I have more ideas than time.  But seeing as I’m expecting a new son in late April, I’ve been keeping an eye out for cute, plain baby boy clothes.  I’m just not feeling all the hot colors this year.  Never did like really bright stuff, so I’m having a hard time with the neon pinks and yellows and blues this year.

I found a darling little sweater at The Childrens Place a few weeks ago.  They had matching hats, but I didn’t get one, and then when I came back they were out of them.  So I went on a quest to find a knitting pattern for the seemingly-simple design on this sweater that I could use for a hat.  I’ve got the cable pattern, but just needed directions for the twiggy design.

The name of the sweater on the Childrens Place website was “pointelle.”  But this seems to be more picturesque than an accurate description of the pattern.  Pointelle seems to refer to open-work knit designs, which this isn’t.

I was pretty sure it was a pattern I’d seen before, but trying to figure out what it might be named was challenging.  I spent an afternoon googling likely names, like vine, tree, trellis, branches, etc… with no luck.  There was a similar-looking but not symmetrical pattern in one of my books called “twigs.”  I don’t know where they got the names, but apparently they are not standard.

Then I stumbled upon the exact pattern as part of an aran sweater pattern in one of my knitting books.  They called it “tree of life.”  But googling that came up with all sorts of other patterns, but not this one.

At least I determined that it is an aran design, and have some basic directions for it.  I can probably figure out some way to apply it to a hat pattern.  The challenge will be figuring out the gauge and how many panels of this pattern alternated with the cable I can get onto a baby hat in the size I need.  I’m thinking of just making a beanie style hat right now.  I’m not sure how I’ll do the decreasing at the top of the hat and maintain the cable patterns.

Now to just figure it all out and find the time to do it.  That will be most of the challenge.

I set out to make some felt Christmas stockings embroidered with snowflakes this year.  I didn’t finish them by Christmas.  I got as far as getting the snowflakes embroidered on one side of the felt for four stockings.  The other side, which I also planned to decorate, has not been finished yet.  I did draw the snowflakes on in chalk to sew over, though.  It rubs off the felt pretty easily and keeps me from going astray as far as positioning them.

We got a tree this year.  A small noble fir.  It smelled great.  It was about 5′ tall, which seemed like a great size for our apartment.  The tree was decorated with faux birds and tinsel and pink and white lights this year.  I kept the breakable ornaments hidden away this year.  Sure enough, my 2-year-old spent many an hour redecorating the tree.  The faux birds didn’t look as subtle as I hoped.  Many of them were bright, garish colors to start with.  I added a few pine cones later.  I didn’t do much decorating other than the tree this year.

We went to my folks for Christmas dinner.  Steaks – my favorite.  My dad even grilled outside.  Omar got into a bowl of chocolates.  We have been keeping him ignorant of sweets pretty well up until now.  He did not learn of cookies this year (he thinks cheese-flavored fish crackers are cookies).  They were on the table.  He didn’t reach for or ask for any.  He was already aware of pie, but only took a few bites and then went off to play.

I don’t make pie much anymore since my husband isn’t a fan.  But I did for Thanks giving and Christmas this year.  For Thanksgiving a tried an apple-cranberry-current pie from Sunset magazine.  Usually find winners there.  This one didn’t turn out so good.  First it called for soaking dried currents in brandy, but then it said to add all the soaking liquid to the pie!  This sounded wrong to me, but I did it anyway.  Sure enough, the pie was too runny and the bottom crust was so soggy it tasted raw.  The overall flavor of the pie was good, though.  The brandy definitely added some tang to the apples, but I’m not sure I’ll make this again  as a pie.  I might use the filling recipe with some kind of steusel topping, though – something where it wouldn’t matter so much about the wateriness.

For Christmas I made a blackberry pie with cornmeal crust.  It was pretty good.  Pretty average for my berry pies as far as wateriness and taste.  I could have used a bit more corn starch.  The cornmeal crust was a new thing for me.  It tasted fine, but the cornmeal had some large chunks that stayed a bit too gritty after cooking for my taste.  I could probably find a finer cornmeal or try to sift out the big bits next time.

