A Bluestocking Knits

Every time that David goes on one of these business trips, I feel an increasing respect for single parents.  It is not something that I would like to attempt on a regular basis.  We are now halfway through this trip, and it’s been hectic, to say the least.  A sampling —

— Potty training.  Still.  Enough said.

— When the milkman brought our delivery at the beginning of the week, three of the six cartons had a bottom corner bashed in.  I didn’t have enough large containers to decant it, so our milk is in various Tupperware boxes in the fridge.  I kept getting distracted from hosing off the porch ("Mommy!!"), so I’m afraid the puddle is still there, bar a watering-can rinse when I actually did remember to water the houseplants yesterday.

— The phone has been ringing off the hook with special-election recordings, including one from The Big Guy himself.  Thank heavens it’s over now.

— I spent probably the most panicked fifteen minutes of my life at Laura’s school the other day, when I turned around in the crush outside the kindergarten classrooms after school and Julia was gone.  I looked in the most obvious places, then the not-so-obvious ones, then the mom I’d been talking with (about sex offenders, unfortunately) started looking with me, in ever-larger circles around the spot I’d last seen Julia, and fifteen minutes later had at least three other moms, two teachers, and a veritable army of kids looking.  By that time, of course, the worst possible things were going through my mind.  I don’t usually panic easily, but this was awfully close — so many people were milling about, anyone could have snatched her and been a mile away already.  The utter relief I felt when I saw Laura’s teacher coming up the sidewalk with Julia howling in her arms was indescribable.  (She’d just wandered off on her own, apparently, all of the way to the corner.  Didn’t want to tell me what she’d done, so I think she knew she’d worried us.)

— Laura then came down with some kind of bug, up half the night coughing, then throwing up the next day, possibly from coughing so hard.  She lay on the couch literally all day, grey shadows under her eyes, watching "Barney" and "Sesame Street" listlessly.

— The house is a mess.  It seems like the more housework I do, the more there is to do, which goes against all the laws of physics I’ve ever heard of.

But knitting, that’s what I was supposed to be talking about.  The only good thing about Laura being sick is that since she wants me to sit with her most of the time, I’m getting an unexpected amount of knitting done.  I am working on a Christmas project, so won’t reveal details, except that I am learning something new with it, Meg Swansen’s "jogless jog" solution to the problem of that little hiccup at color changes in the round (here’s a step-by-step description from Judy Gibson).  This is a handy little trick, almost like magic.  The first few times I tried it looked more than a little obvious, but it is settling in nicely.  It seems to be inspired by the slip-stitch effect, which raises and stretches a single stitch to cover two rows, but here in the jogless jog does essentially the same thing without appearing to do so.  The new color becomes the old color, and the old stitch disguises the new one.  Ta-da!