Twilight

So, I think I am the last person on earth who had not seen this movie. Until today. Wow, I want my two hours back! The only thought that went through my head the whole movie was, "Wow, can you imagine how much knitting I could get done if I didn't sleep? Why don't any of the Cullens knit?" Pathetic, huh?

Yarn, Beautiful Yarn!

It's been a really good fiber week for me. First off, I got my March sock kit from Robyn's Nest. I love the pretty purple yarn and am really looking forward to working with it! If you haven't checked out Robyn's site, you definitely should, she's got some great stuff and she designs the socks for the club herself.

Then, on Wednesday, I got my much-anticipated order from Knit Picks arrived. I had a request for some close ups of my hoard, so here goes:

This is Knit Picks Essentials for the Fern Sweater from Mason Dixon Knitting.

The Sangria Socktail kit.

Spring/Summer Kettle Dyed Sock kits. I accidentally ordered two, but I think I'm happy about that, I like the colors.

Fall/Winter Sock kits
Warm Palette Fingering Yarn Sampler

Laptop Bag Kit

Then last night, I got a wonderfully fun package from my dear friend, Lara, who is a fantastic knitter. I love my new slippers! How freaking cute are they!
And , finally, today I got my second kit from the Rockin' Sock Club! I love the colors!

So, lest you think that all I have been doing is hoarding yarn and not knitting, I'll try tonight to get some pictures of my recent projects.

Damn Yard Work!

I have poison ivy.

Joy! Rapture!

This came in the mail today!

What does it have in it?

I'm so freakin' happy!

I should be napping...

but I really want to post pictures of my lovely yard that I did massive amounts of work in on Monday!

First off, I am not an outdoor-work kind of a girl. I never work in the yard (much to Hubby's consternation), but he knew what he was getting when he married me, so he can just deal with it! Anyhow, this past weekend, in an effort to make him happy (he's had a really crappy past couple of months at work) I agreed to help him out in the yard weeding and re-mulching our flower beds. They were looking a bit rough after the winter and if you have any familiarity with how quickly weeds grow in a swampy region, you can kind of imagine how overgrown they were getting now that springtime has sprung in Louisiana. I really wish I had thought to take some "before" pictures, but I had no idea how involved this process was going to become.

So, over the weekend we got the front beds done. We raked out all of the old mulch and leaves to clear the way for weeding (it's much easier to weed when all the other crap is out of the way). I did most of that part while Wes reburied the wires for our outdoor lighting and he followed my work by mulching the beds. We were so proud of ourselves and how nice things were looking!

Anyhow, Wes left on Monday morning for a business trip and I decided that as a surprise for him, I would clean out the back flower bed, weed it and have it ready for him to mulch when he got home. But first I needed to run down to his office to bring some stuff for them to bring out to my brother. I decided while I was down there (it's a 40 minute drive each way) I had better do something to make it worth the time, so I popped in to a nursery down there. What an amazing selection they had! I'm not a plant person. I have no idea what you're supposed to plant and when, but I did see a whole bunch of things that were pretty and flowery and I decided that maybe I would work on sprucing the back yard up a bit. Uh huh....I ended up filling up my car (not a small car, a Tahoe) with plants! I was a little intimidated by the level of work I had just set up for myself, but what the heck, right? So, I headed home and started cleaning out the flower bed. I filled THREE huge refuse bags with the stuff I raked and weeded out of there and while I was working, my Mom-in-Law came over to help look out for Lilly-Bean while I worked.

First I moved a couple of plants from where the landscaper put them last year because for some crazy reason. If you look in the back of this photo, you can see two really tall plants, one of them (the one on the right) started out in the front of the bed and really looked odd. I also moved a couple of the iris plants to make room for the two xanadu plants that are in the front of the bed now. I also added the impatiens to add a bit of color to the setup. I know the variegated ginger in the center looks pretty bad right now, the couple of freezes we got this winter really reaked havoc on our yard. They will come back this spring though and look great in a couple of months.

