the squibix family blog

Finally it arrived, the smallest branded shirt that WWF offers. Unfortunately the size was youth medium, which was like a dress on Harvey. He walked around proudly for a few minutes in his very own panda bear shirt, until he tripped on the bottom hem and suffered a disappointed melt-down. So I promised him then and there that I would do some sewing to make the shirt smaller. And then he jumped on that idea. And then he jumped on me. And jumped and jumped and jumped until I ran to the sewing room and pulled out the scissors.

Using the 47-cent Halloween shirt that I finally dismantled as a template, I cut pieces out of the front and the back, trying to keep the entirety of the design in tact while still making use of the existing neck ribbing. Then I sort of trimmed the sleeves by eyeball, and surged the thing together. It was a hack job at best, and a testament to the awesome properties of cotton knit that it even ended up a workable t-shirt at all.

The fix would have taken but a few moments, only I had to start by rethreading my serger, which itself takes 15 minutes, all the while with Harvey whining and whining and whining at me for his new shirt which was NOT DONE YET BECAUSE I NEED TO RETHREAD MY FRIGGIN SERGER, DO YOU WANT ME TO MAKE THIS SHIRT FOR YOU OR NOT? YOU DO? THEN SHUT UP AND LET ME SEW!

I'll admit, it wasn't my finest hour of patience.

Because I was in a rush I didn't even hem up the bottom. I wanted to see how long the shirt came down on him and make a mark for a hem, but once it was on of course it couldn't come off for the hemming, silly me. I should just write down his measurements somewhere, but that would be the kind of pre-planning that's possible for a person who does things like rethread her serger the moment the thread breaks. Instead of, you know, picking up a knitting project. In other words, not me.

After the shirt spent a day on Harvey and came out of the wash again I noticed something funny... the back label seemed to be on the outside. I kept turning the thing inside out until I realized what I'd done. In my haste I didn't check to make sure I was sewing right side to right side and managed to throw on the back panel inside out.

And I just thought, yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like me these days.

The important thing is that Harvey LOVES his new shirt (he's wearing it again now, in fact) and I've already ordered another to see if I can recreate my work a bit more neatly (and possibly while he's asleep.)

Oh, and yeah. I know there's a picture of me up above. I thought it would be cute if we took a picture together in our matching shirts. Because I am completely comfortable with how gigantically fat I get when I'm pregnant, so comfortable that even though I can hear you over the internet asking ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO MAKE IT TILL MAY? and HOW MANY BABIES YOU GOT IN THERE? and I'm totally cool with it because I know where you live and once I have my homebirth I can sent bio-hazardous material there. Commenters, consider this your only warning.

So we prayed together for baby Nathan, our dear friends' tiny baby who is now well on his way to health and normalcy after defeating the terrible blood clot that waylaid him during his first few weeks of life.

I have to admit, Harvey's response to my question was pretty impressive to me. He seemed to "get" that praying for baby Nathan was a thing we did, even though we never tried to teach him so or include him in our prayers (although I'm sure we prayed in his presence several times. He does, after all, hang out with us a lot.)

It just goes to show the wonderful and frightening truth that your kids ARE in fact listening to you, whether you believe it or not.

After praying for baby Nathan was done Harvey also asked to pray for mama, which also made me happy. Then he requested we pray for the window and the crib and his stuffed zebra. Then I told him it was time to stop stalling and go to sleep.

Over the past few months I've re-written my crafting priority list several hundred times, trying to get squared away with baby showers, Easter, and Harvey's birthday before my new little life interruption arrives. Many ideas rotated out next to the line that read "Harvey's birthday," but for some reason "sock monkey" was the one that seemed to stick. This boy loves monkeys, after all, and I've been wanting to try my hand at a sock creation for some time now. So going through the priority list ass backwards as is my fashion (Easter is still not done of course) I just finished this gift for Harvey's birthday. All it took was two naps and one very long chunk of night-time time. Oh how I'm going to miss these quiet naps when I have two babies...

