The end of the day…

All is well in my house.

There is large black cat snuggled in at my feet while I type.  A happy dog, having successfully jumped up on the dining room table in one elegant, silent leap and snatched a tidy bit of meatloaf, is roaming up and down the stairs on her nightly mission to defend us from any invaders.  Babies — even teenaged children are referred to as babies in our house — are laughing with their father upstairs (hopefully they are reading children’s books rather than watching The Simpsons or worse).

And my evil migraine is gone!  This means we had a successful trip to Atlanta (involving a visit with an educational consultant for one of the aforementioned babies — if you are reading my blog because you have a child with the DiGeorge Anomally, at some point I’m going to talk about nonverbal learning disorder, which seems to accompany DiGeorge, and some of the coping strategies we’ve learned in 14 years of struggling with this) and I got in some knitting time!

My Clapotis now looks like this.

I’m a little bit sorry I didn’t use a handpainted yarn, but the texture of this silk alpaca blend is luxurious and now that I’ve started into the straight rows and am dropping stitches, I am completely enamoured with the simple brilliance of the pattern.

I also started swatching for the vest my youngest child has been badgering me to knit asking for.  It is the basic Peace Fleece  vest pattern and I’m hoping to finish it relatively quickly because he is a persistent little guy.

We spent the afternoon with his best friend, whose mom, the sadly blogless Jennifer, brought over some wonderful collages she is doing using a picture of her grandmother holding her absolutely beautiful daughter.  After seeing her transfers, I had to go back and work on a few more ATCs for the informal ATC swap (info in the column at left) and finished this one, using one of the cool watch pieces I got from a wonderful guy in London last year.  I have added several new artists to the ATC swap today and hope to add more of my own ATCs tomorrow, because I’m enjoying the swapping, which brings new ATCs in the mail every day.  If you are thinking about joining us, but haven’t yet, please join us!