Starting somewhere

Several people have suggested I write a blog, or asked if I'd thought about it, and the answer has always been a resounding, "No" -  in fact, I have always doubted there was anything new to say.

But what if I put together just the right combination of words and released them to the ether so they were put before a person who needed them, just when they were needed?  Well, I'd hate to miss that opportunity, so here goes...

I knit.  A lot.  It's a meditation sometimes; a form of defense other times; a way of playing solitaire so I can think about my next move.  By 'my next move', I mean, "How can I handle this latest crisis?"  The crisis usually involves behaviors, academic issues, or family dynamics that one might encounter in a family with a 13-year-old daughter who has Asperger's Syndrome and ADD, and an 11-year-old son who was prenatally exposed to methamphetamine and has Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), ADHD, and anxiety.

These are Second Round kids:  I have two older kids who are married and have families of their own.  I finally reached the brass ring in the husband department when they were 8 and 10, and by the time they were teens, Dearest and I decided we needed to have children together.  Into the foster system we bravely forged, without any sense of how it might really end up.  To be fair, it wasn't just us; we got these kiddos so young that no one could really know what we might face.  We were pretty naive, and I was definitely in an "I can save these children!" fantasy world.

Fast forward:  Girlie has been with us since just before her first birthday, and is 13 now.  Boyo has been with us since he was 6.5 months old, and is 11 now.  If our family was a brick wall, you would see more patching compound than brick, I think, because we have seen many, many cracks in the mortar that holds us together - BUT, we have not fallen.

In 2008, my oldest daughter madmaxmama and I decided to learn to knit, while she was pregnant with her second child.  Actually, we had both learned as young girls, but we both ended up decided we'd rather crochet than knit.  When we took it up again, though, we went at it with gusto, watching videos and consulting with each other and anyone else we could find.  I wouldn't consider either of us experts, but we have grown and gained a lot of experience, and I think both of us feel pretty accomplished as knitters.  Wouldn't it be great if we could grow as parents as quickly as we can improve our knitting skills?  For instance, in 2009, a few months after I started knitting, I wanted to dye my own self-striping yarn.  I found tutorials about dyeing with Kool-Aid  and my first go was successful!

Or was it?  No, in fact, it wasn't long after I started knitting a project with this yarn that I realized the colors were ridiculously bright and even if I were capable of knitting some fun striped socks at that point (which I wasn't; I didn't learn to knit socks until several months after this episode), it wasn't the best kind of yarn for socks.

Thankfully, I learned I could have another try.  A dye-over, if you want to put it that way (and I do, because I'm easily amused).  I bought more Kool-Aid, rewound the yarn into a loose hank, and put it back in the pot. This time, I got lucky, and ended up with beautiful fall leaf colors that turned into a cute little project bag:

If you're a knitter, you might have already learned that you may have chosen a yarn not well-suited to the project you had in mind.  Or colors that, on second thought, don't really work with your wardrobe or personality.  That's all right, though, because you can use the yarn to knit something else, or dye it, or or choose a different yarn to go with your pattern.  Raising kids can be like this, too.  If what you tried didn't give you the desired results, go back to the drawing board.  Even if your kids have the same syndrome/condition/behavior as the kids you read about, they are not the same kid.  Give yourself permission to try something different; a different way to praise them, a new way to start conversations, a way to let them know that no matter how much you love each other, you still have to work to get it right.