I referenced a pattern from Miyako Kanamori's book Sock and Glove. I use both the terms "referenced" and "pattern" loosely, because this is mostly a book of ideas and pretty pictures, leaving someone to their own devices for figuring out how to best cut, stitch, and hand finish knit fabrics to create something like the creatures therein. Aside from general sewing competency (or a flexibility with the outcome, either one will do) there is only one piece of information someone needs to create a sock monkey, and that is the diagram that shows how the second sock should be cut to form the arms, nose, ears, and tail. If you're interested in making one, you can find such a diagram here. I was fortunate that Kanamori's book appeared at eye level in my local library this week; It saved me printing out another piece of paper to lose five times over the course of one project.

The finished sock monkey is super soft and snuggly, and I do think Harvey will fall in love with him as quickly as I did. I only hope it will feel to me like enough of a "real" birthday present to keep me from pulling late nighters come the end of June. I know that with big presents likely coming from two sets of grandparents, and new pants and shirts that need to be sewn anyway, all that the boy really needs from his mama is something simple and heartfelt to let him know that I love him. In general I am trying to adapt my way thinking around gift-giving occasions. I tend to go overboard for each holiday, thinking I have to make EVERYTHING that comes into my head, which in turn only makes me stressed and anxious and sometimes moody on party day if something doesn't turn out right. I'd like to just be able to say, "This is my handmade gift. I put a lot of time into it and I think it's pretty good. I think you'll like it too. You don't need 20 of them to know that I love you."

Anyway, it's a work in progress. Me, I mean. Not the monkey, though. He's finished.

Fortunately I'm feeling too nauseous this month to sit for real meals, so I don't mind having no space to eat. Alls I care about is that some of these sprouts get in the ground and out of our kitchen before baby2 arrives and the well-wishing hordes descend upon our house like a swarm of locusts.

There are other encouraging signs that our farm will be a success this year. Like our youngest farmer who absolutely CAN'T WAIT to get outside with his spade in the morning, even though it's only 7:30 and there's still a heavy layer of frost over the ground.

Oh Harvey. I love being outside too, but 7:30 is too early for yard work, even for me. I picked up three very wet and very cold leaves, and then I said "I'm not doing this until later."

But, you know, there hasn't been a wolf fatality in Bedford yet, so maybe our local ones are more shy than the ones at the zoo.

Of course, half of the excitement of the outing for Harvey was getting to see his best buddy Ollie. Here they are hugging outside of the Monkey cage.

And here's the resulting take-down from that hug.

And this is what my friend Bridget would look like if she had 5 kids instead of just 4.

I swear, just being around her makes me feel like a lazy ass. I only have to cart around one kid all day, and sometimes it's exhausting!

After the zoo the plan was to nap in the car ride home, but Harvey and I had already decimated my supply of snacks and both he and my stomach were crying starvation. So we drove a minute into downtown Stoneham to grab a slice at a local pizza shop. The owner and patrons all thought Harvey was the cutest thing in the known universe, and they were very impressed at the way he devowered an entire large slice of pizza. Mama had one too, of course, bringing the total for today's outing to $4. Not bad for a field trip.

The only downside of the day was that the zoo excitement plus delicious pizza added up to NO NAP, which meant an entire day of non-stop standing and walking for mama and her poor pregnant feet. Oh well, these things can't be helped. When it's not a pregnant belly it'll be a baby in the front pack. Such is life, and I should enjoy the former quieter option as long as I can.

Actually, that's putting it mildly. He was really in love.

Meanwhile I took about seven hundred pictures of their coop setup while trying to enthuse myself over the Bedford permitting process. Patience mama, one step at at time. First we gotta see how long that fence takes us...

We had spent only but a moment at the farm when who should we see walking up the hill but the Stevens family themselves! Serendipitous! Great minds think alike on a sunny day it seems (especially when 6 of those minds live about a minute away from the farm.) So Harvey not only got to see his favorite animals, but he got to run and play with his favorite friends, some of whom are significantly faster than him.

And one of whom is just his speed.

