My Only Sunshine

We need help

So anyone who reads this blog knows Bitty.
She's my 6 year old.  This is her on the subway last week in NYC, with Flat Stanley.

Bitty, aka Bit, or Lovie, asked me to teach her to knit recently.  What knitting Momma doesn't look forward to that moment?  What Mommy of two artistic daughters doesn't dream of all of the fabulous things her lovely daughters will make for themselves as they turn the knitting world on it's ear?  One problem, she's a lefty.

Bitty is the only left handed person in our family and we celebrate it.  She is so different from the rest of the family in so many ways (look at the curly hair) and the left handedness just seems to embody all of her singular Bit-ness.  I'm right handed though, and I knit right handed.  I'm a "thrower" rather than a "picker" and though I have attempted to teach myself other ways of knitting (I taught myself to knit via books and the internet) I just haven't found anything that works as well for me as my tried and true.

That's where you come in.  Do I have any left handed knitters reading along here?  Does anyone have any place to point me so that I might find a good way of teaching her?  I'm so excited about having a knitting kid and I don't want to mess it up.  I want to turn her into someone who loves yarn with a deep passion as I do.  Please Help!

DI've got pics

So I've mentioned before about my DI team.  In early March we had our "competition".  We weren't really compared to others due to our age group but we were still geared towards our goal as if we would be.

My team was made up of 4 second graders, 2 first graders, and 2 kindergarteners.  That's a pretty wide age range when you are anywhere from 8 and a half down to just recently turned 5.  Things were rocky but very fun during the preparation but as we got closer to the actual day I started to worry.  I just wasn't really sure we would get it all done in time and be able to pull it off.  My worries about the kids' abilities were completely unfounded, they were GREAT!  Things weren't really what we were expecting at the performance site and I did not have myself together nearly as much as I wanted to but the kids were perfect.  They performed better the day of than they ever had before and when it was over the judges asked questions that were answered better than I could have coached them.

Here they are performing.  That's one of the judges in black.  Bones, standing up, is a paleontologist.  He and his fellow scientists, Kimberley and Houston, changed history by using a spray bottle filled from the waterfall to the left in the picture to bring the three dinosaurs crawling around on the floor back to life.  The orange triceratops is my Bitty.

These are our two museum curators who narrated how our dinosaurs came back to life.  That's Bug on the right.

After doing the skit we had put together we went on to do an Instant Challenge which is the portion where the kids go into a room and are given a problem to work together on just while they are in the room.  I can't tell you about the problem we were given because it's a secret but I can tell you that we were nominated for an award for our performance in the room.  That's pretty exciting.  The funny thing is that I expected the kids to do much better on the spontaneous portion than they did because we worked so hard on it.  I'm terribly amazingly proud of the fact that they got an award for how well they worked together.  That was my main goal with these 8 kids, to teach them about DI and how to be a team.  I competed in OM when I was young and it was such a big thing in my life.  It's important to me to bring the same things to these kids and I feel like I did.  I'm proud of me too.

Here are two of my dinosaurs waiting for the awards ceremony to start.  Aren't they precious?  We all had matching t-shirts that also matched with the 4 other teams from our elementary school.  I think all the kids looked great in their tie dye and our school really stood out and made an impact.