Owlet: Week One & Two

Don’t worry; eventually the journal will swing back to cello, writing, and fibre arts. It’s just that right now there isn’t much time for all that! I do use this to record stuff for my own reference later on, after all, so if you’re not interested in the family and baby stuff just skip these entries.

We’ve never had a newborn with us, so this has all been very, well, new! The baby is a sweetheart and very good-tempered in general, and we love her to pieces.

Highlights of the past two weeks:

    Meeting Ceri, Scott, and Ada; meeting Jeff, Paze, Devon, and Tallis (complete with Tallis taking it upon herself to choose one of her own stuffed animals to give to the baby); meeting Uncle Marc M and Uncle Marc L; and meeting Rob, Kristie, and Rowan. And of course, meeting Nana, who has come down to spend a week with us! This weekend she gets to meet Granddad, who is coming down to join Nana.

    Our first post-discharge visit from the CLSC nurse on the Tuesday went very well: I am recovering splendidly, and Owlet is doing very well, too, gaining good weight. We’d been having latching issues, so the nurse showed us a couple of tricks.

    Owlet’s first outing was to the luthier! Very important to start them young. She travels beautifully both in the car and in the stroller. We did a two-hour shopping trip nearby on foot and she didn’t stir the entire time.

    She lost her cord stump exactly one week after she was born, so that Friday was our first official cloth diapering day! It went very well, without any accidents. In general it’s great, and I’m very happy with it. We’re using disposables at night until her system matures more.

This next bit is hard to write, so bear with me. It’s probably TMI for most of you other than mothers, so like I said, feel free to skip it; it’s mostly here for my records.

Breastfeeding in the first ten days was agony. Owlet tore me up really badly; she chomped and ground and I had bruises and scabs that bled into her mouth. This was beyond the basic “cracked and bleeding” thing you get warned about, and was decidedly unpleasant. She was feeding almost every hour for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, too, and I dreaded nursing her because it was agonizing. She comfort sucks a lot as well, which is nice for her but not so nice for me what with the open wounds and all. I loved breastfeeding the boy, and I was so looking forward to doing it again, so I developed a complex about feeding Owlet because I desperately want to do it but it hurt like OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP.

Friday I took the baby to the CLSC for her follow-up weigh-in. Turned out that she lost ten grams since that Tuesday when the nurse was here. Now, this normally wouldn’t fuss me, because she’d gained at a really good rate between discharge and Tuesday. But Friday’s nurse was concerned. I’d also requested to see a lactation consultant, so she took me into an interview room and we talked about the problem. “Show me what you’re doing,” she said, so I dropped one of my bra cups in prep for nursing, and she had a fit at the state of my breast, which was much worse than Tuesday’s nurse had seen. “It hurts me just looking at it,” she said. So then we brought the baby to the breast, and sure enough she chomped and locked her jaw, and we struggled to unlatched her… and there was blood dripping from me onto the baby’s sleeper. (Charming, I know. Let me tell you, one does not feel like a stellar mum when one’s baby’s clothing is bloodstained.) “How long has nursing been like this?” the LC asked, aghast. Since day one, I told her, and she stared at me. “You’re so courageous,” she said. “You’ve been nursing like this through intense pain for eight days? I’d have stopped long ago.” And it was such a relief to hear that, to know I was really trying hard and not faking it somehow. “Are you putting something on them?” she asked. Lanolin, I told her, and she shook her head and said, “No, I meant a real cream, to heal them. I’ll prescribe you one.”

She watched the baby eat, and she said that there were a couple of problems: one, that she wasn’t opening her mouth wide enough (which we knew, and we’ve been working on pulling her lower jaw down); and two, she’s sucking the nipple sideways into the pocket of her cheek, so that it scrubs back and forth along her sharp upper and lower jawbones. That plus the chomping = sensitive areas that look like ground beef. It’s nothing I was doing wrong, which was also a relief to hear. But the theory is that because she’s not sucking properly and essentially cutting off her own supply by how she’s latching, she’s not getting enough milk despite nursing for at least fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, and pretty much every hour to an hour and a half. The frequency of her feedings is to cover the low amount of milk she’s drawing at every feeding. And of course, the frequency isn’t helping the wounds.

