Baby Knitting

Andy spent much of the past week up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, having a marvelous time. Meanwhile, I kept myself busy knitting and putz-ing around the house. Not the most productive week, work-wise, but I now have two completed pairs of baby pants to show for it!

These are "Baby Bell Bottoms" and I love them--elastic + drawstring waist + super-soft Shine Sport Yarn + fully washable = awesome baby clothes. Now, if you take a moment to check out the photos in the actual pattern, you'll notice that mine don't quite look proportional...this is because I cannot get gauge no matter how hard I try (and I generally don't try that hard). I don't know why, my stitches are just weird. So as I finished my pants--particularly the blue pair--I thought "is this possibly going to fit OVER a diaper? It looks like I need another 3 inches of waist!" and indeed, I do--but I had reached the full measurement for the pants, and didn't have the picture from the pattern nearby to compare, so I thought "oh well, must be close to right" and stopped anyway. Turns out my baby's pants will be long in the legs, and low-riders, thanks to my abnormally tall stitches that made the crotch about 2 or 3 inches higher than it should have been. ...sigh. Its a good thing I have a few years to practice before my child notices such oddities in the clothes I make for him/her.

Here we have a knitting creation I finally finished a few weeks ago, at the end of June. It's a wool diaper wrap, to go over a cloth diaper, also known as a "wool soaker". I knit it because 1) I stumbled across the pattern online, 2) had recently learned we were pregnant and wanted to make anything baby, and QUICK, and 3) I had random scraps of Wool of the Andes lying around the house. Now, this isn't the right gauge either--its supposed to be the newborn size, but I'm guessing is more the 3-6 month range. (I'm learning that anything I knit never looks quite as cute or proportional or fitted as it is supposed to...luckily, I don't really care.) It was easy to knit, but then sat around for weeks waiting for me to buy and sew-in the velcro closures. Once it was finished, I wanted to try it out to see how well it might actually approximate the size and shape of a baby's diaper-covered butt--George the Gorilla, below, is the closest I could find to a baby-sized object around the house...and he's been wearing it ever since:

I don't know how great it will actually be in real life, seeing as my messed up gauge means its not a very tight knit, which makes me think it won't actually have all of those great leak-containing benefits of wool soakers...but I have more random half-skeins of Wool of the Andes lying around, so now that I also have extra velcro, I might try again with some smaller needles and see if I can't make a true newborn-sized one.

For those of you who don't give a darn about knitting and were only checking my blog to see more pictures of the pregnant belly...I do have a belly photo we just took, and I will add it below...but I do so hesitantly, because it truly looks identical to the week 15 shot we posted two weeks ago. So those of you who are just dying to see my growing belly will have to patient, it can only grow so much at a time!

Jess & the baby belly: week 17.

Baby BBQ

Yesterday we had a delightful time celebrating our baby-on-the-way with many good friends--and look, I'm actually posting photos the VERY NEXT DAY! (Don't expect this trend to continue.)

Many thanks to those of you who were able to come and share your well-wishes and good company with us!

Adam, meet Ella--Ella, this is Adam. No, he is in no way related to you, but seeing as those are probably cheerios in his hand, I think you two will get along just fine.

Natalie, Brian, & Toby--and their baby-on-the-way--arrive on the scene.

With Erica & Alex comes baby-on-the-way number three--it was practically a pregnancy convention!

Dane & Sigard, who chose to be photographed sans parental units...

...giving their parents their own photo opp; Marc & Katherine.

Jess, Sara, Nikki, & Paloma--the knitting contingent :-)

Paloma, managing to entertain both Mia (2 years) and Ella (1 year), neither of whom is actually her child, whilst reading my favorite children's book: My Many Colored Days, by Dr. Seuss.

Toby, a.k.a. Mr. Cool.

Ioan, looking incredulous..."you really want to take my picture?"

Proof that time flies: I was particularly excited to see these good friends again--I used to work as a nanny for this family. Billy, far left, was only 10 months old when I started working for them--here he is, almost 5 years old already!

We are *Pregnificent!

*many thanks to Pete for coining this awesome term while visiting us last week!






Well, there you have it--we're pregnant! Above you can see our progress at 6, 8, 10, and 15 weeks--we just took the 15 week photo today thanks to our new (replacement) camera arriving in the mail.

Most of you (well, hopefully all of you) who actually know us already knew we were pregnant. We're having a celebratory BBQ this weekend, and thought it was about time to put up an official blog post.

Our due date is December 28--one day before Andy's birthday, 3 days after Christmas, 3 days before New Year's, 8 days after the end of Jess's fall semester of teaching...any way you slice it, we're pretty sure this baby will be born during a hectic time, and also fairly certain we'll end up with whichever nurse/doctor/hospital staff drew the short straw and had to work over the holidays--but as long as the result is a healthy baby (and mommy and daddy!), we're game!

One very happy pregnant lady :-)

Baby's first hand-knit gift from Mom.