Belt Testing - We've got Yellow belts now...

 

You read that right!  We've officially got two yellow belts in the McGrath household!  Hazel has been asking to do karate for a long time and it took me while (probably too long) to find a place where we could do classes.  If I'm honest, I've been feeling like we're doing too much these days, between, homework and life, and flute and Abby's doctor appointments and all the rest, it felt like adding in one more after school activity was too much.

But, when I found a local Marengo business, just 3 miles from our house, it seemed hard to say no.  Hazel started karate back in October and Abby started asking to go just a few weeks later.  So, 5 months later, the girls have been doing karate 2 or 3 times per week for the last 5 months and last weekend they both belt tested to move from white to yellow belts.  It's our first advancement and honestly, watching the testing was really inspiring!  I might have even had a little tear or two watching some of the more experienced kids test for their brown (or higher) belts.  

The kids are learning discipline, self-defense, form, Japanese and so much more!  I'm really glad we figured out a way to make it work!  It was a good choice and I've been LOVING all the things we're finding right here in our little town.  We don't have to drive 20+ away to find the things we're looking for.  I'm going to try to keep leaning into our small local businesses and spend more dollars right here in Marengo.  

Winter Crafts (Part 2)

(Feb 8)

The past few winter months have been so filled with crafting that I ended up making a part 2 to share all the things I've been working on, but as the weather turns to spring, the days get longer and we're starting to see our weekends fill up with wood cutting, camping trips and hanging out with friends I figured it was time to wrap up this winter post and share everything I've been completing since Feb.  First up, Acadia hats for our trip to Maine this summer.  I know, I know, stocking caps in summer does seem a little silly...but, they'll be commemorative and I'm excited to have another National Park hat in my collection.  

(Feb 11)

I think I bought enough yarn to make a total of 4 of these hats, which might not actually be enough!  We've got lots of friends and family roped into this trip with us so we'll see how many I can get out of the yarn I bought.  

(Feb 12)

The nice thing about these hats is that they knit up fast! I think I can do them in just about a week.  I made two total over the course for a week or two and then decided to table the rest for another time.  I've been itching to dig into the free yarn Purl Soho sent me last year some time.  I wrote them asking if they offered free or discounted yarn for makers who were donating to charity.  I stumbled on a charity called Project Linus who donates hand made knits and quilts to hospitals in the community (for babies and children who are admitted into the hospital).

(Feb 19)

I started knitting over 15 years ago now and believe it or not, you can only have so many hats, scarves, blankets etc.  And, friends and family only need so many too.  So, after all this time, I've finally gotten to the point where I don't feel like I've always got a "need" on the back burner waiting to be picked up and I wanted to start donating my work to others.  The thing with handmade items though is that they cost a lot of time and money.  If feels like handmade should be cheaper than just buying something at the store...but that is exactly NOT true.  A quilted blanket or hand knit throw could easily cost $200-$300 and that doesn't include my time.  

Last spring I reached out to Purl Soho (one of my favorite online stores for knitting) and asked if they offered anything for people who were making for charity.  They nearly floored me when they sent me an entire BOX full of free yarn to use for Project Linus blankets.  I finally made my way through all the backlog of projects and I was ready to cast on and start working for charity!

(Feb 17)

Op!  Pause that story for a second.  It turns out I was also finishing up this second throw quilt at the same time.  I think I blogged the first one back in my Winter Part 1 post, so this is a matcher to that.  I'm not sure who will be recieving this one just yet, but I've got a few homes already in mind.  For some reason "boy quilts" are harder for me than the bright frilly girl ones...so when I stumble on masculine fabric that I love, I scoop it up quick.  This will either be a baby boy quilt for someone in the future or maybe a wedding gift for Dave McGrath and his new (soon to be) wife, Erin.  The girls and I have their shower coming up in late April and I'm not sure I'll have time to squeeze something else in before then.  Either way, this one will go to a good home!

(Feb 23)

Back to my Project Linus blanket.  This one will be made up of 6 total colors, perfect for the patchwork yarn Purl Soho sent me.  I pulled a few free patterns off their website and cast this one on.  It's knit in a series of triangles and as we speak I've moved onto the second of 4 triangles.  