Omar has figured out how to get up onto the kitchen counters now.  He really wanted a muffin.  I told him he couldn’t have one.  He pushed one of his little chairs over to the kitchen counter and used his sticky little toes to scramble up the side of the cabinet and onto the counter where the muffins were.  Well, there’s no stopping him now.

He did it again last night and my husband saw him do it and freaked out.  He is scared that Omar is going to fall off the counter and break his neck.  So he took his little chairs and hid them.  I really don’t think this will stop him, though.  He’s going to find the chairs or use something else.  He already pushes his high chair up to the light switch so he can flip it on and off.

I cooked parsnips this weekend.  I decided to just go ahead and peel and dice all the parsnips from the garden.  Most of the recipes I wanted to try called for chopping them up, anyway.  I ended up with about 1.5 lbs of dice.

The first recipe I tried was Parsnip Muffins.  I wasn’t really sure if they would be good or not, but my 2-year-old was pining for muffins.  It turns out that they are pretty similar to zucchini bread muffins, but with just nutmeg for the spices and less oil.  I had to grate the parsnip for this recipe, which I did in the food processor since they were already diced.  The batter was pretty thick, and the recipe said it would make 12 muffins.  It filled each muffin cup up to the top, which made me kind of nervous, but they did not overflow.  They rose very nicely into perfect, tall pro-bakery-looking muffins! Mine never turn out that good!  The parsnips are slightly peppery and they tasted great with the nutmeg.  My son liked them.

The second recipe I tried was curry parsnip soup.  I had high hopes for this recipe.  I was really in the mood for a nice, creamy soup.  But it didn’t taste that great.  And it was not soupy!  It turned out to be the texture of mashed potatoes.  The curry flavor was pretty much the dominant flavor on top of the sweetness of the parsnips.  My husband hated it.  I wasn’t too wild about the strong curry flavor either.  I had a huge bowl full of it, so I decided to freeze most of it for a Thanksgiving side dish.  Even if I can’t get rid of it all at Thanksgiving, at least I’m hoping I won’t have too much of it left to take home.  And who knows – maybe somebody there will be into it.  My dad was really gung-ho about curry cornbread stuffing a few years ago.

That used up all the parsnips from our garden.  I’m kicking myself for not making a half-recipe of that curry “soup.”  Then I would have been able to try a different recipe.  I was torn between trying that curry one, or a different one that had paprika for the main spice.

Now I need to find some recipes to use up the six delicata squash I have.

I made three batches of crepes this weekend.  I have a little cookbook that is nothing but crepe recipes and I’ve been putting some mileage on it.

First I used up the last of the spinach from our garden to make some spinach crepes.  They were good.  The batter was pretty thick and green, but they cooked up a nice tan color.  They are thicker than a usual crepe.  They were good.  I didn’t know what to fill them with, though.  I may just eat them like bread.  The cookbook suggested something creamy for the filling, but creamy stuff doesn’t sound very appealing to me right now.

I also made dessert crepes.  I was not especially impressed with them by themselves.  I imagined they would be sweet, but they were not.  The batter was super thin, too.  It cooked up fast and got crispy around the edges.  They taste pretty similar to regular crepes too, just thinner.  There are some other “flavored” dessert crepe recipes in that book that I’ll try next time.  I filled these with another recipe from the book, flambed figs in brandy cream sauce.

The figs started out promising and my first attempt at igniting brandy was way less scary than I thought it was going to be.  The flames were not very tall.  I was afraid it was going to create some enormous fireball in my kitchen, but instead it was just a dull blue flame that danced around the pan for a minute and then died out.  Whew!  The sauce was tasting pretty good, and the last ingredient was cream.  That’s where it went south.  The cream really didn’t make it taste better to me.  In fact, it went from being a pinkish figgy and carmely sugar syrup to tasting like sweetened condensed milk.     Yuck!  If I make that again I’ll skip the cream.  The cream really ruined it for me, since I hate condensed milk.

