Knitting Blog: Beautiful Boy

I have been following Dawn (The Dawnminator) for about as long as I have been reading blogs. She lives in my home town, and writes in a stream of consciousness style that is very honest. In fact, honesty is what she probably values the most from other people. She’s intelligent and perceptive, and often very, very funny. She also recently announced on her blog that she is expecting a baby. My sense is that this is what she has wanted to happen some day in her life, but she wasn’t sure it ever would.

It’s a boy.

I dropped her a line last month telling her that I would be in her area over Thanksgiving. We made a date to meet for coffee, in a neighborhood that we both used to live in, though decades apart in time.

I decided that I had to give her my own little baby shower. I bought the baby two books, because I nearly always give board books, always with the same advice: you gotta let the rugrat chew on them. One book was about a baby’s nighttime routine, because babies love stories that are about their lives. The second was a book of animals, because babies adore animals, What they notice most when they look out of a car’s window are animals, and other babies.

I also decided to knit a pair of socks for the baby.








These guys knit up in a matter of days, not weeks, even with the distraction of needing to hold down a job. My Ravelry project page says they took just 5 days from start to finish. They are newborn size, because this is a winter baby. By the time he would grow into a larger sock, it will be warm out and he will take those socks off. Socks are the first pieces of clothing that babies figure out how to remove from their bodies, and they are very proud of the trick once they learn it. In fact, they’re happy to demonstrate their ability to take socks off over and over.

The pattern is called Charlie’s Wiggle Socks from Cat Bordhi’s book New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. I’ve raved about Cat’s patterns before in this blog, and I’ll rave again. They’re clever and unusual, and they work.

If anyone else reading this also remembers Dawn, she is indeed beautiful. She’s also got a very generous spirit. The time we spent together flew by.

I’ll end this with some words by John Lennon, who also had a beautiful boy like the one Dawn will be having soon:

Close your eyes, Have no fear, The monsters gone, He's on the run and your mom is here, Beautiful, Beautiful, beautiful, Beautiful Boy, Before you go to sleep, Say a little prayer, Every day in every way, It's getting better and better, Beautiful, Beautiful, beautiful, Beautiful Boy, Out on the ocean sailing away, I can hardly wait, To see you to come of age, But I guess we'll both, Just have to be patient, Yes it's a long way to go, But in the meantime, Before you cross the street, Take my hand, Life is just what happens to you, While you’re busy making other plans, Beautiful, Beautiful, beautiful, Beautiful Boy, Darling, Darling, Darling... whoever you will be.