My good sense says knit merino in superwash only for a new mom to have to deal with. We’re talking blankets here, not outfits. (I’m listening to at least some of those instincts.)

I…was actually knitting a superwash baby blanket. I have spent the last three days looking for it. And my good packable sunproof straw hat, for that matter, that I was wearing Saturday. Both have vanished.

I’ve gone from frustration to a certain sense of freedom: I could simply start over. I could choose anything. (Did you look in–yes I did. And? Yes. And? Twice.)

If you’ve ever knit with something like Malabrigo Finito you’ll understand why my fingers want to wrap that baby in the very softest ever–or maybe cashmere from Colourmart, as long as I’m dreaming, since they’re about the same. There are those who will tell you cashmere never shrinks, and then there’s me saying that when my kids were small I bought a cashmere sweater labeled size 42 for fifty cents at a yard sale because it fit my six-year-old; someone out there had had a really, really bad day doing laundry. (We, though, totally won.)

Would you do it? Would you knit it on really-too-big needles so that when it shrinks like crazy it wouldn’t be too far off from what you intended in the first place?

This is called, okay, talk some sense into me: back away from the pretty. Put it back. Don’t do it.

But maybe?

I told our kids that I didn’t know what their luggage situation was like and whether they’d rather I mailed it home to them, but either way, if it was alright, I’d made this blanket for Hudson so he too could have a soft cushy one for doing faceplants off the couch into.

My daughter-in-law: “It’s so beautiful!”

(Thank you Malabrigo for the Rios.)

I asked Parker if it was okay to give his brother a soft blankie like his. He gave it a quick looking-over–darker green and a different pattern–and was quite fine with that.

And then it got ignored as sleepy things do while toys got played with and Parker helped me pick apples (don’t forget the scissors to cut the tape around the clamshells) and those apples got sliced and handed around and lunch got eaten and bubbles got blown as little boys danced.

Turns out Hudson had had a bad night being in a strange place and after falling asleep on the plane and having to wake up again after they’d landed and he was tired and so was his mom. She scooped him up to go set him down for a nap.

That toy in his hand just wasn’t enough in that moment. I quickly grabbed the green woolly softness and hunched down to be eye to eye with my 16-month-old grandson.

“Do you want a blankie?”

He gave me the saddest face in the whole wide world and nodded and said, “Uh HUH” and reached out to my outstretched hands, then snuggled his face into it on his mommy’s shoulder, holding it and her tight.

His first sentence to us ever. And with that it was his forever.

I haven’t really talked about the wedding yet, have I.

I brought my gift of a soft, undyed, near-white silk lace shawl to the dinner the night before the wedding and was glad to see quite a few other people bringing gifts then, too.

Holly, the bride, was so thrilled with it that at the wedding reception the next day she sat down right there and wrote out a heartfelt thank you and commissioned someone to find me and get it to me, since of course everybody constantly wanted her attention and her new husband’s and she was trying to do right by everyone at once. But such a personal gift–she wanted as personal a thank you as she could make it, and right away.

She’s a good one. Our nephew is one very lucky man. She said to me later in the evening as we reconnected in the crowd, “I don’t know you yet but I love you, and thank you.”

Which is exactly how I felt.

One bright, one dull by comparison (picture here)–should I knit another baby hat for my nephew’s girl twin? There’s just a dearth of superwash merino in baby girl colors around here. Can’t imagine why… I think I’d have to break into a set that was going to be something else.

Which project wasn’t grabbing me the way I expected it to. Those six skeins could make a lot of little things instead of one big thing. Alright then.

Amazing how deadlines clarify the view.

Tag-teaming with the lupus today. I was expecting a friend over and I wanted to spruce up a bit.

Wait, wait, not so fast there.

Can I do this. Yes. Alright, then, dishes after breakfast, done.