(Feb 29)

(March 5)

I'll continue the progress of this one in my spring post!  I have a feeling this one will take me a few months to finish, though I've got more than a handful of flights in my future for work...and those days are great for my knitting (and audiobook) progress.  

1 Family x 12 (Feb)

 

The go-karts getting a make-over baby and we'll post some pictures when it's finished!  For now, our February family photo!

Winter Crafts

 As the weather cools and it starts to get dark earlier and earlier, I find myself with more time to craft - which is great because I feel like I've been in a bit of project slump lately.  But...not anymore!  I've started and finished so many things in the past couple months that I'm posting my winter roundup early and I might have a Winter Crafts (Part 2) coming later on.

Oct 29

First up, this beautiful two-tone cowl.  It's knit on the smallest needles I've ever worked with, Size 1.  Fingerling wight yarn and tiny lace work in the second layer meant that this one took me a LONG time to finish.

Dec 26

Jan 6

I made some pretty good progress the weekend we were supposed to be skiing but Hazel ended up with the flu and I stayed home while everyone else went skiing.

Jan 12

Finished it up in January just in time to give me time to squeeze in a last minute hat knit for myself.  (See below).  

Last Christmas I got a National Park Hat pattern book and I was so excited to dive in!  I made a Grand Prismatic hat for Jenny much earlier in the year (in prep for our Yellowstone trip) but when I finished my cowl just a few weeks before our trip I realized I might have time to make one for myself as well.  We got tons of compliments and questions about our hats on the trip...which made it all worth it!

Everyone commented how they liked that the little puffball looked like the steam rising from the thermal features!

Not the best picture...but you get the idea :)

Up next - a baby quilt for baby McIlquham (born just 2 days ago...so we know his name is Liam now...but this quilt was made before that).  I love these linen fabrics so much - they are a little tricky to work with (they fray easily) but they make great boy quilts, and I just loved the understated, but deep hues they come in.

This quilt has it's backing fully made it's ready to head to the quilter but I'm holding off because I think I can squeeze in a "twin quilt" (ie: the same quilt again for a future baby boy) while I'm at it....I don't think we'll see Liz and Bobby for a few months now that Liam is here so I've got time!

Plane project - two skeins of yarn and a hat pattern make the perfect travel project.  Hats knit up relatively quickly, their finished size (like...not a full-on blanket) and the limited amount of yarn needed meant this was the next project up on my needles.  A 2-hour delay on the runway + two three-hour plane rides and a few lobby chills gave me time to knit this one up in just under a weeks' time.  

Finished it up on our second night home by tying in all the ends and adding the puffball on top!  I love this one and I think Ryan has decided to claim this one as his own.  It makes me happy to know that he is into wearing my handmade items now too!  

Yellowstone in Winter - Chico Hot Springs

Our final two days were spent in the historic Chico Hot Springs hotel.  While the hot springs themselves were great, I have to say that after 8 nights of staying in historic (read: a nice way to say slightly outdated....but it's fine because we say historic) I made the comment that just because we're staying in a historic hotel doesn't mean we need historic mattresses!  We had two double beds in our cabin at Old Faithful and we had just one double at Chico.  We got lucky and were able to snag one of the few rooms that had a bathroom attached.  The other girls in our group had to use the communal bathrooms that were located in the hallways.  They weren't bathrooms for multiple people at one time, but they were shared acrossed a handful of rooms.

On our final day of vacation Ryan and I really packed in the activities!  We hiked twice, a total of about 7 miles and we visited Livingston, a small town about 30 minutes outside of Chico.  

Livingston was cute - it had two breweries (you know we had to visit them both!), a small little downtown area with some cute little shops like a kitchen store, a bookstore and plenty of local artist shops.  

After we returned from Livingston we met up with Jenny and Jack who had just finished a game of disc golf.  Jack, Ryan and I decided to take a hike to the Yellowstone Film Production film set (Not the Yellowstone show...the name of the company is confusing).  We looked up the movies and shows that Production company did and nobody recognized any of them, but, the film set was pretty cool to check out.

