Almost There

I have been making some progress on Autumn Rose, despite feeling kind of blah and having much to do. I'm almost to the bind off and casting on for the neck steek, which means I'm also pretty close to attaching the sleeves and entering the home stretch.

I'm in a groove now. Hopefully this won't take too much longer. I wonder if weaving in the ends will take as much time as knitting the sweater?

I haven't made any progress on the Milkmaid's Stockings, simply because I've been focusing on AR.

Holiday shopping, doctor's appointments, and holiday commitments will take up a lot of my time between now and New Year's, so we'll see how much knitting time I manage to cram in.

On a non-knitting note, I need to decide whether to put Senior Junior up for the lottery to enter one of the magnet middle schools in our area. The program is really geared towards very independent, self-motivated kids, which Sr. Jr. had become (past tense intentional). Lately, however, his attitude has been changing, and I'm not sure the school would be right for him. Luckily, our neighborhood middle school is also excellent, with a number of accelerated classes for kids like him. I wish I knew what to do to improve his attitude. He's 10 going on 15, with a very tweeny thang going on. Lots of eye rolling and exasperated "Mooo--ooom!"'s going on. The old parental curse of "I hope you get a child just like you" is rearing its ugly head, but at the very least, I knew that if I did well in school, so much other stuff would be overlooked. I wish I could just magic him out of those awkward and torturous middle school years and save him all those growing pains. No one told me when I got pregnant that I would hurt for my child as much as, if not more than, he does. I certainly don't think that was the case with my parents, with regard to me, anyway. My brother is a whole other story.

So, what should I knit next? I'm thinking shawl, in that STR raven laceweight, but I can be tempted by something else...