We drove down in two cars, Michelle with the girls, us three parents in the other one. The Aquarium was great–and then on the way home Michelle texted from the chocolate shop she’d taken her cousins to on the way home instead of going straight home like we were doing: catch up with you later!

Good times!

My brother Morgan and three of his daughters (the other one has a summer job she couldn’t leave.)  From Colorado to Salt Lake (hi Mom and Dad) to Yosemite to here.

So good to see them!

Spent the day getting the yarn-and-projects room sorted and emptied and vacuumed and readied for houseguests, grateful for the energy to do so–I had several days of the Crohn’s threatening a comeback last week and it was such a relief to have a good day. I think we dodged that one.

Meantime, there is nothing like a baby’s smile–or a two-year-old’s giggle, or a teenager reasoning things out, for that matter; every stage is the best stage. And yet–there’s just nothing quite like Hudson’s smile.

Meantime, you saw the bears (and don’t miss Susan’s comment); now I have to show you the shark like none I’d ever heard of. Wondering if the Monterey Bay Aquarium might ever have one…

I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be there Saturday with my brother and his family. Can’t wait!

Hudson and his new cousin Hayes! (I finally got the photo to work–took me awhile.) Hayes looks a lot older to me than not quite two weeks. Those two little boys are going to have great fun growing up together–and I am so grateful they get to.

———

I flipped through Sibley to identify the type of owl my friend Mickey had seen. A barred owl? Can it do Shakespeare quotes, then? Who, “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

“A friend is one that knows you as you are.” That sense of–something, and I looked up from the book and there was my own raptor in the deepening dusk.

The word rouse? As in rouse yourself out of bed? It comes from what a bird, specifically a hawk does after it fluffs out its feathers when it relaxes: it then gives itself a good shake to bring them all back into place just so, ready for flight.

He was perched silently on the fence, watching us watching him, taking in the evening. A finch flew to the twigs hanging by the feeder–then froze, as if that would make its presence less obvious. When the hawk’s feathers seemed to fluff out just a bit more, the little one made a break for it, knowing that that gave it as good a split-second advantage as it was going to get.

A goldfinch a few minutes later. Same thing.

Coopernicus had already eaten; he was just enjoying his people time.

He roused himself at last. “The fated sky gives us free scope.” Tarried a little longer, and having made our day better, was off.

Kathleen stopped by again today for some one-on-one time before they head further south tomorrow. We shared memories, explored each other’s takes on things political and found ourselves nodding in agreement over and over (always a nice thing), laughed loud enough to be heard into the next block. We moved into the kitchen for lunch and kept going for hours more.

The birdfeeder was getting low before that point. It was quite empty and probably had been for awhile when we came out of there when Richard came home, and not to deprive her of any birdwatching time, I gave it a quick refill.

We went from nothing in sight to here comes the flock–we weren’t the only ones ready for dinner. I’d scattered some suet, too, and pointed out the Bewick’s wren.

But you know the one thing I’d really wished was to be able to show off my hawk. (“My hawk, *a* chickadee, but *my* hawk” she teased me.)

At the very moment I found the Cooper’s page in my Sibley book to show her, with the two of us standing there and Richard sitting next to us, suddenly there were two bangs at the window and Coopernicus himself did a swoop around the amaryllises in chase. I missed the first part of it, my nose in that book, and then the windows reflecting off each other from my angle got in my way a moment more, but they said he strolled under the picnic table, looking for his prey.

And there one was. And we got to see those wings wide going past the amaryllises again, only this time he had something to show for it. (The other finch that had hit eventually recovered itself and played the one that got away.)

We held still, watching him and his struggling-then-still finch, and after a moment she reached for her camera. He gathered it close and took off; as I explained, he’s fine with being watched unless he has a meal in his talons and then he gets antsy.

We might be trying to steal his prey, she affirmed.

While I thought, She got to see him!! She got to see my hawk!!

He’s a big bird, isn’t he? I asked.

He IS!

——

The other wonderful thing about today is that baby Hayes came home. The traces of chemical trauma were such that they said there was no indication nor expectation of longterm brain damage.

And he’s a beautiful, wide-eyed baby boy, looking at the insides of a car and carseat for the first time in the picture they sent us.

