Homework = Catherine Wheel (for all of us)

Right now, this very instant there is a soon to be 12 year old boy, on the kitchen floor wrestling with converting fractions into decimals. Right now.

He is so not happy with the onslaught of homework again. My boys have had 3 1/2 weeks off of school.

This is not a good thing. There is serious retraining that has to go on here again, not just for them, for all of us. There is no TV or video games until the homework is done. When I got home, the TV was on and it is almost impossible to pull the eldest away from any electronic influences once they've begun.

Ben is easier, he will do his homework when requested. Once again, it is like having Wolverine do his homework, there is a lot of growling going on under his breath.

"gerrr, why do I have to write the whole page!"
"gerrr, I don't want to read this book!"
"gerrr, huff, gerr, huff... Mom! I'm done, can I go now?!"

Sam, has been privately tutored in the art of dividing the lower fraction into the upper fraction to get the decimal equivalent... by yours truly, thank you, and understands the concept, and has a calculator to finish the work.. and he is still whining about this stuff. It will take him 4 minutes, tops to do this if he is threatened with no video games, or no recess, and it drives his teacher and I nuts!

We still have a reading log to do tonight and have to figure out the topic for the next paper he has to write... he has to pick a topic beginning with the letter "I" . Can you believe that? I had to walk away so that he doesn't have anyone to whine too, this sometimes helps to speed up the process.

Don't think that I am unsympathetic to Sam, he is so tired that his eyebrows are red and he is alternating between tears and laughter. He needs a nap as bad as I do. Poor guy.

There is still dinner to think about, and frankly there is no wonder that I have no time to work out.

It will take weeks to get back to the routine of getting homework done with only an hour long whining session. Right now, that sounds okay.

But life is not all bad, I have about 10 inches maybe 9 1/2, or, of course, 9.5 of the 17 inches that I need to do on the body of my sweater, then I get to knit the sleeves, and then start the color work. This is all on a size 6 needle, so it is taking a while.



Sorry about the bad pictures again, I need to start using my real camera instead of my phone camera.

Anyway, this is very exciting! I also steeked my gauge swatch to make sure that when I did this later on I would not destroy my sweater, and it worked! See?



Very nice! Time to go help the boy figure out what to read for reading log, as he is floundering over picking another book that does not include instructions on how to get past his current game level.

By the way Pam.. I hope your day back was peaceful, and that all of your kids were ready to start working for you. (I'm kinda laughing here, because I know that's a pipe dream, um sorry, hope you have a really relaxing night! )

Christmas Vacation can be too long...

You know, with the snow storm that we had here in the last two weeks the boys have had an extra week of Christmas vacation. Let me just say that this Friday was that day when parents would have said:


"Thank the good Lord the children are going back to school Monday, they are ready to kill each other!"


Of course, this Friday was not that Friday... That is still a week away. So we have done our best to deal with the stress and the irritation in the home. We are failing, miserably.


Oh well.


They have new video games, those are always good for distraction. This is the reason that I have not posted in a while. "Spore" has entered our world. This version of the game is PC based, and because I refuse to get my children their own computer, I have not gotten near a computer until now.


I have, instead, finished some knitting projects, and started some new ones. I will admit to finally scraping my brother, Eric's, Skull hat. I give up, I hate it, I avoided even looking at it -- enough, I ripped it out and will send the k2p2 watch cap to him with some coffee beans and no apologies about the crappy hat that I could see in my mind, but could not translate to yarn. Don't worry, I'm not bitter. Really.


I am happily starting new socks (of course, I always have socks on the needles) from yarn that I dyed myself and I will be working cables into the pattern. They have just been started. See?





Icky photo, sorry. Not much to see yet, I'll post more pictures later when I'm farther along.


I also finally started my Alpaca, fair isle yoke sweater a la Elizabeth Zimmerman. The sweater will be a cardigan, I am just starting the ribbing. See?





And here are the colors that will be in the yoke. See?





And here are the kittens that have done their best to attack every bit of yarn that I've touched for several weeks. See?





Why do all of my children look so angelic when they're sleeping?