Next, I moved on to the back sitting area. I love this part of our yard. This section used to be a crazy, overgrown mess that you couldn't even go near. So, last year we hired a landscaper to come in and create this sitting area. They made the patio area with paving stones and baby mondo grass in between them and put in two of the big urns filled with flowers. A few weeks after they did that, I added three more urns. None of these survived the winter, nor were they meant to. So, when I got started, the patio was crazy with weeds and the urns were really bad with dead plants sticking out of dirt. This is what it looks like now!

I love it! I think this afternoon, if it's not raining, I'll take Lilly out there to play and sit and have a glass of wine in my pretty new garden.

The next project I had for myself was an ugly little strip next to my driveway that we have never done anything with. It's always just been an area of dirt and weeds that we've kind of neglected. Anyhow, before Wes left for his trip, he created a little bed there and told me to go buy something and plant it. Sure, whatever you say, honey! Well, I think I rose to the occasion and I decided that I wanted it to have a bunch of irises. The only problem was that it's too late in the season to plant bulbs, so I decided that I would just throw something in there until the fall when I could put in what I really want. I picked up a bunch of little verbena plants that the lady at the nursery told me would spread out really quickly and give off some really pretty purple flowers through the whole summer.

Then I mulched around them. It looked a lot better than when I started, but I wasn't sure how much Wes would like it.

After, Lilly's nap, I brought her over to her grandparent's house with the intention of having some "mommy time" without her and relax for a bit. I had done a lot of work! For some reason, I decided to head over to Home Depot. I needed some more mulch for the back bed, which wasn't done. Really, after all the work I had done, I wanted it to be completely done when Hubby got home so I could show it off in it's best light and really reap the accolades. Well, by the time I got in the car to head home I had: 5 bags of mulch, 2 bags of topsoil, four encore azaleas, eight potted irises (the solution to my bulb problem!), and two hydrangeas to replace the ones that froze in my front bed over the winter. I really wasn't planning on doing any more work that afternoon, I'd even taken my shower already, but something was driving me, so I dove right back and continued the efforts. Here's what the side garden looks like:

Aren't the irises beautiful! I love them.

After that, I tore three azaleas out of my front bed that were looking a bit sickly and put four new ones back in:

And finally, put in the two new hydrangeas. You will notice in the picture that the two sickly ones are still there, but they are still showing signs of life and I want to give them a shot at recovery and I would love it if that area had a huge bushy cluster of hydrangeas.

Oh wait, that wasn't the final thing, I also mulched the back bed. I can't believe how much I managed to do out there in one day! Wes better be duly impressed and grateful when he gets home! :-) Of course, he's going to expect me to keep doing this in the future and I'm not really certain how I feel about that, it will, after all, take up perfectly good knitting time!

The Pitfalls of Planning

I had it all planned out last night. Hubby is out of town for work and I was going to put Lilly-Bean down for the night, then spend an hour or so online, catching up on reading your blogs and filling you in on my adventures in gardening from Monday, then spend a little while on a new jigsaw puzzle and then knit for a little while before going to bed at a decent hour. (Wow, reading that I realize that I have become a senior citizen a little earlier than I expected to!) Apparently, life doesn't like when you try and corral it into something so mundane or comforting as a plan so I got to do none of those things last night!

Bean had a bit of a fever all day yesterday. Not really a big deal, kids get fevers all the time. You just keep an eye on them, give them some Tylenol and keep them hydrated while waiting for other symptoms to show up to let you know what you're dealing with, right? So, that's how we proceeded with the day. We stayed home, which bugged Bean, since she had really been looking forward to going to the "Li-berry" for storytime and to play with her little friends. I don't know how many times she reminded me yesterday that the "Li-berry" was open. She was pretty cranky most of the day, but it was tempered by the fact that I let her watch a bunch of DVR'd episodes of Playhouse Disney shows. We also had really great cuddles all day, which is kinda my favorite side effect from her not feeling well.