When we got home Harvey was still disinclined to go inside, so we picnicked outside in the yard and then spent the afternoon working in the garden. Well, "we" generally speaking. Mama spent a fair amount of time inside completing some housework I neglected during yesterday's outing, as well as finishing some baby gifts for the upcoming showers. Even while participating in the outdoor festivities I felt like I spent most of my time running back and forth from yard to kitchen, making sure everyone had adequate water and sunscreen and fresh diapers. In other words, acting just like a mother. Still, for a pregnant lady I put in a fair amount of work moving strawberries and pulling up weeds. Enough to filthify my only good pair of maternity jeans. But best of all, I got to experience the sheer joy that is walking around the corner to find both my boys happily digging in the dirt.

Indeed, the only tantrums of the day involved coming inside. It's going to be a good summer.

I had a bit of extra fabric left over so I decided to make a matching critter, the kind of thing that you can hang from the handle of your car-seat. You can't see it from the picture above, but this bunny has got a little velcro strap in the back to keep him tethered to his post. When I was cutting the fabric for the strap I was all, "Hey Dan, do you think this is about the right size to hang from a car-seat?" And he was all, "I don't know - you could measure it against a real baby car seat. We have one IN THE NEXT ROOM, which is like TEN FEET AWAY FROM YOU."

That Dan. As long as I share an office with him he's determined to squeeze the retardedness out of my sewing process.

Harvey for his part was VERY UPSET when he saw a completed stuffed animal in the room and was told that it wasn't his to play with. So upset in fact that I had to make him his own bunny, while he was standing there, actually standing on the chair behind me pushing buttons on the sewing machine and pulling my hair. I made his gray instead of plaid, to avoid the slight chance of Nathan coming over one day and freaking out that another kid had HIS BUNNY - OMG THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE IS RIPPING APART AT THE SEAMS! Says something about my childhood that these are the possibilities I try to ward against. Anyway, Harvey's new bunny is now his favorite toy, and everytime he picks it up he makes sure to clarify "Harvey bunny. Baby Nathan bunny dada's office."

Here he is hugging his bunny before naptime.

And here he is giving baby Nathan's bunny a proper send-off:

That said, there is nothing in the universe I'd rather be doing right now than raising my child minute by minute. I love getting excited about the things he gets excited about. I love presenting new things for him to get excited about. I love watching the little wheels in his head spin and expand as he gets older. Like today when he held up a lego green floor piece next to a duplo green floor piece and said, "Big big one? tiny tiny one?" Woah! Or also this morning when he helped to unload the dishwasher by putting all the silverware in the drawer, and then tried to open the other drawer when he came up with a measuring spoon, and I was floored by how he knows where everything's supposed to go. Or how he walked by himself into the garden, picked up dada's watering can, and walked around trying to water all the seeds while saying "ehn ehn ehn" because the can was so heavy. He walked between the beds and carefully kept his feet off the seedlings. I should have taken a video.

I love that Harvey makes jokes now. That he sings to himself. That if he wants me to sit down and stop bossing him around he says "mama knitting." I love that he mimics my tone of voice to say, "in a second" and "one more" and "Rascal no digging." I love the smell of his hair.

We've gone through pockets of time this year where I've despaired at having no idea what I was doing. Every few weeks I seem to feel that I've reached my stride, only to be thrown back by a new situation or behavior that blindsides me. Which, I guess, pretty much describes parenting. I've been helped by Dan's sound advice (thanks to years of internet reading he knows everything about all subjects at all times, especially child rearing) and also by two books in particular on raising toddlers. The Rosemond book contained a real revelation for me: that parenting a baby is substantially different from parenting a toddler. Babies need to be loved and coddled and taken cared of no matter what, so they learn to trust their parents and by extension the world around them. Kids need to learn they are not actually the center of the universe, and therefore build up their own self-concept and independence. Toddlerhood is the shaky bridge between the two, corresponding to genuine shifts in a child's brain and understanding. Thus, the revelation for me was that sometime between 18 months and 2 years my own actions also need to reflect a shift from babying to parenting. And firmly, otherwise I'll muck everything up. So I've been trying. And I gotta tell you... discipline is awesome! Getting your child to actually do something for you? Much more fun than training a dog!

For example, here are some things we're currently working on in our house. Sand stays in the sandbox, or the sandbox closes. If you hit the dog, you get a 1-second time-out. If you hit mama she will ignore you until you give her a kiss. If you can't stop whining it means you need to go back to bed.

