Cool Stuff

Just a few things that have happened recently that I think are pretty neat (however, you may beg to differ...).

#1 - E has begun to communicate quite effectively using 'baby signs'. It makes life so much easier now that she can tell us some basic wants/needs. She has signs for "all done", "eat", "milk", "more", "tired/night-night" and she now consistently waves hi/bye. Exciting stuff - well, at least for me it is. I'm her mom AND I'm a self-professed speech-geek so anything remotely related to human communication is fascinating to me! I have used sign language with all three of my girls with great success. It is an awesome way to communicate with a baby before they are ready/able to form words. Hand gestures are much easier than all those complicated tongue and mouth movements and it gets the point across quite clearly once they understand that the sign has a meaning attached to it. E's receptive language (understanding what we say to her) is great but she has yet to form that true "first word" so in the meantime we are using the sign language and it reduces frustrations all around! E is a bit later than the other two at her willingness to use the signs, but in the last week or so it really clicked for her and now there is no stopping her!

#2 - R got a ton of craft-related projects for Christmas and was thrilled to get each and every one. But, the most exciting thing for me was giving her the Learn to Knit kit! I was excited to share my love of knitting with her. This past fall she kept asking about learning to knit and I knew that I was getting her the kit so I held off and told her that things were busy but once the holidays were over I teach her. So, on New Year's Day we sat on the couch with her new yarn and wooden knitting needles and I showed her the basic knit stitch. I was not actually expecting her to be able to knit after only one session - but, I'll be damned! She picked it up so quickly and now knows EXACTLY what needs to be done. All she needs to do is work on her "form" and she'll be pounding out some scarves in no time flat! Last night before bed I sat with her again and she knitted two more rows on the swatch that we started on Monday. She did 90% of the work on those two rows and the second row came off much faster than the first. She is thrilled with herself and her progress and I'm bustin' with pride for my little crafty girl!

Here's what she's accomplished so far:



And since I'm sharing cool knitting-related stuff - here's a pic of a little gift I bought myself recently:



I ordered some yarn from Knit Picks recently (good yarn - cheap!) and found this organizational bag on their site. My knitting bag was a MESS so I figured this would come in handy. I always had a hard time finding scissors and other small objects that ended up at the bottom of the bag but now I am super-organized and can find what I need in a flash! YAY for me! The yarn in the top is the start of my latest project - a baby blanket with a fairly complex (but very pretty!) diamond pattern. It's actually been a bit troublesome to work out what the heck I'm supposed to be doing and I had to create a freakin' SPREADSHEET to keep track, but so far it's working and it's a sadistically fun challenge. I just can't TALK when I am working on this blanket so it probably won't be my "travel/on the town" project. I'll reserve my simple sock projects for those occasions!

#3 Rick and I have a date night scheduled for tomorrow night! WOOHOO! My in-laws (bless them!) are going to babysit for us. They will feed them dinner and bring them back here and put them to bed for us. We were unsure what we wanted to do for our date night...and then I was sent a sign....

Which brings me to the next neat-o torpedo thing....

#4 I won ANOTHER movie ticket from Blingo (if you don't know what Blingo is be sure to email me and I send you an invite so you, too, can win free stuff!). I *heart* Blingo. I think I've won at least 4 movie tickets from them since I signed up. I had won a ticket (that I had forgotten all about until last night) back in November. Then last night while I was surfing for information on the web (for R's upcoming birthday party) I won ANOTHER movie ticket. So, I told Rick that since we now had two free movie tickets that it must be a sign that we should do a traditional Dinner-and-a-Movie date! At this point I'm thinking it's a toss-up between "Night at the Museum" and "Pursuit of Happyness" - I guess it depends on whether we want to see a somber and probably depressing movie that HOPEFULLY has a uplifting ending or whether we want to just laugh our butts off for nearly two hours. Probably the latter would be advised for a date night, huh? I have heard great things about both movies, so we'll see what Rick feels like seeing... Dinner is another question that is up in the air and is to be determined later.

So, that's my recent list of cool stuff. Off to the museum for story time! Catch ya later!