Most of my friends and acquaintances know I knit — doesn’t take Sherlockian powers of observation to deduce this when there’s yarn peeping out of every bag I own and I’m actively knitting it at every opportunity. So when Ada’s decked out in cute woolen hats/sweaters/booties, people always assume I made them for her. This is true less than half of the time. My girl is blessed with a great many talented knitting aunties who have made many of my favorite articles of her wardrobe. Case in point: the pear sweater.

I was so delighted to find she’d grown into this. Daphne made it for her and I think it may be the cutest sweater ever. Those stripy sleeves! Speaking of stripes, she’s also wearing this now:

Still loving the toes. I swear I try to get her to do something else in photos, but up go the feet…

But it turns out I didn’t get the shoulders quite right. I need to overlap the fronts and backs more, which may mean changing the shaping a bit as well. So we’ll call this an Okoboji prototype and I’ll add it to my list of designs that need to be tweaked and re-knit…. Anyway, back to the gifts. A fabulous blanket arrived last week from my dear New York knitting friends:

Psst… look who learned to sit, just like a real person!

Knowing my eternal admiration for Elizabeth Zimmermann, they collaborated on a Mystery Blanket for Ada. (That’s a Ravelry link; go check out the many beautiful versions others have made so you can really see what it looks like. I’ll try to get a better photo of this one.) This is the April project from The Knitter’s Almanac and EZ’s singular genius for imagining new constructions is on full display: the squares are knit from the center out and never bound off, but rather grafted together. I’ve knit a few squares of it myself for inclusion in that crazy log cabin-ish blanket that’s languishing at the bottom of my workbasket, and it is fun. As long as you don’t mind grafting. (Which I don’t. But not everyone enjoys it the way I do, and therefore I’m extra impressed that my dear friend Lisa put in as many hours of it as I know she had to for the finishing of this project.) This blanket is soft, soft, soft, and we’re loving it thoroughly.

Thank you, my knitting friends! We wish you all lived in Portland!

4 o’ clock: My baby is home, having succumbed at last to a nap in the stroller while her father took the dog to the park. Her cold, rosy cheeks smell of milk and snow.

10 o’ clock: This is my fourth visit upstairs since Ada went to bed at 7. (Mr. G and I have been taking turns.) It’s the first night we’ve put her to bed unswaddled since she was born and it isn’t going very well, but we can’t keep swaddling her forever and I’ve begun to suspect that she isn’t napping well in part because she hasn’t learned how not to wake up when her arms get capricious. She’s calling for me now, and I’m beating back the lapping edge of frustration with admiration of her effort to use consonants. Only in the past few days has she begun to mimic the patterns of English by punctuating her usual siren of vowels with bleary consonant sounds, and it pleases me that she’s giving it her best shot even in her distress. Not that she doesn’t have a weapons-grade angry howl — she’s been unleashing it upon confinement to her car seat this week — but she isn’t angry now. She’s just bewildered and exhausted. “Ah-byah-vdah-vdah-vdah-vdahv!” she explains tearfully, presenting me with all her arms and legs. What am I supposed to do with these? When I lean into the crib, she buries her little fists in my hair and pulls me close to mouth my cheek. I stroke her face, hold her hands, and she’s asleep again in a minute.

3 o’ clock: This is a long night. Ada is in bed with me, carefully bolstered against rolling; Mr. G made his own bed on the couch — I’ll stick it out with her until 5:30 or 6 and then sleep for a few hours before he has to go to work. She is twisted half to her side, back arched, arms outstretched. Those mutinous limbs have woken her every half-hour or so. I’ve stopped counting the times I’ve nursed her back to sleep or given her my little finger to suckle. (Partial night-weaning is officially on hold for a few days. We’ll take one thing at a time.)

