I have a bowl on my dining table that has very interesting reflections in it.

Leaves in a pinnacle, reaching towards the sun

With a lot of help from the knitting shop, it’s done! The neck band wasn’t as bad as I thought – it went pretty quick. It took longer to dry from blocking than to do the neck- and armbands. As you can see, I decided to knit a little flower for the waist. The pattern calls for threading a thin ribbon through the eyelet holes, but since I messed up the pattern, and there are no holes, the flower will do.

The back has a button closure with a real shell button. Ain’t it fancy?
I bought a onesie to go underneath, in case it fits her before it gets warm. It has cute little pink flowers to match. Aw.

On an optimistic note, I have a new project on the horizon with the below yarn. The yarn came from my grandmother’s stash, and is handmade from West Virginia at Greenbrier Art Colony. Cool. I’m going to be knitting a lace scarf.

So I decided to make bread today. Last time, the dough hardly rose. But this time, lovely, poofy, doubled-in-size dough. Punching the dough down is my favorite part.

Hey, and the loaves rose, too!

Nice crusty bread. White bread on the left, cinnamon swirl on the right. Yum!

Well, it is a pile of lettuce between two buns, but there is also a burger in there, somewhere. This is how my husband eats a burger. There is literally half a head of lettuce on this thing. It was so amazing that I had to take a picture of it to share with you. I mean, that’s a good four inches of lettuce there! I don’t eat that much on a salad!

See? Burger.

Synopsis: Martine’s life turns upside down when her parents die in a house fire. She is sent to live with her grandmother (a person she did not know existed) on a game reserve in South Africa. Martine immediately falls in love with the wildlife and countryside, but maintains a stiff relationship with her grandmother. Things get mysterious when she learns she has “the gift” – what it is, she’s not sure, but it somehow seems connected to the white giraffe she spots in the game reserve.

Rating: Good in parts; overall, enh.

Opinion (SPOILER ALERT!): I was much more interested in the story for the first half of the book. It petered off after that – even though the action picked up in the last half. Martine is a likable character, but her gift, which turns out to be a gift of healing magically, seems out of place in a story otherwise firmly placed in modern society. Likewise, her destiny that she be reunited with the giraffe (at the cost of her parents’ lives) just doesn’t seem to work with the realism in the rest of the story. I’m not sure why these magical elements don’t seem to fit, unless it’s that the other parts of the story, like the scenes at school, are so very realistic and familiar to the reader, that it’s like trying to mix oil and water.

At times, the writing seemed trite and unrealistic. Near the end, Martine frees the white giraffe (named Jemmy) from a ship in the Cape Town harbor, and on the way out, knocks down Alex, the game warden, who has been involved in a conspiracy to capture Jemmy. Then, Martine rides Jemmy triumphantly back from Cape Town to the game reserve, and sees Alex being arrested. How did he get from Cape Town to the game reserve (a two hour trip)? Why wouldn’t he have been arrested in Cape Town? There is no explanation. Martine’s triumphant ride home is complete with crowds chanting her name and a rainbow over her house.

There were interesting parts to the book, including the parts about wildlife in South Africa, and Martine herself, but overall, I came away with a dissatisfied feeling. Perhaps the target age (9-12) won’t be so discerning.

Here you see a dress in progress for my little niece. The only thing left to knit is the neck band and arm bands, for which I am going to have to consult someone more knowledgeable. The instructions are a little confusing. Especially for a book called Baby Knits for Beginners. When I knit the eyelet row (you can see it in the photo here), I didn’t understand the instruction “k2tog, yf, skpo.” It was the yarn forward that threw me. I was doing it all wrong, and while writing this post, I just discovered that they fully explain it on page 79 in another pattern. The only place they note this in the pattern for the dress is in the little blurb at the beginning of the dress pattern that describes the dress. I skipped it because, at first glance, it doesn’t seem to have any important information. Augh. That’s my gripe about this pattern. I didn’t have too much of a problem with anything else, except that my gauge was off vertically, but not horizontally. I have too many rows but the right amount of stitches. I really want to know how that happens!

