busywork

No one really tells you, when you become a stay-home mother, that it is pretty much a totally boring job. It's also largely thankless, but we mostly know that, I guess. After nearly 6 years of stay-home-ness, I am bored out of my mind. In the dead of winter in a cold climate, there is little to look forward to each morning...making meals the children will not eat, cleaning up after the children, watching PBS, playing playdoh, painting with watercolors, doing mountains of laundry, listening to the wind rattle the windows, more cleaning up, etc, etc.

I've scheduled many playdates this winter in an effort to combat the cabin fever, but inevitably someone gets sick or something comes up and either I cancel or our friends do. We've all been sick since Christmas, almost non-stop. We were on the upswing for about a week, until Daughter brought home another nasty virus from Kindergarten. AJ just managed to squeak in for his surgery last week, though his nose was stuffy. Another couple of days and he'd have had chest congestion and a fever like his sister. Luckily those symptoms showed up after the surgery day. He is, in fact, sound asleep right now (11:45 a.m.) and has been since 10:30, because he barely slept last night. He was restless and feverish, crying almost constantly. Which means Hubs and I are exhausted as well.

It's just a crappy, crappy time of year. I'm going through the motions but barely getting anything done. It's all too easy to just sit and browse the internet for hours on end. I grab a ball of yarn here and there and work on something, but I'm not feeling inspired. It's all just busywork to pass the time.

Here's the marled sweater I showed a couple weeks back, now finished:

Knitting pure & simple neck-down cardigan, size 2-4. My little boy is getting big! This took nearly a whole skein of lion fishermen's wool. US 9 needles for the body, US 8 needles for the ribbing.

It went really fast and was pretty satisfying, so look what I found in my yarn trunk:

Another orphan skein of fishermen's wool. Another neck down raglan? Sure, why not.

I'm making an attempt to cheer up and look forward to spring:

This yarn has been hanging around since I was pregnant with AJ, waiting to be made into socks for Daughter. I'd better do it now, as her feet are almost too big to squeeze 2 socks out of one skein. I'm hoping to put these in her Easter basket. We try to go really minimal with the Easter candy because no matter how we beg and plead with my in-laws to lay off, they inevitably show up with enormous baskets filled with chocolate and junk. So I go with one very small chocolate figure, some jellybeans and m&ms, and some sort of useful item (like socks) or a book or something.

I'm pleased with myself for actually working through my stash a bit so far this year. I keep most of my yarn in my old college footlocker, and I can now close the lid easily, without sitting on it. That means some yarn is definitely gone. With little else to do and sick/post-surgical children lolling around the house, I might as well keep cranking out the knits, using up all that yarn I've been collecting for so many years.