It 100% felt like we were doing something a little naughty by walking around an empty film set trying the door handles and peering into windows to see what was inside of the buildings.  Many of them were just facades with nothing behind the windows, but a few of them were fully set up, like the church and a fully functioning stable that appeared to have had animals bedding it the pens at one point.  

After 8 nights and 9 days of fun and adventure we traveled home on Thursday afternoon and made it back to Marengo before bedtime.  The kids had welcome home signs all made up for us and were jumping around in the window cheering as we drove up the driveway.  Erin held down the fort for us for the majority of the trip and I'm so thankful for her!  She did a great job...I think the kids wish she was their mom now!  She had all kinds of fun activities planned for them including a trip to Epic Air, Build A Bear, a movie at the theater and bowling!

Vacation is fun...but I'm glad to be home too!

Yellowstone in Winter - Old Faithful (Part 2)

Our final planned tour in Yellowstone was a 5+ mile snowshoe (or cross country ski) to Lonestar Geyser.  Turns out...we hiked out to this same geyser when we hiked to with the kids back 2 summers ago when we visited Yellowstone in the summer for the Ritterbusch family reunion.  The good news is that we fondly remembered this hike as one of our favorite places in the park because it wasn't crawling with people!  That wasn't a concern in January!  There were about 10 of us on our tour and maybe another 10 or so people that skied there on their own that day.  We missed the eruption by about 20 minutes and were hoping to catch some  minor eruptions but after hanging out for about 30 minutes we gave up and started our trek back to the snow coach.

Our group all decided that we pretty much hate snow shoeing - lol!  Ryan and I and tried it twice in our back yard earlier this year when we got a big dump of snow but 5 miles was too many miles for us with snow shoes.  They make you walk with a strange gait...and my hips were killing me by the end of the hike.  We do a fair bit of hiking and I'm always up for going longer distances...but by the end I was complaining like the kids and wishing Ryan and a snack to nudge me forward.  I was totally over it by the time we made it to the snow coach.  If we'd have has skis on at least we'd have gotten to glide for parts of the trail!

Being in the park in the winter time was really crazy.  We heard some stats on one of our tours that during the summer months they park sees around 7,000 cars per day and the annual visitor numbers top 5 million per year.  On one of our nights at Old Faithful I asked the front desk what the occupancy was for that day and she told me it was 125 guests total.  There were another 200 or so staff members so in total we're talking less than 400 people.  It was crazy to watch Old Faithful erupt alongside only a handful of other people.  Most of the places we went it was just our group.  And, over and over again we ran into the same couples and groups during our trip.  It was a little like college or a fraternity.  

This year was also very strange because there was so little snow around.  When we arrived at Mammoth there was bare ground everywhere.  Typically there is 2-3 feet of snow in most areas of the park and you could tell that the staff was a little worried about the lack of snow.  They are worried about it being a very dry summer and the potential for fires if there is a drought.  It was over 40 our last two days in the park and our tour guide for Lonestar told us that the staff was starting to carry around bear spray again because they were worried that the bears might come out of hibernation.  We didn't see any bear but on our way out of the park we stopped in Mammoth to pick up our luggage from the snow coach and one of the hotel staff said they found bear tracks outside the general store earlier that morning.

The above picture looks like a photo of nothing, but I wanted to capture a snow flea or springtail.  We learned that these tiny little guys are able to "jump" further than anything else relative to their size.  If we could jump the same distance as them we'd be able to fling ourselves over the Empire State Building in one bound.  Pretty crazy!

If you look right in the center of the above picture you can see a little trail in the snow.  This was a slide made by the otters into the river.  We saw quite a few animals on during our trip but sadly we didn't get to see the otters or a moose.  But, I think other than those two animals we got to see pretty much everything we named on our list before arriving.  

Needle Ice!  Another cool winter phenomenon we learned about on our trip.  It forms when the ground is over 32 degrees, but the air is below freezing.  Once someone pointed it out to us and taught us about it we found it everywhere.  I'm glad one of our friends grabbed the photo so I didn't forget to write about it.

