A Long Time Coming

I have been working on this baby blanket since May...of 2009.

 I started working on it on a trip I had last year to San Antonio, Galveston and a few other towns in Texas in mid-May.  A friend's baby was due July 3rd, and I thought I could finish it before the baby arrived.  I had it all planned out.  If I did two squares a day, it would take me roughly 2 weeks to finish, giving me plenty of time to do any finishing work and send it off to the mama- and daddy-to-be before the little one arrived.  Done and done! 

Except that it didn't really work out that way.

I got to this square by the end of my 5 day trip to Texas (I should have been done with 10 squares if I kept to my schedule):

Yes.  That's "B"

When I got home, we closed on our house.  Then we spent 4 days painting and cleaning said house (which was in a state of dreadful neglect when we bought it) before we headed off to my sister's wedding in North Carolina.  Rebecca's wedding was on May 30th, meaning I should have been completely finished according to my (as it turns out, completely unreasonable) schedule.  I was on this letter:

So now it is June.  We have until July 1st to be out of our old house.  Which means we have until July 1st to complete any of the major upgrades we wanted to get done on the house before we moved in.  We spent the entire month of June finishing our basement, cleaning up the yard, re-doing the front walk, painting and generally making the house pleasant and liveable.  Which means that by the time litte KG made her North Carolina debut three weeks early, I was only on:

Oops.

After my self-imposed deadline passed, I took a much more laid-back attitude towards getting it done...meaning I stopped working altogether for at least 3 weeks while we cleaned our old house and moved into out new house and got settled in.  So by KG's actual due date, I had progressed to here:

After we were mostly settled in, I started working again.  Slowly.  I was getting pretty pregnant myself by this point.  I was tired.  I had a house I was trying to settle into, a nursery to decorate, diapers to make, and - oh yeah!  Work.  So I took my time, now that I had missed the big event.  I got hung up for days on a space holder square:

It was actually before the "G", but the "G" looked so quick and the spacer so...not quick that I skipped the spacer, and worked the "G" first.  Perhaps it was a premonition.  I ended up having to improvise a new pattern because I screwed it up so badly and dreaded the thought of pulling all the stitches out and starting over.  You can't really tell, but this little square is out of proportion with the rest of them.  **sigh** No one's perfect.

I doodled with this for the rest of the summer, working on it in front of the TV at night, before bed, after teaching at the arts camp where I was working.  Number one on my list of bad ideas, by the way, teaching drama and yoga in August to small children while vastly pregnant.

Kevin left for the Berkshires for 2 weeks in early August.  I was left at home with my mom, who came to keep me company and make sure I was taken care of should Baby Corbett make an early appearance.  I worked on the blanket sporadically, but mostly just sat like a beached whale, wishing it were time to have the baby. 

The night I went into labor with Lucy, I was stitching this square:

I was watching TV when the contractions started.  They were pretty mild and I could still work through them.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going into labor, because my body had been a Braxton-Hicks festival for weeks.  They just seemed different.  Anyway, when I put the blanket down, shockingly enough, I didn't pick it up again for about 2 months.

After I so blatently missed KG's actual birthdate, I though HEY!  Christmas gift!!  Yeah!  So when Christmas rolled around, I was still working:

Clearly I was just not meant to give this thing away as a gift. 

I remember working the "S" when we were recording the April Fool's Day radio show at the end of March:

The piano player said "You still working on that??"  Yup.  At this point I was pretty much only bringing it to shows to work backstage in my downtime.  The same piano player said a few weeks later "I know you don't have many shows because you are still working on "S".

I decided finally that I would give this blanket to KG for her first birthday.  Surely I could manage THAT.

By KG's birthday, I am here:

SOOOOOOOO CLOSE.  Yet so very very far.

Lucy is 10 months old now.  KG celebrated her first birthday on June 23rd (I THINK - it may be the 22nd.  Or the 24th.  Grr.  I am terrible at dates).  When we were recording the JULY FOURTH radio show at the end of June, I was on:

I told LW (the piano player who was mocking me in March) that I would SURELY FINISH before the radio shows were done.  This was on June 25th and 26th.  The whole cast of the Capitol Steps has been cheering me on...and making fun of me...for over a year now...DW said to me "You can't give that away now!  That's a family heirloom!"

Last night, I put the finishing touches on the last letter:

I frayed the edges of the blanket.  I ironed out the marks left by the embroidery ring (you can tell which ones I spent the most time on by how deeply entrenched the creases around the letter are).

So that's the story of the baby afghan.  Now I am faced with the conundrum - do I keep it, hang it in Lucy's room and pretend it was never meant for anyone else?  Or do I box it up with a copy of this post and send it on to our dear friend's and their now 13-month-old daughter?

Hmmm....