Slow and Quiet

A change is in the air.  Not so much outside, where Winter continues to cling to our little plot of land, desperate to bar Spring from coming, not unlike the White Witch in her denial.  Inside, however, is a different story.  We're slowing here, a little bit each day.  It's contemplative, for me, the way these days are taking shape in their own way.  We stick by our more important signposts like bible and reading, but I'm finding quiet moments for myself here and there and the kids seem to be following my lead.  A friend of mine at co-op exclaimed "The next time I see you, you'll have a new baby with you!" and the thought really knocked my socks off.  It seems the longer I am expecting, the more I feel like I'll be pregnant forever - although the exact opposite is true.  But these are some slow and quiet days and I'm trying to soak them in as much as I can.

Oddly enough, I haven't been knitting, although I did find a few scraps of leftover MadelineTosh from last years' Easter shrugs and am entertaining the thought of yet another baby hat.  No, I've mostly been cleaning - repetitively  unnecessarily, obsessively.  My bedroom floor hasn't been this frequently vacuumed in, well...ever.  I clean and reclean and take my little box of baby supplies out and look and them and then put them back.  It's funny, this way that we prepare our minds and hearts for baby - our mammalian ways of feathering our nests, even as modern and intellectual women.  Still, it soothes me, and each night when I roll my tired body into bed and pat my massive abdomen and whisper "soon!" to my little one, I feel at peace - prepared.  

Thanks to the loan of a sewing machine from my sweet cousin Amy, my baby quilt is finished and ready.  Were it not for the issues my sewing machine suffered, it would have been a very quick project - one I hope to replicate in a larger size for my own bed, someday.  I ended up backing it in red gingham and binding it with small white dots on red.  I quilted it by doing simple ties - something I thought was a "cop out" for a while until I saw that Alicia Paulson uses this technique quite a bit!  The pictures aren't doing it justice - very bad natural lighting here lately!

 My husband gave me the green light to buy a new baby carrier, so I settled on this wrap.  It came in the mail last Saturday, the final puzzle piece in preparations.  Peter and I have already taken it for a test run and love it!

So, we're slowing down.  The mania of preparation has come and gone, and now the only thing that is left to do is wait, as quietly and peacefully as we can.  I do it just as I know how, treasuring up these last precious moments in my heart, these final days in our family of 7, ripe with anticipation, excitement and love.

(Are we friends on Ravelry?  I would love to get to know you better!)

{Linking up with Small Things and Frontier Dreams today}.

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