Knitting Champ, Household Slacker

This week, I've been hard at work.  Well, I guess it depends what sort of work you're talking about.  I have been failing at the housewife thing.....no one starved, and no one went to school in dirty underwear, but I didn't do any of this:

 

And I certainly didn't do any of this.

 

Luckily, I'm one of those moms that doesn't think they need to raise their kids on a pedestal that's too high to climb down from when it comes time to pitch in around the house.  My son is often on dishwasher duty (with help from Dad), and both the kids help out folding & putting away the laundry.  (I'm almost ready to teach them how to actually wash the laundry, but for now, well, I'm just not quite to the point where I think they'll retain everything they need to know for my clothes to continue to fit me.)  

Just so the kids didn't feel totally neglected, I did do this with them:

And we even decorated the sugar cookies together the night before we brought a tray of them to our first family Christmas gathering of the season.  My daughter's cookies and mine looked quite lovely.  My 12-year-old son still likes to see how high he can spread the frosting and go for the world's record for number of sprinkles adhered to a single cookie.  I am pretty sure he blew away all previous records.

But by Wednesday afternoon, I had the body of a new sweater done.  It's made out of the lovely Good for Ewe sock yarn on #2 needles, and probably took me somewhere in the 12-15 hour range to get this far on it.  Yeah, sweaters made of sock yarn do take a little longer to knit, but not that much longer.  And I love the look of them!

Over the past 3 days I've gotten the first sleeve finished and started on the second.  The first one ended up just a hair tight on the lower arm, so I'm going to space the decreases just a little farther apart for my second sleeve.  This means I'll end up redoing the first sleeve (and hopefully that's all I'll have to redo!) but it'll be worth it to have a perfect sweater in the end!

I can already tell from just trying it on mid-knit, that it's going to be a thin but very warm sweater.  Perfect for the Illinois winter that is about to start any minute!