It was not my intention to go this long between posts when I revived the blog! It was one month between the resurgence post and my last one, and the same thing has happened again. The reason for this lapse in my blogging has been an unfortunately very difficult third trimester.
I am currently 38 weeks pregnant – I am so trying to enjoy it as I am pretty sure this will be my last time pregnant but it has been very challenging. Back in February, I was forced to admit to myself that I needed to go off work early, which was a mixed blessing. Good in the sense that I put my pride aside and admitted that if I continued to do my work (I am an Intensive Care Nurse), I would do permanent and long-standing damage to my pelvis. Difficult in the sense that I was going to be off work early and for reasons I won’t go into here, that complicated things quite a lot.
As of 2 1/2 weeks ago, I have been unable to lift our 19 month old son and my gracious father has stepped in to look after him! It has been really neat, for lack of a better word, to see them together – they were close before – but now they are quite The Team. Just Tiny and his Gramps toodling off with the wagon on adventures around the neighbourhood. Sometimes I am having a good, relatively pain-free day and can follow them – at a much slower pace of course! But most days, I have to stay behind and wait to hear about the adventures when they return.
This was back in February when we had a bunch of snow and Tiny refused to leave the wagon at home!
Never before has this Winnie-the-Pooh quote meant so much to me as I watch the two of them go adventuring:
“What I like doing best is Nothing.”
“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it. It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
As you can imagine, I feel very grateful to my dad for stepping in so much in the past couple of weeks – especially since this may continue for another few weeks if I am anything like I was with Tiny (I delivered 10 days late with him!). BUT, as it would happen, Dad’s birthday is on Monday! What can I do while I sit around feeling sort of crappy?!
You guessed it! Knit him a sweater.
I am under no illusion that it will be finished by Monday – I have just finished the first sleeve and still have the entire body to knit. He made several comments about how much he liked Tiny’s Lucky[you] sweater, which is one of my most favourite knits to date, so I decided to man-ify (I know this is not a word) the pattern to turn it into a Gramps Cardigan. Due to gauge differences, I’m knitting the L1 to come out to the XXL size, which in women’s sizing will fit the measurements of my dad’s favourite sweater perfectly (50″ chest for the finished sweater). I chose a beautiful yarn from Studio Donegal in Ireland: Soft Donegal. It is a dream to work with (again! I used a Donegal tweed for my Truffle Cardigan). For the button band, rather than the rolled St st that Solenn calls for in the pattern, I am going to work a 1×1 ribbing and sew it on afterwards with toggles – sort of like the Alber jacket from Berroco.
This is my third pattern from Solenn – I can not believe that her patterns have not gone viral. They are awesome. Thorough. Well written. AH-mazing! I can not rave about her patterns enough. Honestly, there are so many talented designers out there – how do we knitters keep up?!
As I enter into the 39th week of pregnancy, I will be knitting like the wind as Brenda Dayne likes to remind us on her show and I hope that you are enjoying your knitting as much as I am right now!