Also, I'm not going to fight you to put your jacket on. I'm going to sit here and read until you come over and say you're ready. It's you who wants to go outside, not me.

Don't I just sound like a mother? Yeah, it surprises me too, sometimes.

Harvey is a good kid and he's taken very rapidly to saying please, to knowing that it's time to shut of the whining machine, and to recovering on his own from a screaming crying tantrum. At the same time, we have challenges. I haven't yet taught Harvey to go to sleep on his own, so we're still doing nursing put-downs, which I have grown to hate. Dan thinks I coddle him too much by going into his room in the night when he calls. I reply that nighttime is scary and turns big boys into babies. Dan replies that I am TEACHING him that nighttime is scary. I say, well, nighttime IS scary, and no amount of pedagogical reading, self-reflection, or grace is going to fundamentally transform me into a person who isn't afraid of the dark. The kind of mother I can be is limited to the kind of person I am, and I'm working hard man, but some things just don't change all that much.

Challenges aside, the days are mostly so good around here that I fell I've finally hit my stride at parenting a toddler. Of course now we're going to go bring a banshee screaming infant into the mix. And then everything will change again.

And then just when I've started to hit my stride with 2, I plan on getting a brood of chickens.

Still, there's a lot down the road to look forward to.

Anyway, the woman this morning was particularly point-and-laughy because standing at the sink was another pregnant woman wearing the exact same bathing suit as me. Which, I admit is coincidental, but not THAT coincidental. At our local mall there was exactly one maternity bathing suit available for purchase when I went looking. But the other pregnant woman and I got to talking about how nice our mutual bathing suit was, and I encouraged her that it would stretch far beyond the strain she was currently putting on it. Then she asked the inevitable question, "When are you due?"

(Which when it's directed at me is usually followed by a "soon, huh?" or "you're not here alone, are you?" or "how many babies you got in there?" Because I make big babies and, again, the world is filled with assholes.)

So I'm like, "About a month and a half still to go." And she's like "Oh! Me too! My due date is May —" and then she says a date that is EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY DUE DATE, even though I was expecting her to say she was only 6 months pregnant or so, because her belly is maybe half the size of mine.

And then she goes on to say that it's her second child, and out the window goes my "second pregnancies are bigger" excuse.

And all of a sudden I realize why people are such assholes to me, why it's hell to walk outside my house for the last two months of each pregnancy, why I have to weigh the need to buy groceries against the hassle of being called fat by a check-out clerk, two stockers and someone in the cheese department. Because if this is the kind of pregnant lady everyone sees walking around, then maybe my belly does look a a lot bigger than normal. Maybe, just maybe, I AM the gargantuan disgusting freak show that everyone has been pointing and laughing at these last few months.

Or maybe I could believe my midwives that my pregnancy is healthy and normal and the world is just filled with assholes.

Up to now I have not had the same shame complex about my size that I did with my first pregnancy. Since I've put on week-by-week the exact same amount of weight that I put on with Harvey, and since I eat healthfully and walk a mile each day and swim three miles a week, and since I'm a mom and have bigger things to worry about than what I look like in a bathing suit, I figure that the weight I gain while pregnant is simply the weight I gain while pregnant - no value judgement. Last time I gained 50 pounds and I lost it in 5 months. This time it'll probably be just the same. The process may not look pretty on someone who's only 5'1, but who asked you anyway random lady standing in the locker room?

It's like I just want to put on a t-shirt with answers to everyone's most commonly asked questions:
No, there's only one baby in here.
No, my due date is not tomorrow and beyond that it's none of your business.
No, I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but you probably want to tell me it's a girl because I look so fat. Your opinion has been noted.
No, YOU "take it easy." I came here to swim.

Because Neil's death was so sudden and stupid and random it was like I had to change the whole way my brain worked to fit it in. Obviously people die all the time, in car accidents and from cancer and from freak things like amniotic fluid embolisms. But I just don't want to believe it - it's one stupid puzzle piece that just does not want to fit. So I think maybe I should hide it or throw it into the trash because its presence means that I might have been putting the whole rest of the puzzle together wrong.

