After 4 days of snow and freezing cold, it finally warmed again yesterday—a touch. It got into the low 40’s and rained all evening,whing away the majority of the snow. Now it’s in the mid 40’s and the snow and the rain are mostly gone just in time for the first annual Mystic St. Patrick’s Day Parade at 2pm this afternoon.
Friday we took off to the yarn shop as soon as the snow stopped coming down. Tammy has a marvelous way of finding patterns that have some rather odd methods and instructions in them, including her current sock proje’ct. She wanted to check with Lynn and Sina on this rather odd toe shaping technique. After a 20 minute walk down to the shop—guess who wanted to jump in every snow bank along the normally 5 minute walk—we stormed the shop.
It was fairly quiet, only a couple of regular local customers braving the snow, so we had plenty of time to chat. Johann did his usual show and tell session. Once for Lynn and once for Sina (who was making an order in the back during the first session). Tammy and Lynn worked on the problem pattern for a bit while Johann and I wandered the store picking out yarns from different countries, then different animals and finally different colors. In each case, we tried to name as many categories of yarn as we could. This is a game Johann really enjoys.
Johann spent some time on his own, investigating which yarns were the softest or scratchiest while Sina looked at the pattern with Tammy and Lynn and I talked about textiles and Johann. It is wonderful knowing he is so well behaved that we can give him such freedoms even in a very tempting store. He is always very careful with the yarns and needles only touching one skein at a time and being very careful not to unravel it.
It turned into a two plus hour visit, in which the ladies spent a good half hour determining that the pattern—though very poorly written and illustrated—was doing what Tammy though it was, much to her relief. All the way home we had snowball fights, made snow angels and in general, had a snowy good time. By the time we got back, we had been gone for about 3 hours!
Johann missed nap time completely, but still managed to hold out for a very extended book time before bed. We read every book that had anything to do with zoos, as well as a book about the history of printing. (More on that one sometime later).
We’ll see how the parade is…rumors estimate that there will be over 800 participants from all over the region. They are talking about it lasting one and a half to two hours.
2 hours with a not-quite-four-year-old in ANY store is a major feat of parenting!!!! But, then, I have always known y’all were exceptional parents and his nibs is the MOST exceptional child born in the last millenium! ;-) So - how WAS the parade?