So the first prescription was: Supplement. But bless the nurse, I was to supplement with pumped breastmilk, between 15 to 30 ml after each feeding; that way the baby gets more milk to bulk up, she’ll feed less frequently allowing me to heal, and we know she’s getting more milk. The second prescription was for me: An antifungal, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory cream for the open wounds.

In the days before the CLSC visit I was in so much pain feeding her that I’d taken out the small hand pump my cousin’s wife had passed on to me and cleaned it in preparation for possibly giving up on breastfeeding for a bit and pumping to feed her instead. I came home from the CLSC and pumped for ten minutes with that teeny hand pump, and pulled 60 ml right off the bat from the breast she’d fed from at the clinic. So, um, it wasn’t my supply that the issue (not that I was worried about that). After she nursed HRH gave her 30 ml and she gobbled it up, so I checked to see if I could pump more (um, another 80 ml… okay) and then he gave her the other 30 ml I’d pumped initially. She gobbled that, too, then passed out in his arms.

So it looks like she’d been hungry all this time, because her latch isn’t efficient enough to get her what she wants (or needs). Poor thing, she was starving, so she attacked the breast aggressively, which had been causing physical damage and creating tension in both of us. Breastfeeding will continue, but the ointment plus the supplementing has certainly eased the pain and her aggression at feeding time, and allowed me to almost completely heal in three days. So here I am, pumping again regularly when I thought it would only be an occasional thing. I dragged out the big double pump I used to pump for the boy when he was in hospital, cleaned it, and have been using that once or twice a day.

But we already saw an improvement within a day: the supplement allowed her to sleep a bit longer between feedings and she didn’t come to me ravenous. The ointment numbed the pain and sped up healing of the wounds, making the physical aspect much easier to deal with. Definitely a thumbs up from me. Plus HRH doesn’t feel as helpless any more, and the specialized not-a-standard-bottle/delivery system we’re using for the supplement (Medela Calma, for those interested in that kind of thing) will allow him to handle a whole feeding if he wants, as there’s been no issue with nipple confusion or rejection so far. We also resorted to a pacifier, since she demanded comfort sucking and I couldn’t give that to her while nursing was so incredibly painful. The pacifier has turned out to be a godsend, as much as I dislike them.

Monday’s CLSC weigh-in revealed that she gained 20 gr over the weekend, a good improvement, so while she’s not yet where they’d like her to be at 11 days post-birth she’s already past where she was on the initial Tuesday visit. Yesterday she had her first appointment with our GP, who weighed her in at 7 1/2 lbs, so she’s certainly gaining well; she’s just a week behind where she ought to be on her post-discharge timeline.

Speaking of sleeping better, at night she’s nursing, sleeping for three hours, nursing, then sleeping for another three hours, so nights have settled nicely. Days are more social; she likes being snuggled with someone and looking around at things with a funny furrowed brow. She has crazy-impressive neck and head control already. The poor thing has had some nasty problems with gas, too, bad enough that I went out for gripe water last week. She loves the taste of it, and when she’s taken some she settles right down, and then I love to bury my nose in her neck and sniff the dill/fennel/anise/new baby smell.

She is awesome. The boy is a fabulous big brother, too, doing drive-by kisses on the top of her head as he runs headlong through a room, or reading books to her. We’ve been trying very hard to pay a lot of attention to him and give him special time with us. And speaking of reading books, I am going to indulge in a bit of bragging here, and state that we have just finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets together. And when I say ‘together’ I actually mean together, taking turns reading. My mother said to me, “You said he was reading well and I thought oh, well, yes, everyone says that about their kids, but then I got here and heard him… and no, you weren’t exaggerating, were you.”

Okay, I think I’m caught up. This post was originally a one-week post that dragged on in draft form. I know you all want more pictures, but those will have to wait till I have more time.

Welcome, Bria Elisabeth!

Hello, world. We’ve been offline for a few days; sorry about that. I managed to get a quick announcement via text message out to Twitter late Thursday morning, and eventually a quick post to FaceBook when I’d had the time to sit back and buy data access for my iPhone on Thursday night, but this is the first chance I’ve had to sit at my computer since we got home late Friday night to acquaint you all with the lovely news of our daughter’s birth and shower you with photos.

