Sunday 20 January 2013

Due and Over-Due

My due-date, Friday the 18th, has come and gone and now it's just the waiting game. People keep asking me if there is "any sign" which I understand means "do you think it'll be soon?" but is literally "tell me about your vagina" and thus making me twitch. My mother says you lose all sense of privacy about such things by the time you've had the baby but I'm pretty sure I'll still be uncomfortable with the idea let alone the reality. So, yeah, no updates about my nether region beyond possibly "I think things are starting" or "It's time to go to the hospital". We'll see how extroverted I'm feeling when it happens.

Speaking of my mother, she arrived safely on Wednesday afternoon having left her house around 11am our time the previous day. I do not envy her that trip. The weather held clear until after she got here though it snowed most of Friday and hasn't yet melted. She's from Chicago originally and seemed charmed by our millimetres/day snowfall, being more accustomed to inches/hour. She's not well pleased by the cold. I had advised her to bring at least one pair of thermal long undies but she figured I'm always cold when I'm at her house and she wouldn't much go outside so she didn't need to find room for bulky warm things. I couldn't tell her what temperature we keep our house as we don't have a thermostat (our heat is on a timer) but Chris and I do spend most of the winter wearing long-underwear in the house. When I moved over my mother gave me a bulky Aran sweater she'd bought on her Ireland trip which I've now returned to her use. I wore it once as it's too warm to wear inside and when I go out I prefer a coat, but she's worn it every day. She did warm up enough that I could turn the fire off. I do think jet-lag affects one's ability to regulate temperature, so it's not just that she's unused to the cold. And I have a space-heater strapped to my torso and have not been the coldest person in a given room for the first time in my life, so it is possible that the house is as cold as my mother thinks and I'm just not noticing.

In knitting news, my mother has decided that she wants to knit socks for herself, and toe-up ones at that, so I loaned her circs (she had DPNs but not the right size, plus I couldn't figure out how to start Judy's Magic CO with DPNs), cast on for her, and explained Magic Loop. For the next sock I'll teach her the cast-on but I didn't want to throw too many techniques at her at once.

My baby blanket is almost done. I'm about halfway down the last border and could possibly finish today. I no longer have space in my house to block it properly (I used to use the floor of my office, now the nursery-cum-guest room) but I can wash it and at least stretch the stitches into evenness and shape. I hope. But if Yarn Harlot is right that an unfinished baby blanket can keep the baby from arriving, then the end is in sight.

If I do finish and have time before Little Djinn shows up, I'm going to switch back to the socks for my mother though I've still not had her try on the one I'm convinced won't fit. I did start the second sock though, so that's something. I think it's big enough around but too long and too tight to go over the heel, so working on the up-to-gusset part of the second sock won't be wasted.

That's life in the largely-pregnant land. Chris is working through the weekend, "up until Little Djinn arrives" so he can have some hours stashed for when Little Djinn is here plus his two weeks' paternity leave. My mother has cleaned a few little things around the house which I know is meant as "I'm here to help" but feels like "you don't keep house to my standards". Plus I am uncomfortable with the idea of sitting around while someone else cleans which means even though I'm tired I have to get up and do something, too.

Next weekend is both my husband and my father-in-law's birthday's. We're hoping to go to a seafood restaurant with my mother for Chris' birthday and have Aged Parent over on Sunday for his. Chris wants a chocolate mouse cake with coffee custard. There's always the chance that one or the other of them will get a child or grandchild for their birthday, though I think we're all hoping for sooner rather than later.

Saturday 12 January 2013

39 Weeks, Oh My!

Apologies for the particularly bad mobile phone/mirror picture this week. Chris came for a snuggle and I didn't want him getting bored and wandering off (his forbearance for being photographed is greater than that of the kitties, but not unlimited). We've made it to 39 weeks, 6 days to go (give or take actual arrival date, of course). I'm hoping to be a few days to a week late but not need to be induced so next Saturday is when I start eating pineapples or spicy food, drinking raspberry leaf tea, and bouncing up and down on my exercise ball all day. Until then, it's lying on my back with my feet up and my knees crossed. Or cleaning the house in preparation for my mother's arrival on Wednesday, whichever actually happens. The sad thing about my mother arriving is that I'll have to move out of the nursery/guest bed and poor Chris will be kept awake all night with my snoring. Even in a non-adjacent room, wearing ear plugs he can sometimes hear me. This is why I try and read for an hour or so after going to bed, to give him a chance to fall asleep before I do. Honest, it's for purely altruistic purposes and not because I'm a bookworm

Speaking of books, Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy has been my latest form of crack. It's about a(n adopted) brother-sister team of bloggers and their crew some twenty years after the cure for the common cold and the cure for cancer got together to turn the recently deceased into zombies and the government conspiracies they unearth. I'm not a fan of the zombies, this and World War Z (has that movie come out yet? I live under a rock) are pretty much the entirety of my exposure to the genre. Oh, I've seen Shaun of the Dead and that movie where the kid has the rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Anyway, Newsflesh is as good as everyone said and if her urban fantasy series published under her own name, Seanan McGuire is anywhere near as good, I will be a very happy bunnybookworm.

On the knitting front things are looking less optimistic. The baby blanket/shawl is coming along nicely, I've knit the border along the first side and turned the corner, but everything else is in the frog pond.* The socks for my mother, I'm convinced, are not going to fit. They're a little long and too tight to go over the heel. I can't really try them on because my own feet, ankles, and legs are swollen but I'm convinced they're all wrong. Plan A is to knit the second sock to be the size I think it should be and then when she arrives I can frog whichever sock is the naughty one and reknit it. Chris' pullover otoh just needs to be frogged. I knit a gauge swatch but I'm not happy with the size it's coming out. I had him try on the body and it was quite snug which, combined with the denseness of the fabric, means it'll be too hot and not comfortable enough for him to actually wear. It took forever to knit in the first place, but I don't want to finish a sweater just to have it finished and not be worn. So I'll frog it and go up half a mm on the needles and start again at some vague point in the future.

On the more optimistic side, I have acquired *cough* yarn to knit Ravi Junior which is another Carol Feller pattern. It starts at the 6 months size but I think I'll do the next size up for Little Djinn to wear in the Autumn/winter. Not that a cardigan would go amiss in our Scottish "summer". I also acquired yarn for Snawheid and the matching mitt(en)s, Snawpaws. I don't actually know that I have enough yarn for both, but I'll knit the hat and see how much I have left.

~ * ~

* unravelling knitting is known as "frogging" because the stitches make a small "ribbit" sound as one pulls them apart. This sound used to make my husband cry, but he's become jaded to hours of knitting wasted.