Hello, Woollydaze here…
This project took just under nine months to complete. No, I didn’t do a gauge swatch and the finished result is a little bit larger than expected. Although not as large as I was led to believe she could have been if she had taken a little longer to finish. We didn’t want to know the colour until we met our little person, but this didn’t work out quite as planned.
The last few days have been busy, exciting, scary, painful, happy, exhausting and filled with love. The newest member of the Woollydaze household made her appearance on Thursday, officially nine days early but a well cooked 8lb 7oz.
She had been specifically instructed by her daddy not to arrive on Thursday since it was sheep shearing day on the farm. Mr Woollydaze had quite enough to do shuffling 500 ewes and their lambs from field to field, plus the rams and some sheep from a neighbour. There was absolutely no time for the arrival of a baby. However, Littlest Woolly chose not to listen. This does not bode well for the future.
I had arranged a crafty day with a friend and we were supposed to be doing a show-and-tell of our projects, discussing ideas and inspiration and generally having a jolly good natter. She wasn’t expecting to be the labour partner, but she did a fabulous job of keeping chatting to me in the early stages and of packing me off to hospital when it became apparent that this actually was ‘it’. Poor Mr Woollydaze wasn’t aware there was anything going on until he got called inside to drive. Mind you, I wasn’t really aware until shortly before this point that the pains weren’t going to fade away. Thankfully I had arranged for my parents to visit to cover looking after Little Woolly ‘just in case’. I will be eternally grateful to my mum for saying she thought it was time to go; I would have waited just a little bit longer. That would not have been a good idea.
We arrived at the hospital with ten minutes to go before the birth. No thanks to the white van man who smugly drove in the outside lane of the dual carriageway next to another car and blocked our way. I hate being a cliche, but I hope he realised quite why a 1.4 diesel car was driving at such a ridiculous speed and what a *&^%$£! he had been. I stand by every single swear word I threw at him at the time. I wasn’t the most dramatic entrance of the day; apparently somebody else gave birth in the lift on the way to the delivery suite, which makes it seem like I had plenty of time.
The biggest surprise of the day for me was the sex. I had a late scan where I was knitting when the sonographer called me in, and it turned out she was a knitting fan too. They turn up everywhere, you know. The sonographer referred to the baby as ‘he’ and asked me if I was going to teach both of my boys to knit. Despite knowing that I thought I knew the colour, Mr Woollydaze resolutely didn’t ask; I’m impressed by his self control on this issue. A boy or a girl would have been equally welcome so I’m not at all disappointed, just happy to see her and pleased that she and I are healthy and now at home.
So if the next few months contain fewer blogs from the Woollydaze household, I’m sure you’ll understand why. It’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m a little busy right now. But I will try to check in regularly and I do have things planned, and we’ll just see how it all goes.
Woollydaze 
Huge, huge, congratulations!