(Carefully) rolling the box he’d climbed into made him giggle.

So the computer did it to my picture. Sorry, Mac, you’re just not as cute.

The forgotten Blue Moon Fiber order from Tina Newton’s dyepots arrived the day before we left, a cheerfully vivid 50/50 merino silk. Not real practical for kids but a lot of fun and it would at least last a little while. Lily got a hat, and on hearing the next morning that Mathias had insisted on wearing it yarmulke style, I knit him one, too, fascinated at how differently the yarn played out in the two sizes.

The white: I had Shibui with me in I think baby alpaca/merino, when some cotton with a little silk is what I’d intended to grab. Again, at least Lily would get to wear it for a little while before it would have been outgrown anyway, right? I had time. I had needles. I had this yarn. Go.

I did know that everything goes through the laundry there; to knit with anything not machine washable was to know it would have a very short life. And that was okay.

I realized afterwards that I buy enough coned yarn that I deliberately preshrink that I hadn’t actually realized just how much laundering could affect yarn-store wool. It wasn’t going to just go down a single size or so.

They really did love them while they lasted and even though it was okay with me, the kids hurt that they’d felted them down to iphone-6 cozies.

Our last full day in Anchorage, then, Richard and I stopped by Far North Yarn and bought a skein of by-golly actual superwash merino. Their Rios shipment wasn’t in yet but I just needed a little something simple to start.

The replacement white lace hat, identical to the original but not quite as soft (hey Plymouth), was finished by the time the first plane touched down in Seattle on our way home Saturday.

Now I need to stop by the local shops to try to find a washable rainbow. Bright. It has to be bright.

It rained every single day we were there. There had been thousands of fires across the state and the air had been record bad, to the point that the doctors had been reluctant to send Lillian and Sam home into it and you could even smell the smoke from inside the hospital.

Rain, blessed rain.

We got to see the biggest rainbow ever, stretching across parkland from mountain to mountain and towering over the one in between.

Mathias and his baby sister need rainbow hats now that hold up to the elements.

Five and a half pounds and they nearly readmitted her, to eight pounds one ounce 17 days later and thoroughly healthy.

She’s perfect.

No is, at two, his favorite declaration. It’s like the color black: it conveys and claims power unto oneself.

No picking up the toddler for six weeks.

Hey, we could help with that part.

We just walked in the door. The earthquake was in Alaska. My laptop was dead and I couldn’t access my email till we got home, but I can now. After 19 days I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do–and pictures to share.

Crashing for now. Type to you tomorrow.

Sunday: I startled her into a laugh, and it was a warm, welcoming laugh that left me wistful that I couldn’t stop right there and chat and become friends for life, because it instantly felt like we were now.

Up to that moment I had been a bit consternated, and the rain wasn’t helping any. Church was over, the building was emptying, and I was glad to have found someone still there I could ask as she finished clearing things from a children’s classroom.

“Excuse me–we went outside looking for our car and it wasn’t there; is there another parking lot on the other side of the building?”

I’m sure no one had ever asked her that before, and the chance to so easily make my day easier delighted her.

“Yes, there is,” she nodded as she laughed in surprise.

Richard, meanwhile, was already ahead, determined to find that car without having to be out in that rain any more than necessary. You have a problem, you apply logic, you solve it. Which is fine.

But I wouldn’t have missed that moment of mutual delight for anything.

A massage chair, not too hard a one. I looked up at their big screen and had this brief moment of, I didn’t know those could ripple.

5.1 or 5.2, depending on whom you ask. We like our earthquakes at entertainment-only level like that.

We were heading for a pizza picnic at the park where there was a playground designed for 2-5 year-olds, and before we left I grabbed my ready-for-anything jacket. After all, it was 5:00 and it gets cold fast at sundown, right?

Oh wait. Sundown takes several hours in September in Alaska. There is not that precipitous drop from 63F there would be at home.

Sam grinned and said to two-year-old Mathias in the back seat, Grammy’s a Californian.

Clearly this was meant to be an in-joke between them, even if he had no idea what it was about.

Grammy is uh Caff Phone uh!

Sam laughed and said it again.

So he did too. They were having a great time.

We got to the park, I looked at the kids playing in t-shirts and my sweater and left the down jacket in the car.

For the record: the lemon mousse topped blueberry compote tarts at Fire Island Bakery were worth several trips there. I’m going to have to figure out how to make those.

Just by way of apology for the radio quiet these last two weeks.

It’s weird to get ready for one season when I haven’t let go of the old one yet. Turtleneck, anyone?

When you have a new baby sister you love and you get to go with your best friend and you get to run outside and you get to find blueberries and pull them off of bushes and you get to eat them and your fingers turn purple this is how it feels.

We were sent pictures of Mathias carefully kissing the new baby.

And an observation that will probably be referenced with a grin at both kids’ future weddings:

“Apparently we made a strategic error when we named the baby something that sounds like ‘Alien’.”

She beat the odds again.

It’s time to go meet the dog and cats and make her big brother wonder why she isn’t being returned to that hospital where she belonged.

I actually have hair. I don’t have cancer nor chemo nor baldness; I have no right to complain.

And yet. It happened not once but twice and I was done.

It took me a year to get up the courage to try again.

I took recommendations. I wanted the reassurances that only getting through it could offer me. I did not ever again want to spend that kind of time intensely rueing having so much of my hair chopped off above my ears after saying I only wanted the bottom trimmed below my shoulders.

Krista from knitting gave me Kimber’s name and told me I would love her.

It took me over a month to finally reach out to that number, but today I found out she was right. I do. I cannot tell you the relief it was to have it matter to her that how I wanted it was how she did it. She asked lots of questions. She listened.

I love my new haircut. It’s actually how the old stylist used to routinely do it, plain and simple and hippy earth-motheringness with a little bit of a shorter sweep across the side of the face. That face in the mirror, said the woman with lupus-onset prosopagnosia, I recognize.

I can trust someone with my head and hair again and that feels like no small thing.