I've been wanting to post for a long time. Every time I have two hands free I am doing something else though. Having a baby hasn't stopped me from reading things online, but it sure has limited the amount I can participate. Honestly, most typing gets directed to Ravelry forums these days about topics like breastfeeding and cloth diapering and chatting with mothers of other November babies about what is going on. Either that or commenting here and there on Facebook.
So last time I posted was right after the Great Lakes Fiber Show last May. It is almost that time of year again! In knitting, I am working on a pair of Sweet Fern Mitts from The Knitter's Book of Wool with the green Wooly Knob yarn I bought last year at the show. They are technically backward because I didn't read the errata until I wanted to check something that didn't seem right in the directions for the right thumb gusset. Then I saw the cables are mixed up so if you knit them like the chart in the book has them they are upside down. They are still cute though, so I'm not going to rip them out.
I get a little knitting done now and then. Since November I've managed to knit a vest that baby E wore once or twice and the other week I finally finished a sweater knit in 6 month size that is too small for him. That is my fault, partly for knitting too slow and partly for not knitting a gauge swatch. I have a feeling the sweater is a little smaller than it should be. I knit that from some sport weight Knitting Notions yarn I bought last year too.
I have to knit up at least some of the yarn I bought at the show last year if I am going to justify buying any more this year.
So yeah, if I haven't posted since May I haven't posted at all about my baby.
My pregnancy went pretty smoothly. I really loved being pregnant until about the last month. Then "the baby" as he was known then was laying in such a position that he was putting pressure on my sciatic nerve and it was pretty painful to walk much at all. Up until mid-October Mark and I were able to go walking almost every day and I loved that so much. I felt it really made a difference (and not in a good way) when I had to cut that back. I was also having a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions which made work really interesting some days.
I actually worked up until the day before the birth. It was Friday so I only worked until noon that day. That evening around 7 p.m. I got some signs that I was going to be having a baby soon. I tried to get as much sleep as I could that night, and I did ok until about 5 a.m. and then I couldn't sleep through the contractions any more. I got up around 6 and went out to the livingroom and rocked back and forth on my big excercise ball. That thing was my best friend throughout pregnancy and labor. Then I realized that the contractions were coming regularly at around 3-4 minutes apart and were lasting awhile. I went to wake Mark up but he was getting up anyway. He timed them for awhile and then I sent him out to get a copy of the local paper. I wanted the newspaper from the day my baby was born and I was getting more certain that it was going to be that day. Then it all is kind of a blur. My midwife showed up around 9 a.m. and I was already a few centimeters dilated. I was fully dilated by mid-afternoon. (Oh yeah, I had a planned homebirth, I don't think mentioned that either) The pushing took awhile, but our son was born at 5:15 p.m. Saturday, November 14, 2009. We hadn't found out whether we were having a boy or girl ahead of time, although for most of the pregnancy I suspected the baby was a boy. Mark thought we were having a girl. The midwife also thought we were having a girl based on the heart-rate pattern. When handed me the baby she said something about "her" and I looked down and exclaimed that we didn't have a girl! I will refer to our son as "E" on this blog. We had thought about that name since pretty early on in the pregnancy, we had it as a potential name before we pinned down a girl's name. We were waiting to see if we felt it fit, and it did.
Now that someone is awake. I will return to this, maybe sooner than 11 months from now...