5 o’ clock: Holding one of her hands is working fairly well to keep her asleep, but my arm is tingling in this awkward posture. I am numbering the new things my daughter has encountered in the past day or two: the taste of carrots, the light and color of a slideshow projected on the wall at a party, the alphabet song I sang for her this afternoon, the plush fur of the Corgi pup at our neighbors’ house, the heady power of sitting up in the bathtub to smack at the surface of the water, the knack of tapping the tongue to the alveolar ridge to say “da.” The work her infant brain is doing to consolidate these experiences is staggering. This is why I’m anticipating her movements to guard her sleep. I am thinking of my mother and her mother and all the mothers keeping the night vigil over their babes. I am thinking of mothers in Christchurch camping in broken houses and of mothers in Libya sheltering their little ones from violence, giving thanks that only her own healthy movements are waking my child tonight. In the cocoon of my warm bed, I am wondering whether the snow has begun.

I do, I do! And also I have a pretty dress from a beloved neighbor.

I’m now fairly certain our most prominent scientists are overlooking some very compelling evidence that time is not as linear as we’d like to believe. This is either because not enough of them live with three-month-olds or because a three-month-old creates its own event horizon, within which it’s impossible to do science or anything else that could later be duplicated or even accurately recalled. But here are a few shards of the past few weeks that have somehow endured.

– My daughter can laugh and crow like Peter Pan, she’s been to her first cyclo-cross race (not as a competitor yet; we were just cheering for Uncle Daniel), and she makes a pretty irresistible ladybug. She can also grow stinky cheese in the folds of her fat little neck, which is somewhat less appealing.

– There’s been knitting, mostly with this:

Yum. It’s Luster — 75% Bluefaced Leicester and 25% tussah silk — a yet-to-be-released yarn from A Verb for Keeping Warm and the first installment of their Pro-Verbial 2010-11 club, to which I treated myself. It came with a new pattern by Stephen West; I hardly need to tell you how exciting those are. The Luster is like nothing else I’ve knit. It’s unusually grippy on the needles (this may be partly due to the indigo dye, which doesn’t finish fixing itself until it’s been knit and stains one’s fingers a bit in the process) and its two-ply structure creates a stippled, textural fabric with a high sheen from the BFL and the silk. The result is an intriguing blend of luxe and rustic that’s a perfect expression of AVFKW’s aesthetic. It’s verby and I love it.

– There was this comical episode with a poached egg. In my most inept kitchen moment since the time I used warm tap water to make tea for my sick mother (I was five or six), I cooked breakfast for my visiting parents. Having botched the timing of the toast and the eggs, I ladled the eggs onto the plates and tried to carry them to the toaster rather than bringing the toast to the stove to await the eggs. Nothing is more slippery than a poached egg. One of them promptly flew off the plate and splattered all over the floor, whereupon I stepped right in it. Thank goodness we have dogs.

– I’ve done a fair amount of seventh-grade algebra text work during baby naps. If you like logic puzzles, you can take a crack at this one and tell me whether you think it’s any good:

Six knights gathered for a jousting tournament. Work out the ranking of the knights, the color of each man’s horse and lance, and the Order he represents.

1. Sir Palamon did better than Charles the Bald.
2. The knight who rides a gray horse carries a purple lance.
3. Charles the Bald placed two spots below Don Quixote, who was not as good as the knight on the chestnut horse.
4. The knight who rides a white horse finished just above the knight who carries a green lance.
5. The knight with the roan horse finished last.
6. The Black Prince finished higher than the knight from the Order of the Barking Deer but lower than the knight with the purple lance.
7. The knight from the Order of the White Bear rides a chestnut horse.
8. The knight from the Order of the Chafing Garter placed third, which was better than the knight with the striped lance.
9. The knight on the white horse finished two spots below the knight from the Order of the Silver Parrot.
10. The knight on the black horse (who is not The Black Prince) finished second.
11. Sir Roland carries a blue lance.
12. The knight on the bay horse finished above the knight from the Order of the Armored Codpiece but below the knight with the red lance.
13. The knight with the red lance was not the champion.
14. Sir Bedevere finished two places below the knight from the Order of the Golden Fleece.
15. The knight from the Order of the White Bear was better than the knight on the gray horse, who was better than the knight with the yellow lance.
16. The knight with the yellow lance finished behind Charles the Bald.