Can I scrub that. Not without collapsing. Okay, then, that will have to stay imperfect–how do two adults with no little kids around anymore get a floor in need of being swept again two days after the last time? But mopping, not happening. How about this? Okay, then, laundry, mostly done.  I rested and I made progress and at one point I put my feet up and cast on the next Colinette hat.

But rather than feeling growly or worried that things were flaring a little more than I’d like, I found myself mentally giving a brief nod at all the things that weren’t going wrong medically that had before and simply rejoicing at the great gift that it is to be alive. To be able to love. To have been raised by parents who love me, to have been able to turn around and give that to my children in turn, and best of all, to see the payoff in how very well my grandchildren are being parented, with much thanks to Kim’s parents and grandparents too.

Got to see some new pictures today of 15-month-old Hudson helping his cousin out by eating most of Hayes’s birthday cupcake for him. You want all that? Nah, it’s a little much, here, have some. Thanks! Um, wait, that was a lot.

Hayes. A year already! What an intense joy after all those prayers to see him growing and interacting and perfectly fine.

The friend’s day changed such that there was just no way she could make the long drive here and back up clear across San Francisco and beyond after all the traveling she’s been doing. She was so sorry.

I know fatigue. I would have loved to have seen her while she’s back in California, but I totally understood how it was, no problem. I’m just glad we got that close.

And as I knit I anticipated happy faces to come. It’s all good.

Malabrigo Rios* blankie before the blocking: it looks like the side view of the grater we used to get lemon zest for our clafoutis. Latest batch: fresh blueberry.

(Pro tip: if you use the springform pan out of sheer habit like I did, and you, um, don’t get the bottom snapped on quite right, a quick cookie sheet under there before putting it in the oven and then you’ll have a giant popover! And clafouti too! All of it good and you get to enjoy it sooner, too.

And…the blankie after the blocking. I love how it looks like fireflies coming out to play.

(*Rios means rivers in Spanish.)

Six weeks and I’m ready to be done and go dive into something far smaller and faster.

But first. I need to add a few rows of ribbing–and then this blankie is *done*.

I had ten 100g skeins of Malabrigo Rios (close to the Bobby Blue here in real life) and I could have made it tall enough for my 6’9″ son to curl over his feet and up to his chin as a good afghan should do–and Hudson’s going to be tall–but when I asked him if he wanted it adult size or baby he said baby.

Baby blankets always need to be at least 45″ square in my experience. I’m somewhere around there-ish, preblocking.

So what I decided to shoot for was this, since it wouldn’t be too big: my birthday knitted right into the thing. A little genealogy mystery for the future.

Now, it helps that for me the number of months and the number of days are only off by one number: so you have this many full repeats of diamonds and this-many-minus-one full repeats of diamonds framed by a half repeat at each end, since the diamonds alternate by half motifs. Go look at the pattern framing this blog to see what I mean–it’s that one, with yarnovers instead of the more-solid make-ones.

I like how lots of little diamonds together add up to bigger diamonds, individual within and yet solid and big all at once. Like families.

I know, it’s not very diamondy looking yet. Just wait till it hits the water tomorrow.

While I finish up one project I’m trying to plan the next. My grandkids need matching sweaters come Christmas and just for fun I thought I’d put a link here to bookmark the Ugly Christmas Sweater (TM) that did itself in in its enthusiasm. With thanks to Richard Thompson, whose Cul-De-Sac strip is the best.

(While thinking, you know, I bet I could get a soundtrack doohickey to stick in a sweater pocket, and and and… oh wait–and wouldn’t the people at church have fun when one of my grandsons pokes the on button sitting hidden in his handknit sweater in the middle of services and wheredidyoufindthat! Okay, never mind then.)

Maybe just a plain t-shirt for everyday.

Sometimes all it takes is starting that first step.

