Baby Pants!

That's right, another baby project! This time a pair of Sheepy Pants. This is my favorite longie pattern, it has just the right fit for my long skinny kids. We use cloth diapers and I love wool covers over them. Since this baby is due in February, I decided I need some more long pants. I only made 2 pairs of longies for Brenna, the rest of her covers are short since May is usually a little warmer than February.

Owen says that these pants prove baby is a boy not a girl. If we were having a girl the pants wouldn't have blue in them according to him. I think they are pretty gender neutral myself.

BIG DAY!

Guess what today is?

It's the anniversary of THIS day, but that's not what I'm excited about. It's also the anniversary of the seizure Owen had after carving pumpkins without gloves last year. We didn't make that mistake again this year, notice the gloves in the pictures. Why am I excited about Owen having a seizure last year?

BECAUSE IT WAS THE LAST "true" SEIZURE HE HAD!!!!

That's right!!! Today marks one year seizure free!!!!

Unfortunately, he still has very abnormal EEG's. Bad enough that we received our ESES diagnosis in June. But, I'm not worrying about that today. Today marks a whole year without rescue medication. Over a year without an ambulance, since the few seizures he had after starting the Ketogenic Diet were milder and didn't require an ambulance.

We still don't let Owen sleep alone all night because of the ESES, but we let him out of our sight for more than 4 minutes at a time now. He is allowed to play in the yard or the playroom without someone watching over him constantly. I don't carry rescue medication everywhere we go anymore. I still keep it close by, but I don't have to take it every time we go to the store or into the library anymore. We aren't on constant alert for seizure activity. It used to be an official chore for the older kids to watch Owen for seizure activity any time Rod or I couldn't. We don't do that anymore. We are able to treat him the way we would our other 5 year olds. The Ketogenic Diet is a pain in the neck sometimes and Owen still really misses some of his favorite foods, but it is so worth it! The best thing is that Owen knows how much the diet has helped. He doesn't try to cheat anymore (he still complains sometimes),but he turns down offers of food that isn't on his diet because he knows how much better he feels. I can't believe the difference in the last year!

Kid's Clothes Sewing Week Wrap Up {Fall 2014}

                                                      

                                      

This last week was Kid's Clothes Sewing week again. I skipped the summer one because we were just too busy that week. This week, I had a bunch of sewing projects I needed to work on anyway, so I decided this would be great motivation to finish some of it. I did get in my hour a day of sewing each day (even the day Rod worked until midnight!). I didn't, however, get pictures of anything until today.
My first project was Morgan's witch skirt for her Halloween costume. I told the kids I wasn't doing much sewing for Halloween this year, so they cobbled together costumes from previous years and the dress up box. Morgan had seen a costume in a catalog she really liked though, so when I was in Joann's picking up a few other things, I couldn't resist this orange cobweb fabric.

The next two things I made were for Morgan also. It finally got cold here and I realized that most of Morgan's pants were way too short. I made her two pairs of Parsley Pants out of baby wale corduroy. I made a size 7 for her, but I added several inches of extra length including enough to make a small cuff that we can roll down as she grows. I'm hoping they'll last through the winter that way.

Then I started in on baby things. I don't need much for this baby, but a few long sleeved items were on my list. I didn't save much from Morgan and Brenna was born in May and didn't need many warm items. These little dresses are made from side snap t-shirts. I love side snap T's for little babies, but they are kind of boring so I dressed them up a little.

For this little dress I used one of my most often used patterns, the Miss Violet pattern by The Handmade Dress. I've never actually made this pattern according to the directions, not even once. I use it as a base pattern for all sorts of little smock type dresses. This time I used a soft cotton lawn. I extended the sleeves to be long, cut it down the front and added button plackets, and bound the neck edge instead of using elastic. I also pleated the front instead of gathering it.

The next little dress I made was from a  French pattern. I love Citronille patterns! If I had unlimited funds, I'd probably have all of them. I used the Rose pattern for this dress. I made a few changes here too. I extended the length to a dress instead of a tunic and I closed up the back instead of leaving it open.

I ended up with SEVEN finished projects! Which I think is pretty good seeing as most days I only got in the minimum hour of sewing time. Most of the projects were pretty simple, but I'm still giving myself a thumbs up. Now If I just do two more weeks of this, I should be mostly caught up with the amount of sewing I want to get done.





 

Fluffy Booties

The baby knitting continues! I made these little booties last week. I knit them up in one day, but then they sat around for a week until I finally got them seamed up. I mostly knit seamless projects to avoid that little problem, but I loved these booties so much I had to make them despite the seams.
My favorite yarn store had their Pajama Party sale a couple of weeks ago and I just happened to have some cash leftover from our great Wolf Lodge trip so I had to go to the sale. Thanks to everything being 40% off, I actually stayed within my budget too!

I really, really want to get more of this yarn in the other colors (all of the other colors) and make a few more of these. The big kids all want me to make them some, but that would NOT be in my budget.

Ice Cream for Dinner { Ketogenic Diet Recipe}

Last week we celebrated Ice Cream for Dinner Day! The kids loved it! Brenna mostly ate bananas and whipped cream. The other kids tried to see how many toppings they could get in one serving.