Housework in its mindlessness (I do after all have houseguests coming in a week) is a way to let ideas sift through for the creative side: okay, if we add to the seed stitch in blue here and change the cables here and here to go over, not under, it will look like water flowing around the pier near that park… And don’t forget to add stitches to make up for the tightness the cabling causes.

But how much of that will be offset by the seed stitch? Okay, so add fewer than the typical third more. Right?

I sat down to actually start making all this visualizing come to pass and found myself remembering how much my son Richard in particular, uncle to the baby getting this blankie, liked to fit things into things. A hole where a plastic screw was missing on his Smurf ride-on toy? Bobby pins fit into it nicely. So did straws, twisties, our missing pens, anything he could get in there. We took up the air vent covers all over the old house before we moved and retrieved some of our missing silverware. Don’t let that kid near the dashboard again–we don’t know where he found the coins but we eventually found out what he did with them while I was buckling his new sister in first. Gave new meaning to the term baby rattle.

And I thought of Bashie’s story and the penny in her dad’s back. Yeah, I think a little one would have fun figuring out how to get a coin wedged into the curves of the cables.

Discovering. It’s all good.

Kathy and Rachel are neighbors to each other and Purlescence buddies to me; Kathy had an errand to run this morning, and so she came by here with yarn, a quick gab-and-g0. Mostly Cascade 220 superwash, mostly from Rachel, some from her, pick and choose and use what suits and have fun.

The happiest kind of peer pressure. Not that I needed any to launch right into it.  To Hayes with love from the whole wide world, welcoming him to safe harbors.

So here’s what I know now: Hayes went 15 minutes without breathing when he was born. I knew he’d been given transfusions and oxygen.

They did take him off the cooling blanket Thursday and gradually warmed him up, so the fact that the MRI on Saturday was normal was everything they could have hoped for in terms of worrying about brain damage–it’s a miracle. It’s just a miracle.

He will stay in the hospital a number of days yet to establish his breathing as the effects of the morphine on a newborn’s metabolism gradually wear off.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am for all the prayers and positive energy sent his way. I know so many others in his situation don’t get to have a happy outcome. It looks like we sure do. Not home yet, but…

I so cannot wait to see my grandsons playing with their new cousin. To life!

I almost deleted most of yesterday’s post. I came thisclose. I didn’t want to make the yarn anybody else’s problem nor even to remotely seem like I might think it should be.

I have very generous friends. Thank you, Kathy, thank you, Rachel, and everybody else who got beaten to the punch. I offered Rachel to swap her some silk for her blue Cascade, sure that that basil green in my stash would be just the color on her, or maybe the brick red, and she half-waved me off telling me she knew I needed to give back but it certainly wasn’t necessary.

Yeah well.

So we’re still working out schedules to get together.

Meantime, Hayes’ MRI results came back: absolutely. Normal. (Standing on a chair and cheering  to the skies!)

See? Just the threat of being knitted for helped him get better! (I’m still waiting to hear when he’s off the cooling bed, but hey. We’ll take every good step along the way.)

Oh, and the photo? Someone brought this flower arrangement to church last week. One young man got up to give his talk and as he started, he couldn’t help but turn back to it and he marveled to his audience, wanting to share his close-up view, There are *fish* in that vase!

Okay, I’m slow–it wasn’t till I typed that just now, a week later, that I realized, oh, wait, it IS a Christian church, and as a visual poem that’s pretty cool.

The best part was the little children who came up after the meeting to see the fish swimming quietly under the flowers where you would never expect to see such a thing.

World’s cutest three-month-old waving hi at everybody…

While I wondered what yarn I had in my stash that was baby boyish enough, babyproof-ish enough, and natural-fiberish enough to keep me happy too; Hudson’s newborn cousin Hayes now has a name. As far as I know, he’s still at so far so good.

Still praying hard.

Knitting is another form of praying.

A hat would show I love him (as if there were any question) but right now, given Parker’s rapture at his blankie homecoming on the day of Hayes’ birth, my heart’s set on a blankie for him too after all that little guy has had to go through in his first week.

Oh, right, I already knit up the…and the…and that’s almost all gone too? Well, good then, I put them to good use (oh right, that was the…)

Browsing a little online: extra-extrafine ’90’s merino if I didn’t mind blowing a couple hundred bucks. (I wish!)

Budget vs good intentions. Reality vs perfectionism. Not to mention the new flooring we’re saving for.

