happy halloween!

Happy Halloween! Are you doing anything spooky today? I might watch a scary film later on, but that's only if I can resist watching last night's Misfits. I'm so excited about the new series, although a little worried that it won't be so good without Nathan. Fingers crossed the writers won't have let us down. Do you see the spooky witch stamp on my train ticket from the weekend? The ticket inspector on the train seemed like a real jobsworth at first (making people sign unsigned railcards and asking to see seat reservations etc.) but he had brought in his own witchy craft punch to make all the tickets spooky and all the travellers were surprised and delighted when they spotted it, myself included. Very fun.

Elgin was good, although a weekend does always go by a bit too fast. Other than eating so much delicious food, the main activity of the week was organising and shopping for baby clothes. Here is Beyonce-Buble's new wardrobe laid out on my mum's living room table. As you can see, this baby is not going to be short on stripes. I was pleased to get so many unisex things that were not just cream or yellow and got especially excited looking at the navy outdoor suit in the top left corner there, I think because it is so thick that it actually looks like there is already a baby in there. These clothes are a mixture of hand-me-downs from my sister and her friends (things that she doesn't need for her own impending baby), things my mum and sister bought for me at a second-hand baby sale (you know what I mean and it's not a sale of second-hand babies!) in France and a few things we bought new this weekend. I will share just a couple of highlights with you.

Eeep! My mum found this at the second-hand baby sale in France and I just love it. It's so soft and snuggly and the colours are beautiful and just look at the embroidered leaves on the tree and the little bird above the pocket. I can't wait to see our baby in this. There was another lovely knitted suit amongst the second-hand baby sale items, which is plain charcoal grey with a nice cable in it, also super soft and snuggly. I don't know if French baby clothes are more lovely or if there was just someone with great taste getting rid of a lot of stuff at this sale, but either way it worked out well for us.

This is a hand-me-down from my sister that I was very excited to see. I bought this for my eldest niece Kim (now six) because it reminded me of the stripy baby Toby from Labyrinth. I remember holding Kim in this outfit when she was super-duper tiny and it was so snuggly and cute. It's made from velour. I think my other niece and nephew have also worn it, but Kerry thought I should have it back for Beyonce-Buble this time around. Aw!

It's just occurred to me that I might not have referred to the baby as Beyonce-Buble here before and you could be feeling rather confused reading this. We've been calling the baby that for quite a long time, since it seemed right to have a name to refer to it by (rather than "it" or "he/she") but I didn't like using names we might actually use in the end. The Beyonce part comes from the fact that fancy lady Beyonce is also expecting and the Buble part... Well, Graham's hairdresser was telling him that in Chinese culture, babies are named by their grandparents. We were speculating about what sort of names our parents would choose for the baby and decided that Graham's mum (a dedicated Michael Buble fan who can use the word "Buble" so many times in one sentence that it stops making any sense) would definitely go for Buble. So the name Beyonce-Buble was born and in my mind it is completely unisex so it doesn't make me imagine the baby as either a girl or a boy particularly, something I am keen to avoid doing.

Here are two more great things about being in Elgin - the real log fire and Patch the elderly three-legged cat. We were trying to work out how old he was this weekend and think he might be about 22 in human years, making him over 150 in cat years! He's been missing a leg for about 20 years and is getting very stiff, short-sighted and hard-of-hearing, but he is a lovely cat who purrs a lot. This year he has stopped wanting to go to the toilet in the garden, so has a litter tray in the bathroom. He won't use it when anyone else is in there though, so he queues up in the morning and waits for him turn. Aw.

And so completes my final post for Blogtoberfest. Although the quality certainly varied (it's probably not a good sign that my blog has less followers/members now than it did at the start of the month!) I am still very proud of myself for managing to blog every single day. I had thought I might take the whole of November off if I succeeded, but now I find I have all sorts of things I want to share here because it's become so normal to write something every day. I'm certainly not going to keep up the daily blogging, but I will definitely be back soon to share my latest crocheted creation and whatever else is on my mind.

Enjoy the rest of Halloween and don't forget that today is Day In The Life, so you can blog about every little thing you do if you fancy joining in.