In a delicious show of irony, the Owlet decided to hatch on the estimated due date I’d been using from the beginning before my doctor adjusted it back and forth. To the medical community, I say Ha, and Ha again.

Thursday morning I woke up just after 4 AM and thought to myself, Hmm, that’s probably another annoying prodromal labour contraction. And really, there was no reason to think otherwise, seeing as how I’d been handling two weeks of prodromal labour on and off. I got up to walk around as usual, and started timing the contractions just out of habit. Good thing I did, because it turned out that they were getting more intense, were lasting about ninety seconds, and were coming between two and four minutes apart. After a solid hour of timing them to be extra-sure I woke HRH, who called his parents, and we threw the last few things we needed into bags. The boy woke up just before his grandparents arrived and we gave him hugs and kisses and told him his sister would finally arrive that day, and that he could come meet her that afternoon. The roads were beautifully clear at six-thirty in the morning, and we got to the hospital in record time. Good thing, too, because when they checked me out they discovered I was just passing 4 cm, and the contractions were getting stronger. They let me move around with the monitors strapped to me, thank goodness. Within an hour I was at 8cm, and then suddenly 9+cm, and the doctor was there and they made me get on the bed to push ( “Please don’t make me get on the bed, I hate the bed, the contractions are worse on the bed,” I remember saying). After fifteen minutes of pushing (which certainly felt much longer than that), and a grand total of four hours of labour (a time span which I certainly do not recommend in general, because yes, that was about fourteen hours of work compressed into a quite intensified four hours), Bria Elisabeth was born at 08:13, weighing 7 lbs 12 oz and measuring 51 cm long.

Our first family picture, post-birth:

Baby!

A close-up of the baby!

True to our word, the boy was the first person to hold the baby after HRH and I, and he got a little teary about it:

And then he began gifting her with all the little toys he’d chosen and bought for her:

Culminating in the ceremonial Passing of the Bunny, one of the boy’s special favourite toys when he was just a tiny thing:

We were released 36 hours after the baby’s birth, and only that late because they weren’t allowed to release us any earlier. Both baby and I are in sparkling good health, eating and sleeping and settling in well. Today the hit-by-a-bus feeling that lands a couple of days after a major physical undertaking arrived, and Tylenol is my friend, because everything everywhere hurts.

For those wondering, Bria is pronounced BREE-ah, and yes, it’s Elisabeth with an S instead of a Z.

While Waiting

Life goes on, of course, and I’m trying to keep busy, which is a challenge when you’re exhausted. We’ve started watching the Read or Die TV series with Marc after rewatching the OVA, which is fun. In the attic, HRH and his dad have finished everything but the drywalling and laying the laminate floor, although we are still waiting on an electrician. The boy and I went up into the attic during the terrific thunderstorm we had Monday afternoon and delighted in hearing the rain pound the roof about three feet above our heads.

I sat down yesterday to gather all the info I needed for the QPIP application for maternity benefits for self-employed workers, and discovered that I hadn’t made the minimum income last year required to qualify for the program. This was really, really annoying. The programme didn’t exist for self-employed workers the last time I had a baby, so this was going to be a nice bonus, but now I can’t take advantage of it. Equally annoying in a different way is the fact that HRH can’t take paternity leave. Or rather, he could, but there are a couple of major obstacles. First, it would require him taking the weeks immediately before plus the first week of school off again, which did not go over well last year when we moved the week before school started; and it would also mean training someone else to do his job while he’s gone because the technician is essential personnel at this time of year. This is more trouble than it’s worth and very risky to do besides, because then they may not take him back but put him somewhere else instead (his permanency guarantees him *a* job, not necessarily the job he’s got at the moment if he goes on leave of whatever kind). And second, taking paternity leave means bringing home only 75% of his salary, which we cannot survive on if I’m not working, which I can’t because hello, I’ll be taking care of a baby. If he chose to take it he’d only get 3 weeks at 75% pay, or he could do 5 weeks at 70% but that would be even more financially suicidal for us.

It just sucks on so many levels. If it were any other time of year he could take, say, a week apart from his five days of compassionate leave (that’s at full pay, whew), and we might get by. If we’d had the baby last year, there wouldn’t be an issue because I made twice as much in 2009, which puts me well over the minimum. I’m cranky about it because the money would have been nice, as I can’t really take on freelance work again for at least two or three months when things have settled down to a point where I can start shoehorning a productive hour at the computer in here and there, which means the cheques won’t start arriving till the end of the year.

