Hello! I know you come here for the knitting, but I wanted to share my new living room look with you. Four months ago I hired a young, adorable designer from San Francisco to consult with me for five hours on a few decorating ideas for three rooms in our home--the family room, kitchen and living room. They just needed some sprucing up, nothing too major, just paint, pillows, pictures and the like, and I was up for anything that would fit my small budget. We painted the kitchen a brownish gray to match the family room, (it's prettier than it sounds!), and replaced ratty pillows and dated wall art in the family room. But it's the living room that had me stymied. I've always struggled decorating the too-long wall of bookcases in that room. My decorator arrived and within minutes suggested we paint the bookcase wall a crazy green. She pointed to a painting in our adjoining dining room, and said, "that green."  I'm sure my eyes popped because "that" green was shockingly neon bright. I wasn't even sure if I really liked green anyway except except on a plant. But somehow, and with little effort, she was able to talk me into it because one of the things I had originally asked of her was to convince me to add some color. Within days the painter was in my living room and before I knew it, I was staring at a shock of acid green. I panicked! (In contrast, my husband loved it right off the bat but I suspect he might have been influenced by the idea that I was ready to paint over it and he didn't want to spend the extra money.) My decorator was sympathetic to my worry but asked me to live with it for a few weeks and if I still wanted to change it, then no problem, paint was easy to change.  So live with it I did because the pandemic hit, we were sheltered-in-place, we started babysitting, and then finally just got too busy to think about decorating. None the less, every day I would naturally look at it and little by little I started to admire it's citrony loveliness until I was in completely besotted. I am so happy with it and glad I gave myself the time to change my mind. Love at first sight is perhaps over-rated. Spice Market is the green color and Temptation is the charcoal on the walls, both by Benjamin Moore. I loved working with Sheila! If you live in the SF Bay Area and need a decorator, call her. Sheila Kramer Interiors.

Below is Carter with his first real Humpty Dumpty. We blew an egg and painted on a face and added arms and legs. Carter loved it so much and was completely thrilled and proud to be in charge of something so terribly fragile. He dropped it constantly, always by accident, but then accidents are second nature to two year olds, until eventually Humpty literally could not be put back together again. Not by king's horses nor king's men, nor by Carter's grammy and her armload of tapes and glues. Since that first Humpty we've made a dozen more. We've been eating a lot of scrambled eggs lately!