Knitting with a new born

After a few week hiatus to deliver a baby I wondered how getting back into the swing of things might go. For some reason the powers that be have seen fit to gift me with an astoundingly calm and peaceful baby who likes to sleep at night. I did not even know that babies like Gabriela existed who are so easy to take care of. So this week I am slowly getting back to class and catching up on school stuff. I actually managed to knit this morning while Gabriela was taking her nap. Shocking, I know. I have been thinking about what motivates people to change and have come to the conclusion that having your first child definitely makes you want to become a healthier person so that you can model that for your child. As I was knitting and thinking about how I want my child to be able to enjoy life and appreciate the little things I was wondering how I instil that in my child. I enjoy peaceful moments like sitting on my couch knitting amidst all the chaos of my life. It takes a moment to calm my mind and get beyond thinking of all the "productive" things I "should" be doing but once those voices are quieted I can relax and just stare at the beautiful fall colours outside my widow. It still has not sunk in that I am mother now. I will never be one of those people who finds my identity solely in being a mother, as I am already itching to get back to school, however I thankfully have found the role of mother coming more naturally than I thought it would. My husband is more the nurturing parent type and fills the role amazingly well. I am very thankful for him and joke that he is the wife and I am the husband in our relationship.

Do low expectation produce low results?

So I am blaming my lack of posting over the last week an a half on the discussion we had in class about being set up to fail. Ever since that conversation I have not been knitting more than once or twice a week and I have not posted anything. I think I unconsciously decided if I am supposed to fail I might as well go ahead and stop. Obviously flawed logic but surprisingly effective in making me stop. This brings me back to the idea of pressure and expectations. I am not sure what I think about the idea that all stress or pressure is negative. Sometimes I need pressure and expectations or else I accomplish nothing. But too much pressure is definitely not a a good thing. The past two days I have enjoyed waking up in the morning and knitting a little. My scarf is coming along and is about two feet long, maybe a little less. I wonder if setting goals is a bad thing? Or maybe it is just that setting goals is fine as long as you are ok with not achieving your goal but getting closer to it. I have often gone the other direction and resist setting any goals because I do not like it when I do not achieve my goal. I like to just try and see what happens without setting specific goals. But then do I accomplish less because I am not "aiming high". I don't know. I guess the real question is what does success look like to me versus what others think success looks like. Am I ok with personal success rather than what is judged to be success by others.

Pairing Knitting with Hot Tea

Yesterday I decided to pair knitting with my morning ritual of hot tea or coffee while sitting in my living room enjoying the sun coming up. I have been wondering what I could pair knitting with that would help me do it more consistently. I really enjoy the view from our living room that looks out to small rolling hills and green forest behind the intramural fields. I like to wake up and enjoy a few minutes of quiet in the living room with a warm cup of something. Knitting fits well with this because it is also calm and quiet and I can still enjoy the view and be still for a while and enjoy my hot tea. This week I will try this a few more times and see how it goes.

Introducing a new habit for someone like me who does not like to do the same thing twice is quite a challenge. I have been knitting a scarf that is coming along, now almost a foot long. But I have trouble consistently sitting down and relaxing through out the week. I have been thinking about the whole idea of pairing behaviors to increase the likely-hood that I will do it. However, I am not sure what I could pair knitting with? I do like to drink tea in the evening or morning when I wake up so maybe I could pair knitting with sitting down to enjoy a warm cup of tea? Or maybe I could pair knitting with listening to the radio. I tried pairing knitting with watching a movie but that was a no go because I could not look at the TV and pay attention to my knitting at the same time. I am not good enough to knit while looking at anything else yet. I am sure I will get better and knitting will become automatic muscle memory at some point, but for now it requires too much concentration for me to do much else besides sit and think.

