Capitalization, Polygons, Diaper Pins, and an Aha! Moment
If you have met my oldest daughter, and seen her launch herself into the air repeatedly over discovering some happy thing, such as a friend sharing the same favorite color as she, you know that her life is full of drama. I now have a theory that this is why she has trouble with capitalization. What better way to acknowledge Importance and Joy than with a Capital Letter? So when she wrote the sentence “Jesus Saved us by Dying for our Sins on the Cross,” she was confused when I told her there were Too Many Capital Letters. I have tried to explain that Capitals belong to Proper Nouns, but still confusion reigns. So on her spelling test yesterday, she thought long and hard before capitalizing Passover and February. She ended up properly demoting Education to lowercase. The one that tripped her up? The word ‘Beehive’. Let me know if you figure that one out.
We finished the Shape Up book yesterday, learning about quadrilaterals and other polygons with up to 12 sides, using only graph paper, bread, pretzel sticks and our brains. The raspberry preserves had no educational value, just made the bread that much more pleasant to ingest (after we turned it into an octagon, of course).
In other news, the diaper pins arrived yesterday!! It took them just 17 days to arrive here (priority mail, mind you) from Montana. But now at least they are here, stuck in a bar of soap (this makes them slide into the cloth diaper more easily). I learned a snazzy new ‘origami’ diaper fold that looks like it will work well for newborns. And today in the mail I got the countoured foam diaper changing pad to turn the top of the dryer into a changing table. Ta-da! And I made diaper wipe solution and poured it over the cloth wipes all lined up nicely in the diaper wipe warmer, ready to be plugged in when I call the midwife. And my diaper pail liners got here today, too! So I think I am all ready, diaperwise. On to the rest of the baby preparation list!
My aha! moment occured last night while I was knitting. I have greatly perplexed myself repeatedly while trying to figure out proper left handed knitting technique that won’t twist my stitches. I had felt several times as though I were really close to figuring it all out, and Raquel had tried several times to help me brainstorm through it. I could discuss leading and trailing edge of the knit stitch, front and back loops, and open omegas. And I was still confused. But last night while I was knitting, all of a sudden I SAW it. How my stitches were coming off the needle, and why my stitches were twisting when I knit around in a ribbing (and not other times). It was all perfectly clear. Brilliantly simple. It is nice to know that as fuzzy headed as I have been lately, understanding will still sneak up on me occasionally. AHA!