Sister Sweaters

Here at long last are the sister sweaters.  On the left is my original Rhinebeck, hand-dyed orange superwash, knit as "Miss December" in my 2009 12 sweaters dodecathon.  It's been one of my very favorite sweaters of all time ever since.  And sister Beth liked it so much, recreating it for her became my challenge for this year's Tour de Fleece and the the Ravelympics.  I put it aside to buy buttons for it and then the school year began and I just finished sewing the buttons on the first night of her short visit... but it fits and it went back to Scotland with her!  Secundus snapped this photo before she had to leave.  It may be a bit blurry but it works.  Great pattern, happy yarn (homespun is the best!) and I still love orange.  I would knit another orange sweater.

It has been weeks since I did a proper update on my stash report.  I finally have some movement in knitting and quilting to report.

Fabric used this week: .5 yards for binding log cabin, and I'm counting 16 yards as donated (or at least on long loan!)
Fabric used year to date: 74.5 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 28 yards
Net used for 2012: 46.5 yards

Yarn used this week: 600 yards for camping shawl
Yarn used year to date: 6744 yards
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 3503 yards (all handspun, not purchased)
Net used for 2012: 3241 yards

I'm hoping to get back into both quilting and knitting now that the highest stress week of the school year is past and it's back to just ordinary stress!

Pflaumenkuchen

Inspired by the description of a German lady I know from my knitting group, and a box full of Italian plums from Costco, I browsed the web for some Pflaumenkuchen recipes recently.  Above is an interesting, yeast-leavened plum cake.  Recipe here.  It was good.  The yeast dough gives it a totally different texture and a less-sweet taste.

This one is a little closer to some other recipes I've tried... very nice.  We tried half the plums face up and half face down. 

I want to do another try with this recipe before the rest of the plums go bad.  In the meantime, just saying "pflaumenkuchen" is fun!

Randomday

Chaaarge!  This is the little push-wagon we had for Tertia's therapy when she was little.  Once she figured out how to climb she sometimes would get up on the boxes of dried beans we used for weights. 

Soon nothing was safe.

Hotel room drawers...

the dryer... she was everywhere!  I was looking through old pictures and I just can't get over how photogenic and cute she was/is.  Having a baby with Down syndrome is just as wonderful as having any baby, but you get the added benefit of a slightly slower-paced infancy and toddlerhood.  You can watch the miracle of human development in slow-motion, sometimes with therapists pointing out things you never noticed in your other children.  It's a little bit (just a little bit) easier to keep up with a developmentally delayed toddler.  But you still don't dare take your eyes off them!

Sister Beth is back home in Scotland.  The fall rains have started and it's cold enough to want to wear wool.  Secundus had a massively huge cross-country meet today in Portland.  I think he had his best time yet, but scores haven't been posted yet.

The school accreditors have left and we can all go back to the regular stress of teaching and grading.

I finished the bind-off on my half-Pi "Camping" shawl yesterday.  No energy for blocking it quite yet.  Actually, today I had no energy for much of anything.  Lots of standing around at the meet and I still need to grade quizzes and figure out food for tomorrow.

Perfect

In the 31 for 21 challenge, I've been cheating a bit and blogging about general family things.  But this video came to my attention today and it's truly heartwarming.  Definitely worth the 15 minutes to watch.  So often our culture doesn't have anything positive to say to families expecting a baby with Down syndrome.  It may take a bit of time, but these families will frequently tell you that their child is one of the best things that ever happened to them.

Birthday

Not a bad birthday so far.  I had only one class evaluated today, and I guess no news is good news.  No one asked me why I was impersonating a teacher, so that's good!  Logic 1 and 2 both sang to me, and I was given a plate of home-baked cookies.

Beth took me out to get a pedicure today at the Athena Day Spa.  This place is good.  Not like the one we went to last year, where three separate people assumed I was her mother.  I chose An Affair in Red Square and I like how my toes look.

Steve is picking up his mom and making Pad Thai for dinner for us all.  Supposedly there will be an ice cream cake, and tomorrow Beth has to leave to go back to Scotland.  I blocked her orange sweater and it is still drying; I hope it finishes soon so she can take it with her!

Spontaneity

Today was the day the accreditation team sat in on my 7th and 8th grade classes.  They slipped in the back of the class in their navy blazers and khaki pants, with their clipboards, opening the manila folder with the carefully-prepared, in-depth lesson plans.  I got the kids to stand up (we had already run through the more boring of our warm-ups) and we did the silly verb songs:

(to the tune of "Three Blind Mice")
o, s, t, mus, tis, nt
bam, bas, bat, bamus, batis, bant
bo bis bit bimus bitis bunt; or am es et emus etis ent
These are the endings for present system
Active voice.  Use the 1st principal part

i, isti, it, imus, istis, erunt
eram, eras, erat, eramus, eratis, erant
ero, eris, erit, erimus, eritis erint
These are the endings for perfect system
Active voice.  Use the 3rd principal part.

(and then to the tune of "Yankee Doodle")
r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur
Present system passive
r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur
Subject receives the action

Perfect system passive is a compound tense
with the 4th principal part;
PPP agrees with the subject,
then add a form of sum.

Then I hummed the "Twilight zone" theme and we entered the subjunctive zone.  Kids earned the right to sit down by correctly giving a grammar rule or verb form or translation.

Then I felt extremely awkward and self-conscious and I basically ditched my lesson plan.  Well, not really.  But in a flash of self-awareness I realized that I can't stick to a lesson plan when it's written out in that much detail, and the inspectors would not like to see me up at the board diagramming sentences, and anything else we might work on would be too much lecture and too little student involvement, but the kids really needed to work on translating sentences with purpose clauses.

So I invented a game.  I called on a team of two volunteers from each House to come up and jointly race to translate and diagram the 1st sentence from tomorrow's homework.  I called on members of their Houses who remained seated to help them with grammar advice.  This is 7th grade so there was a lot of need for grammar support.  It actually went surprisingly well, for a seat-of-the-pants innovation.  Either I've invented the newest fun Latin game, or I've cost the school its shot at accreditation. 

Eighth grade was a little more traditionally structured.  We had a bread-and-butter lesson to get through.  The fun review happened before the inspectors walked into the classroom, and then it was just going around the room and correcting sentences.  Simple sentences, so we didn't have to put any up on the board.  Then introduction of the new lesson (hic/haec/hoc and ille/illa/illud).  We made vocabulary and grammar cards, we reviewed the honking geese who aren't shy (these geese that come right up to you) and the tweety birds (those shy birds off in the forest).  My kids were troopers and had their homework all done well.  It might have been a more interesting class if they hadn't, but I'm glad they had.

I'm putting an end to it for tonight and making grape pie. 

Do you suppose spontaneous is just another word for random?

All God's Critters

I love this song so much.  Sister Beth is flying in soon to spend a few days with us.  Wish it could have been a few less stressful days in the school calendar, but oh well.

That is all.