Shrug

The monkey has spent this past week healthy and seizure free. After the drugs completely wore off (it took until Wednesday) he has been the same normal kid he has always been. The one difference I've noticed is that his sleep patterns have really been thrown off schedule by the electrical storm in his brain. He hasn't taken a nap since, and his night sleeping is all screwy too. He woke up hourly with dreams for the first several days, which was only partly why I ended up sleeping on his floor so frequently. Maybe things are getting back to normal though. While he went to bed at 9pm last night and got up at 7am, he was pretty grouchy and went back to bed after some snuggling and an aborted attempt at breakfast.
Incidentally, in case anyone is here because they are searching for information about seizures. Sister #1 sent me this link recommended to her by a Neurologist she knows and the information has been extremely comforting. It starts out acknowledging your fears but follows quickly with "Knowledge is an antidote to fear," which I really learned working for years in a hospital. It has good advice and nice hard numbers, which I find comforting.

As promised quite a while ago, here is my latest project that was started and finished before even getting a mention here. Friday night Marc and I had a ROTC formal dinner and I wanted something interesting to wear. Mom* and I went shopping at Soul Spun and picked out a delicious skein of Mango Moon recycled silk. Amazingly beautiful stuff that was a lot more fancy than I would usually use. I knit it with some black #3 crochet cotton to unify the colors a bit more and keep it from being too bright. I used the Anthropologie Inspired Caplet pattern from Craftster, a pattern I've used before. It knit up beautifully.

But.

It stretched hugely bad across the back. So much that by the end of the evening I was having a hard time keeping it on my shoulders. Now, this might very well be my fault. It took forever to dry after blocking, so long in fact that I had to throw it on wet to go (I really had no choice with the dress I was wearing under it. Imagine a strapless dress without a strapless bra; it was the shrugs job to hide that particular sin.) It started the evening fitting perfectly but as it dried on me (and under the air conditioning, burr) it relaxed a great deal. Is this my fault for wearing it wet? Will a good blocking fix everything? Or should I just frog the damn thing and try again, several inches less wide in the back.

*My mom loves to look at yarn and offers really good advice about patterns and yarn choices but I can not get her to learn to knit for anything. Seriously, I offer to teach her every single time we are together.