There’s a picture of her on the right, here, at my in-laws’ old house in Kensington, Maryland. Anyway: my childhood friend Kathleen and her husband and son are having the Great American Summer Adventure and have now driven clear to where the sun doesn’t rise at the ocean like suns normally do.

Which is why we discovered that a tree root had lifted the side of the inner gate such that it no longer latches (never noticed that–that tree’s gone now, though) and we wanted to give their dogs a chance to run around in the back yard awhile. Gee, did we have any, like, string in the house we could, y’know, tie that thing together with for the moment?

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?

I learned something tonight.

I finally got to go to Purlescence‘s knit night, the second time since May due to germs and travel and other friends’ schedules. I walked  in and felt like, oh, I’m home!

I had heard about the Halos of Hope program to knit chemo caps for cancer patients (finally googled it just now; I recognize the logo, that’s the place); those running it donate all their time so that there is zero overhead involved, only the mailing of the caps. They sell patterns for them to try to meet those mailing expenses themselves as much as they can. Benjamin Levisay had mentioned it on Facebook.

But I’d thought, well that’s nice but why don’t I just knit one and drop it off at the clinic’s hematology department next time I go in and save them the postage? They do actually have a collection table for such and I’ve thought for awhile that I should.

So I asked Nathania. I knew Purlescence had gone in in a big way, with a 24-hour Halos of Hope knitathon last weekend. (I missed it. Richard had a bad 24-hour bug and I sure didn’t want to contribute that to the gathering.) Two hundred and ten hats!

And that’s when I learned that Halos is aimed at those in medically underserved communities and where yarn money is hard to come by; here, there are a lot of knitters and crocheters, there’s a lot of people who are financially quite comfortable and it’s not difficult for the needs to be met: something beautiful, something artistic, something made with love and talent and skill and compassion and a good-deed outlet for one’s leisure time.

I mentioned I had an online friend who has to drive two hours to get to the nearest doctor, and she nodded, Exactly.

And then she told me of a woman here who was housebound and limited in her old age–but she could knit. She had talked to Nathania, wanting to contribute, and told her she could afford to knit maybe one or two a month; Nathania and the others at the shop responded with, Let us help you out with that. And so they gave her a large donation of yarn, and at the knitathon she got a ride over there and was just going to…drop them off in the corner and, y’know, slip back out the door…

No no, come, let everybody see what you did! And so her fifty-four hats got put in the center of the group for everyone to see and the woman got the applause and cheers that she wasn’t looking for but so much deserved.

She had earned her halo.

I remember how hesitant my mother-in-law was to ask me to knit her a chemo cap, and how deeply gratifying it was to be able to say, Of course I will!

And then another and another, let’s see, Mom’s favorite colors, and another and another, I tried to make her a full wardrobe of chemo caps.

Tonight made me stop and envision what it must be like to have–none. Wow. Soft yarn, small purse project, coming up.

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.

Years ago, someone from my then-knitting group (which would gradually dissolve as people moved away), a staff member at Packard Children’s Hospital, was diagnosed with cancer. It was when they started her chemo that they found she had an autoimmune liver disease and could not take the treatments.

Lenore faded pretty quickly.

Near the end, she offered our group her yarn, having no family of her own to pass it down to, and I looked her in the eyes in a quiet moment and promised her I would make something beautiful from it to remember her by; she was grateful, with tears.

And then I was not in town, I don’t remember why, for the yarn get-together: people chose, and there was a bit saved for me for when I got back.

None of which, to be honest, had the remotest appeal. Just, none. I wanted it to but it adamantly refused to comply.

And I felt guilty about that. I had promised. It had meant so much to her.

I was cleaning out some old stuff today and came across a stitch sampler that had been among those itchy scratchy hideous s0-not-my-color yarns. It was knitted very tightly, like a good solid old Irish sweater. Way too short to be a scarf, way too funky shaped to be, say, a hotpad, way too much work to just toss aside; she’d put a lot of time into it when time had been the one thing she had had so little of left.

This time I put it around my neck and imagined it sewn shut at the ends as a small cowl.

You’d want a thick turtleneck under it to protect from the itch, but, yes! At last. She herself had made the pretty thing to remember her by.

And I do.

There was an article in today’s Mercury News and I found myself wanting to throw out the hype and the extraneous and, for the sake of his children in time to come, distill it down to its essence re a man who’d been away from his family on what I assume was a business trip; while overseas, he’d bought some toy fire trucks to bring home to his little ones.

The in-flight movie was a foreign film about firefighters rescuing people.

He thinks, gratefully, that that put him in the frame of mind to react well in what would happen next: he was in the emergency seat aisle and next to the window, and he wrestled that door open on that Asiana flight in San Francisco that had just crashed and then, instead of riding the slide to the ground to safety, he shouted to his fellow passengers so they could know there was a way out and he stayed to help.

Someone screamed MOVE! and smacked and walked on one already-hurt woman trying to protect her daughter, someone hit her, at least one man in utter panic adding injury to injury, people pushing and shoving and grabbing for their bags, impeding the exodus from the plane as the smoke came at them; but the man by the emergency chute helped the woman and her daughter to safety.

And dozens of others.

That man was later grateful that in such pain and chaos the best had come out of him, that what he would so hope his response to others would be actually had been, and he clearly ached for those who’d panicked and done terrible things. For those who now have to live with themselves for not doing right by their fellow passengers–that would be so much harder, and how could you ever know in advance how you would react, maybe blindly like that… He asked that people not judge them.

He was so glad that movie had been the one shown. He wondered maybe that had made the difference for him?

His compassion for those who’d responded poorly in such primal fear moved me deeply.  He wondered if he could just as easily have gone that way too, but thank heavens he had not.

He got home. He told his children nothing; they were too young to handle or understand such an enormity as he’d just experienced, and so he protected them, too.

And his little boy, playing happily with his brand new fire truck, out of the blue and with no prompting whatever exclaimed in delight, “Let’s go save some people, Daddy!”

(Edited to add, Thank you, Ben Levy, sir.)

Thank you, everybody. The giddy intensity of accomplishment yesterday gave way to a quieter, I did it! that’s had me smiling all day. Chan called me the Blanket Doctor, and I told her I gave it a dose of anti- boy antics.

And back to the soft cream dk silk project at hand.

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.

A bunch of us went out for dessert tonight together with an old friend who is about to move across the country after lo these many years here. We wanted a last chance to sit and talk and enjoy her company before she goes off.

She just got married.

The groom’s first marriage was to our oldest.

We wish them all the very best.

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.)