I made a half-recipe of regular old crepes for breakfast the next day.  My two-year-old likes them with peanut butter.  “Want more crepe,” he kept saying, even though he’d only eaten half of it.

Omar was too tired to go trick-or-treating as he didn’t take a nap all day.  We got him into the dog costume, but he wouldn’t let me paint his face.  And he didn’t want to wear the hat with the ears.  We gook him to three houses and then gave up.  The first house he was fine.  The second house was playing some scary music and he didn’t want to wait around on the doorstep to get a piece of candy.  At the third house he wouldn’t even go up the steps.  So we walked around the block and looked at jack-o’ lanterns and then went home.  He didn’t even want to eat the candy. Maybe next year.

We cleaned out the community garden plot for the year.  Omar ate some of the last carrots while we worked.  We dug up the parsnips.  There are a lot of them.  Milad cursed the whole time, yet he has decided he still wants to do the garden again next year, because Omar likes it.  I was ready to give it up. I don’t want to do as many tomatoes and peppers.  My idea for next year is to fill the whole plot up with giant pumpkins or some other squash.  But probably we’ll do fava beans and carrots again.  Omar is really fond of the carrots.  And maybe spinach.  No doubt the chard will reseed itself as it has the last few years.

The summer was not hot enough for many of the tomatoes to ripen this year.  There were a lot of small green ones on the vines when we dug them out.

Now I need to think of some things to do with parsnips.  They seem like they might be one of those fussy vegetables like squash that need a lot of prep work to make anything out of.  Some of the parsnips are quite large and probably have woody cores.

Who says the 2’s are terrible?  Terribly cute?  Omar is talking up a storm now.  Last night he was watching “baxit ball”  with his dad.  Then we carved pumpkins.  He helped pick a face from a few that I drew on paper, and he tried to help sort the seeds from the pulp so that we could toast them later.

So later I was toasting the seeds and taking out the pan to stir them around.  Omar was watching.  He declared “I LOVE pumpkin seeds!”

“You do?” I said.  “Have you had them before?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you have them before?”  I have never given him any.

“On the floor,”  he said.

I gave him a toasted seed to try later, but he didn’t like it.  He chewed on it and spit it out.

Later he found an unopened box of sidewalk chalk.  I have to admit I’d bought it for him months before but then never gave it to him.  I’m fairly certain he hasn’t seen it before. The package is still in shrink wrap.

“Open this,”  said Omar.

“What’s in there?”  I asked.

“This in there,” he said, pointing to the chalks inside.

“What are they?”  I probed.

Omar looked stumped for a minute, then he said, “Roddins.”

“What?”

“Roddins in there.”

“Okay,” I said.  They are sort of rod-shaped, but I have know idea if that’s what he really meant.  He is pretty good about just making something up if he doesn’t know.

Anybody with student loans has probably had their loan sold and bought by various companies over the years.   During the last recession I consolidated mine at a nice low interest rate with College Loan Corp, who then sold it to ACS.  I’m not so happy with ACS’s customer service, though.  They make it really hard to make extra payments without “pre-paying” the account.  I haven’t had this much of a hassle with any of the other companies that have owned my student loans in past years.

So today I had to call customer service to figure out what was going on.  Apparently you have to send your check to one department, and even if you send payment instructions to apply the extra payment to principal and not advance the next payment due date (a.k.a. pre-paying the account) they will NOT do this.

I found out from ACS’s customer service that you have to send that kind of request to a separate customer service department.  Most of the other companies I’ve dealt with just have a box on their bill our coupon that you can check if you want to do this.   Much easier!  And no other company has blatantly disregarded payment instructions that were enclosed with the check like ACS does.

I was hoping to make at least one extra payment on my loan each month, but boy is it going to be a pain.  I’ll have to notify their customer service each time I make an extra payment.  It could be easier, but I doubt they want it to be.  Obviously they want to collect as much interest as they can from these loans. Anyway, I complained to a supervisor about it.   Not sure if there is anything I can do about having ACS hold my student loan.  I wish some other company owned it.