Good News and Bad News

I know, I know. Trite. The problem with trite is that it so often describes reality. I really do have all sorts of good news and bad news.

I thought I had gotten back into the swing of blogging, especially after last week. It's not my fault, though. The first bad news in Marco's got the 'flu. The good news is, he only has the 'flu.

One of the constants with Down Syndrome is a less efficient immune system. With Marco, this manifests itself not so much in the frequency with which he gets sick as in the severity of the symptoms that manifest on the rare occasion when he does catch something. Four days of mounting fever -- and it was pretty high to start with -- a complete loss of appetite and a cough that could drown out the seal chorus at Lincoln Park Zoo at feeding time had me spinning pneumonia, hospitals and antibiotics delivered via I-V scenarios. I blame some of my over the top response on sleep deprivation. The cough is a 24 hour thing that nothing works on, leaving me fantasizing about the good old days when cough syrup meant codeine.

Let me also mention my bemusement that anyone exhibiting those symptoms could belt out The Proclaimers cover of Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" at the top of his lungs while simultaneously performing the percussion on the way to the doctor's office or conduct Walt Disney's Fantasia with an energy and verve that would put Leonard Bernstein to shame later that evening. Going by his behavior, he was healthy as a horse.

The doctor's visit was reassuring - no other, underlying infection (good news), too late for Tamiflu (bad news). He's on the mend now, obviously or I wouldn't be writing. Still running a temp, but it's been dropping for the last two days. All I have to do now is manage to remain vigilant enough to notice if he backslides.

All of that has reduced all knitting to the plain vanilla variety. All those little projects with which I hope to entertain you until Christmas are back-burner-ed. I have absolutely no progress to report. The tricky thing about little projects is that, while quick to knit, they take concentration. There's no long stretch of mindless knitting to occupy your hands and soothe your soul when your attention must be focused somewhere else. That's the second bad news.

The corresponding good news is that what's bad for the little Christmas projects is good for the big one. I've been just churning out rows and rows on Marc's sweater. The sleeves are almost finished. The whole knit two at once thing worked really well. I switched over to one at a time once I'd knit to the end of the respective skeins. With only the shaping for the sleeve caps left it didn't make much sense to use 2 balls of yarn. I doubt there's more than a few hours knitting left and these are done.

Which in turn brings us to the third set of good news/bad news. The good news is that I can cast on for the cardigan fronts.

The bad news is I can't put off figuring out where to place the cable pattern for much longer.