I bought a full bag of Malabrigo Rios skeins several months ago, a very soft superwash wool and what Parker’s blanket was made of, for a matching drag-around-everywhere blankie for Hudson. I made him that vivid blue silk one when he was born, and it was gorgeous and good for thermoregulating in heat or cold, but for doing head-first dives off the couch into the softness and poking holes in and having Gramma fix it? (I know, I know, so I keep convincing myself–wool really is the way to go.)

And a friend having been burned out of her apartment last year by a hot water heater gone bad, you never know; wool self-extinguishes when you remove the source of flame, whereas synthetics melt onto the skin. Wool is definitely safer around small children.

I finished the ribbing tonight and I’ve started in on the pattern part.  The yarn had thrown a tantrum clear from the next room and had demanded to be next. Nothing else would do. Me me me, it loudly bossed my needles.

At long last and such a relief–I’d wanted to want to work on it and now nothing else will do. (Sorry for the delay, kiddo.)

Among the UCSF questions: “In the last twelve months, have you had trouble getting your insurance to cover a medication that was prescribed because of your lupus?”

“Yes, I have,” I started to answer, “actually, including right now”–then I stopped myself with, “Oh wait–they must have gotten it through finally, because I’m scheduled to have that shot tomorrow.”

So today was the day.

And against all this season’s odds it rained, a long and at times hard, glorious, much-needed bout of rain, briefly down to a drizzle so I decided it was a good time to head out the door for the clinic. It was why I decided to go to the post office with the hat after, though, rather than before, a little reluctant to leave a warm dry house with quite enough leeway time. (Rain is always cold here. Always. It was a revelation to me when we moved to northern California that the very concept of a soothing warm summer rain simply did not exist in this part of the country.)

And I wanted to give myself enough time for backups on the road: people here too often do not drive well when there’s actual weather, not to mention it would be when the high schoolers would be getting out as I went by and they definitely do not have much driving experience in such conditions.

But all went well.

So I had waiting time. Then the shot. Then twenty minutes’ more of a wait to make sure there was no reaction to it.

Which means I sat and knit, the desperately-needed rain in view from the second-story windows and people coming and going to their appointments around me, each one getting a smile and a nod if they wanted to see it.

Because throughout all that, as I added green stitch to green stitch in a lace pattern my hands knew so well I barely needed to look at it, the happy thought of that little box waiting expectantly in my car and the love I got to hear in a daughter’s voice for her mother and my own anticipation of her mother, fighting for her life, cheering her on, her opening that box and the card and the note and hearing that someone out there loves that she raised her daughter so well, loves them both, whoever they are….

Maybe the baby alpaca that was growing in my hands as I sat would in its own time go to someone someone around me right then knew. We are all connected somewhere. It made me happy for them, too.

And I caught their eyes and silently wished them well on their way into their doctors’ offices, whatever may have brought them there, or on their way home.

There you go, that’s a better picture of the color of the hat: the morning sun bouncing off the San Francisco fog with the trees below.

Meantime, the cinnamon sticks disappeared. No crumbles, no shards, gone. Huh. The cinnamon branch against the peach tree was left untouched but above it one of those sticks had been jammed between clamshells where the squirrels couldn’t reach it even if they’d suddenly stopped avoiding the stuff. No sign.

I finally got it: birds’ nests.

I wonder if they had any way to intuit that the non-native cinnamon would keep mites and ants away from their babies? Squirrels will line their nests with bay leaves to keep fleas away if they’re lucky enough to find any.

Or maybe they just were attracted to the size and shape and color and smoothness and light weight.  I don’t know.

Meantime, after very rarely ever seeing a single one, (like, twice, I think) –but I don’t think it was the cinnamon that called them–today I had a flock of fourteen elegant birds crowding the patio. They dwarfed the mourning doves, who kept well clear. According to Sibley, band-tailed pigeons are 13 oz to our Cooper’s hawk’s 16 oz–they are big. Beaks with a bit of a curve downward with dark coloring at the tip rather like a hawk’s. Cool.

