Yarn Along: Christmas Surprise

I wish I could tell you what I'm working on at the moment, but it is a (shhh!!) Christmas surprise for someone.  I have knitted this pattern before, back when Clothilde was wonderfully immobile and still in that cute stage where they are extra chubby and can't crawl anywhere.  Needless to say, I am finding the lace patterns VERY hard this time.

I've tried only working the difficult rounds with the yarn overs and K2togs and SSK's while Clothilde seems completely immersed in something else - but her toddler radar must beep like crazy when I make a start.  There have been a few times I've messed it up and had to discretely add a stitch in the purely knit rounds.  I refuse to frog it, because just casting on the right number of stitches in the tiny yarn was so painful while being climbed on by Clothilde.  It seems to be turning out "lacy" anyway, so I am happy enough.

As for books, we have been following our family tradition of reading Washington Irving this time of year.  We skipped the usual favorites this time - Wolfort Webber or Golden Dreams, Dolf Heyliger, Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Young Buckthorne, and have been reading bits and pieces out of Wolfert's Roost and Other Stories.

 One of these was a story  called "A Time of Unexampled Prosperity" and goes into a historical account of "The Great Mississippi Bubble."  It is an engaging true story of a Scotsman named John Law, who was responsible for an imaginary period of wealth in France in the early 1700's, which ended up with the country being impoverished.  The parallels that can be drawn between now and then were eye-opening.  It's amazing how history repeats itself.