The good thing that came of this annoyance is that I was angry enough to pull out my cello for the first time in a month, physical awkwardness be damned, and I played the Prelude to the Bach G major solo cello suite the best I’d ever played it. Owlet was all “Whoa whoa whoa, what is this, no no, LOUD” so I had to stop after playing it twice and then noodling experimentally through more of the first two suites. But it made me feel fantastic. I haven’t played it in well over a year, so to just sit down and pull it off made me really appreciate all the hard work I’ve been putting in at lessons and orchestra. Also, it served to remind me that callouses fade when you don’t use them. Ow, my poor left hand fingers.

I’ve been slowly getting through A Dance With Dragons and I’m still not sure where I stand on it. There’s so much going on in the grand scheme of things that nothing feels like it’s moving, although that can often happen in a middle book of a series. People keep leaving Westeros so more and more of the action is taking place elsewhere, and the reader has to keep learning about new cultures. It’s all moving the story in a way, but it’s doing it slowly enough that it doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to. I bought my first eBook, too, which is actually a Laurie R. King novella only available in electronic format, and I am saving that to read in hospital. No, I lie; that’s my second purchased eBook. I bought, read, and enjoyed Cate Polacek’s Tempus House in May (aha, I knew I missed something in my May booklist! eBooks are going to be harder to keep track of, I suspect, because I can’t pile them on my desk as I finish them).

I pulled out a braid of Louet Karaoke fibre (half wool, half soysilk) in the Parrotfish colourway on Saturday (more pale greens and purples, with touches of gold and blue) and finished spinning it today. I’m chain-plying it to preserve the colour changes and suspect I may use it to knit an Oriental Lily dress for Owlet, should she ever decide to make an appearance. The soysilk was finicky to draft, though, and made for an overall weird chunky , sticky drafting experience. Curiously, I had similar issues when drafting silk pencil roving from Ozark, so I had an idea of how to deal with it (hold it just less than a staple length apart and snap it between the hands); it just made drafting the blend tricky, because the soysilk would slide past the wool, muddling the colour changes a bit. I’d have preferred sharper colour changes, so if I ever use this fibre again I’ll split it by colour and spin from the fold or something.

I’ve knit three more inches of the back of the lace cardigan. It looks just like it did in the last post, only longer. Knitting lace to length is somewhat annoying, because you really have to pin it out to measure where it’s at in order to have a proper idea of what its actual length is since lace looks like a ramen noodle disaster while in progress on the needles. And I picked up a skein of brownish orange embroidery floss to embroider beaks on our mobile owls, I ordered a yard and a half of owl motif fabric for the coverlet the boy wanted me to make for the baby, and a stamp to use to make thank you cards. I’d almost decided on some Cluny lace to finish the short ends of the woven blanket, but I re-examined the edges and I might be able to live with them as they are after all. In fact, all they may need is a row or two of single crochet to secure them a bit more. Which means I have to look up how to do that, because I have forgotten how after my one use of the technique to finish something eighteen months ago. Something to do tomorrow while waiting for the Owlet…

What I Read in July 2011

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (reread, eBook)
Rebecca of Sunnybrooke Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (reread, eBook)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (reread)
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (reread)
A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (reread)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling (reread)

Missed earlier:
Tempus House by Cate Polacek (eBook)

Owlet Update, 38 weeks

I am having a hard time shaking the belief that this is actually 39 weeks, since I’ve counted according to earlier data from the beginning. Yesterday’s prenatal was my 38-week appointment according to my doctor, and with her new numbers I’m technically at 38.5 weeks.