Maybe coordinating sock yarns paired together? But there’s no loft in that, not the same thing for smushing your face into with glee like Parker did.

Hmm. Sometimes you just have to sit down and start. (Maybe tomorrow, after I let ideas sift through for the night.)

Anyone have any experience with machine washing and drying baby alpaca repeatedly?

And now the other video taken yesterday: Hudson at three months one week. (That soft new-baby hair, it’s almost all gone.)

We stumbled across a newsletter from Stanford this evening that we hadn’t thrown away because it had an article Richard had wanted to read on a new-improved type of cataract surgery.

We did a doubletake when he happened to pick it up: this meant we still had, now that we wanted it, the article neither of us had noticed on a treatment they’d pioneered for full-term babies born with oxygen deprivation, including their trial over a dozen years ago of a cooling process to keep swelling in the brain and seizures from setting in during the most dangerous early period, to calm down metabolic processes that would do damage; it is now the accepted standard.

And that’s what they’re doing with my daughter-in-law’s sister’s Baby P. But the cold is painful for him so he’s been on a morphine drip. Still, he’s active despite the morphine and he got through the first 24 hours without a seizure and that is very good. And we are very, very grateful for all the prayers and the Thinking Good Thoughts and the support. Thank you all.

Normally, our son explained, when the cord is wrapped around the neck and causing problems, the heart rate drops during delivery and they’re right on it. In Baby P’s case, everything appeared normal, heartbeat peachy fine, until he was out: but not only was the cord wrapped, it was kinked, and there was no way to know how long it had been affecting him. He stopped breathing two minutes after he was born and he had a hole in his lungs.

He was supposed to have the breathing tube removed today and that hole is supposed to have healed by now, as we wait on updates; babies are amazing little troopers.

He will be in the NICU for a number of days being monitored and the next big risk is when they let him warm up again. But his sisters have been allowed to come in and meet their new brother and welcome him into their family.

And a year from now he’ll be giggling with and bugging Hudson by grabbing him to try to pull up and walk just like Hudson, just like Parker’s cousin four months younger did with him two years ago.

Hang in there, little buddy.

Wow, what a day.

It started off with a note from our son: his sister-in-law, who lives just blocks from them, had just had her baby. After three girls, Parker and Hudson finally had a boy cousin to grow up with.

But things had not gone well and they were praying hard that the baby not have a seizure during his first 24 hours and if he can pull that off then things will hopefully look much better.

Deep breath. He’s in the NICU with a breathing tube. We are praying hard along with them. So far, so far as we’ve heard, it’s been good news, no seizure. I want to be told that in the morning, too. I want it to *be* morning already.

I drove over to my friend Johnna’s.  Richard and I have promised her college-age daughter that she always has a place to stay when she wants to visit home and friends, knowing that it is really hard to have that change out from under you at that age; meantime, her family is leaving tomorrow first thing to move across the country. There’s that morning thing again. (I need to go knit a few long rows, to create, to center.)

I hugged Johnna and her new husband and the younger two kids on a day when they especially needed it. I did too.

Turns out Johnna’s youngest sister had a baby girl just yesterday, Juliette, likewise in serious straits and in need of prayers, and of course we again added ours to the mix.

I remembered the time the doctors gave me no more than a quick look at my own newborn who arrived blue, and ran, and she turned out peachy fine. I know, I know, the situations don’t compare.

I had totally forgotten in the intensity of the day–and so it was a surprise to get the message that had the video in it. Which isn’t on YouTube so I don’t have it up here yet, but. His other grandpa carefully slit open the box such that his grandson couldn’t see what was inside, then handed it to him to discover for himself; Parker pulled back the flaps. He took  it out of the box in wonderment: “A blankie!” He put it down still mostly folded up tight on the floor. He looked shyly at the camera, he backed away from it, and I wondered just for an instant if it was being rejected for being too solid now (but he hadn’t even opened it up enough to know that yet…)

And then he LEAPED as high as he could in a flying faceplant into his favorite, his made-with-love blankie, back with him again. It was HIS! It was safe and sound! It was home! YAY! Or as he said afterwards, and I quote, “Tee hee!”

We should all be so lucky. We hope to be.

All that time that I was kicking myself for not getting the repairs finished faster, for not getting it out the door sooner for my little grandson.