Pattern: dress with eyelets, p 116
Baby Knits for Beginners by Debbie Bliss

Synopsis: Franklin Delano Donuthead (yes, that really is his name) is afraid of everything. He doesn’t see it that way – he just sees it as avoiding unnecessary risk. Franklin could quote you risk factors for engaging in practically anything (painting outdoors on a metal ladder near the power lines: high risk of electrocution), but when he meets Sarah Kervick in 5th grade, his life begins to turn upside down. Sarah is far from Franklin’s high sanitary standards, and yet they end up friends. By the end of the first book, Donuthead, Franklin begins to suspect that maybe his way of living in fear of everything isn’t the best. By the end of the second book, Donutheart, Franklin finds himself doing things he never would have considered the year before.

Rating: Both excellent.

Opinion: Franklin is wonderful. He is so exact in his language (especially for a 5th and 6th grader), so fastidious, and yet very warm-hearted and loyal. He is hilarious, though he doesn’t realize it.

My story takes a decidedly dangerous turn on the morning of our
visit to Happy Cattle Dairy Farm. Needless to say, I always position
myself just in back of the bus driver to take advantage of the extra
protection offered by the plastic barrier located behind her head.
Originally intended to shield the bus driver from spitballs, it might
hold the weight of my body in a minor impact situation.
(Donuthead p. 9)

I loved the humor in the writing – I really did laugh out loud at some of the passages. I was also on the edge of my seat about Sarah. The real drama in the story is about Sarah and her home life. I liked the juxtaposition between Sarah’s real problems and Franklin’s self-perceived ones – we see everything through Franklin, since he is the narrator, but the reader can clearly see the difference between Sarah’s problems and Franklin’s. Both these books would be great for 4th or 5th graders of most reading levels – they’re easy enough to comprehend the basic story, but the story also has depth for more advanced readers. I hope that there are more Donuthead books to come!

Synopsis: Lucky Trimble is a curious, independent child who is in the guardianship of her father’s first wife, Brigitte. Brigitte is French and came to California to be her temporary guardian, and Lucky is afraid she will move back to France and Lucky will have to go to an orphanage. The story follows Lucky as she strives to find her Higher Power (Lucky eavesdrops on AA meetings and other twelve-step programs at her job of cleaning up at Hard Pan’s Found Object Wind Chime Musem), even though she’s not really sure what that is, exactly. Miles, her five-year-old friend, and Lincoln, a classmate and future president (if you ask his mother), come along for some of her adventures.

Rating: Very good

Opinion: This book won the Newbery, so I expected a great book. I was a tad bit disappointed for this reason: I put the book down about half-way through to read something else, and it took me a long time to pick it back up again. I wasn’t even sure I was going to finish it. To me, that says that the book wasn’t gripping. However, it was a very well-written book, even if it wasn’t a thrilling page-turner. Lucky is so accurately drawn as a child. She hears a few things, sees Brigitte’s passport in a suitcase, and jumps to the conclusion that Brigitte is leaving her to move back to France. With her world tumbling down around her, Lucky comes up with a grand plan to keep Brigitte with her: she plans to run away, which will make Brigitte realize that she wants to keep Lucky. That thinking – that logic – is spot-on for a child. I remember thinking similar things as a child, and I wasn’t even an orphan, like Lucky is.

Now, to weigh in on the Great Scrotum Debate, oh joy! Having read the book from cover to cover, I really think that there is more controversy than there needs to be. See, on the first page of the book is the word scrotum. Not a word you hear in everyday conversation, I’ll grant you, but Lucky overhears this word and wonders what it means. It’s not even talking about a man’s scrotum – it’s a dog’s. It comes up again at the end of the book when Lucky asks Brigitte what it means, and she explains it in very straightforward terms. And that’s it. It’s not the central theme of the book, nor does it go into raunchy terms inappropriate for the book’s readership. This is essentially a book about a child who needs to be loved and to be taken care of, and it’s a shame that a single word overshadows what is good about this book.