This was an uneventful OB appointment. She was totally not perturbed about the heavy bleeding on Monday that sent me to the hospital (what, were I and the nurse on duty the only ones who were worried? the gyno on call didn’t even check me out, only the nurse and a resident), isn’t concerned about the ongoing light bleeding, and says my membranes haven’t broken. There has been zero change from last week: 1 cm dilated, 50% effaced, contractions gaining in strength and pain but apparently doing nothing (except waking me up and making me walk a lot at night). Weight gain has ceased, which is normal, and for which I am deeply grateful, because pretty much nothing fits any more except dresses since the baby dropped two weeks ago. The internal exam hurt like blazes this time; my cervix is currently at a weird angle, apparently. Baby’s still chugging along all healthy and strong, and seems very happy where she is… which of course means I’m cranky, because I’m really, really past ready to get her out. I’m just going to start planning to have this baby in mid-August, which is the latest I’ll be able to go without being induced. That way I can’t be disappointed.

I’ve decided that trying to get as much crafty stuff done in the next couple of weeks will either (a) make Owlet arrive sooner rather than later, and/or (b) keep me busy and distracted till mid-August when they’ll evict her. I’ve sewed the owls for the mobile the boy designed (and they are so incredibly adorable! HRH wants me to keep making them for no other reason than to see more. Pictures to come when the mobile is assembled) so next on the list is the coverlet the boy decided she should have. I’ve narrowed the owl fabric down to two choices for that by browsing Etsy for two months; a backing can be chosen once that first decision is made.

I cast on for the long lace cardigan the other day in an effort to trick her out, too. Here’s the first three inches of the back, done in diagonal eyelet lace stitch with the BFL/silk blend I spun and used for the lace cap, on needles bigger than the weight of the yarn calls for so that the stitch is nice and open and airy:

I blindstitched and machine-stitched the ends of the green woven blanket I posted last week because I didn’t want a fringe (it would just get matted and felted) but I’m not sold on how they look, so I’ve decided to find some nice natural unbleached Cluny lace to sew over them, which means more fun Etsy browsing and mailbox joy to which to look forward.

And finally, I’m looking at free online patterns to sew wool soakers to cover the cloth diapers. It didn’t even occur to me that I could sew them. (Or rather, it did a while back, but the first patterns I found were for PUL covers and involved a lot of layers and stretching and elastic and Velcro tabs and I just don’t have to energy to deal with all that right now.) But durr, there are more ways to make things with fabric than knitting and weaving, as sewing the tiny owls for the mobile reminded me. I can use polar fleece, or I can hit the thrift stores and look for real wool sweaters to felt slightly and then cut pattern pieces out. I’ve also been browsing free patterns for making tiny dresses, because I’m finding such glorious Japanese printed fabrics on Etsy during my hunt for owl fabric for the coverlet.

The boy has a playdate this afternoon, the second day in a row with his best friend. I’d offered to have them over here today after her mum took them out to play in the local pool yesterday so I could go to my doctor, but she said that she’d have them over to her place again this afternoon to give me a whole afternoon at home to myself, something I haven’t had all summer, bless her. HRH is back at work as of yesterday, and while I deeply appreciate all the work he and his dad have put in on the attic (it’s 90% done!), it has been increasingly stressful dealing with so many people in my house at once for four weeks straight when I am accustomed to having lots of mental and emotional space to myself. I find that lately I’ve been needing even more space as this pregnancy nears its end, which is perfectly normal, and the social pressure of dealing with people on a daily basis has not been helping my ability to find a still space inside myself with which to deal with the stress and emotions attached to the last couple of weeks of pregnancy, especially one that has gone past what the medical community predicted would be the end based on past evidence. It doesn’t help that I’m sleeping horribly because I’m in a lot of pain, and can’t nap successfully when there were so many people around. (You would think I’d be used to sleeping horribly due to pain, but this is different from fibro. I know how to handle that kind of sleep/non-sleep. The only cure for this is to have the darn baby, and she’s not cooperating.)

A lot of things will be easier once we have the baby, and I keep telling myself that. Two weeks, max. It’s just that I’m working through so many tangled emotions about the whole going to full term (and possibly even past the EDD) after being primed to expect another early baby thing that two weeks feels like forever, especially when yesterday’s appointment showed zero change from the previous week. The empty baby bed next to ours is starting to be depressing instead of exciting.

Last week I bought the Owlet a party sundress for Ada’s birthday, and if she isn’t out to wear it and attend, I will be very, very sad indeed.

