a little knitting. I had a great time!

It’s time for the final installment of my contest series. The first contest prize was a set of cookbooks, won by Chappy’s Mom. The second contest prize was a trio of IKEA big blue bags, won by Uberstrickenfrau.

I mentioned my fondness for the Hobbit tradition of giving gifts on one’s own birthday. Typically, these gifts are mathoms, described by Tolkien as “anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away.” (Michael Quinion points out, quite correctly, that there’s plenty of use for such a word in our own society. Take a look in your basements, closets, and plastic storage totes, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.)

The cookbooks were mathoms. The IKEA bags—well, not so much (but maybe they’ll be employed as mathom storage). For my final contest, the prize consists mostly of mathoms of the knitting-related type.

First, there’s Crazy Aunt Purl’s book, Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair. The very excellent Blind Purls gave me this book, and now that I’ve fully digested it, it seems only right to spread the Crazy Aunt Purl love and send it to a new home.

I’ve been sorting through my yarn stash, and I’ve come across quite a bit of yarn that, frankly, I’ll never use. It’s all decent stuff—all sorts of different fibers in a variety of colors and totally unused. Some of these skeins are leftovers from past projects. Some were gifts that just don’t suit my knitting style. (With so little time and so many projects, I’ve resolved to knit only things I really want to knit with yarn I really want to spend a lot of time with.) And some of it is “where the hell did that come from?” yarn that must have snuck into my stash when I wasn’t looking because I honestly don’t remember how I got it. All of these balls and skeins of yarn are true mathoms. I know I will never use them, and I’m confident that they can find a good home with another fiber enthusiast. I won’t list all the yarns here, because I’m still in the process of selecting them from my stash. Suffice it to say there will be a lot.

I’m also including one of those IKEA big blue bags, ’cause I really love ‘em and thing everyone should have one. And something yummy—though not, alas, any chocolate or meltable items, now that spring is here and temperatures are rising.

If you’re interested in getting this box o’ stuff, leave a comment to this post and tell me about your favorite thing that you’ve knitted (or crocheted, if you’re more of a hooker than a needler). If you’d rather post about this in your own blog, that’s fine; either include a link there to this post or put a comment here telling me to go read it there. On May 7, the eve of my birthday, I’ll randomly select one winner from all entries.*

My favorite knitted item? Hands-down, it’s one of my first projects: a baby blanket I made for Sylvia. Yeah, the seaming is really bad. But she loves this blanket, and I love her, so there are happy feelings all over the place.

*Alas, once again I must restrict this contest to residents of the USA. The mere thought of filling out customs forms for this package and dealing with international postage rates makes my brain hurt.

About three weeks ago we noticed that some birds had built a nest in a copper hanging thing (I have no idea what to call it—I think it may technically be a bird feeder that we have never gotten around to filling with bird seed) on our front porch. We think the bird is some sort of wren. It’s small, and it is totally terrified of humans. At least, it flies away immediately whenever anyone opens the front door from the inside or approaches the porch from the outside. So we figure it’s either scared of us or it somehow thinks that by flying away it will convince us to leave the nest alone.

We have left the nest alone, of course. The day we noticed it we took a quick peek inside to confirm that there were three little eggs in it, and since then we were very careful to avoid the porch so we wouldn’t scare the bird. Having birds nesting on the porch has done wonders for motivating pokey toddlers to go inside or outside; Sylvia, too, rushes through the portal “so the mommy and daddy birds will come back right away and won’t be scared any more.”

Earlier this week, Jan announced that the eggs had hatched. He knew this because, as he put it, “I saw the parent puking into a baby bird’s mouth.” Yup, that’s a pretty good indication.

Today I managed to get a few pictures of the nest and its inhabitants. I didn’t spend much time fiddling around with the camera or positioning to get good quality. The parent bird gave me plenty of dirty looks when I snapped the first photo from just inside house. I didn’t want to stress it out any more by lingering too long near the nest while it went to get more food. But I did manage to catch a glimpse of three little ones snuggled up together.

It’s spring, it’s Friday, and this is just the sort of thing that cracks me up.

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