Ah, the joys of childhood...

So Sydney celebrated her 5th birthday on February 20, although we didn't celebrate with family until the weekend. We still haven't partied with her friends - it's looking like we won't get our act together on that one until April (our excuse is that we'll then be able to just have a joint Sydney-Owen party, something that won't work as soon as they get a little bit older!). Sydney had two friends who had parties in February so that month was a little crowded anyway.

The family party was a big success. Grammy made cupcakes, and Syndey did a great job blowing out her many, many candles.







Isn't she sweet?



Owen has been making himself useful around the house lately. He's going to be a carpenter or an engineer when he grows up (or an electrician) - currently he manages to get ahold of the screwdriver no matter where we put it and proceeds to unscrew anything and everything he can reach. Here he is taking Sydney's Viewmaster apart:



And here's some of his handiwork on one of our French doors. His father is going to be really happy about that one (he hasn't discovered it yet since he's out running 18 miles in preparation for the Boston Marathon in April - crazy man!):



If you can't see exactly what's going on there, he managed to unscrew the top of the plate, loosen the bottom screw, and put a totally different screw in the top hole. I really love it when he unscrews the "childproof" battery covers on all of his toys. Yeah. I've got to watch that one every second...

He also did some serious damage to my sock project the other day. Here's the result when your almost-3-year old grabs your nicely wound, 400-yd ball of sock yarn and tears around the house with it, pulling out clumps of yarn as he goes:



Of course once I saw what he was doing, I started shrieking "Nononono!" and running after him, which only made things worse. Such a delightful child! At least he's decided that the potty is not his enemy anymore so we're making progress on that front...

The knitting is going great guns. I've got projects lined up over the horizon and one of my biggest frustrations is that I don't have enough time to knit even 20% of what's in my head. Even if I sketch all my ideas out when I have them, that almost adds to the frustration because I know I'll never get to them all. Better to have to many ideas than not enough, I suppose! Fortunately I've got an army of test and sample knitters helping me out. They are so awesome and generous - especially since I can't adequately compensate them (if you saw my tax return for last year, you'd know why, but at least I'm getting some nice deductions!).

You may have already seen some sneak peeks of a new shawl design on Grumperina's blog, and her current post on Panda Wool pictures a sock sample she's also working up for me. I can't quite believe I'm lucky enough to have her knitting samples for me - she is ridiculously fast and obviously extremely skilled. In fact, it's a bit terrifying sending her a new pattern because I know that if it's not amazingly awesome, I'll hear about it! LOL! I had a totally different edging on the shawl before she got ahold of it and (very nicely) suggested that it might look better with something different. She was, of course, correct and we're both delighted with the final result.

I'll never be able to adequately express what my helpful, generous, reliable testers, sample knitters and tech editors mean to me. If you happen to be knitting one of my patterns, take a second and look at the acknowledgements at the end. These are the people who helped to make your knitting experience the best it can possibly be. Of course we can't catch every mistake, but I'm amazed at how much we improve each pattern together, with each tester and editor adding something to the mix. Thank you all so much!