Worst.morning.ever.

Yesterday was my fifth wedding anniversary. It did not start out well.

I went into DD's room to wake her up and get her ready for daycare. She was - as usual - resistent to the concept of wakefulness. (This is particularly frustrating for me because at night, she is always resistent to the concept of sleep.) I started getting her ready and she started screaming. She screamed when I tried to take her diaper off. She screamed when I tried to put a clean diaper on. She screamed when I put socks on her (which I did three times - not because she has more than the usual number of legs for a human, but because, in her fury, she ripped off the first sock that I'd managed to grapple onto her).

On a different day I probably would have put her back in her crib for a time-out and let her calm down. Today I wanted to get the heck downstairs so I could give DH his anniversary present. I wanted to hustle and I really wasn't up to the patience thing. So I wrestled her into her pants and shirt instead. Predictably, more screaming ensued. Later on she refused to have any fruit with her breakfast. Then she agreed to eat half a banana, so we got it all ready for her...and she never touched it. Although she did cry in protest when I put it in the fridge.

(Inconstancy, thy name is Toddler.)

So that was Horrible Aspect Of My Morning, part I.

Part II came when I gave DH his anniversary present. If you've been following story, you'll know that I've been working on this for some time, often right in front of DH, because he was under the impression that I was making the socks for me. I've been very excited about telling him The Truth about that and giving him the socks and seeing his reaction. I was almost cackling with glee as I slid his present across the table to him this morning. He opened it up, and...

...Got pissed off that the socks weren't for me after all.

Seriously. He started complaining. About how he's tired of always getting socks when I don't have a single pair, that he won't wear these new socks until I finish a pair of my own, blah blah blah.

(For this I wrangled with a screaming todder?)

So that made me feel like utter crap.

But the morning was not done with me yet. Part III occurred about thirty seconds after I got off the train to work. I realised I had left my tabard pattern behind. The pattern I designed myself. All the instructions, measurements and notes for the pattern, which were my ONLY COPY...gooone.

Dumb.
Ass.

Sadly, my director did not give me leave to spend my day on the TTC, transferring from train to train trying to find my pattern. So I am forced instead to wait until Monday, which, assuming that someone turns it in, is the earliest that the pattern will show up in the TTC's lost and found. However, the odds of anyone actually turning this thing in are slim. More likely, since it is just five or so pieces of paper that I left on the ground (more dumbassness), it will be stepped on and torn to shreds by the stampeding throngs of Toronto before being tossed into a recycling bin by whichever poor sod it is whose job is to clean up the detritus on the trains at the end of the day.

Sob.

Fortunately, once I got to work, the world stopped working against me. DD was delightful from the moment she and DH picked me up from work and we had a great evening. She even went down to sleep well.

And DH called me up at work shortly after I got in. On the ride downtown in the car we had had a discussion wherein I communicated about the following issues:

• My hobby. No one tells me what I should knit.
• I don't really decide what to knit - usually, the yarn tells me what it should become.
• I knit for two main reasons - the joy of the actual knitting and the joy of seeing the recipient enjoy their giftie.
• Anyone who has just received a handknitted gift, regardless of the emotions that may be running through them at the time, should have the decency and courtesy to express appreciation of said gift as their first and foremost reaction. Any concerns the recipient has about the gift should come later. Much later. Maybe never.

(If there are any of you who are worrying about all this 'discussion' happening in front of my kid, fear not, there was no yelling, it was genuine communication conducted rationally, honestly, and with tempers in check. We modelled good relationship management.)

Over the morning, what I told him had apparently been sinking in and he said the more he thought about how he reacted to the socks, the more he realised that he was a real - to use his word - 'moron'. (I concurred.) By the evening, he had showered and changed into the socks and was marvelling at how great they were:

Moreover, he spent the day making furniture in the workroom for me. When I came home and saw it all, my mood was instantly raised up to 'really damn elated'. :) There is a desk in the closet:

(ignore the mess at the bottom left corner of the shot - that will all be taken care of down the road)

It's almost ready to have the household computer moved into it. The package in the right bottom corner of the shot is the keyboard tray which DH will be installing this weekend, and the only thing left to do after that is drill a hole in one corner of the desk for cables to pass through. I am so happy.

But wait...there's more! DH also completed the shelf on the far wall to hold all our fabric:

It fits seven of those huge bags. Seven. Loads of storage. Two of those bags aren't even fabric, they're DD's old baby clothes. Moving those bags into the shelf made the 'staging area' (spare room) a lot neater, boy howdy. It's really coming together! I am thrilled.

As for the lost tabard pattern, I at least had done the intarsia motif charts on computer rather than by hand. So DH was able to email the spreadsheet file to me at work so I could have a printout for the commute home. We're also going to dig through the recycling for the pages I used to work out the math for the tabard pattern. If I find those, I might be able to figure out what I decided the dimensions of the tabard should be, and can recreate my instructions. If we can't find them, I might be able to remember most of the the dimensions anyway.

Cross your fingers for me?

Herald's tabard for moi

Despite the setback of losing all my pattern notes, I have been able to forge ahead because I could reprint the intarsia charts. I'm now done most of the motif on the front. No pictures yet, and all the entangling of the skeins is really getting to me, but it is looking good and I like it.

Fafner blanket for baby Whyte

I did a few rows on this Thursday night. No big whoop. The turquoise yarn continues to die a fast death.

Self-patterning socks for moi

Got back into these last night. The heel has begun:


DH is very pleased that I am getting closer to having my own socks.