Don was up in the wee small hourse this morning to take Phil (father-in-law) and Smilla (step-mother-in-law) to the airport for the next step of their antipodean jaunt – they’re off on a whirlwind visit to just about every corner of NZ for a week before heading home.

Fortunately, I managed to complete the hats in good time and they seemed delighted with them. I do really love that tam pattern, and knitting it the second time was a breeze because I’d sorted out the (to me) ambiguities and the jacques cousteau pattern is brilliant and knits up very quickly. I’d have to say that I’m discovering that knitting with good quality yarn (in this case Morris Empire) was quite superior to knitting with lesser wool.

The babies were back in residence on the weekend, after being away on hols for some weeks, and met the step-(step-)grandparents for the first time. Before they arrived, Bessie asked what they were like and really, I can understand why Don could not describe them to me – Phil and Smilla are quite beyond description.

After some thought, I told her that they were the exact opposite of Mom, “oh, but I like Mom a lot”, she responded. I assured her that she would like Phil and Smilla too, and of course, she did. Really, I would defy anyone not to like them: they have big, big, big personalities, heaps of energy, can talk of (and have opinions about) everything and are definitely an experience. So, it will be back to quiet times around here for a wee while.

In craftal news, I have un-abandoned Don’s jumper. I figure I’ll get significantly less on eBay than I paid for the wool (which was not a lot, really), so may as well start knitting it up to see if I actually have the tenacity to actually finish a project of jumper/sweater magnitude. And then I can go spend up big at the yarn store for a proper jumper. I have been catching up on this marvellous blog while casting on and knitting the first few rows (and casting on again after I measured Don’s chest to check size, when I discovered he is a medium and not a large).

The Crazy Woman downstairs is doing her usual latter-half-of-the-year thing – bailing people up, railing against the world. Now that we have been here for a while, we recognise the pattern. She’s mostly quiet for the majority of the year (although there are exceptions), goes off in Sept/Oct/Nov and then disappears to locales unknown during December/January. Repeat. She previously taped her crazy notes to the bulletin board in the foyer, but has now taken to affixing them to her windows.

Jaw still quite tender, but this did not stop me from embarking on a caffeine-fueled house-cleaning/tidying frenzy today. Most coats, boots and jumpers are now packed away (waiting to go to the garage, however this will have to wait until the Big Clean Out, because with GerryScotti in there, additional storage space is at a minium), so I have ensured that the cold weather will remain with us for some time yet.

My poor oldest baby is stuck in Prague with a terrible cold and I am doing the worried Mummy thing from afar.

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