Baby gift

Another coworker of James is having a baby soon, so I knit a little hat:


Who says that babies can only wear pastel colors? I really like the combo of purple and greens in this hat and since I don't know the gender of the baby, I thought it would work well for either a girl or a boy. I knit the hat out of Claudia Hand Painted Yarn in fingering weight, and the pattern is Swirl Hat by Mandie Harrington. It is an easy little hat to make, but the swirling rib pattern is interesting, particularly when knit with hand painted yarn.

We will pair the hat with a copy of Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell's Catch the Moon book and CD, which was our favorite CD from when Aidan was a baby. Truthfully, the three of us still like the songs and play the CD fairly often. Have a listen:



We have given many of these CDs as gifts over the years; I don't know what we will do if we can't buy them anymore!

In the closet

The hall closet on the second floor of our house is a little unusual: there are four built-in drawers topped by two shelves. In order to open the drawers, the door must be completely open and flat against the wall.

This closet has intrigued Spenser since the day we moved into the house. A closed door is absolutely irresistible to a cat and Spenser has been known to sit outside the door for hours on end. When the door is finally - FINALLY! OH JOY! - opened, he seems baffled that there is not a room behind it.

One day last week, one of us left the hall closet door open for just a few minutes and when I started to close the door, I realized that I was being watched:


There Spenser was, crouching on a pile of towels and when I reached in to pick him up, thinking that he was unable to get himself out, he took a swipe at me. Obviously he liked hunkering down in the closet, so I left him alone.

He has climbed in there several times over the past few days. I think he is rather proud that at the age of 14 he can still jump four feet to get onto the shelf, and it provides him with a neat little hideaway.