They were skittish and didn’t stay long (Don’t move! You moved!) and I got no pictures, but, wow, my birdfeeder has never seen the like. (And no you can’t land on it–one tried.)

The third thing. I got the call from the UCSF researcher and we finished up our annual lupus survey but just before she could go I told her what I had done.

She was stunned. She was thrilled, and she loved that the color matched where she worked. She was so excited for her mom to be getting that soft chemo cap made just for her and she completely made my day by how grateful she was–she has no way to know how many more people will get knitting done for them rather than just thought about after she so thoroughly fed my soul in those moments.

After I hung up that did it: I sat down and undid the last ten rows and redid them to take out that one single non-decrease row right there that was making the back poof out funny. Yes it did. Out it goes. Should have made them all decrease rows as of one step sooner. Now it’s nice and rounded off at the top the way it needed to be and now it’s good enough for her mom and now it’s reblocked and tomorrow, now that it’s perfect, tomorrow it goes out in the mail.

It’s amazing the difference one single step can make.

Can’t blog yet, gotta finish this… Fog blue, with the leaves of the trees peeking out from under the San Francisco morning cloud cover.

Well there you go. Now to block it and run the ends in.

A joyful Easter Sunday–and a birthday dinner at Michelle’s, shared with our niece and nephew.

And…

For about 15 years now I’ve been in a lupus study at UCSF, the current focus being longterm SLE patient outcomes. There is an annual phone call of an hour to an hour and a half.

That call was scheduled for Friday, and we got through most of it–but the woman’s voice was giving out and you can’t talk softly to my hearing. She apologized that it had been an intense week and sorry about her voice and could we finish the memory testing part next week? Maybe Thursday?

Yes, sure, of course.

Then, with some hesitation, she told me why she was so stressed: her mother had just been diagnosed as being terminal.

Oh honey!

Which is why I found the ever-so-slightly-grayish-ice-blue Venezia merino/silk in my stash, very soft, and got right to it: the sheen of the morning light across the San Francisco fog for where the daughter lives, warmth and love to the both of them, whoever they may be.

A chemo cap. A little bit of knitting. It’s nothing and it’s everything.

The connection was iffy. Sound came and went. The damaged hearing aid worked for the memorial concert after I toggled the battery case a bit, like I mentioned, it worked through the hours of the cousins gathering afterwards (with just a few moments where it randomly cut out and back on again a few times), and I simply left it on all that night, afraid to risk opening it again, after getting assurance from Marian that it wasn’t feeding back. I put it on in the morning thinking it should be okay that day too but so much for that, it was dead.

But by then it was just my folks, my brother, my sister, her friend, my son, my niece and her fiance… So I guess quite a few people actually but where it was easy to say, talk to my left side.

I kept the right one in, though, even if as custom-but-dead electronics it plugged up that ear a bit because at $4444 *each* (and that was at a discount from $7k) you just don’t lose those, y’know?

I opened the battery cases again on the plane home to turn them off, glad there was nobody in the middle seat this time, and after we landed I turned the left aid back on.

It went through the exasperating little overly-long tune it plays inside one’s head to let me know it was ready to go. (I would love to someday ask Oticon, hey, whose idea was that? Just–why? Why not make that part reprogrammable?)

Closed the other one, wishing if only, since I was going to need to call Richard to come out of park’n’call shortly. But I knew I could make the bluetooth work with just the one.

–When–hey, I know that song–it played! Look at that! Whyever, I’m happy, and we were able to talk all the way home on the noisy freeways, catching up after I’d spent three days with So. Much. LIFE! crammed into them. Small/great blessings.

And then this morning it was dead again. And intermittent again.

Yesterday, after seeing Dad’s museum and taking Bryan to the airport, Marian had said, call your audiologist right now and I looked at the clock and realized it was still before 5:00 California time. Hey. So I did.

They got me in this afternoon. They replaced the battery door (now I know the right way to describe it) under warranty. Done. And that was clearly all it needed.

