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.

Lately I’ve had a lot of time to think between the hours of 4:30 and 7am. Ada has taken to waking up very early indeed, so she and I alternate dozing and cuddling in bed together while it’s still dark and civilized people are not yet beginning the day. And when I say “cuddling,” I mean that one of us is setting a good example by feigning sleep and the other is hooting, flapping the bed covers up and down with vigor, and pedaling the air like a capsized beetle. It’s a good opportunity to cogitate on various ideas for knitting designs, but sadly there are very few arms-free hours for the actual execution of these plans.

I have finished some knitting lately, though. I meant to have finished a second Small Things romper back around Thanksgiving, when my friend Linus welcomed his baby daughter. He and his wife had admired Ada’s snail romper, so I knew I’d have to make them one of their own. Two months on, it’s finally done. I hope the baby hasn’t grown out of it already.

This one is Dream in Color Classy; if memory serves, the colors are “Nightwatch” and “Lunar Zazzle.” They’ve been marinating in the stash for several years. The Small Things romper is an irresistible canvas, as I discovered with the snail version. So what did I add this time? A motif that’s been in the back of my mind since I discovered it on a Chinese robe that belonged to my grandfather.

Chinese lore tells us that bats are symbols of good fortune. I’d thought to make Auspicious Bat mittens, but the orientation of the motif just isn’t right. The bat is too wide; it’s 65 stitches. I love the sweep and curl of her wings and didn’t want to alter them. But a cloth-diapered baby bum? That’s a nice broad canvas. Here’s the front pulled open so you can imagine the wing wrapping around the stern of a chunky little baby:

When I did Ada’s snail, I used an intarsia technique. This time I had a line drawing rather than a more solid block of color, so I turned to duplicate stitch or Swiss darning, just tracing over the stitches in the contrast color after the romper was already knit. I’m quite pleased with the result; some of my early-morning musings have turned to modifying my chart to create a more solid bat suitable for Armenian knitting, as seen in my beloved missing rooster hat. I suspect that the design as it stands would be too delicate to read well in a fingering-weight yarn, and I do think Ada might need an auspicious bat hat. More to come on that, let’s hope, but as of now my little cherub is awake and only the cat’s antics in a large cardboard box are distracting her from the realization that she is catastrophically hungry…

P.S. Yes, you should admire my restraint in not titling this post “Bat A$$.”

P.P.S. The postman just came, and I’m sort of horrified to discover that having a baby will land you on a mailing list for Weight Watchers six months down the line.