Three generations of girls and a couple of happy dogs at the tidal flats:

Thanks to my father for these pictures. There was a cold wind up and Ada had just woken from her nap, but she gradually warmed to peeking under the rocks for crabs and touching the various seaweeds and barnacles and laughing at the dogs sprinting through the shallow water and snapping at the wavelets coming ashore. When she’d explored enough for one chilly afternoon, she firmly took my finger in her little hand and used her newest word: “Home?” She meant we should go back to the house where I grew up. Yes, baby girl. This place is part of your home, too.

Bronchitis. Sinusitis. Busted ribs from so much coughing. Stomach virus. That’s been our existence since January. This morning Mr. G fell down the stairs and simultaneously bumped his head on the door frame, which pretty much sums it all up. I have a new sweater and a new hat to show you, but putting my face within reach of a camera has seemed like a laughably poor idea. I think we are all finally on the mend, but outside there’s steady rain, and the photographer is still in bed with his cough and sore muscles anyway. So today you get Ada in her comical (but very effective) rain suit.

Apparently we’re not quite a size 2T yet. But getting another year’s wear out of this will be no bad thing. It’s the perfect protection for those times when you need to plop down on the wet sidewalk and exclaim over a “wom” braving the trek across to the dirt on the other side. (Then Mama picks it up and we admire its pinky-brown squiggliness before Ada directs its careful placement in the “gwass,” safe from wheels and boots.) The rain suit is made by a company called Tuffo, if you’re interested.

Speaking of boots, my girl is thrilled to have a pair she can put on by herself. She clomps around the house in them just because she can. I’m delighted her feet finally grew big enough to fit the smallest size. It took her a little while to get accustomed to the little heel on these; she looked just like John Wayne climbing off his horse and swaggering into a saloon the first few times she tried to walk in them.

The long soak of the Northwest winter isn’t over yet, but there are daffodils starting and fat buds burgeoning on the magnolias. The hellebores are at their plum-and-ivory best. The red currant is unfurling its new leaves and fountaining pink blossoms at once. Spring is so close we can smell it.

It’s hard to believe that this new season will be capped with the arrival of another child in our family. Pregnancy is a wondrous time (and I’m fortunate that it’s pleasurable for me, health wise), but it’s very different when there’s a first baby already absorbing all the focus and energy you can give. Carrying Ada, I could turn inward and revel in every fluttering movement, submerge in my imaginings of who she’d be and who we’d become as a family of three. The new baby seems to sense already that there’s competition for Mama’s attention. This child knows kung fu. Ada kept her head down and pranced back and forth across my abdomen; this baby rolls and flips and unleashes breathtaking flurries of sharp blows. The common response when I tell people this is, “Oh, it must be a boy!” I have to raise my eyebrows at that. If there were any scientific evidence that boys are more active in the womb, wouldn’t we all have read about it? And whence this notion that boys are more active at all? I work at an elementary school. I watch the children at recess. Yes, boys are generally the ones playing football and soccer. But the girls are fearless and nimble as monkeys leaping across the bars or practicing flips and cartwheels, and I see both sexes racing across the grounds in games of Tag or goodness knows what imaginative play. I ran as swiftly and climbed as high and played as hard as anyone when I was a child. Three more months will tell who this baby is; I’m not making any judgments in advance. But I’m trying to steal moments to soak in his or her lively presence.

Villagers all, this frosty tide,
Let your doors swing open wide,
Though wind may follow, and snow beside,
Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;
Joy shall be yours in the morning!

Here we stand in the cold and the sleet,
Blowing fingers and stamping feet,
Come from far away you to greet—
You by the fire and we in the street—
Bidding you joy in the morning!

–Kenneth Grahame, from The Wind in the Willows

Advent is my favorite season. I didn’t know it was a season until I began choral singing for the Episcopalians — I knew the word only in the context of the many Advent calendars I made to count down to Christmas in my childhood (the tour de force being a rather intricate model castle for a young friend). But I could have told you that I liked the weeks of festive preparation, of secret gift-making, of gathering greens to decorate the house (my only horseback-riding accident was precipitated by finding myself unable, at full gallop, to untangle a branch of scarlet-berried hawthorn from my wooly glove and my mare’s mane), of tramping out into the damp fields to cut a spindly fir, of eggnog and satsumas and caroling in the cold, as much as the climactic morning with the stockings and presents under the tree. And in recent years, I’ve liked those weeks of anticipation more than the event itself, grinchy as it may sound to say so. (I get, quite frankly, a little overwhelmed under the deluge of generosity from our dear ones. If I could get everyone on board with thoughtfully choosing — or even making — a single gift per family member, I’d be vastly happy.)

Now I like the thought of this season as a time of beginnings, of preparation, of watchfulness and mindfulness that the winter earth is sheltering and nourishing the seeds that will thrust up and shake themselves free when the sun returns.

And so Advent feels like the right time to share that a little field-mouse has drawn himself — or herself — up by our fire to bide. In the way of little mice, this one didn’t wait for an invitation, but quietly established itself in the coziest way possible and made its own plans to appear in the outside world in June, when the world is warm and lively again. I haven’t knit him or her anything yet, but these summery little slippers are waiting to cover a set of tiny toes…

The thing I’d most love to make for this second babe is Leila Raabe’s Spire Blanket from the new LOFT Collection. In that wonderful Old World color, blue flecked with red, exactly as shown. I’m sure that later I’ll be seized by fits of inspiration to design anew for my little one, but Ms. Raabe has already crafted every detail of this blanket just as I’d wish. (And really, why put pressure on oneself to design as well when one is already contemplating knitting a big lace blanket involving 1600 yards of fingering-weight wool? Will the baby care? I expect not.) But I am determined that this child shall be no less thoroughly swathed in woolen handknits just because it wasn’t anyone’s firstborn. You’ll learn, little field-mouse, that this is how your mama shows she loves people.

Yes, joy shall be ours in the morning.