And now I can go back to talking about things like handing cousin Bruce in person the cashmere/silk cowl for his wife Paige in handdyed turquoise, a color I knew she loves, as I asked how her treatments were coming. Still in radiation. He was so thrilled, and he told me how much she loves her shawl I’d already sent.

I was just grateful there was something I could do to be with them where they were in any way.

And how another cousin said she was moving to England and said it with so much embarrassment mixed with such fervent hope, something about how she was going to be needing a scarf and hat in seven months when they go, that I laughed and told her, “Of course. What color?”

“Surprise me.”

As I grinned but thought of my friend Constance’s line that color is everything, wondering just how adventurous I should be, she added, motioning at my blouse, “My coat is that shade of purple.”

Having twenty-three cousins on that side plus aunts and uncles and spouses, I almost told her, Just don’t let the word get out, okay?

And so there was a birthday party, three days early because weekends rock.

Grampa Richard read the Pirate book, the current big favorite in the household as it turns out. I turned to another parent and marveled, “The Pied Piper,” as he got swarmed by small children all trying to climb in to get a better look at the pages.

There is nothing in this world as funny as a twelve-month-old with that early-walker stagger growling, “YAWRRRRR!” I’d been told about it but I got to actually hear it in person. Twice.

Richard and Kim both exclaimed in delight at the sight of Hudson’s new sweater to go with his big brother’s, totally making my day, and they loved the hat, too, far more than I did. Next thing you know there was a proud Parker parading with great glee towards us down the hallway in his digger sweater, Hudson was then dressed in his (I was very pleased with how it fit–a thank you to the Bev’s Country Cottage site for the measurements), and cameras were being whipped out all around for some play outside on the grass where the light was good. (Pardon the sleep-deprived thumb.)

I did at one point put the hat on Hudson and he looked up at me with this suddenly sad little face as if to ask, Gramma? Why are you doing this to me? I laughed and hugged and took it off him and promised him I was all done now.

There was a bounce house set up during the party. I had never actually been inside a bounce house before, but after the party was over and the neighborhood little kids and the cousins had gone home, Parker and I ran races inside it, going along the blue outer-perimeter lines.

Parker stayed within those lines. I could not and keep up and keep my balance at the same time; seems that being somewhat bigger means you sink somewhat more and kind of evens out the little one’s chances of beating you. We did the “we all fall DOWN” ring around the rosie part, too, and the sudden oooof was a surprise–I am not three anymore and that was not as soft as I expected. I bounced down twice more with him just the same but am quietly fine with not doing that again soon. I’m still glad I did it.

I don’t usually have multiple projects going, and yet the night before the trip I was just not satisfied with what I had going somehow and I grabbed the  Stitches West, Jimmy Beans-bought Technicolor Dreamcoat MadTosh yarn and some needles and cast on a random stitch number and threw it in my purse. The tag said it was worsted, I’d call it more chunky–it was a cowl and it went fast.

I started knitting at the airport, on the plane, to keep my calm when Richard almost missed the flight (more on that tomorrow), during random quiet moments (Hudson napping, Parker playing in the sunshine when I couldn’t go, company gone home and Kim out for a moment’s errand.)  Kim exclaimed over how pretty it was. I asked her her favorite colors, and she said browns and navy blues and brights, like that.

I said to her just before we left for home, right after casting off, that knitting serves to me as a kind of mental marker of various events in life, as in, I was making this when that happened. And so, I said, this was for remembering Hudson’s first birthday, and I surprised her with it and would have been surprised myself the night before–but not very. The chance impulse had become the perfect one.

Parker drove with us to the airport, his favorite digger toy in his hand the whole way. He teased us and pretended at first not to say goodbye because maybe that way we wouldn’t really go.

And my brain woke me up at 5:00 this morning so I wouldn’t miss the alarm and the flight and I thought nice try, and went back to sleep.