Some of those toppings came all the way from New Zealand, thanks to Jason and his big box of junk food.  Don't worry, we also had leftovers for dessert for everyone who still had room for dessert.

I wanted to include Owen so I even came up with a Ketogenic Diet Banana Split. Owen was so excited about eating bananas that he refused to let me mix everything together and ate all the components separately though.

Banana Split  4.04:1 ratio 284 calories

60g 36% cream, whipped

10g Davinci sugar free chocolate syrup (mix with the whipped cream)

13g fresh banana

8g macadamia nuts (Mauna Loa brand)

[Disclaimer: the Ketogenic Diet is a highly specialized medical diet and should be used only under medical supervision. Do not use this recipe without dietician approval.]

Baby Kimono

 I've still been working on baby things. This time it's a sewing project though. This little kimono is from a vintage pattern I found at Goodwill. I found this adorable Japanese double gauze fabric at one of my favorite fabric stores, Fabric Worm. They only had a half yard left, so I grabbed it for baby clothes. I got lazy and bought the bias tape instead of making my own. This fabric is so soft, I'd love to make all of baby's clothes out of it. The adorable little penguins were just too much to resist too. I started this project before we found out baby was most likely a girl. I think it's a perfect gender neutral pattern. My babies tend toward jaundice and extremely pale skin and don't look too great in the typical gender neutral yellow.

Penguin close up

Baby Jacket!

The baby knitting continues. I started baby's blanket, but that's going to be a long term project and I have attention span issues, so I whipped up this little jacket between blanket sessions. Devon's friend Adalia gifted me with some gorgeous alpaca yarn before she moved to new Zealand.  I decided this yellow skein was perfect for baby. This was made out of 100% alpaca, so it is as soft as can be. With baby due the beginning of February, some warm handknits are a necessity.

I still need to wash and block it, but I'm calling it finished anyway! I just can't wait to put it on baby.

Baby Bag!

 Since this baby is due in February, she (probably) will need lots of warm handknits. We use cloth diapers and I love wool covers. A baby bag is perfect for sleeping in since I won't have to feed wiggly, squirmy, little newborn legs back into pant legs during middle of the night diaper changes. I made one of these already using the Sheepy Sack pattern.

This time, I decided to try out the Nocte pattern. I like the look of the buttons at the bottom (Nocte also has other bottom options). I don't know if I'll actually like USING the buttons as much as I like looking at them. I'll let you know in February! Okay, I probably won't let you know in February, because I'll be too tired to blog again, but I'll try.

I bought this yarn out of somone's stash and I can't remember who the dyer is, but the colors were based off of Harry Potter. I planned on using it for a pair of scrappy longies for Brenna, but I never got around to it, so I decided to use it for baby stuff instead. Baby stuff knits up faster than long-legged toddler stuff. It's nice to have  a bit of a yarn stash. That way I always have something to knit even if I can't manage to get to the yarn shop!

More Baby Things and a Lie!

I lied! I said that I would be posting more often now that my anti-nausea medication has kicked in and I'm not as sick as I was. It hasn't happened though. One problem is that LESS sick isn't the exact same thing as not sick at all. Another is, that I only get blogging time at night after the kids are in bed and even though I'm less sick, I'm still tired. Then, I lost the camera  and we all know how badly blog posts without pictures suck. Then there is this little problem I have. If I get too far behind, I get overwhelmed and can't figure out where to start, so I just don't. BUT, I made myself a May Day resolution( New Year's resolutions for procrastinators)  a while ago, that I would post ALL of my finished projects on Ravelry and I have been very good about it until this Summer. I didn't want to mess up my resolution, so I decided that since I finally found the camera and got buttons for the sweater, that it was time to catch up my Ravelry page. Since I'm putting stuff on the computer anyway, I figured it was a good time to pull the blog out of mothballs. So, finally a blog post!

This little sweater is a bit of a mystery. I found this tiny pattern and decided it was perfect for one of my club yarns. So, I finished the sweater and set it aside until we found out baby's gender to pick out buttons. The little green buttons I decided on are actually flower shaped although you can't really tell from the pictures. When I went to post the sweater on my Ravelry projects page, I couldn't find the pattern anywhere. I couldn't find the hard copy I'd printed out and I couldn't find it online anywhere. It's like it disappeared into a different space/time continuum. I know I found it online once and I know I printed it out. Obviously, I actually made the pattern, but I can't find it anywhere now.

Right after I finished the sweater (minus buttons), I made a little bootie to match. Then 2 months later, I decided that one bootie probably wasn't going to be of much use and made the second bootie. I don't know why it's so hard to finish second items. Most things that come in twos; mittens, gloves, socks, booties, etc; aren't really finished without the second item of the pair being made. You'd think it wouldn't take so long to get around to making the second item, but it almost always does.

So, I'm not making any promises this time about my upcoming blogging consistency, because obviously, I'm a liar.  I do have a few more baby projects to post though and the photos are already uploaded, so there should be some more posts coming soon.