Today was the day they needed that to happen.

Update Wednesday morning: no seizures so far. And here’s the video.

You’ve seen the first picture, right? What you can’t see on that first one is a whole bunch of other loops besides the ones that show there, pulled way, way out.

Sometimes when you have to go to the blankie hospital, you have to get stitches.

I spent several hours again on the thing today, using Friday as my inner absolute, past-due deadline.

All worked back in now. Kitchenered across the break.

I kept laying it out on that rocking chair, done at long last–and finding two more places where Parker had worked more loops loose. Fixed those, laid it out–two more. Flip it over–oh wait. And there’s this whole pattern-repeat area where he’d pulled row after row in a row, open wide and say ahhh…

Five o’clock was running in my direction fast and I so wanted to be able to tell them that Parker’s blankie was finally on its way back home.

Four thirty-five I pulled back out of the parking lot.  Tuesday they get to open the door and the box will be there.

My brother and his daughters are coming in two weeks. They are driving from Colorado. We shall tour the Aquarium with them. We can’t wait!

And it dawned on us tonight that that means the yarn room–you know, the one with all the projects for book one and the successes and rejects and hmm maybe I should improve on this ones let me think about its for my long-delayed second book idea, plus the yarns to go with, all of it has to be emptied and put somewhere else–and not in the other two bedrooms they’ll be staying in.

Oh goodness.

Not to mention the fact that a friend was desperate to get rid of her late grandmother’s hospital bed as she closed down her house for selling, and it happened to be between when a doctor sat me down and explained to me just what that scan showed, trying to prepare me for the news, and when the biopsies came back–and they were negative. By that time we’d already helped the friend out and taken the thing off her hands on the grounds that it looked like I was going to need such a thing.

And having not gotten rid of the old twin bed in the yarn room yet, we simply put it upside down on top, mechanics-side up. Where else you gonna put it?

I wondered if we should pass it along now that we didn’t need it and my husband thought bluntly that given the last ten years… Yeah, might as well keep it so we have it when we need it.

Or not. We could figure it out later, there was no hurry.

But in two weeks…

Which is why I was sorting socks. Makes sense, right?

(Edited to add: there is no basement. There is no attic. Not in this California Eichler.)

It’s been really bugging me for a week now that two-and-a-half-year-old Parker didn’t have his blankie back right away. I wanted it right out the door the next day and it just didn’t happen–I kept wrestling endlessly with how to find the most perfect way  to bring it back to its former glory. Overthinking. Using the shawl-knitting time to chill out about it, hoping that would get me back to it.

Rip it and knit it again, was one friend’s take.

I considered. It’s near the cast on.

So to take the easy out with that I would need to cut it off at the end of the tear and carefully undo two rows’ worth: if you’re frogging knitting from backwards, you have to pull the entire undone length carefully through the last loop of each row, it doesn’t just keep coming freely at those points like it does going the other way. Then I would use that two rows’ worth to cast off above the break, the blanket much shortened. Then I’d undo the original cast off at the other end and continue knitting on with the cut-off yarn.

That way I’d be ripping out a third+ rather than nearly the whole thing.

I kept picturing myself driving easily a hundred miles to get to all the local Bay Area stores that carry Malabrigo in hopes of finding a close-enough match to replace whatever might be too broken to work with.

And maybe I should have. But I decided to at least see first how it would look if I went for a simple repair. I spread the much-loved blankie out on the floor with the former loops now crossing the gap side-t0-side pulled a bit to straighten them out, and with a crochet hook caught each one on up, loop by careful loop in stockinette mode: plain, no dragonskin pattern.

Got all done, turned it over to the back to check–and there was a whole group of strands that had been caught sideways and upwards about ten rows’ worth. How on earth did THAT happen?

So I partially undid and tried again.

Well, it’s better…

Tomorrow, with a little more light again and a little more energy again, I hope to close the gaps, fix the last errant loops, and get it off to the post office.

Or maybe I just needed a break from it for a little while before trying to finish it tonight. So I came over to the computer and typed this.

Oh and. My Cooper’s hawk flew in while I was fussing over the whole thing and there it was!  A U-turn just past the birdfeeder, wings and tail spread wide, maybe a dozen feet away. Wow!

Just can’t growl at wool when the feathers fly by like that.