Blame Baby

This week my knitting fell to the way side. I blame baby who I sometimes call fetus to the dismay of my family. Some how they think calling a baby "fetus" is gross or something. I think it is funny and it makes me laugh so I continue despite the odd looks. This week has been a strange one. I know that by now it should have already sunk in that I am about to meet my child and be a parent but it has not until this week. I have been avoiding knitting because when I knit I sit and think about all kinds of things. Sometimes fun things, deep things, stupid things, meaningful things, memories, and on and on it goes. This week I was stuck on the idea that I am about to be a parent. Holy shit! and I did not want to think about it too hard an freak myself out so I avoided knitting. Not that it helped me abstain from thinking about parenthood. When I think about what kind of life I want for me I am pretty happy with how things are. I have enough meaningful work, enough people I love and that love me, and enough struggles to keep me grounded about my limitations. I get freaked out with the idea of how to impart to my child what matters most in life. When I think about this class on change and I think about the journey my life has been, the ups and downs, and all the in between, I think about how to empower my child to believe they can change things in their life for the better. I look around and see many unhappy people and I refuse to accept that life has to be this way. I want life to be more for me and for my children. I am in no way under the illusion that life is all peaches. I am unfortunately well acquainted with pain. I think it is only because of some of my deepest valleys that I am determined for those things to not define my life. How do some people decide to defy their bad experiences and others decide to be defeated by them. I know it is not really a choice that is consciously made but more of an unconscious inner attitude. So what about change? How do some people make changes and other people stay stuck their whole lives in the same pattern. Everyone says they want to change and don't like the patterns but instead of changing they self medicate to avoid thinking about the problem. Ok I know I am speaking in sweeping generalizations and should not so let me speak of the people I know, my family. My mom has a mental illness that she has struggled with most of my life. She does not seek to get the help, treatment, what ever you want to call it, to manage her illness so she copes very poorly with her illness and it makes life very hard for her. There is a lot she could do to live a better life but she does not do any of it. I have always wondered what makes her not get help. I know we have been learning about physiology and all that but what about when a person does not believe they deserve to live a better life? Then we are talking about deeper issues of self worth. and sleep and exercise will only get a person so far. Though undoubtedly a person feels better about themselves when they are sleeping and exercising. So I am in a stage where I am about to have my first child and it is making me reflect on a lot of things about my parents and the kind of parent I hope to be. Though the reality is I can only be me what ever that looks like. I don't want my child or children to settle for a crappy life. Maybe I am too idealistic but It makes me sad to see my mom still struggling an no further along. I want so much more for her but it will only change if she wants it for herself. Well that all has nothing to do with knitting but it is what I think about when I knit. Here is a pic of my latest progress. Don't laugh too much at my prego belly ; )

Slow and Steady

This week I realized small increments of knitting, say 20 minutes at a time, are more likely to happen than long periods of time like I originally thought. At first my lofty goal was one hour three times a day to sit down and unwind. This is proving to be unrealistic. Mainly because my internal dialogue says "you don't have an hour right now" so I end up never sitting down at all. My solution this week has been to forgo the attempt at a whole hour and try smaller increments more frequently. So far so good, even though it has only been two days. I have already found it easier to sit down and knit for 20 to 30 minutes as a study break or reading break in the evenings. This helps break up studying, because who likes to study/read for 4 hours straight anyways.

Knitting and talking is harder than it looks

This week my scarf has grown two inches. It is a slow process OK. As of now I cannot knit and talk at the same time because I am still absorbed into every stitch. Amazing how easy it is to mess up one of those little suckers. All it takes is me looking away for a second and pretending like I can actually knit without staring intently at every move. Well, I am getting better in the sense that I am getting faster and my hand positioning is coming more easily. All sarcasm aside. I still cannot knit and do anything else. My husband tries to talk to me while I am sitting in the living room and this is how the conversation goes: Husand "blah blah blah blah blah". Me "where your talking?". I have never been able to do two things at once, and in fact do not think anyone is good at it they are just rapidly switching from one thing to the other. That aside, I am sometimes amazed how knitting sucks in all my attention and I look up and suddenly realize an hour has gone by and I was unaware of anything around me. I enjoy this in a simple kind of way. Meaning that there is so much distraction around me that it is nice to have some focused time with no interruption, just sitting in my living room listening to faint music focused in knitting. Sounds kind of strange maybe but it is oddly enjoyable. Maybe because I am at the stage in my pregnancy where exerting energy is more and more challenging? Maybe because I just need more calm in my life? My husband says it is because I am an "old soul", whatever that means.

