They tell you it’s amazing how the time slips by when there’s a new baby in the house and you’re its prime source of food and solace. It’s true. While I’ve been home much more than usual with plenty of time to spend at the computer, the rate of blogging has not increased correspondingly. This is partly because I do most of my typing with one hand while feeding my daughter (actual nap time when two hands are available has to be used for working and, when my brain is too fried to be reliable for editing, for knitting) and partly because I’m constantly discovering new ways to botch the infant care and waste time fixing my mistakes. The prize-winner thus far is the day I filled out a bunch of forms as if I were the baby (this I was supposed to do) and then capped it by signing her social security card (this I was not supposed to do). It’s really just unfeeling of our government to send an important document to the home of a new parent with instructions that read, “Adults: sign immediately in ink.” Those of us with brains not running on premium aren’t too good at reading on to the next line that explains how children should not sign until reaching age 18 or until their first employment, and then inferring that the instructions are written as if Ada could read them herself. So now I’ve made one trip to the social security office for a new card and have been told to return with a letter from the pediatrician affirming that the tiny baby I’m trying to keep quiet by breastfeeding in their waiting room is actually who I say she is. (Her birth certificate, a carbon copy of the form from the hospital requesting her original social security card, and the spoiled card itself are somehow insufficient proof, and it’s going to be a while until she has a driver’s license or a passport.)

And just now I’ve blown twenty minutes picking green fuzz out from between her fingers, toes, and chins. You may have seen the impossibly soft and fluffy bamboo blankets they’re making these days. Don’t be fooled into thinking they’d make a scrumptious cozy towel for after a bath when the baby’s actual soft towel is in the laundry hamper, okay? They lint like you wouldn’t believe in the face of dampness and rubbing. Yes, I muppetized a baby. She is clean and fresh smelling, but she looks and feels like the love child of Kermit the Frog and a chinchilla. Or maybe The Hulk was fuzzy when he was a wee bairn?

Anyway, before I was spending my time in these intriguing kinds of ways, I took pictures of the finished Oliver + S Sandbox Pants to show off here. Ada won’t be able to wear them for another year or so, but I’m pretty pleased with myself them. You know how to click for bigger.

The darker patches are where I removed the pockets from Mr. G’s old shorts. There are grass stains, too… I think my beloved played some ultimate frisbee in these one summer at college. Here are the secret polka dot pockets:

… and the buttonhole elastic I substituted for the drawstring:

Best of all, I think she’ll be able to wear them just about the time she grows into this adorable owl vest, knitted by my lovely friend Katherine. Mmmm, tweed:

This outfit is going to be so ridiculously cute I’m going to want to gobble her up. Oh wait, I already do that. The green fuzz kind of sticks to the roof of your mouth, though.

Thank you all so much for your warm welcome to Ada! I imagine one day she’ll see the archives of this blog and be amazed that she had so many well-wishers all over the globe. I hope it makes her feel all cozy and grateful inside the way it does me.

Sometime soon I’ll manage a post about my own knitting — really! I took all these photos of finished goods before Ada arrived! — but today the temperature finally dropped back into the 60s and 70s and our girl got to wear her very first handknit, made by the lovely and brilliant Kristen Hanley Cardozo. (No, that cute little stripey number she’s wearing in her debut post wasn’t made by hand, though it’s nonetheless a very sweet gift from friends.) Kristen designed this adorable cardigan especially for our Minnow. It’s called Surtsey and you can get it here.

She also somehow got another baby to hold still long enough to take pictures of it for the pattern. Now I know why those famous photographers who arrange babies in fruit baskets and giant pea pods and whatnot only work with sleeping infants. Herewith my laughable attempt at a Surtsey photoshoot:

Okay, not too bad. You can see the sweater pretty well. But then it goes downhill…

This is the girl the pediatrician just called one of the mellowest babies he’s ever seen.

Boy, does she have him fooled.

Mille grazie, Kristen. We love it!

Hello, world! I am Ada!

I decided to come in July instead of in August — surprise!

I am very healthy and so is my mama.

Dear Mrs. Smith of Rome,

I suspect you are long dead and will not receive this letter, but last weekend I found my grandmother’s book of dessert recipes. I was hoping to find some notes about the summer pudding she used to make with blueberries and bread, but there were none. Faced with a nearly empty ice box and a need to produce a comestible contribution for our monthly book club tonight, I leafed through the handwritten or typewritten or clipped-and-glued pages of sweets. Your “Dropped Molasses Cookies” were faintly dubious in title, but I had nearly all the  ingredients in the pantry.

I did not have “cold lard or drippings,” but your recommendation of them has caused me to reconsider the flavors cookies may have had in the past. As far as I am able to recollect without searching the family genealogies, my relations last resided in Rome, NY in the era of my great-grandparents. It had never occurred to me that their experience of a molasses cookie might have included “drippings.” Anyway, I am a vegetarian, so I hope butter was an acceptable substitute.

I also wasn’t sure what sort of molasses you had in mind. Would the default molasses have been blackstrap or sweetened seventy years ago (or more)? At any rate, I only had blackstrap and there wasn’t a full cup left in the bottle, so I topped it off with some Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I’m not sure if this would have been familiar to you or not, but my half-English grandmother certainly knew about it, so I felt I was still proceeding in the right spirit.

At this point I made perhaps my most controversial innovation. I didn’t have any ground cloves; in fact, I remember trying to buy them recently and their being either unavailable or absurdly expensive. So I used garam masala instead. I believe you won’t have heard of garam masala, as I don’t think Indian cookery had yet attained much popularity in the Northeast United States when you were living there. It is a blend of various peppers and spices, including cloves, and upon sniffing the bottle I was able to imagine it lending a piquant note to the cookies. In it went, although I didn’t dare add quite so much as the half teaspoon you had stipulated for the cloves.

I appreciated your instruction about the more-or-less 3 1/4 cups of flour. “Use your judgement” is positively Zimmermannesque. I think this time I may have judged on the side of a little too much flour, but I will remember this and make adjustments at next baking.

You left me entirely in the dark as to the optimal temperature and time for baking, my good woman. So I have guessed at 375 degrees and eleven minutes. I hope the cookies will come out well. I have licked the spatula and the batter certainly holds promise.

Yours sincerely,

Mary Theresa Soper’s great-granddaughter Sarah

Update: The cookies were pretty good! They’d be even better with chunks of crystallized ginger. I think molasses was probably sweetened back in the day, because these were not very sweet — I actually rolled the second batch in brown sugar before dropping them onto the cookie sheet. And ten minutes is enough baking time.