August in The Knitter’s Almanac is devoted to Christmas “fiddle faddle”, and is probably the most enjoyably written chapter. It’s like the original knitting blog, pre-internet. Aside from my general affection for this chapter and the endearing story of two old people tooling around in the wilderness in a canoe, I was not won over by the patterns. My tree turned out bloated and floppy (I won’t even burden you with a picture of it), and I didn’t even try the angel as it looked really too old-fashioned for my tastes. The stars, however, won me over.

Katy(posted on Dec 15, 2009 at 5:52 pm)

Yep, I must be doing something right…

She’s playing Portal, with proper form, and she even finished the first three levels!

4-year-olds can do some pretty amazing things.

Chris(posted on Nov 20, 2009 at 9:16 am)

I always liked the word “soporific” because it sounds kind of like something that’s sleepy and terrific at the same time.

Katy(posted on Nov 16, 2009 at 12:33 pm)

This is how I’ve been seeing C a lot these days. All autumn we spent a substantial part of our day in commute to his school (2 hours for him, double that for me, there-and-back-again.) He likes to play games on my iPod, mostly block-type puzzle games, Gomi (a little ball who rolls around eating stuff), or occasionally Pocket Phonics (which is one of the few pieces of educational software that doesn’t profoundly suck.)

However, for various reasons (the long commute was actually pretty low on the list), we’ve decided to take C out of school and try homeschooling for a while. We’ll definitely keep everyone posted on our progress.

Katy(posted on Dec 11, 2009 at 11:08 pm)

A portrait of Ruby. Well, a snapshot that I tried to pass off as a portrait. (They don’t sit still long enough for portraits.) A bit more post-processing than I usually do… not sure if I’m happy with that aspect of it.

Chris(posted on Nov 16, 2009 at 11:32 am)

It took a while to get him to actually look at me. If I had tried to get him to take his hand out of his mouth, I would probably not have gotten any photo at all, so I took the opportunity that presented itself.

Chris(posted on Nov 18, 2009 at 6:24 am)

Apl’s crooked half-smile… I wonder if she’ll always do this.

As an aside, shooting in dim light at f/1.2 from so close (and it has to be close, because she’s so small) makes focusing almost impossible.

Chris(posted on Nov 17, 2009 at 6:36 am)

These korkenisser (“cork elves”) were my contribution to Julemesse (“Christmas Fair”) at the kids’ schools. It took about 25 minutes to make each one, using leftover yarn and “economy” corks we decided not to use for bottling anymore. Each little one has a smiley face, but it’s hard to tell in this picture. I ended up knitting about 40 of them.

Katy(posted on Dec 2, 2009 at 7:48 pm)

We had some errands to run around town, so we made a day of it, stopping at the toy store for a friend’s birthday present and then walking down to the harbor. We went to our favorite restaurant-with-play-area and had a relatively quiet dinner. A good day!

Katy(posted on Nov 22, 2009 at 1:30 pm)

C woke up from 15 hours of flu-induced sleeping and greeted me with one less tooth. He said “I just pulled it out!” It had been loose for a few weeks.

Katy(posted on Nov 22, 2009 at 1:33 pm)