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.

I’m one sleeve and five buttons short of a new jacket for Ada. It’s got a hybrid round-raglan yoke, some garter stitch, some stockinet, and some slipped stitches for extra style. I’m going to change a few things based on this prototype, but I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. And the yarn, too — I finally stopped chiding myself to knit from the stash and bought some Malabrigo Twist. I’ve got two skeins of Liquid Ambar (and I can see how liquid amber sounds more poetic than pitch). I’m cutting it close on the yardage, though. Good thing I didn’t bother to swatch, right? I knit most of this while we were most pleasantly putting our feet up in Friday Harbor a couple of weeks ago. A cooperative baby who was strangely amenable to being propped among the couch cushions at the yarn store allowed for the knitting of the first sleeve on a rainy day last weekend. We’ll see if such favorable circumstances can be reproduced this weekend to finish it all off.

Speaking of babies, I love the sleepy stretching before they wake up:

Yeah, that’s a commercially knit hat. I have no excuse for not having made her a better one yet. Or a pair of mittens, for that matter. Except that I’m all about the little jackets right now.

Raise your hand if you need to knit a quick baby gift. (Yeah, me too.) May I suggest a Pebble vest? This is the quickest and easiest of projects, and it is So Darn Useful. Just right for a little extra coziness before you bundle the baby into a front pack for a nice long walk when autumn is coming on. If the baby lives in a hundred-year-old house like ours, it’s also perfect for fending off the morning chill indoors. And the evening chill. And the high noon chill, here in soggy Portland. (Not today — today’s lovely. But last weekend? Yes, that was Pebble weather.) Ada’s been wearing hers very regularly indeed.

If you’ve already made a vest like this or if you’re a seasoned baby-dresser, you’ll probably spot the most major thing wrong here immediately. Let it be said that I knit this vest when Ada was four weeks old. It was probably the peak of sleep-deprived loopiness, looking back. I thought I was feeling pretty sharp, all things considered, but it took me three tries to graft the twenty shoulder stitches together. I pride myself on my thorough understanding of grafting and I got it wrong three times. That’s more times than I botched my very first attempt ever. The third time I just laughed at myself and let it be wonky. I wasn’t going to win this one. It wasn’t until I went to put the vest on the baby that I realized I’d grafted the wrong shoulder to boot. Um, yes. The point of having buttons on the shoulder is so you can open up the whole garment flat, place the baby on top, feeding one arm through the armhole as you do so, then button it all closed. It still works just fine the way I did it, but I have to feed the head as well as the arm through the hole. Aren’t these mismatched buttons fun, though?

Close examination here will reveal that I couldn’t even manage to be consistent in the way I sewed the buttons on. Oh well! The baby’s cute anyway!

The yarn’s nice, too. It’s Rowan Purelife British Sheep Breeds, the Bluefaced Leicester DK. I used slightly more than one skein for this vest, so I’ll have to combine the leftovers with something from the stash when I make the next size up. I didn’t actually use the Pebble pattern because I was knitting at a smaller gauge — I cast on 98 stitches and allotted 40 to the front and back stockinet panels and six to each button band and the opposite side garter column, if you’re wanting to do something similar. It came out just right for a three-month size, which was my aim.

Hey! I can smile on purpose now!

Norwegian Wedding Mittens, adapted by Jen and moi the better to suit our Betsy and her Jonathan (Jen’s handsome pair for Jonathan are here)

Mods: Braided cast on (thanks, Nancy Bush, and thanks, clever Estonian knitters), thumbs moved to the sides, palm motifs altered to add an anchor (Jonathan builds boats), a dog and a cat (Jen charted nice ones, but I forgot to copy her charts and made up my own, so our dogs and cats are similar but not identical), shortened the back motif to accommodate my extra-large row gauge. Duplicate stitched red for the central hearts. Added a ribbed cuff liner for extra coziness and a better fit.

Wool: The natural white is an alpaca/wool blend from Imperial Stock Ranch; all else is Hifa 3 from my stash.

And now I’m going to take advantage of Baby Nap Time!!! and go prepare for a conference presentation. Would I rather be knitting more colorwork? What a silly question.