We read it in church today and this time of year every year. Men die. Sons die. Prophets die. It's true but also random and stupid and hard to make fit. So instead we say: Look over here! Look at this bunny!

Rascal killed a baby bunny once. He hardly touched it and all of a sudden it was dead. The poor little thing looked so sweet and perfect and beautiful and completely and stupidly un-alive. As did the mouse who died this week in our kitchen. We try our best to catch the mice humanely, but this one we didn't even trap - it was one of two that got stuck in the recycling bin overnight. Harvey and I released one mouse who'd gotten stuck in the bin plus two we'd caught in the traps, but the other little one who'd fallen into the recycling looked very sick when we transfered her to the big cage, and she failed to make a rallying recovery when we moved her to a warm little hospice box next to the stove. By bedtime she had stopped breathing, and even as I was relieved that she looked so peaceful I was almost inconsolable that something so sweet and small and perfect just died because of my stupid recycling.

I know that mice die, that indeed these ones only lived because of my kitchen scraps, and when they're pooping disease all over my silverware every morning it's a war of them versus me. But still, it's my fault. My kitchen. My recycling bin. My big wide sphere of influence that I can't control that includes death.

And when I reflect, I know that the other three mice who we drove 20 minutes into Carlisle to release might not even have it any better. They may not have found warm places to bed down for the night. They might have gotten eaten by hawks just moments after I set them down. Even driving there yesterday I was thinking: does it really matter? Does it really make a difference? Does this little outing for the sake of my conscience do anything really? anything at all?

What Jesus did on Good Friday seemed pretty trivial at the time too. That he died on a cross instead of while leading a violent insurrection... Seriously dude, what the difference between a dead messiah and a dead messiah? What's the difference between a mouse dying in the woods and a mouse dying in our kitchen. Does it really make any difference at all?

Is there something in the way that Harvey says, "Mouse fee inna woods?" Something that means something? Something that makes me tear up because "free" means something somehow important?

One stupid death on a cross among other stupid deaths on crosses, it shouldn't have made a difference or changed anything, but somehow it did; somehow it changed our hearts and through some miraculous mystery set them free. Even though death surrounds us, even though we all taste it someday and smell it in our nostrils long before that, still there is something in this Friday that we call it Good, something about the assurance of freedom that is important. That in death and before death and after death there is a real freedom, that is a real thing that means something.

Neil, you knew that better than me.

The pants are the same pattern I keep using over and over, which is to say an elastic-waste pattern drafted from a current fitting pair of pants. The vest uses an online pattern from burda style, and the tie is someone's temporarily free online pattern which I found and drastically reduced in size (be warned if you're trying to make this one - it says toddler tie but it's really quite too big for a 2-year old.)

You may recognize the orange fabric from last year's eater pants. I bought 2 yards of this fabric in Ithaca the summer before Harvey was conceived... I saw it in a sewing store and immediately pictured a beautiful baby dress for my hypothetical one-day daughter. That daughter not yet materialized, over the intervening years the fabric went to a dress for someone else's baby, the lining of last year's pants, and then this ensemble. This project pretty much decimated the rest of my stash: the vest is completely lined in orange and the back is orange as well, and that teeny tiny tie ate up a huge chunk of fabric as ties surprisingly do. I'm not sure if the bits and pieces I have left will be salvageable for a baby dress of my own. It's sad to see it all gone, but somewhat gratifying as well. I can't just use the same orange every Easter in perpetuity, after all. And as Dan lovingly encouraged me, "You'll find other fabric you like some day."

I also made Harvey a critter for an Easter present, which I guess is becoming tradition too. Last year it was two bunnies, this year it was a sheep.

I used this pattern, which I also used in miniature at Christmas for Harvey's nativity sheep. The pattern calls for strips of fabric to be sewn on as wool, and while I'm sure that looks lovely in quilter's cotton it just looked stupid in the fleece I had on hand. So I scrapped that idea and embroidered little curly-cues to represent the sheep's wooly tendrils. Perhaps you can't tell from the picture, but there are three colors of embroidery thread interspursed over the body of the sheep. Yeah, it kind of took a long time, but not as long as say knitting a sweater. And in the end all that matters is that he picked it up and hugged it.