Anyhow, around 5:00 last night, we were curled up on my bed and she was obviously not feeling very well. She asked if she could sleep in my bed that night and started rubbing her back around where her kidneys are located. She knows that the only time she's ever gotten to share my bed is when she was REALLY sick, so that worried me, but her rubbing her back is what really got me. I'm a little gun-shy when it comes to her kidneys, the urologist told us that if she has a breakthrough infection while she's still on prophylactic antibiotics we will likely have to proceed with a surgical correction to her urinary tract problems rather than waiting for the issue to resolve itself. So, I called her doctor's answering service to set up an appointment to get her checked out this morning. The answering service patched me through to the on-call nurse, who after listening to Bean's symptoms, forwarded me to the on-call pediatrician. He concurred with my assessment that it was likely another UTI and recommended that we go to the ER rather than wait until morning when she would likely be even more uncomfortable. So, after packing up a bag of snacks, toys and some yarn for me, off we went to the hospital. Fun stuff, no?

Once we were at the hospital, the waiting game began. It was around 8:00 when we got there and I knew it wouldn't be a quick process. The only time I really got annoyed was after we had seen the triage nurse, I noticed another little girl and her mother, who had come in after us, were already back in the examination area. I know, you're thinking that perhaps this little girl was in more serious condition than my child and perhaps she was, but where my little one was lying listless in her stroller, the other little one was bouncing all over the waiting room, playing and having a great time with no outward signs of anything being wrong with her. She was seen and released before we even got called back for an exam. Hmm, wonder who they knew at the hospital?

Once we got back to the exam area (around 9:45), things were a bit better. I hate being in the waiting room with everyone else who is suffering from god-knows-what-that-might-be-contagious. Fortunately, the nurse and the pediatric resident came into our room at the same time, so I only had to go through my observations of Lilly-Bean once. He did a brief examination and then we waited for the nurses to come back to do a urine collection (catheter). That went as well as could be expected. In other words, pretty darn miserable. Lilly cried and told them it hurt, which absolutely broke my heart. And, since she hadn't had much to drink in a couple of hours, they had a hard time getting enough of a sample. But they finally did and we went back to waiting. I got Lilly as comfortable as I could on the bed with her blankie and sat back with my yarn to wait for the results of the labwork. About the time she drifted off to sleep, the nurse poked her head back in the room to let us know that the attending physician was hoping we wouldn't mind going back out to the waiting room until the lab sent the results. After seeing the look on my face when dealing with the prospect of waking up my sleeping baby, she smiled and let me know that she would tell him we needed to stay right where we were. I like that nurse!

Finally close to midnight, we got the lab results. There were no signs of infection and the doctor had no real idea of why Bean was running a fever. That's not terribly uncommon with kids and often the cause is viral even if the obvious symptoms haven't arrived yet. So, I was a little put off by the fact that, without knowing the cause of her fever, the doctor prescribed a fairly potent, broad-spectrum antibiotic. I worry that sometimes doctors feel pressured by their patients to "do something" and prescribe medication that may not be necessary when common sense would suggest taking a wait-and-see course of action to find out if the medication is actually warranted.

So, this morning, Lilly-Bean seems to be feeling much better, the fever is much lower (although she won't let me near her with the thermometer) and she has more energy than she did yesterday. I spoke with her pediatrician who agreed that we should hold off on giving her the antibiotics that were prescribed in the ER until we get the results of the additional culture that the lab is running. I do love our pediatrician. She is much more conservative when it comes to doling out medicine and has no problem telling a parent that sometimes the body is better able to take care of itself rather than give a kid medicine that doesn't do anything other than calm a worried parent's nerves.

Needless to say, I am very tired today. We finally got home at close to 1:00am and although Bean slept well past her normal waking time, it still wasn't enough! Maybe later today I'll get the energy to post about my beautiful garden, but for now, I'm going to cuddle up on the couch with my little girl, watch Mickey Mouse and relax!

Grace in Small Things - 33 of 365

1. Making back to the gym, although I didn't really want to go and didn't do my complete workout. At least I dragged my butt over there!

2. A beautiful sunshine-y day!

3. Wes staying home from work. He is working, but at least he's here!

4. Really yummy chicken quesadillas made with chicken left over from last night's yummy dinner.

5. Casting on a new project!