How, how, how are you three, little girl?
With your light, silky hair and your heart-piercing stare.
You chuckle ’till you’re out of breath, you whine my patience half to death;
you’re a quiet, patient friend; you’re an effortlessly kind sister…
I’m still hopelessly in love with you, you sweet, smart, expressive, thoughtful child.

Indeed, how can she be three? How can I be the parent of a three year old?

Three, N is teaching me, is old enough to make up songs, to dress herself, to deeply desire to do everything else by herself, to play board games, to learn all the sounds letters make, to do and undo every button on her clothes, to “help” sweep the floor, to “help” cook, and to “help” do the dishes every morning. I am not going to apologize for the use of scare quotes; you don’t understand why they call them “scare” quotes until you have a three-year-old “help” do the dishes. We have a lot of fun, but that broom gets lots of use.

Three is also old enough to pick one’s own knitted birthday gift. N had been dressing and undressing her one little fancy doll several times a day, so I offered to knit her a new dress. She came with me to Iqaluit’s local yarn store (which is half of a fabric store, within half of a hardware store, and really not bad). With only a little coaching, she narrowed down her many choices to some yarn that was downright lovely (Patons Silk Bamboo, in a sort of salmon-coral).

Three is, however, definitely not old enough to have a concept of the time it takes to craft something by hand. After that initial purchase, every day came the question, “Did you finish knitting Pink Dolly’s new dress?”

The pattern was a total eyeball job, right out of my head: I cast on some stitches that seemed about right, fiddled about with stitch markers ’till they seemed about right for a raglan shape, then knit downward, throwing eyelets and garter bits until it seemed “right.” I did actually try the thing on “pink dolly” to make sure the whole scheme was working before casting off to finish the yoke, then knit straight for the skirt, incorporating a couple increases. Another bit of complementary patterning at the bottom, and shazam, a dress!

I admit to being fairly proud of myself, though the newly re-christened “Orange Dolly” isn’t quite ready for 5th Avenue. That’s that fashion place, right? Or is that where the money people are? No, that’s Wall Street. Clearly I’ve never been there.

Improvising a doll dress was about half cleverness (It’s a tiny sweater, I know how to do those) and half laziness (who wants to google when you can guess?) I have since been introduced to the wide and wild world of doll fashions. I have a friend up here lending me pattern books full of pictures of dolls who are all significantly better dressed than myself.

But they’ll have to wait. I told N I wouldn’t teach her to knit ’till she’s four.

One of the more maddening things people say to parents of small children is some variation of, “Enjoy the moment!” “Seize the day!” “They’re small for so short a time, enjoy it while it lasts!”

Now, I’m generally a polite person, so I usually say something along the lines of “okay!” or “yeah, I’m doing my best!” and what have you. But, at least when I had one baby, I was usually thinking something along the lines of, “Do you even remember at all what it was like to have a baby?” Parenting is so much harder than anything I’d ever done before, that I couldn’t do too much to control my desire that it just be over quickly. People would say, “It goes by so fast!” Uh huh. Sure. More like, every single day goes by so slowly that when a whole month is done, I’m so shocked that time managed to pass at all that it seems way faster than the eternity I was sure it was going to be.

Well, baby #2 is giving me a slightly different perspective.

I enjoy M so much. My little Dot. Her giggles, her noises, her first words, every new thing she learns. So far, familiar. But I started noticing: when the time came to be looking for milestones, or stages, or things to mark with your child’s growth – which I had studied to memorization with N – With M, I had forgotten all of it. I had no idea what was supposed to be happening when. I remembered no cows milk or honey before one year, but for the rest I was content to guess. I chalked it up to being more relaxed with my second child.

Then one day, I was looking back at pictures of N when she was M’s age, and I realized – I don’t remember her. I don’t remember what she sounded like. What she smelled like. What she did when she was learning to play. Learning to eat. I took ten thousand pictures, but that sensory memory of my cuddly bald baby is already more distant than I thought possible.

Now, that’s partly because N’s babyhood was a really insane season in my life. I was a full-time graduate student, we were living on a ghost of a shoestring, I was discerning a call to ministry. I spent most of my days at home with N, and gave her a lot of devoted attention. But life was complicated.

It’s also partly because my memory of who N was has been subsumed into the current reality of who she is. She’s a tiny wiry force of nature with a massive vocabulary and a bottomless fount of desires. She’s sweet, orderly, compulsive, willful, thoughtful, sharp, and busy busy busy. She’s the same person she was two years ago, but also so much more than she was. She was a complete human person then, but with agency has come complexity, in exponential leaps and bounds.

Brave explorer.

Exploring the frozen river, very carefully, on a weirdly warm November day when the snow half-melted.

But it’s also because, she was a baby then. This is now.

M is a baby now. She’s here. All the time, when she’s not sleeping, she’s right there. And I know now: I will forget. I will forget what this is like.

So yes. I’m eating it up. I’m savoring her baby-ness.
Her impossibly round features, but delicate expressions.
Her intense frowning brow of concentration as she uses thumb and forefinger to pick up a piece of corn.
Her dive-bombing attempts to eat my nose.
Her desire to be held at all times, especially when sporting her rosy teething cheeks.
Her deep baby chuckle, contrasted with her high, soft attempts at speech.
The way she says “dadadada” when happy, and “MMAAAMMAAAMMM” when she’s mad.
The times she catches her sister’s eye across the dinner table, and they both tilt their heads to the side and dissolve into giggles.
The day she discovered how to bang two cups together in the bath, and was so pleased with herself she laughed every time she did it, then had all three of us banging cups together by the end.

I have no less than five books of knitting for babies. I have very little hope of knitting most of the enclosed patterns for my own babies, as M is already into her 12-month things. But my one bit of Christmas knitting is for her.