So a rather successful day for crafting all around. Dan will write later about all the fun things we did today. I only provide the wardrobe.

Because the windows in Harvey's room are sized appropriately for our 1910 farm house and not for the gargantuan Swedish loft windows that IKEA imagines, I had a LOT of fabric left over when I shortened the curtains. Which is to say, more play clothes could still be made from my ample pile of scraps without disturbing the curtains on the wall. If Harvey ends up with a baby sister who fits into this dress I just might have to make him a matching pair of lederhosen.

What is she talking about? you ask. Lederhosen? Of course I'm referencing The Sound of Music wherein the governess Maria fashions play clothes for all her charges out of her bedroom curtains. Then they run around singing Do A Deer, from which the title of this post is surreptitiously lifted (if you remember, in the middle section the children are each assigned a note and they sing Do Mi Mi, Mi So So. Probably you'd only have that section memorized if you are a total dork.)

So yes, I can't say we'll be COMPLETELY unprepared if this baby turns out to be a girl. These dresses do come together quickly ... even quicker than all the pink sweaters I've been knitting. But I'll save the pink yarn porn for another post.

I wanted to try my hand at making a beret for myself, so I used a free pattern from Ravely which was a big mistake because apparently the pattern was sized to fit some manner of frisbee rather than any person's real head. If you cock the thing all the way back it sort of looks like something you could wear to a renaissance fair.

If you cock it to the front it looks like a pizza on your head.

The sad part was that I did all that purling before admitting that the finished product would be awful. And then I finished it off anyway, because I wanted to be SURE that the finished product would be awful. Still, I'm not the kind of person who will rip apart a knit work to reclaim a measly skein-and-a-half of yarn. For one thing I hate re-knitting with kinked-up yarn, and for another thing I might want to save this for a Swedish chef costume some day. Unless anyone is going to a renaissance fair in the future, in which case by all means the hat is yours.

There. Lest you think all my free time is productively spent. Also, I'm going to post about some lovely baby knits later in the week, and I wanted to start with the bar low.

This issue is forefront in my mind these days because I recently finished paying off the service fees for our upcoming homebirth, all $3000 of them, only to find myself having to shell out another $150 or so for sterile medical supplies to have ready for the day of. And let me tell you, even though I had the option of pushing a single button and buying the homebirth pack online, I shopped around for every stupid item on that stupid list. No way was I going to pay $.20 each for several individually wrapped bendy straws when I have a pack of bendy straws in my kitchen cabinet. I've been through this once before; I know they're not for the baby. Neither did I buy ten individually wrapped gauze pads when a pack of 20 was less expensive. Or an umbilical cord clamp. Fuggin, just use a shoelace!

No, just kidding - I bought the cord clamp. Please, no one actually use a shoe lace; it can cause major bleeding.

Also, when you're paying for everything out of pocket you're more likely to push back against your provider's recommendations. Homebirth midwives tend to be an earthy crunch bunch, and no harm there, but I take it with several grains of sea salt when they instruct me to stock homeopathic arnica for swelling, when I already own tylenol in convenient medically effective quantities. We can have a separate discussion on whether homeopathy is even a real thing, but not on my credit card. Also, I'm not buying organic olive oil to use as a lubricant. If regular olive oil is good enough for cooking in my kitchen, it's good enough to rub on my taint.

All this is to say that when offered an a-la-carte menu, as I was when filling my birth supply list, the price of things affected my choice of treatment to some extent. This may be good in the sense that a smart consumer drives medical costs down. But this is only true up to a very small point. If I was out to save money on this endeavor, after all, the easiest thing to do would have been to give birth in a hospital where the whole kit and caboodle would have been free. I didn't choose that option because my preference for homebirth over hospital birth is price inelastic. So the fixed cost part of the birth, the 3 grand to pay the midwives, did not get any haggled. And how could a patient even begin that conversation? Look, I want you to give me good attentive care and save the life of my baby in dire circumstances, but could you think about doing it at a 20% discount? Because my husband is a member of the Massachusetts Teacher's Union?

