I love due dates. I like the casual whistling they make as they saunter by.

I thought maybe you were the punctual sort, baby. But you didn’t come on Tuesday. Then I thought maybe you wanted to share a birthday with Granny (happy birthday, Mom!). But unless we both bust a move in the next two hours and forty-five minutes, that’s not happening. So just in case you actually are waiting for this:

Seriously, kiddo. The weather’s fine out here. But you are going to live in the Pacific Northwest, so you might want to think hard about letting too many more days like today pass you by.

I’ll say this in your favor: you appear to be the considerate sort, having waited for Mama to get (mostly) over a cold and Daddy’s back to feel better before putting us all through labor. Maybe you know exactly what you’re doing in there. I trust you.

Hi, baby.

I’m looking at the calendar and finding the number of weeks until you’re due to join us out in the world is alarmingly small. So small that your big sister can count that high without skipping any numbers. You do seem to have made yourself quite at home in there, rearranging the furniture however it suits you, staying up late, eating whatever you want. So maybe you’ll be in no hurry to move out and I’ll be carrying you around a whole month longer than I carried Ada. But it’s definitely time to start getting some things ready for you.

I’ll be honest. Some of the things that are going to be for you were supposed to be for your sister. These booties, for instance.

All I had to do to finish them for your use was to weave the ribbons around the ankles. Ada wasn’t born sporting much in the way of heels, so it was nearly impossible to keep footwear of any kind on her unless you could really cinch it tight around her scrawny little legs. And somehow I never took the necessary ten minutes to scare up a couple of lengths of ribbon and solve that problem with these booties before she grew out of them. (And your sister has tiny feet to this day, so it’s not as though I didn’t have a window of months and months.)

The quilt, though? That’s new. Especially for you. If I can muster the courage, ingenuity, and attention to figure out how to attach and use the walking foot for the sewing machine so I can quilt it before you’re born. (Because after that I’ll still need to hand-stitch the binding, and if we compare the size of that task to the job of putting the ribbons on the booties… I think you can see where I’m going with this.)

By the way, I hope you like green and purple and red. I seem to have stumbled into a bit of a color scheme here.

Thank you, each and every one of you, for your comforting words about Selkie. It’s so hard to believe she’s gone when I’m still vacuuming her fur out from under the table. My parents brought her down for a visit just a week ago when they came to collect another truckload of my grandmother’s furniture from my garage. I’m glad I got to see her so recently, to give her love and pats and praise.

During the effort to move the furniture, my father spent hours breaking down the excess packaging, and the wind blew some heavy cardboard over to squash the tender young lupines I planted in the patch of soil by the garage. I put them out in homage to a favorite book from my childhood, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. (I loved saying Rumphius. What a name. Someday I’m going to design a comfy cardigan and call it after that character. I just had the thought that if the book were coming to print today, surely the marketing department would insist on a different title – The Lupine Lady, perhaps. Miss Rumphius isn’t a very enticing and obvious sell to grown-ups.) Anyway, the foliage on one side was all busted, but the main stalk seemed to be bent rather than broken, so we propped it up with a sturdy stick and hoped for the best. Here’s the same plant, ten days later:

Isn’t it marvelous how things grow back?

In an effort to jolly myself out of the glummery of the past week, I finished cutting my Leafy Snowball fabric and laid it all out.

Never mind the little seafoam-green squares; they’re not staying. I’ll find either a more olive-ish green or a grey-blue of similar value. But here’s the thing: I have LOTS of squares left over. I could make this quilt twice as big, and I just might. I’ll need more of the border fabric, which I think I can get; the calico for the back I think is all gone at the store, but I might be able to hunt it down somewhere else. Or I could just have the back be half something else. Here’s a medium-large cat for scale:

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t think about the layout for this quilt for more than the three minutes it took me to crawl around setting down squares willy-nilly. I wish it had more large-print fabrics, but I’m not going to worry about it too much. It seems I’m helpless before an array of beautiful calicoes, so that’s what’s here.

Oh, and lest you should think I’ve stopped knitting entirely: