Osborn Fiber Studio

Our due date was on Friday. It’s really weird to think “we’re 9 months pregnant.” It seems like some kind of rare achievement, when it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just… we’re done! We’ve reached the finish line! Except we haven’t.

To be perfectly honest, we’re still in no rush. We’re doing intelligent things to keep things moving, but we had very low expectations that she would be here by now. Plus, we spent so much time and work trying to get her flipped that being able to just wait for her to come is actually downright enjoyable.

The main thing that’s annoying is dealing how everyone else seems to think we’re feeling. So many people seem convinced that we must be tearing out all our hair waiting for this baby. (Of course, being pregnant and having a child makes you the object of half a million projections anyway, but that’s just good practice for ministry. I’m just getting bored with this particular one.) It’s a catch-22: if we go anywhere or do anything, we have to deal with the abject shock that we haven’t had the baby yet. And if we ignore people or skip things, everyone assumes we’re in labor. Oh well. It’s a huge blessing living in a community that cares for us and is so excited for us. And now I’m getting an opportunity to educate everyone on the average lateness of first babies (7-10 days, folks!). People have also been asking intelligent questions and giving us a chance to talk about things, and I won’t say I mind having a free pass to whine about tiredness as much as I want.

Of course, if you come up to me and say “Haven’t you had that baby yet?!” I will just assume that you want me to despise you. And if you ask it on the internet, I will just send you here.

Meanwhile, we are well and truly nested at this point. Her room is really really finished, and it’s easily the brightest and cutest room in the house (mostly because no one’s living in it yet and leaving their crap around – literally and otherwise).

I’ve knit a few things for le bebe, which I’ll show you when I get a chance, but this tiny thing I’m particularly proud of.

It’s called a “heartwarmer,” and I learned about it from Posie Gets Cosy. The pattern, Le chaffe-coeur, comes from this book, which considering I speak hardly a lick of French, would be useless for me to own. So, since I am sort of a terrible person, I just scrolled through all the pictures of finished projects, made a schematic, used established baby measurements, found gauge, and winged it. I installed the buttons with a simple tie and long, easy-to-remove ends, so if they are in completely the wrong place I can move them. I can’t advocate this sort of behavior, but we all have weak moments.

I used a mostly-full but discarded ball of worsted weight 100% Mongolian cashmere that I found lying around the shop. (I asked before appropriating this part of the project; I don’t want to clothe my baby in a garment completely made of crime.) If you ran across a tiny ball of worsted weight cashmere, would you want something like this to be made from it, rather than seeing it lie in a scrap bin? If you can’t quite picture how this garment works, here’s Monkey modeling it for you:

In the rest of life, my priorities are continuing to simplify and slow down. My energy levels have dropped lower than ever, and doing more than one thing outside the house every day wipes me out. Plus, being tired all the time makes it harder to make good decisions about how to spend my time (and harder not to be grumpy with the above-mentioned perfectly lovely people), so after thinking it through today, I’m making my priorities plain. Until baby comes, my priorities are:

1. Get enough sleep to not be exhausted all the time
2. Keep communicating with God and husband
3. Eat healthy food
4. Exercise enough to keep things moving.

All the other things which I tend to work on by default, like communicating with everyone else, going to class, staying on top of schoolwork, blogging, hanging out with people, etc. If you know me, you know I like being on top of schoolwork, out of worldly hubris if nothing else. Today I found myself having to choose between doing the homework that’s due tomorrow and taking a nap, and the nap was the better decision. I figured this would happen after the baby was born, with a snuggly, squalling little excuse for all kinds of delinquency. But apparently I need a little advance practice.