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!

I do, I do! And also I have a pretty dress from a beloved neighbor.

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!