Halloween has snuck up on me.  I kept telling myself, "oh, it's next week, you have so long, take your time. . . " and I just realized, no. All of our costume-centric activities happen this weekend, which means tomorrow, which means I have got some serious work to do. 

One of the new winter tops I made for R. I really love this fabric - it's a double gauze which makes it super soft and comfy, and the animals floating around just kill me with their cuteness. We call it her "secret bunny" top. 

It really is next to impossible to get a good shot of this lady lately, so I had to sneak my camera out while R was trying to coax a smile from the little one. 

R's little friends came over last week for pumpkin decorating. We had grand plans of actually carving something, but surprisingly none of the kids wanted to get their hands dirty with the goop and seemed uninterested in the idea of cutting them up. Luckily we had a back-up painting plan (thanks Grandma Judy!). It was a total success. 

One of the things about not keeping up with this blog is that I have a whole stack of projects I've finished but never photographed. I am going to try and make a permanent record of all this hard work in the coming weeks. Unfortunately R is not the easy model she used to be, and most photographs have to be backed with bribes of tattoos and play dough. Totally worth it.

New baby N turned one month last week. So big and still so little. She also had a clogged tear duct that finally healed, took the bottle for the first (second and third) time, and grew out of her basinet. So many milestones for such a mini gal.

Thank you everyone for your nice comments and emails and texts about the last post. I am happy to report that the major storm has passed for the moment and things have gotten much easier over the past few days. N is sleeping again and R seems to be in much better spirits. The true test will be Wednesday which is the one day of the week R is home from daycare and I juggle the two girls on my own. That seems to be when things get tricky. At least I can give R credit for being smart enough to get me at my most vulnerable. That's one clever cookie.

The first three weeks went so well, and the last three days have been so rough. R is still the sweetest big sister anyone could hope for, but the rest of life has been tricky. We've had a lot of tears over the last few days and I'm afraid she's feeling a general sadness about the change in the family dynamic. I'm trying to be as gentile as possible while still making sure life goes on in a fairly normal manner, but man, it's been hard. To make it all worse, little N has forgotten how to sleep on her own and is waking up every 45 minutes, day and night, in full crying mode, insisting on being held. Ahh, the joys of parenthood. Tomorrow we start again.

Poor little N. As is the case with almost every second child I know, pretty much everything that she has is second hand. From the bassinet she sleeps in at night to the teeny tiny socks we put on her feet - it's all been used before. I figured she needed at least one thing to call her very own - and I needed something to knit. 

I whipped up this little sweater in my last weeks of pregnancy. The pattern is the Baby Girl Fair Isle Cardigan from Purl Soho. I made mine in a combination of Anzula Squishy and a selection of Koigu Needlepoint Yarns. I didn't get a chance to put the button hole loops in, and now that N is born, I probably never will.