Meet Elmer the elephant. From Vintage Baby Knits by Kristen Rengren, a book so beautiful I have flipped through it many times for the sheer joy of it. Elmer is an honest-to-goodness vintage pattern, from the 50s I think. No one would be designing like this these days, with the above-shown insane number of flat-knit pieces. I loved it. It was really different.

And the yarn, which I brought with me, was some old sock yarn from Mother Martha’s stash. So this is a little bit from Martha, to Martha. This warms the heart.

The sweet moments of having a baby, I’ve decided, are not unlike catching a sunset. You take the picture because you can’t help yourself, you really want to preserve some of this incredible moment for the future. (Not that I get on anyone’s case for taking pictures. It’s their life, and petty criticism is attractive on exactly nobody.) But really, a sunset is a gift for right now. The fact that it is only for a moment is part of the enjoyment, even though that knowledge is a little like sadness. It’s also a little like looking forward to heaven.

(Ok, so this is a sunrise. It’s hard to miss sunrises here, since they happen at 9.)

You’re worth it, baby. I wish I could communicate to the whole world what an overpowering joy it is to be your mommy. But I can’t, so I’ll just store it up in my heart.

The toddler is actually asleep during the daytime. The six-week old is swaddled and staying asleep while not physically attached to me. At the same time.

This is the first time this has happened in weeks.

Welcome to my life!

The adjustment to having two kids has been… about what you’d expect. We had our “babymoon” – two weeks that are easy not just because I have extra help, but because baby is clueless to the world around her. She’ll eat and sleep when she needs to, and as long as I keep her close and respond to her needs, she’s pretty undemanding.

But pretty soon, she’s waking up. She starts moving her hands, which she uses to cluelessly bop herself away from her food source. She starts lifting her head, which she uses to keep herself from falling asleep on the comfort of my chest. She starts smiling, which distracts her from nursing. She starts straightening her strong legs, which she uses to keep herself from getting comfortable in newborn wrap carries.

Isn’t it amazing how, from the very very beginning, we use every single tiny new power of independence to push ourselves away from what we need? From what we were made for? And from the very very beginning, someone with a lot of grace and patience has to be there, teaching us to use our powers for what is good, and what is good for us.

M is a truly wonderful little baby. She’s at that peak stage of newborns-being-difficult, with her waking up to the world meaning that she is getting in the way of herself. And getting in the way of me helping her meet her basic needs. But she’s at the very easy end of such things, so I really have nothing to complain about. She’s thriving, all medical question marks have turned out to be false alarms, and we’re learning each other’s idiosyncrasies. The details of this dance of learning each other have been all-consuming for the past weeks. And will continue to be so; I expect continuous transition for quite a while yet.

I got a surprising amount of knitting done during that first month, but the last two weeks have seen about five stitches. Even during those few moments that it’s been possible, I feel like just lifting the two ounces of sleeve and needles will make my arms fall off at the shoulders. Besides, I need to start showing my daughters the example that it is possible to rest sometimes.

You can imagine my frustration, then, when I kept running into issues with the tiny sheep sweater.

You see one sweater here, but I think I knit enough to have two of these already.

The body of the thing (back and two fronts from bottom to armpits) I knit most of twice, because I completely misread the instructions for the decreases.

The collar I knit twice as long as it was supposed to be before reading the directions and realizing it only had to be four rows long.

The button band I managed to read the directions right, but when I bound off the first side, I realized it was unconscionably tight. I ripped it out and had to redo it with more stitches.

The sleeves were fine. I was supposed to knit two of those.

The sheep yoke… oh dear.

I did a row of sheep, then ripped it out because doubling my contrast yarns was too thick.
I did a row of sheep, then ripped it out because just one strand of contrast yarns was too thin. (I was using some fingering from stash. I don’t know why I thought that would work.)
I did a little finagling (and gee, swatching), and found that pairing each contrast yarn with a lace yarn gave the right gauge. (I paired the white yarn with some lace mohair, which adds a little extra fluffiness to the sheep.)
Then I did a row of sheep, decided doing the colorwork flat was making me insane, so I ripped back and added a steek.

Yes, I am the sort of mad person who adds a steek to a pattern that does not have a steek.

See, I have rules about fair isle knitting. (1) It should always be in the round. (2) you should never have more than two colors to a row. (3) you should keep long floats (6 stitches or more) to a minimum, since that means you have to catch the floats more often. This pattern broke all those rules, making it absolutely impossible for me to work fair isle with decent tension.

So I got rid of one problem by adding a steek. Cutting and sewing down a little steek is easier than working this stupid maddening little yoke flat.

Then I did the second row of sheep, and had to rip back because I’d missed the instruction for three extra rows between the rows of sheep.

I got the second row of sheep right. Then I did the decreases and few rows after it. I looked at the directions and decided I’d done those rows wrong. So I ripped them out, looked at the directions again, and realized I’d ripped out what I’d done correctly. (I stopped knitting for the night at that point.)

This project was novel for me, in that it was not knit from stash – this is the first time in a long time that I’ve bought the yarn for something, then just knit it. That helped, because every time I ripped back, I said to myself “I spent too dang much on this nice yarn to have a screwy, dumb-looking sweater out of it.”

Though, after I finish the green sweater (hopefully without having to knit enough stitches for two more of them), I think my next project will be something nice and garter-stitch-y. At least until I’m getting a bit more sleep.

So far so good, though I haven’t gotten past the sleeves.

No, not much knitting time with a tiny kid. And this post, started during a naptime on Thursday, is now being completed on a Monday morning. But this phase shall past. And this little peanut is entirely worth it.