A Bluestocking Knits

"Groundhog Day", by Julia

"The groundhog is down in the ground, sleeping."

"He is going to come up here.  He might see his shadow!"

"He's coming up, and if he sees his shadow, he's going to go 'Aaauugh!' and ..."

"go back down!"

"He's back down!  Winter is going to last six more weeks!"

Daisy, Daisy

I was amazed to realize this morning that I have not touched a pair of knitting needles for a week.

But Girl Scouts are starting up for the new school year, and as it happens I am going to be a Daisy leader this year.  Daisies are the newest level of Girl Scouting -- new since 1984, at least, after my time in Scouts -- they are in kindergarten or first grade, before Brownies, who are in 1st-3rd grades or ages 6-8.  Things are getting very busy for me now, organizing a brand-new troop, registering girls, planning crafts and actitivies, and wondering what I've gotten myself into!

I remember having mixed feelings about Scouts when I was a girl, but as happens so often as one gets older, sentiment tends to win out.  I remember feeling left out when my school's Junior troop folded and I had to go to another troop where the girls all knew each other at their school and were more than a little clique-ish in some cases.  I remember feeling utterly dismayed (and not a little disgusted) when we were doing the sewing badge and I went ahead and finished the pinafore top we were all making because I already knew how to sew, and the girl whose mom was in charge of the project got catty and said that I should have waited for everyone else -- my first experience with the bitchiness of preteen girls.  But I also remember laughing a lot, and singing, and washing my mess kit in a ditty bag (delightfully bizarre), and feeling very brave that I'd actually knocked on strangers' doors and sold them Girl Scout cookies, and the delight of sisterhood when I recognized one of those pinafore tops on another girl for years afterwards.

One of Laura's preschool teachers has been a Brownie leader for many years, and so Laura fell quite easily into that troop when she entered kindergarten -- a year earlier than usual for Brownies, but I've noticed that leaders can be very flexible!  Julia, I was pleased to find, decided that she wanted to do something different from her big sister, and wanted to be a Daisy.  I started looking for a troop, but since the Daisy level is only for a year, troops form and disband fairly quickly, and it soon became obvious that if Julia was to be a Daisy, mommy would have to put her own hand up a little higher.

I must add that while I am, I think, not your bra-burning-type feminist, I am very strongly convinced that girls still need more than a bit of extra encouragement in this world, and that while I am frequently something of a fencer-sitter on political issues, I am firmly in the women's-issues camp.  It's kind of weird to think of myself as a role model, but I seem to have found myself in that position almost without my realizing it, as a parent and now as a Girl Scout leader-to-be.  I've always thought that role models are more effective when not promoted as Role Models, anyway, by themselves or others, and so I'm hoping that my so-called parenting style will suit the small-l leadership style as well.

(I love that little Daisy patch!  The artwork reminds me a little of Lauren Child's, whose Charlie and Lola books are a favorite of ours.  I've bought the patches as a little present for the girls, a thank-you for being part of my first experience as a leader.)

Microscope

I've been thinking a lot about family history lately partly because I recently received a few things that had been my dad's.  He was a chemist -- with chemicals, not a British chemist, meaning pharmacy et al. -- and bought this Bausch & Lomb microscope for lab work when he was at the University of Kansas in the 1950s.

I remember many happy hours when I was a kid, peering through this 'scope, examining bits of colored paper, old soup, my own hairs plucked out by the roots, fascinated by the microscopic world writ large on a sliver of glass -- can't think why I was such a dud in science at school, but there you are.  Anyway, it's nice to have this as a fond memory of those hours, and of my dad.

Missed It By That Much

I didn't have these ready for Laura's first day of school -- got down to the toe shaping last night and decided that I'd rather sleep.  Had everything else ready -- backpacks, lunch boxes, new shoes, clothes laid out, even everything on Julia's kindergarten teacher's list (disinfectant wipes, fabric paint, scissors, 3-pack of T-shirts, etc. etc. etc.) -- so I don't feel too bad about the socks.  I have the flu, in fact, in the middle of a heat wave -- 106° F outside our front door yesterday, 41° C -- so I think I'm doing pretty well to at least be standing up!

So my littlest is a kindergartner.  I got a bit teary-eyed when the time came to say good-bye, although hid it well enough, I think, not to embarrass Julia.  She had fussed dreadfully the first few weeks in both of her years of pre-school, so that I was half-expecting a struggle today, but she and Laura skipped and ran much of the way to school, and after a little story-time from Miss B. -- who read The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn -- Julia ran over to give me a hug, refused a "kissing hand," and ran back to the circle of kids.  I even had time to wave to Laura as she danced gaily into her own classroom.

Now for that second toe!

Snow Day

An Heirloom

The heatwave cooled a bit this past weekend, and it has been a positively balmy 82 F/28 C or so -- cool enough to tackle the Fibber McGee closet in the front bedroom, our catchall-television room.  Among a great many other things, I found this, and thought I'd share a last Project Spectrum purple --

This rug was made by my grandmother -- she dated it "1947" along one edge.  She was an excellent seamstress -- one of my greatest regrets is that I did not ask her to teach me the arts of dressmaking -- and although I don't think she ever knitted, she did a lot of other crafts, including of course rug-hooking.

I love swirly acanthus-leaf-type decorations just about any time, but this delights me no end.  I love the colors, the swirls, the beautifully-modulated flowers in the center, the subtle color variations from the stripes (?) in the fabric that makes the lighter purple, and of course most of all the fact that my grandmother made it.  (Somewhere in the thousand or so Kodachrome slides I've got is a picture of this rug or one very much like it, at a long-ago holiday celebration, in front of the piano that I have now.)

I'm not quite sure what to do with the rug -- I hate to wrap it up again and put it away, but it is quite fragile around the edges.  Perhaps I could sew a new backing on it....