Knitting continued

This is me trying to decipher the knitting jargon. I just gave up reading and tried to follow the pictures. What the heck is a skeine anyways? Well I have officially started my first knitting project. A scarf. How hard can it be? I am sure it will at least kind of look like a scarf when I am done. I have been enjoying the beginning of my project even though I am amazingly slow and wish other could see me curse and make faces as try to mast the hand positions. My eye finger coordination is surprisingly terrible. Who knew there was such a thing. It must use a part of my brain that has atrophied. Here are some more pics of my progress, or lack of.

Knitting is fun?

I decided that making something with my hands is more up my alley as far as fun things to do for a hobby. That way I can have a finished product to be semi-proud of,... maybe. I feel like I accomplished something when I physically make something. So this week I got knitting needles. Way back when I was in high school I learned to knit. Let's just say if the memory of how to knit is still in my brain somewhere it is doing a stellar job of hiding from me. I cannot remember jack !@#$* about how to start. So I am in the process of watching "how to" video's on the internet to figure out knitting. No luck thus far in terms of starting but I did decide to start with something simple. My mother in law is from New York and I am going to make her a scarf for the winter. Of course I won't tell her until it is done just in case it looks like a triangle of some kind. And guess what, I can knit anywhere, even outside. This mobile hobby is sounding better and better. I am excited to go sit out by my new found lake and try knitting. Do I have to dress like an old lady to pull this off? One of the perks of being prego is you don't have energy to care about what people think.

First failed attempt

Ok so maybe drawing is not my thing. I tried twice this week to sit down and relax and draw or color. I know I am far from being good at artistic things like drawing but I enjoy art classes when someone is telling me how to do it. I guess I forgot that on my own I just sit there and stare at the paper wondering what to do? Well, I like to color so I will still try that on occasion but I am putting drawing back on the shelf for now unless I can find an art class. I need something more constructive, like building something with my hands. I was looking up hobbies on pintrest and found this guy who glues toothpicks together and makes these elaborate structures like the entire city of New York, or the London Bridge. Very impressive. Well that won't me by any means, but it gave me an idea to try my hand and making something. I did do something fun this weekend but it was not really a hobby. I found some trails through the woods around my place that go around this small man made lake. Very pretty and enjoyable. I love being outside it is very calming. What kind of hobby can a person do outside that is not too active, since my tummy is growing by inches with baby Farnham as we speak? Bird watching? No way, I too ADHD for that. Can walking be a hobby, after all it is an Olympic sport. Once again this brings me back to drawing or painting because I could sit out in the woods and enjoy nature. This could be promising. But don't expect me to show anyone my artistic endeavors.

Has it come to this?

Yes, it has come to forcing myself to have fun. I have set a goal of doing "something fun" three times a week for an hour. How sad that it has come to this. Fun is such a natural thing when you are young. Everything I did when I was little seemed fun and if it wasn't I stopped doing. Now, I seem to has lost some of that. Don't get me wrong, I love to laugh and I do it frequently. However, I have gotten a little lost over the last three or four years being in graduate school. So this semester I am on a mission to have fun. What is the point of doing things if you do not like them. Now, before anyone chimes in and gives me the cliche "life is full of doing things that your just have to do like paying bills" let me clarify what I am talking about. I am quite aware that there are responsibilities like paying bills, filing taxes, taking out the trash, doing dishes etc... that may not be fun but are necessary parts of life. This is not what I am talking about. I have no problem sucking it up and doing the things that have to get done. I am speaking more to hobbies, interests, leisure time, and things you do when you are not working. In America it seems like we live to work but I grew up in Europe where they work so they can live and do the things they like. I have nothing against a hard days work, in fact I think it is good for you. However, I do have something against my life being consumed with work. I want to do things that are life giving, rejuvenating, and just plain fun. With all that said, what fun thing should I do this week? I know that I love team sports and activities of that nature, however, I am a week away from being 8 months pregnant so those fun things are out of the question for now. I also love to make things and use some creativity so I will try my hand at some kind of craft this week. I will pick one out tomorrow and see how it goes this weekend.