Quarter of a Century

For my birthday on Friday Mr Kiwi asked me what I wanted to do for the day. He is very big on the importance of birthdays, so I got to choose whatever I wanted to do all day. I had some things I wanted to do that were pretty important. Such as taking 5 more minutes in the shower, taking my time putting on make-up, actually putting on lotion for the first time in a month, doing my hair, and getting out of the house. And I got them all accomplished, thanks to Mr Kiwi's help in watching after Little Kiwi while I indulged.

The first thing we did while getting out of the house was to go to Article Pract. I had never been to this yarn store before, and had been meaning to since very many of the people I knit with love this place. Finally, I have a chance to go. I must have looked at every ball of yarn they had in the entire store, and I'm sure I spent a good 15 minutes in front of the books section. I had a "birthday budget" that I got to spend, and I was looking for some good knitting books since I already have enough stash to last me a while. My stash will certainly also last longer now that I am knitting much slower than I used to. I picked up the recent issue of knitscene, Knit So Fine, and Fitted Knits. I had considered picking a project from one of the books and buying the yarn then, but I was pushing my budget, we were running out of time for an appointment, and I needed some time to plan, so I skipped the yarn and off we went to a nearby cafe for a quick lunch. Since then, I have also found a number of patterns I am excited to start and are queued up in Ravelry, since I surprisingly have enough yarn in my stash to work on 3 sweaters out of the books.

After lunch at 3pm, we arrived at Brushstrokes Sudio. One thing I knew I wanted for Little Kiwi was imprints of her hands and feet so we can always look back and have something physical to show how small she used to be. We decided to get some extra pieces and give them to grandparents for Christmas gifts. Little Kiwi was not thrilled to have her hands and feet smushed into the clay and screamed almost the whole time. She did well with the first hand print, but she was also so kind to spit up on that clay piece the moment we pressed her hand on it. Lucky for Mr Kiwi, he was filming. Not so lucky for Little Kiwi, he was filming. I'll post pictures of this event (not the spitting up) when we go back in 3 weeks to paint the fired pieces.

Before dinner, we stopped at OSH to pick up 2 containers of ladybugs. I'll write a second post for them because it may get long.
We had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant in Berkeley (where strangely one of the bussers recognized us from the cafe I knit at on Wednesdays, where he also works). Little Kiwi was pleasantly quiet the whole time, and while she cried in the car all the way home, it was very nice to have a peaceful dinner away from home.