He's arrived!

Mum a bub are both doing well. Mr0 was 10lb (4.53kg) when he got weighed. We don't know yet how long he is but he's already out of the 00 size stuff.

Now to survive night feeding...
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keeping on keeping on

Yep. Still pregnant.

For a general pregnancy/quilting obsession update, see after the cut...



The final few days of pregnancy suck. (Oh please let it only be "days"!) I feel like I've been in the early stages of labour for about 3 weeks now - I get a couple of hours of proper contractions here and there - strong enough to stop me in my tracks and get the wheat-sacks out - but just when I'm thinking it might actually be ready to roll it all dies down and goes away. Very frustrating!

I'm not sure what's worse - worrying that when I finally decide that I am in labour I'll be 10 minutes away from pushing it out and have to give birth in the carpark - or the other nightmare scenario of turning up at the hospital thinking that I've been labouring well for a while and must have made some progress to find that I'm only 2cm and have hours and hours of work still to go! My midwife plans to do a 'stretch and sweep' on Friday (the 40 week mark) so I guess I'll find out then a little more about the state of play.

As far as 'schooling' goes, we've gone ultra-unstructured the closer we get to the baby's due date, so the kids' 'work' has mostly been colouring in, role-playing with dolls and puppets, reading, chasing the chickens around the yard, helping Daddy cook tea... just generally living life.

As far as 'what do you do all day?' goes, I've discovered hand-piecing patchwork and am now subject to a whole new craft addiction I had been carrying on with piecing a quilt that my Mum had only just started (having finished the other one), but found the paper-piecing technique to be tedious, and the colour-scheme she chose to be dull and boring. So I checked some quilting books out of the library for inspiration and found one which has step-wise instructions for hand-piecing using a running stitch (instructions are great - Jinny Beyer doesn't even assume that you've threaded a needle before). This is much much much faster, so I've set Mum's 'boring quilt' aside and am making a bright scrap-quilt using random bits and pieces from my fabric stash. I plan to use the 'Squares and Triangles' pattern from this book by Lynne Edwards (also from the library), but have just started by making the random-fabric four-patch blocks so there's room to be flexible with my final pattern if I change my mind!

I never thought I'd enjoy hand-piecing. But it really is more convenient than machine piecing. I'm sure the machine would be tons faster - but I just never get around to sitting down in front of it. Hand-piecing is easy to do on the couch in the evenings, and in odd moments here and there, so it actually gets done.

Other than that, we're just hanging around waiting for the baby to be born. It all feels a bit surreal, really. I've been organised and ready for almost too long now - I'm starting to un-organised again (taking things out of the hospital bag because I need them for something else, the bassinet is somehow not made up properly anymore, the 'baby' corner of our room has had a few piles of non-baby stuff stashed there 'out of the way'...)
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still hanging in there

Just a short note to say that I haven't forgotten about my blog, but nothing has happened around here that has struck me as particularly bloggable lately.

So I'll just give you the boring update...

The baby and I are now past the 37 week mark, and my midwife says that 37-42 weeks is 'full term' so if I go into labour now then that is a good thing.

Bring it on, I say.

The quilt is finished - I sewed the binding on last night, and it got washed this morning. I was a bit worried about this as the quilt had some rust stains in it from when my Mum stored it - she'd (very uncharacteristically) left the needle stuck into the fabric. 25 years in a not-always-dry cupboard does horrible things to needles. But, wonderfully, most of the marks came out with a very ordinary warm wash on the delicate cycle in the machine. There's a brownish shadow where the worst mark was, but it's not very obvious, and I'm now confident that it will come out with a gentle spot remover. So that's brilliant.

I'd post a photo but the camera is packed away in the 'going into labour, get me to the hospital' bag, and I just know that if I take the camera out of the bag, it won't make it back in, and the poor child will the first one without newborn-birth photos. So you'll just have to use your imaginations. It's a 'Grandmother's flower garden' single-bed sized bedspread - slightly shorter than a proper single blanket, but wide enough to sleep under without gaps at the side. Mum used calico as the background colour, with the 'flowers' being navy blue centres, with bluey floral then green gingham surrounds.

I finished it with a straight binding, no border, since this was the easiest thing to do. Before she died, I did ask Mum how she'd intended to edge it, but with the combination of a 25 year time-lapse and chemotherapy induced exhaustion, she (understandably) couldn't remember. There were a couple of half-hexagons missing from one edge, too, so I compromised as best I could, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

That's about all that's been happening here - hopefully there will be news of the happy variety in the near future. I tell ya, if this baby goes over the 40 week mark, I will cry.
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