In the spirit

I finished this cute little sweater as a gift for one of DH's coworkers and his wife their first was born earlier this week. I adore these buttons on this sweater, so cute and sweet. My husband is giving it to them when he stops by to see them today. I am working on two projects right now. A pair of longies with MM Gwoin II for a customer, they are almost finished the second leg should be done tonight and I should have ends weaved and the drawstring done by Saturday so they will be ready to ship Monday. These knit up wonderfully and I love the detail of the stripes at the bottom. The other project I am working on is a Faraway So Close shawl for a customer done with some MM Unexpected Rainbow I have had in my stash for a bit. I truly love and adore this pattern, this is now the third one I have knit and they just go so fast for me. I have plans to make one more for myself in February.

We met with the neurosurgeon for V on Tuesday. We both really liked him, he answered all of our questions honestly and addressed every concern we had. I feel like we have a real true picture now of what we face and what things will be like after the surgery. We were also shocked when we left his office and he took us straight to his assistant and we scheduled her surgery. She goes in February 16th, faster then we ever imagined. There are risks but he feels (and we agree) that those risks are minimal compared with how this will change her life. The main risks are infection of the incision site, menengitis and bleeding which can lead to strokes. They are minimal risks though and not something that they generally see after the surgery. The more real risks are that she will lose a small pie shaped piece of her eyesight in one eye, it will not interfere with her ability to drive though and most likely she will never even notice it is missing, and that she will have problems with verbal memory later on in life. They have to remove the entire hippocampus of her left temporal lobe and that area controls memory and more specifically verbal memory. So when she gets older in school she may have a really hard time taking notes in classes, and learning material when it is just presented verbally -- all things we can work with though and far better then a life of worsening seizures. This surgery means she may have a chance to drive when she turns 16, she will be able to learn how to swim, she will be able to learn how to ride a bike, she can take baths without one of us in the room, she will be able to play any sport she wants and she will be able to live a life that is far more independent then the future she was facing with seizures. The surgeon believes that for her the surgery has a 70-80% chance of working, and those are odds I am hoping swing in her favor. It took me a bit to post this as we have been processing all of this and adjusting to the idea that this is going to happen in 2 months (when we began this journey we were told it could take upwards of a year and a half to get to the surgery). We are very hopeful this will work for her but if it does not my husband and I are prepared, and we have plans in place for moving forward with making her life as normal as possible.

With the surgery now in our very near future I will be taking a short break from customs. I have one pair of custom longies left to start and finish and after that there will most likely be one more slot that I offer with a quick turnaround time for January. PKat Pants will then take a break for a few months from Their Own Knitted World and from customs. I hope to return to custom knitting soon but for now I need to focus on my family, I have loved all of the knitting I have done over the years for my customers and I hope to return to knitting for all of you sometime next year.