quiet is my favorite

January 2021 has been quiet; the cold, cold weather has driven us mostly indoors.  It's not the temperature, but the scouring wind that we're avoiding.  No matter how I bundle my littles, they finish our outdoor time with red and raw hands.  We've been (ok, I've been) avoiding our Wednesday park play date because one of my children always falls into the creek and we have to leave early.  

This has been a selfish month for me.  I've listened to several audiobooks and finished several projects.  I've ignored the cleaning a little.  And the laundry.  And occasionally the people around me.  I'd really prefer to putter around the house all day long, laboring at my little self-appointed tasks and neglecting the things I should do but detest. How can I strike a balance between positive rest for myself and being self-oriented?  It was last year at this time, when I was having the same struggle, that a friend quoted C.S. Lewis:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.”

Oof.  It must be a January kind of feeling for me, then.  

The little house out back was coming along quite nicely until we decided that we needed to shift the toilet a foot to the left.  We've been awaiting the plumber's visit to make the final call about the possibility.  Other than that, the bedroom's wallboard is up, which is a huge step forward.

Little M and I have been reading Winnie the Pooh of an afternoon.  We had to stop for a few days when she broke her heart over Piglet's popped balloon.  She is the little Piglet of the family (although she will insist she's Kanga, because Kanga's a girl).  She felt so deeply Piglet's excitement at having a present for Eeyore and then the tragedy of him tripping and popping it, precisely because she does such things.  It's hard to be five-and-a-half.

I noticed, at the end of December, that I had four pairs of socks headed for retirement.  They'd been accidentally put through the wash at some point in their careers and never regained their shape and elasticity.  So, new socks for me!  I ordered several skeins of yarn: some quite inexpensive, some decadent.  I'm excited to share the socks that result, although one skein looks like it would rather be a shawl when it grows up.   The finished pair up above is this yarn, in the discontinued colorway Mermaid Mane, purchased ages ago.  The pattern is this free one, which had the perfect stockinette-to-pattern ratio: enough stockinette to be mindless, but enough pattern to keep me fro snoozing.  I knit the socks toe up, so the pattern stitch is upside down.   

Also pictured are the mittens that I started last year around this time.  They're enormous and felting in the washer as I type.  Hopefully they'll be just right, and dry by tomorrow morning so I can wear them in the snow!