Anyway, it's a very interesting discussion from an economist's point of view, if you can keep from getting mad over the disparity of maternity care state by state. And at least for me it's all done and paid for as of today! Now just to pop out that kid some time in the next month and hope it doesn't need much in the way of new clothes...

I started by using up some small balls of scrap wool and a pattern from this book (thank you Bedford public library for your large and awesome knitting selection). If you're looking for a learn-to-knit book, this is a really good one, and the instructions for each project are written out in long descriptive form. If you already know how to knit and follow a pattern this feature may be kind of annoying, but the projects are so good that it's still worth a look, especially if it's in your local library and therefore free.

The problem with working with bits of scrap, though, is that you never know if that ball of yarn will hold out till you're finished, and in the end I didn't have quiiiite enough gray to complete the edging. So as you can see from the photo above, the front edge is half gray and half green. Enough to make my eye twitch when I look at it, though I'm sure no one else would ever notice. Good thing I know 3 people about to give birth to baby girls, because this one is going into the gift pile.

This next sweater also came from scrap yarn - some cotton I had bought for a girl dress right before Harvey was born and then abandoned for obvious reasons. I wanted to try out this pattern for a baby cardigan knit all in one piece. Turns out it was extremely satisfying to knit. If you stitch up the seams as you go using a crochet hook then you never even have to break your yarn, making this a project I can complete from start to finish in just 4 days. Since this one ended up being more of a 6-month size than a newborn size it's also going to go into the gift pile too, for a baby shower this weekend in fact. I'll gladly trade the fact that I have no girl sweaters in my drawer for a season of free baby gifts.

Dan suggested the big white button. He should be the knitter, really.

I liked the one-piece cardigan pattern so much that I decided to knit another one, only this time in more neutral colors and using up a bunch of different yarn scraps. I was inspired by a sweater I saw Harvey's friend Noah wearing at church. It had wool mixed with silk and ribs mixed with straight stitch in absolutely no predictable fashion. I was all, "That's CRAZY! That sweater should not be able to exist!" Then I spent I week wondering if I could hold my OCD at bay long enough to make one. The result is this newborn sweater:

This was a rather difficult exercise for me, trying to make a sweater that's patterned in a fashion of n'importe quoi, but I really like the result. It's easier to make the mental leaps required for an experimental sweater when it takes less than a week and all the materials are free. I ended up liking it so much that I made a matching hat.

After all that I still had some white organic cotton left over, so I made a cute little turbain hat from this pattern (bigger than newborn size, fyi).

And some fantastically soft booties.

The booties are a brilliant pattern from the book I mentioned above, knit all in one piece with almost no finishing. I'm starting to feel that I can take on any knitting project as long as I don't have to weave in any ends.

After three sweaters two hats and a pair of booties I finally exhausted my supply of scrap yarn and buttons. Just the excuse I needed to order a some more organic cotton and pick out a few more buttons, which Harvey and I did this week. So hopefully there'll be some more projects to show before baby shows up, and maybe I'll even keep some of them.

All in all, things are pretty awesome.

I guess I used to have things like career goals too, but in retrospect those were stupid.

Packages of all shapes and sizes have been arriving at the house this week. I feel rather sheepish in the face of all these surprise gifts. I accidentally opened one Amazon box thinking it was a book for Harvey and caught a glimpse of this sewing book that had been on my wish-list. It was all I could do not to crack it open on Wednesday and immediately start cutting out pattern pieces. So yeah, that should give me something to work on for the next year or so.

Really all I want for my birthday is the fence I've been going on and on about, which is promised to be generously gifted for by my parents and Dan's parents. When all is said and done it will probably end up being about as expensive as Dan's 30th birthday computer, not that I'm keeping score. And as soon as our permit comes in we have ALMOST DEFINITE plans to break ground before my water breaks. Well, as long as we get that permit application in this week. Details details.

The whole clan is headed out to a fancy restaurant this evening to celebrate. Dan requested we eat at this establishment even though last time the food and drink was so rich that he threw up before getting into the car to drive home. Harvey for his part has been throwing up almost every meal this week, and I have evening nausea and a stomach crowded out by a full-term baby, so if we all make it to bed tonight un-puked-upon I will consider it a birthday miracle.