Bobby Socks Trees - these are petrified lodgepole pine trees that sucked up the mineral water from the hot springs and eventually died where they stood.  You can see the characteristic white bottoms best on the left hand side of this photo.  Again, I'm bummed I didn't grab a better photo of them to share, but one of our friends took this and you can see them pretty well here.  They give the area the look of a bomb site.  

We spent 3 nights in Mammoth Hot Springs and another three nights at the Old Faithful Lodge but our trip isn't over yet!  We left the park and headed to Chico Hot Springs for 2 final nights of relaxation and exploration.  

Yellowstone in Winter - Old Faithful (Part 1)

 

On Saturday we moved from Mammoth down to Old Faithful.  In winter the only road that is open in the park is the road from Mammoth to Lamar meaning that the only way into the interior of the park is to take a snow coach.  They are basically small 9 or 10 person buses with big aired down tires on them.  I posted a picture of Ryan in front of our Norris Basin tour snow coach in the last post.  The drive down to Old Faithful is maybe 50 total miles but the snow coach ride is very slow plus they make lots of stops to see animals and viewing spots along the way.  Figure 4 hours to get from Mammoth to Old Faithful in the winter months.

I can't remember the name of the falls behind us in this photo but it was one of the better stops we made along the way.  It's not the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, but cool in its own right for sure.  The tour down included a stop at Madison Junction where they had heated bathrooms (the first we've used outside of our rooms and the hotel by the way) and a little store that sold hot chocolate and a few different snacks.  

On our drive down we saw the swans that are known to live in the park (the first time we'd seen them on the trip) and we came upon a small herd of buffalo walking down the road that included this very small calf which they call a "red dog" meaning it was born so late in the season that it didn't have time to grow it's winter coat before the snow started to fall.  Sadly he (or she) is not likely to make it through the winter because they are easy prey for the wolves and other predators.  This one was falling behind the group, though not by far...so hopefully it'll be an easy winter and this little one will be thriving by spring.  

Speaking of the weather here, I should touch on that for a moment.  Two weeks ago in Illinois it was -10 for the high for a day or two.  We had a total of three snow/cold days off school in less than a weeks time and it really got the entire group feeling like we needed to be fully prepared for cold cold cold and tons of snow here in Yellowstone.  Turns out, it's one of the driest and most mild winters many can remember here.  We learned that last year they had record snowfall which was great for suppressing the wild fires here over the summer.  This year is a stark contrast.  When we arrived on Wednesday there was probably less than 6 inches of snow on the ground.  I think the whole group was a little sad that there wasn't feet and feet of snow to tromp through but honestly, I'm pretty happy for the temps in the mid 30's and even in the upper 40's later in the week before we leave.  It did snow for us on Thursday night so it was fun to wake up and have the whole park coated in snow like a winter wonderland.  Most of it melted by mid day, especially off of the trees and darker areas, but it was fun while it lasted.  There is more snow down here at Old Faithful but nothing like they normally plan for.  Everywhere you walk you can see the snow poles they use to mark the trails when they plow.  Someone told us they typically have over 2 feet of snow now here.  I'm guessing there is 8 inches in some of the deepest parts.  

We finally arrived down at Old Faithful around noon on Saturday.  We checked in and left our bags in the lobby and grabbed lunch at the grill before actually going to our rooms.  We rented a cabin again here at Old Faithful, though this one doesn't include a hot tub.  The cabins here are old too, but much more spacious then at Mammoth.  We have two full sized beds and a small 4 person table in our room.  There is no fridge but there wasn't one at Mammoth either and, believe it or not, it's cold enough to just put our cold stuff outside and it's stays cold - lol!  The bathrooms are similar to Mammoth - small shower and toilet in one room and the bathroom sink is in the bedroom.  Honestly, if we didn't have the camper and we were looking to come here with the family for a few days in the summer, the cabins would be a great option!

