Photos from my lost time

Wow. Did those three months ever go by quickly.

I got involved in a project that picked up momentum and just drove by, we're almost at the end of a really busy start up of The Rail Garden.  We started with a Community Meeting:

 

Then we realized we needed to generate some start up money and good will so we hosted a Community Dinner. Four women, three wagons and one smartphone later we hosted dinner for our neighbourhood. One hundred and twenty of our neighbours came and broke bread together. It was a beautiful thing.

 

It was important for us to try and give back to the community as quickly as we could after the support we got at the community dinner so Carly, one of our committee members, ran the first free community event. Art in the Garden. We invited the children of our 'hood to come and paint shapes to take back the chainlink fence. It was amazing to see them join in. 

To break ground on Earth Day was our goal and so we did. Almost 200 friends and neighbours joined us throughout the day to help us dig our first 10 allotment gardens and enjoy the barbecue at the end of the day. It was cathartic and energizing to come together and see our permanent gardens get built.

Of course we didn't finish work that day so we worked until we finished them. By we, I mean neighbours, friends, family, gardeners and their children showed up week after week to help us finish the beds, build a shed and composter. Our community is as invested as we are. It is inspiring. I have been working slowly on putting this piece together over weeks with minutes stolen during naptime, between meetings and gardening. Since the last work bee we've had kids from the local schools plant the community beds - tomatoes, herbs, strawberry beds and pollinator gardens. It fills me gratitude to have been part of this project on my maternity leave.

Fenner wanders through our house and neighbourhood singing "With My Own Two Hands" and it has been by the luxury of my maternity leave that I've been able to show her what that looks like in real life. I hadn't even heard this song until she started singing it.

People, it's a beautiful thing to make things grow with our own two hands. 

I knit, therefore I am present.

Oh man, I am procrastinating hard core right now.  Some knits I've finished in the last few weeks.  Completely finished.

Classic Tomten. This is a great lesson in how superwash wool is shitastic when knit in a loose gauge in garter.  It is enormous and growing by the minute that Fenner wears it. 

Live and learn.

A dreamy classic Noro striped scarf for a close friend's birthday. I knit him a scarf every year for his birthday in Mid March. Not only does he get a scarf but it guarantees that temperatures will soar to the mid twenties for a week before and after his birthday.

And, finally, out of left over Cascade 220. An Aviatrix for Marlowe - gauge gone wrong. I forgot that Cascade 220 is closer to a DK than a worsted and should have made a bigger size.  No matter she out grew it anyway.

My knitting and writing had been going so well in 2012. A result, I believe, of list writing on Sunday's. Well the last few weeks (I think six) have gotten away from me.  There are a couple of personal project I have on the go that have been taking up a little more bandwidth that I thought they would.

One of which is starting a new community garden in my neighbourhood. I will be writing about this more extensively next week.

Old Man River

Dear Dad,

It's 3:45 am the morning after your birthday. Everyone in the house is asleep except for me because I actually slept last night and, well, you know how it goes. 

I think I spoke with you twice today looking for Mom to sort some stuff out and totally forgot what day it was.  To be honest, for some reason I think it's March 3rd which would be great because it would mean I didn't totally miss your birthday.

Holy Hell. I just checked the date on the computer and TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY!! I'm up super early on your birthday SO I DIDN'T MISS IT AFTER ALL.

I can't believe I get to start the day with such a great sense of victory.

These are some of my favourite Dad moments of last year.

We are solving all of the family problems and preventing future problems.  BECAUSE WE ARE AMAZING and also, our noses give us super powers.  Little known fact.

The quiet times and moments of focus you have with my daughters are what make you such a great grandfather.  Girls need more men like you in their lives to take them on adventures around the bay, to take them on special fishing adventures and to challenge them to rise up on their own to take on the big world.

 

Luckily you still embody the 'craggy old fart' aura pretty professionally.

Love Jen

Affairs of the Heart

Shitballs! I've been killing the blogging regularity until this month.

It's time I was honest with you.  I've been keeping secrets. Big ones. Secrets about who I've been hanging out with and how awesome it's been.  We've tried to feel terrible about our time together but the reality is, we're all really amazing, smart, witty and charming people who were getting together for a common cause.

My sister Liz is having a baby.  This baby is going to be absolutely fantastic.  I am just dying to meet the little person that Liz has been diligently making for months.

My excitement about having another little bean is almost outweighing my absolutely inappropriate jealousy at how gorgeous Liz is looking.  She looks just perfect.

I was deeply concerned at my ability to knit the baby's weight in wool given my own hijacked schedule so I asked Nat and Steph to give me a quick how to on the beautiful community blanket that my coven at Lettuce Knit put together for me.

The wool: Cascade 220 in their natural colourways. My sister is an environmentally minded woman who helps write policy for water sustainability. If we are drinking freshwater in 30 years we might take a minute to thank her.

 I organized 2 big stitch and bitch sessions and a number of smaller sessions to blitz this puppy. Almost everyone I could stalk knit on this blanket.  Aunts, and Friends.

 Cousins and Mothers.

 Cousins in town for a shopping trip came by, learned how to knit and then knit on the blanket.

 Together we made a beautiful blanket to wrap your beautiful bean in.

I'm sorry Liz. It was a lot of fun.  The people who love you are really lovely and it was just impossible not to enjoy each other's company. 

The border was put on and cast off the morning of the baby shower so I didn't quite make the deadline but the ends have been woven and our blanket is having a little bath today.  I can't think of a nicer person to have so many people knitting a welcome for.

And now that the whole torrid affair is out of the closet I'll be able to trust myself in this space again.

The scene of the party.

Photo credit Kristan Hendriks

Green is the colour of hope Springing

Last week a bunch of the kids and their keepers headed to the local Greenhouse to get a bit of green in our eyes.  It's big enough to feel comfortable with 8 kids at different ages but small enough to know that none of them could make a great escape.

Though they tried:

 

I think we all felt refreshed seeing plants looking green and lush.  It was easy on our eyes.

 

For some reason I chose this setting to fool around with my camera settings.  I had been meaning to play with black and white for a bit and decided this excursion was the time.


We have collected a nice group of super charming and fun kids in our neighbourhood and it is fun to try and capture them in their rare moments of stillness.

 

 Those curls are hard to let go of.

  

Our charming Peter Pan trying to corral the ladies.

 It was a lovely morning spent in the Garden of Good and Evil.

 

Family Day

This past week has come and gone like a flash.  Family day weekend was filled with performing and family, exactly as it should have been I suppose.  J started the weekend with improve then we middled the weekend with stand up.  The finale was our monthly Urban Family Brunch, a fantastic event filled with our friends, caesars and eggs. Delicious.

I feel like J and I have eaten at the buffet of family weekend.

Family day, we took it slow and easy and decided to go geocaching in our neighbourhood.  We needed something easy and local to do. This hit the spot!

Our friend Joyce had mentioned that she thought their might have been a geocache in our local park while we were tobagganing the weekend before.  So Jason thought it might be fun to find it.

Digest that for a moment while looking at this picture.

It was a beautiful warm Spring day, in February!

Since I'm working on some secret projects I can't show you quite yet I'm going to take this opportunity to showcase my first handspun, hand dyed toque.  I may have written about it before but it was after Fenner was born so I can't really remember.

Jason carried Marlowe so I got to take a ton of pictures.  I love a man who sprouts a third nipple so attractively while exploring his neighbourhood. This was the first day of a week exploring the theme of community.

I'm heading out of town tomorrow morning so I'm hoping to write more of the week's adventures while I'm up north with Marlowe on a knitting retreat.  I'm packing my snowshoes in hopes that I might get some outside time..