"Ug-guh!"

It has been quite a week. When I published my last post, what I did not tell you was that I was doing it from my bed with a sick kid beside me. In the middle of the night on Saturday (or technically Sunday morning) she woke me up with her crying and said her neck hurt. I managed to get to back to sleep for a few hours, but she was up again at 4:30 a.m. with a fever. She was pretty miserable all day, and to make a long story short, we ended up at the Children's Hospital ER with her that night. Fortunately, the diagnosis ended up being just a virus of some kind, but it has been a rough one. Her fever has only just gone away (or so it seems) today, and we're hoping she'll be well enough to go back to school tomorrow. Poor kid has not been happy about missing almost a week of school!

One of the perks of her being sick is that she's been allowed to watch whatever she wants on TV (it's a compromise to get her to sit and relax -- not to mention that it distracts her enough from how she's feeling to keep her from whining and crying all day). One of her preferred shows to watch is Lalaloopsy, a show I have some tolerance for. All the characters have cute little pets that do everything with them, so another distraction was looking at patterns on Ravelry with me for a stuffed animal that would look like one of them. We settled upon Owls Two Ways, and I dug out some Knit Picks Swish Worsted in pink and white and started knitting. By the end of the day, there was an owl.

I made a few modifications to the pattern. First of all, I doubled the size, so I cast on twice as many stitches and doubled the rows/rounds worked. I also threw in a little simple stranded colorwork to look like feathers around the body and on the top of the head. I used Kitchener stitch to graft the top closed and used the remainder of the yarn tail for the little tufts on the ears (which have since been removed because she decided she didn't like them). I used a US 4/3.5 mm needle for a firm fabric and stuffed it pretty full. It probably could have used some poly pellets at the bottom to make it stand up, but I didn't have any.

Meanwhile, I've made a good deal of progress on my State Fair Cardigan. I finished the back and got started on the right front, which is probably about halfway done.

I managed to get the whole back done with less than two full skeins, so I'm fairly confident now that I will have enough yarn in spite of the gauge difference.

(By the way, if you're wondering where the title of this post came from, it's the exclamation Rainbow has been using frequently lately, and it pretty much sums up how I feel about this week!)