Similar to the afternoon we did the wildlife tour everyone was ready to move and explore a little bit after we get ourselves settled in our cabins so we decided to hike around the boardwalks here at Old Faithful.  As we hiked around we came upon the Old Faithful Lookout trail which Ryan and I did with the kids two summers ago and loved.  It's a short hike - only .5 miles, but 200 ft of climb in that short hike.  Once you hit the trail head but it offers a great view of the geyser that's a little bit away from the crowds and higher up so you can really see it.  When we came up to it we checked our watches and realized we had about 20 minutes before Old Faithful would erupt.  We decided we could make it up in that time and set a really quick pace to make it.  Turns out we had a solid 10-15 minutes once we got to the top before it erupted but we got some great views.  You can see our view in the picture above this and, if you squint, you can see the small handful of people on the boardwalk.  In the summer months that boardwalk would be a see of people.  I should pull in a similar picture from 2021 summer so you could compare.

I had to post this picture to document my hat!  Last Christmas I got a book of knitting patterns by Nancy Bates, a pattern designer who makes hat patterns for each of the National Parks.  This pattern mimics Grand Prismatic here in Yellowstone.  I made one for myself and one for Jenny.  I was so excited when we got 4 comments and questions about the hats.  People recognized that it was Grand Prismatic or that they were handmade and it really made my day.  We can't visit Grand Prismatic in the winter, it sounds like the steam covers it up too much to actually be able to see so they don't even offer tours there...but this picture in the park seem slike close enough!

Sunday was a pretty open day for us at Old Faithful.  We had a tour booked for the evening called Steam, Sounds and Stars where we hiked around the geysers at night.  During the day we decided to do a 5 mile loop from the hotel out to Black Sand Basin.  From Old Faithful you can take the boardwalk past tons of pools and geysers out to Black Sand.  I saw a sign in the visitor center that said this area has 1/4 of the geysers in the entire world and that one small section here has the largest concentration of them in the world.  Sadly, I have to admit that after awhile I sort of felt like...huh....another hot hole...cool...let's keep moving.  The wonder almost drains off when you can see so many in such a short period of time.

Black Sand Pool (pictured above) is known for making a loud rumbling noise and a physical vibration you can feel if you sit still enough at the end of the pool for some time.  We sat there for probably 20 minutes before we got cold and decided it was time to start moving again.  While we saw the tell tale bubbles in the pool, I don't feel like anyone in the group actually felt the rumble the trail boasted of that felt like "a giant snoring underneath you".  Maybe next time!

That afternoon Ryan decided to rent cross country skies and did a ski by himself that afternoon while I sat in the lodge and relaxed with an old fashioned.  It was a lovely choice for BOTH of us...and much needed.

Monday evening we did a short tour called Steam, Stars and Soundscapes that involved three short hikes around the Old Faithful area after dark.  There are lots of rules here at Yellowstone that help keep the park beautiful and natural.  In the winter (and maybe all year long) they regulate the number of vehicles in the park by "sound events".  We learned on one of our tours that the park allows 125 sound events each day.  A sound event is a snow coach or a pack of 10 snowmobiles or even the trucks moving supplies and people across the park.  It's meant to limit the impact of humans on this area.  We also learned that all traffic has to be off the roads by 9pm.  In the evenings they run two buses of the Sound/Steam/Stars tour meaning we were one of 25 total people out in the park after dark that night.  Pretty cool when you think about it!  The night was very cloudy so we couldn't see stars or the moon but exploring in the dark was still fun.  We did a lot of listening with all the flashlights off.  I think the group is pretty happy that we'd explored most of what we saw on the night tour during the day so we had a sense of what it really looked like.  I think the tour would have been better if it had been clear with stars...but you can't control nature and we got what we got!

Tomorrow is our last day at Old Faithful and Jenny's birthday.  We have one final tour planned to snowshoe to Lonestar Geyser and then we have dinner reservations to celebrate tomorrow evening.  After that we head to Chico Hot Springs for 2 nights and then we're headed home.  We're over half way through the trip but we still have lots of fun ahead.  I'm looking forward to those hot springs!