halloween

our little hungry caterpillar from last year turned into a cute fairy baby for halloween this year. here she is trying on her costume for the first time. she really didn't mind it at all which surprised me.

Natalie helped andy carve a pumpkin. she was very excited. she didn't actually get her hands dirty, but rather spent most of the time walking around. Something inside of her clicked over the weekend and she realized "hey, i can walk!". And she hasn't stopped since.
Her favorite TV show is Yo Gabba Gabba. She's crazy about it. So I thought it would be fun to do one of the characters from the show. Muno is tall, like our pumpkin, and he's reddish/orange. So Muno it was. Look how much she loves him!


Then we headed up to my sister and brother in law's house for trick-or-treating and zombie games (for the boys). We were one sister cousin short (and we're adding a BROTHER cousin to the pack soon!!!), but we still had fun. Nadia was Cinderella. Malcom was a pumpkin.

cousins

Nadia, 3.5 years; Anika 23 months and Natalie 15.5 months

offer?

.......and on that note, we're supposedly getting another offer on the house tonight. we'll see how this one materializes.

close?

As it was, we were supposed to close on the sale of our house today. Way back in July when we got the offer the buyers requested September 25th as the date for closing. As it is today, we're back on the market and showing the house once again. It is disappointing, I'm not going to lie, but then there are the positive aspects.

-We don't have to pack up and, well, move
-We didn't find a house and therefore we didn't have to back out on the purchase of another house
-We like our house, so we get to live in it a bit longer
-I wasn't looking forward to spending a long winter cooped up in an apartment with a one and a half year old

Of course there is still that sliver of a chance that we'll actually sell the house still this year, but we're not counting on it.

It's just interesting to think about how life would be had we been closing today. Strangely the weather today is very much reminiscent of the day that we closed on the purchase of the house. Chilly, dreary and rainy.

knit

i finally got around to taking a (shoddy) photo of the longies that i knit for natalie for this fall/winter

the middle pair are the ones that i dyed with kool-aid (my first attempt).

here is the yarn that i just dyed on friday, starting to take shape

i don't think i rinsed it well enough because it still smells like kool-aid. heh. actually, it's more of a pez-y smell than kool-aid. strange.

and i wanted to try to make a dress for the babe as well, but i didn't have enough yarn. so it turned into sort of a tunic.


when i finished it i realized that it matched a pair of the pants i had made




score.

dye

i've been experimenting with dying yarn. for a beginner the best way to try it out is with good ole kool-aid. i don't want to invest a ton of money into it because my knitting skills aren't all that great, so i decided to just stick with basic wool yarn from joann's. This is the second time i've dyed, but the first time i only used 3 colors. (that yarn is just about finished being made into a pair of longies for natalie.) this time around it turned out a bit browner than i had intended, but not bad for a first try with so many colors. so here's what i did:

first i dissolved the kool-aid in about a half cup of water



then i took my yarn that i had wound into one huge loop and soaked it in a bowl of water to get it nice and wet. then i laid it out on top of my workspace



and since vegetarians don't normally own a turkey baster, i had to get creative. i used the snot sucker that the hospital sent home with us when natalie was born and i sucked up the "dye" and just went to town



very carefully i transferred the yarn into a microwave safe dish.



i nuked it for 2 minutes, let it rest for about 5, nuked it again for 3 minutes and let it cool for a good long time. then i rinsed it off and now it's hanging to dry.

it pretty much looks the same as it does in the above photos. but i'm pretty excited to see how it will knit up.

lake

last weekend we went to the lake and on the way we stopped at andy's parent's new house. Besides the fact that we came home a day and a half early because i came down with the swine, it was a fun trip.