39 Weeks, Oh My!

Apologies for the particularly bad mobile phone/mirror picture this week. Chris came for a snuggle and I didn't want him getting bored and wandering off (his forbearance for being photographed is greater than that of the kitties, but not unlimited). We've made it to 39 weeks, 6 days to go (give or take actual arrival date, of course). I'm hoping to be a few days to a week late but not need to be induced so next Saturday is when I start eating pineapples or spicy food, drinking raspberry leaf tea, and bouncing up and down on my exercise ball all day. Until then, it's lying on my back with my feet up and my knees crossed. Or cleaning the house in preparation for my mother's arrival on Wednesday, whichever actually happens. The sad thing about my mother arriving is that I'll have to move out of the nursery/guest bed and poor Chris will be kept awake all night with my snoring. Even in a non-adjacent room, wearing ear plugs he can sometimes hear me. This is why I try and read for an hour or so after going to bed, to give him a chance to fall asleep before I do. Honest, it's for purely altruistic purposes and not because I'm a bookworm

Speaking of books, Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy has been my latest form of crack. It's about a(n adopted) brother-sister team of bloggers and their crew some twenty years after the cure for the common cold and the cure for cancer got together to turn the recently deceased into zombies and the government conspiracies they unearth. I'm not a fan of the zombies, this and World War Z (has that movie come out yet? I live under a rock) are pretty much the entirety of my exposure to the genre. Oh, I've seen Shaun of the Dead and that movie where the kid has the rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Anyway, Newsflesh is as good as everyone said and if her urban fantasy series published under her own name, Seanan McGuire is anywhere near as good, I will be a very happy bunnybookworm.

On the knitting front things are looking less optimistic. The baby blanket/shawl is coming along nicely, I've knit the border along the first side and turned the corner, but everything else is in the frog pond.* The socks for my mother, I'm convinced, are not going to fit. They're a little long and too tight to go over the heel. I can't really try them on because my own feet, ankles, and legs are swollen but I'm convinced they're all wrong. Plan A is to knit the second sock to be the size I think it should be and then when she arrives I can frog whichever sock is the naughty one and reknit it. Chris' pullover otoh just needs to be frogged. I knit a gauge swatch but I'm not happy with the size it's coming out. I had him try on the body and it was quite snug which, combined with the denseness of the fabric, means it'll be too hot and not comfortable enough for him to actually wear. It took forever to knit in the first place, but I don't want to finish a sweater just to have it finished and not be worn. So I'll frog it and go up half a mm on the needles and start again at some vague point in the future.

On the more optimistic side, I have acquired *cough* yarn to knit Ravi Junior which is another Carol Feller pattern. It starts at the 6 months size but I think I'll do the next size up for Little Djinn to wear in the Autumn/winter. Not that a cardigan would go amiss in our Scottish "summer". I also acquired yarn for Snawheid and the matching mitt(en)s, Snawpaws. I don't actually know that I have enough yarn for both, but I'll knit the hat and see how much I have left.

~ * ~

* unravelling knitting is known as "frogging" because the stitches make a small "ribbit" sound as one pulls them apart. This sound used to make my husband cry, but he's become jaded to hours of knitting wasted.