Owlet Update, 37 weeks

For those greedy for precise info: Yesterday’s prenatal revealed that I am 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced, and my OB said that the baby’s head was right there against the cervix, ready to go (I could have told her that; she lowered right after the last appointment two weeks ago and has been headbutting the cervix with great verve ever since). “Votre accouchement prendra place comme une charme,” my OB said with great delight. I swear, she’s more excited about how this is going than I am. I’m finally at the one prenatal appointment a week till the end point, so we’ll see where we are next week. Of course, we all know that dilation and effacement aren’t reliable signposts and that things can mysteriously reverse themselves, but physically I was already feeling Stuff Happen, so it’s nice to hear her confirm my suspicions.

For everyone else: Hey, I’m going to have a baby in a couple of weeks. That’s about all we know, because while there are certain signs that a baby’s body and a gestating mother’s body are headed in the right direction for birthing, no one really knows what triggers labour to happen whenever it does, though there are lots of theories. Also, hey, did you know that an estimated due date isn’t anything more than a guess based on a couple of charts put together by some doctor decades ago? A precise science this is not. A baby is considered On Time if it’s born two weeks before or after the EDD (why yes, that does mean a four-week spread, and yes, that’s kind of stressful if you’re trying to plan anything). This is why we’ve been telling people a rough time period instead of an actual date when they ask. And really, with all the adjustments back and forth being made to my EDD for various reasons, I’m just as glad we went that route, because otherwise people would be terribly confused by this point.

The renos upstairs proceed apace. HRH goes back to work next Wednesday, and while he’d like to be further along in the attic conversion, that would be logistically impossible. He’s done an incredible amount in the month he’s had, and his dad has been right there with him. The roof insulation is pretty much done, the wiring is all there just waiting for an electrician to check and connect it (waiting for replies from electricians = annoying), and HRH even took a day to run a duct up from the basement so that there would be air conditioning up there. That had to be done, really, because otherwise it was a sauna and the environment was unworkable. Not that the a/c actually makes the room cool, what with humidex temperatures of 48 C this week and working directly under a dark roof being baked by the sun, but it does make it somewhat more bearable. Plasterboard can be screwed to the wall framing at night after work once the wiring is approved and connected (c’mon, electricians!) and then it’s mudding and painting, and then it’s essentially done. If we can swing it and the sales are still on, HRH wants to put a floating laminate floor in instead of pouring three coats of paint on the plywood floor, too.

We have a car seat that fits our vehicle now (that was one of those Kind Of Important Things we had to handle quickly a week or so ago when we discovered that the incredibly awesome luxury car seat we borrowed from Miranda was too big to fit our car for safe and regular use), and we got the lightweight Snap n’Go stroller frame we wanted, too (we borrowed one six years ago and they’re brilliant; they’re much lighter and smaller than a true stroller, and you just snap the car seat into it). Best thing is we got them both on excellent sale, and they’re the only new items we’ve had to buy for this baby. And the resale value on the stroller frame is awesomely high, which means we’ll be able to recoup almost all of what we paid for it, tra la la.

More handmade show and tell!

Cate knit this absolutely fantastic Tweed baby blanket for the Owlet:

I forgot to post photos of the lace baby cap I knit (my first real lace project!). It needs a proper ribbon, as this is a temporary braid of yarn:

And here is the blanket I wove last weekend (which obviously did not work to trick the Owlet out). I love how the thick and thin single-ply yarn creates the texture and visual interest here with just a plain weave:

I think that’s it for now.

So:

We have seen the final Harry Potter film, and I am still pregnant, although Owlet is now welcome to arrive whenever she likes.

I had a nice, quiet birthday that included a three-hour nap (I slept horribly earlier this week, mostly due to the heat and humidity, so this was seriously the best gift I could receive), several e-mails and calls from people, and a gift or two. One of those gifts was a bookstore gift card from my parents, which I spent pretty much immediately, ordering myself A Dance With Dragons and The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook. I was rereading A Song of Ice and Fire in preparation for the release of book five — actually, I just read A Feast for Crows for the first time, much to my surprise… I bought it when it came out but didn’t get around to reading it for some reason, and forgot that I hadn’t — and I finished it last night. I thought for sure my parcel of books would be awaiting me when we got home, but alas, it was not! Ah well; it will be here Monday.

I’m going to go ahead and warp the loom for that baby blanket. That should encourage the Owlet to arrive and interrupt things.